Bold as Love (28 page)

It was strange to be back, to see the rebuilt Blue Lagoon, the Zen Self dome same as always, the Mood Indigo tent where the shit-fest had been held—the dishevelled permanence that had settled over all the rockfest ephemera of their history. The Chosen went on early in the afternoon, which the tv schedule people didn’t like, but too bad. The crowd seemed pleased (though they howled and begged for Jerusalem, and didn’t get it), and for once the frontman’s girlfriend managed to be there. At five the Heads were on Yellow Stage, otherwise known as Scary Stage because of its accident record; however nothing went wrong. There were other stages, other acts, poets and fire-eaters, dance troupes, storytellers and tumblers, non-Few Name Bands: but these were the images of that sweltering May holiday. Aoxomoxoa on the big screens, stalking around with a hand held mic, having left the visionboards to Cack Stannen, chanting the lyrics of ‘Kythera’—previously unintelligible to all but those trainspotters with the personality and the equipment required to strip a Heads track down to the bit stream.

Fireballs, interstellar gases, balls of glowing plasma shooting through the arena crowd, Sage in black and white optical print trousers that took on pinwheels of whirling rainbow and shards of piercing gold, sweating so hard he appeared to be
melting
; the sun a small pale burning blob through the overcast, like the star of a different planet—

And Ax Preston, in subfusc brown jeans and a faded red Tour singlet (with the
It’s The Ecology, Stupid
, message on the back), holding an immense crowd—all of them longing to wave their arms and sing anthems—in silence, as he plays the long, hypnotic solo in ‘Put Out The Fire’, (the title track): fine-boned profile detached, intent; as if there’s nobody but God.

At sunset Fiorinda was in Allie’s new van, hiding from the suitish, grown-up things that Ax was having to do. Allie had decided, now that Fereshteh was off the scene, that she didn’t need a place in London. No fixed abode Allie… The back of the van already felt like her Brighton flat, where Fiorinda had dossed a couple of times: a rooted place, a lovely womanly bookworm’s study; a little cloying. But the green aircon worked. Anne-Marie Wing was there too, with a few of her rugrats. AM and Allie were talking about the Volunteer Initiative; Anne-Marie interested to know the ropes. ‘You park yourself on a crusties’ lot? And move in with the message?’

‘You don’t get as far as that. They are lost souls. The Counterculturals who can handle volunteer work are the tip of the iceberg. I’ve spent,
hours
, explaining how to catch a bus. No kidding. The world’s become a very mysterious place to a lot of the people we’re dealing with.’

Ax’s New Deal had been invented to keep violent eco-warriors from breaking the place up. Now they were running into a submerged mass of hopeless cases, and no one knew what to do. Is that a live metaphor or a dead one?, wondered Fiorinda. Hull down in the killing cold water outside the citizen-ship, this mountain of rotten ice, the twisted and broken and bent-out-of-shape Unculture. Collateral damage… She wished Anne-Marie would lay off, she didn’t want to think about the size of the problem. But that was what it was like today. Non-Few bands, outsiders, guests, kept coming up all bright eyed, asking: what’s it all about? What IS this thing, where are you heading?

We have no idea. Go ask the Ax, he knows everything.

Jet, the baby, was fastened on his mother’s tit, Ruby the boy toddler watching the process with intent, professional interest. Eight year old Silver lifted books from Allie’s cardboard boxes, with the air of a museum curator examining curious relics, and handed them to her little sister Pearl, who was using them as building blocks. Anne-Marie’s oldest kid was thirteen, already fucking, already flown… Fiorinda listened to backstage PA messages whispered in her ear. There were half a million people packed into Reading arena. Fifteen millions, hey, who’s counting, why not let’s say twenty!, on sites countrywide, watching the show in front of big screens: the Countercultural Very Large Array.

There can’t be half a million people, she thought. That isn’t physically possible.

‘I’m going to open some wine,’ said Allie, ‘I’m sick of being sober. Sun’s over the yard arm, I think I’m off duty. White or red, Fio?’

‘Nothing for me. Not til after the show.’

‘God,
’ said Allie, greatly impressed. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘Oh yeah, no problem.’

