Bold as Love (40 page)

But that was obviously nonsense.

Charm, aggressively
non-star
in an eclipsed-sun teeshirt and baggy jeans, mud-brown dreads tied back with string, stood propping up the dressing room wall, while Fiorinda was buttoned into the silver and white cowgirl dress (which had recovered from its experience on the night of the Mayday concert), and had her hair brushed out. It was the first time Fio’d had a personal minder on tour, but her dear bodyguards, backed by Allie Marlowe, had insisted. She suspected the woman had been briefed to prevent her from thumping Charm.

‘Your boyfriend’s going to get us all killed.’

‘He didn’t know it would be like this. Anyway, I don’t know what you’re complaining about. We’re headlining now,
and
we’ll be on the telly. Such telly as there is. Sounds good to me.’

One of their own security guys put his head round and said, ‘We’re ready to take you down.’ The opened door let in a blurred, thunderous rush of noise: massed bodies charging the police horses, a rattle of gunfire. At least it sounded as if it was back towards the station. Cafren’s breath hissed through her teeth. Tom mopped his brow. Sweat dripped from under the rim of the Potemkin cap.

‘Jesus, Lenin and Trotsky,’ he muttered. ‘Is this
England
?’

Maybe they were being naïve: but surely even the Deconstruction Tour had been nothing like this, nothing like so bad and poisoned and dangerous—

‘This is England,’ said Fiorinda. ‘This is how it feels. Hey, Tom. Freedom to flail?’ They slapped hands, the six of them, united in scared, sweaty defiance.

Freedom to flail.

‘Aw reet hinnies,’ said Charm, grinning hard. ‘Aw reet,
princess
. Let’s go.’

Fiorinda walked on stage, and picked up her Strat from the piano stool. She couldn’t see much, but the atmosphere was thick with tension. They’d made the crowd wait. Now she was making them wait again, and she could feel the band getting uneasy. Ax not here, Sage not here. Rob and the Powerbabes not here. Well, moral authority isn’t something you can argue about. If they decide you’ve got it, you’ve got it. She walked to the front, taking a mic from a stand, the guitar clutched by the neck. (She looked, on the big screens, like a little girl dangling her favourite doll by the hair). Thank god, at least no technical meltdowns tonight. The yelling had stopped. There was almost silence, out in that seething, spinning void—

‘Hey,’ shouted Fiorinda. ‘I wasn’t born here. I can’t hardly speak your language, Geordies. But it’s a small world. I think I’m at least partly human. So do I stay or do I go, and DO YOU GET THE MESSAGE?’

Without waiting for them to answer, (don’t tempt fate) she swung around, donning the guitar, grinned at Charm, and they plunged together into the opening chords of ‘Wholesale’.

And DARK delivered it—

Newcastle Arena (and thereabouts), 7th July: NME reports from the Edge of DARKness-She made us wait, but we don’t care. She came up front and gave us a sound telling-off, and we loved it. She leaps into action, and the crowd explodes in sheer relief because it’s bad and nasty and violent out there, but we’re going to be ALL RIGHT NOW. We’re in the engine room right next to the fire and we are fine, we are ecstatic, we are wonderful, and she’s hauling this whole fucking Titanic of a national emergency around by sheer blackhole radiating female energy. Damn the torpedoes, damn the giant berg of human flesh that just rammed our island. DARK are brilliant and inspired, all power to DARK, but Fiorinda is magic tonight, and I’m going to fucking belt the next person that tries to tell me its the Ax effect. This girl is the music… She shrieks, she wails, she whispers. She leaps she whirls, she loses the plot and we don’t care, we know she’ll find it again. She even, for a brief aberration, lets us know how gorgeous *that voice* can be. Fiorinda for God! howls the mosh pit, Fiorinda for God! we all join them. She laughs like a hyena and goes flying into the crowd, caught in a hundred arms, the airborne-cams following her, she’s dancing with us, if you’ve got tv that works you can see her doing it in your living room: down in our dirt, absolutely without fear, that hair on fire, flashing piston arms and legs, nothing can harm us now. I swear to God we’d die for her, all fifty thousand of us here tonight. We’d die for her.

Joe Muldur. On the road with DARK

Ax had been called back south. A huge old RoRo ferry had struggled into Southampton Water with cholera aboard, in pretty bad conditions. He had to walk around looking reassuring about that situation; and see how many could be taken in at the campgrounds, because the government settlement provision down here was seriously overbooked.

It was the eighteenth of July, and he hadn’t managed to speak with Fiorinda since Newcastle. Things kept happening too fast. The Rock the Boat Tour (formerly, The Peace Tour) had fragmented, so many calls on them, travel so difficult, weather abomniable. They were managing to put on
some
kind of gig wherever a gig was demanded, or had been promised: best they could do. He could only catch the reports from afar, awed and terrified by the stunts she was pulling. Sage, meanwhile, was zooming around on a motorbike being a morale booster for the barmy army and the real military: which meant zooming, unarmed, into deadly dangerous fucked up confrontations. So those two were both giving him sleepless nights, as well as the rest.

The next day he was in London, where the camp in the Park, (dismantled after Pigsty died), was being put back together. The Armada’s numbers were up to the worst estimates, it was a case of packing them in anyhow. He found himself yelling furiously at Dilip, who had been ordered home from the Western tour with nervous exhaustion, but had now decided he was fit enough to dig latrines and run a concert party—

‘I lived in the Park all Dissolution summer,’ the mixmaster protested, angrily.

‘Yeah. Most of the time SO FAR OUT OF YOUR TREE you knew not where you were. When you’re half sober I expect you to have more sense. Give me credit, I know you won’t endanger anyone. I don’