If the day belonged to Ax and Sage, it was Fiorinda’s night. When she appeared, having been dead elusive for hours, she was dressed for the stage in a silver and white lace cowgirl dress and red boots, her hair a burnished storm. Sometimes Fiorinda was kooky-pretty, sometimes beautiful, sometimes just a sulky, skinny white girl with a stubborn jaw. Tonight her fickle redhead’s good looks had come out to play: she looked absolutely wonderful and she knew it. The New Blue Lagoon was packed, government suits and other VIPs taking up too much space in their raked seats, canvas walls reefed high to allow the crowd to spill out across the arena; the mosh pit one deliquescent squirming mass, yelling in undamped delight when Fiorinda walked on, picked up her guitar from the piano stool and waited, grinning, for DARK to get settled.

Charm Dudley, DARK’s frontwoman, had decided she couldn’t make it, which was on the whole a good thing. Friction between Charm and her spinning black hole of a vocalist had been a major problem when they were last together. And away they go, Fiorinda leaping into the attack, from that calm little grin to
instantly—
In the wings, the Fiorinda Appreciation Society gathered: crew and stars, by no means all of them male, staring like rabbits caught in the headlights.

‘How’s that for Sugar Magnolia, Sage?’ murmurs Dilip.

Sage, beside him, shrugs, ‘All right I suppose. If you like that kind of thing—’

Skull gives Dilip a little crooked twinkle of acknowledgement, and they both resume concentrating on the rock and roll brat: who has calmed down a little and is singing that
Jesus doesn’t want her for a sunbeam
.

Doing it the Vaselines way, but louder.

DARK had not managed to get to Reading until the day of the concert. That was okay, rehearsal had never been the band’s forte. It only led to trouble. They arrived at the Leisure Centre after their brilliant performance, sweating like pigs, grinning fit to split their faces, accepting with no false modesty congratulations from the non-Few famous. In their shared dressing room they jived around stripping off soaked clothing, sousing each other with cold water from the sinks, gabbing happily about the terrible mistakes they’d made in various songs, the impressive company they were keeping, the thirst they had on them: sniffing up powder, pouring cooling draughts of alcohol down their throats. Fil Slattery raised the bottle on which she had been swigging.

‘Absent friends—’

‘Absent friends!’ they yelled in chorus.

‘Go on,’ said Tom Okopie to Fiorinda, hopefully. ‘Say it. You miss her.’

Cafren cuffed her boyfriend gently around the head. ‘Eee, Tom, trust you—’

‘I miss Charm’s guitar,’ said Fiorinda. ‘On stage. I fucking
do not
miss Charm. Absent is the way I like her. Sorry, folks.’

It was Charm Dudley who’d formed the band, with her friends Cafren Free and Tom Okopie, and enlisted Fil Slattery and Gauri Mostel on drums and keyboards. A year of thwarted-ambition hell, shit venues and flashes of genius later, they’d demoted Gauri from lead vocals, and advertised, which was how Fiorinda had come to join them. Cue a different kind of hell, because Fiorinda and DARK were soulmates, utterly right for each other, but the mix was volatile. The kid was in a hurry, far more ambitious than Charm: and the effect of Charm Dudley and Fiorinda jockeying for control had quickly become awful.

Just awful… Four happy faces fell. They all looked at Fiorinda, and she looked back, the five of them reality-checked, deflated.

She had wanted DARK so badly, in Dissolution Summer. Wanted DARK and been such a little horror she didn’t see
why the fuck
she could not have… The sad thing was that she still wanted DARK, just as badly: and they wanted her too. But she was grown up now, so she knew they weren’t going to break up with Charm. Whereas Charm and Fiorinda could not work together. Situation hopeless. Fiorinda sighed, and hunted around for a towel for her hair. She suddenly didn’t want to be here. It was like looking through a window at a life she’d lost, seeing it all going on without her.

‘Hey, whose are the flowers?’

‘Oh, they were for you,’ said Cafren. ‘Sorry, forgot—’

‘Who the fuck sends me flowers?,’ growled Fiorinda. She
did not like cut flowers.
Who didn’t know that? She tore off the florist’s paper, harbouring a wild idea that Charm might have Interflora’d her a bunch of pink roses, as an insult. There was no card or note. The rose leaves had a sweet scent. No, not these, some other pink roses, long ago… Sweetbriar, what her father used to call her. Oh. Oh no.

something like a bright, silent explosion in her brain.

She had walked into one of those waking nightmares, the weird kind of migraine-without-the-headache she’d once suffered occasionally, hadn’t had one for ages, she’d forgotten how bad—

She put the flowers down, so clumsily they fell to the floor. She felt very sick. Oh. This isn’t migraine, this is me feeling
very sick
. She felt so dreadful she thought she should shout something like
oh shit, I’ve been poisoned
: but before she could get that together something started happening, an experience she couldn’t stop, couldn’t escape, couldn’t deny—

What is going on, does it show, I DARE NOT look in a mirror.

‘Are you okay, Fio?’ said Gauri, putting an arm round her.

‘Yeah,’ said Fiorinda, drawling, hearing her own voice from a long way off, wondering how she’d got to be sitting on this chair; little snip in time. ‘I’m fine.’

She told them to let her alone for five minutes, and managed to stay
fine
until they were gone, which wasn’t long. Thank God for the awkwardness of the Charm issue, which made them probably glad to get away—

Tom thought Fiorinda was not okay. But there was history that made it difficult for him to pay her special attention. And that red headed kid had changed so much. Her beauty and authority daunted him, daunted all of them. If Fiorinda wanted you to go, you were gone.

After DARK the show was over. The day-trippers and VIPs were efficiently channeled off, the bands came out and danced with the staybehinds. Cooling breezes flowed through the Blue Lagoon, where Olwen Devi stamped and whirled to highly-evolved bhangra, long ago classical training put to use: thinking of Ax Preston and the future of all this (thinking about the energy audit of stage lighting, in fact). Zen Selfers, notable campers, faces and costumes named and namelessly familiar surrounded her—particularly the lean young giant in the skull mask, who seemed almost to be dancing
with
her. A sweet boy, once you got past the loutish affectation, but she started to feel a little confused about his motives. This would never do: she left the floor and made her way to the bar. As she waited in the press of bodies, Sage was there again.

‘Hi Olwen. You got that boyfriend of yours staying tonight?’

‘Ellis? Yes. He was tired, he’s back at the trailer.’

‘Shame.’

Olwen knew the Heads well. They were some of her best converts: genuinely, intelligently fascinated by the project. Their boss (as the band called him) was funny and crude and charming: an A student, a delight. But what was this? The skull’s inviting grin went on giving her the message, while she stared in disbelief.

‘Get away with you, you joker. I am old enough to be your grandma.’

‘If my gran could dance like what you can,’ he said gallantly, grinning more sweetly than ever. ‘I would want to fuck her too.’

The bar staff and the people by did not seem to be hearing this. She hoped not!

‘Sage, I am afraid you are smashed out of your young brain.’

‘I certainly am.’ But there he stayed, waiting, exactly as if he had asked a reasonable question that deserved a civil answer.

‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ said Olwen. ‘He’s my husband. We’ve been married nearly thirty years, but we have always spent a lot of time apart. It suits us. He’s a professor at Cardiff, he’ll be going home tomorrow.’

The mask came off. Sage beamed, pupils so dilated his eyes looked black instead of blue. He nodded, ‘Okay, later.’ The skull snapped back: he plunged into the crowd, vanishing like a seal among the waves of his natural element.

‘Hi rockstar,’

‘Hi, other rockstar. You look very…
interested.
What have you been up to?’

‘Something I’ve had in mind for a while. Where’s Fiorinda?’

‘I was wondering that myself. Let’s go find her.’

No Fiorinda, anywhere. They found part of DARK, Tom Okopie and Cafren Free: Cafren thought Fiorinda might still be in the Leisure Centre, hob-nobbing with non-Few Big Names. So they set off on this expedition, an adventure, many music biz friends and enemies to avoid.

‘Your parents gone?’

‘Thank God. I find my dad
fucking unendurable
, around things like this.’

‘I like my parents,’ said Sage, magnanimously, ‘Not both in the same room because that can turn ugly, but separately they are good. I like going to visit them in their lives. I would very much appreciate if they would
stay out
of mine.’

‘Yeah… Sage, If we’re going this far, you could change those trousers. They are getting me down.’ The white singlet was fresh. The trousers were the eye-hurting Bridget Riley rip-offs that Sage had been wearing on stage.

‘No. I like ’em.’

‘Ah well.’

The Leisure Centre was empty. They strode along an endless-seeming corridor, feeling equal to anything: never got this whammed in Yorkshire but what if we had, we’d still have been useful. By some dimensional trick they missed (possibly he’d come out of a door, there were doors) Chip Desmond was heading towards them. They advanced with friendly intent, but the kid unaccountably veered away and scuttled off.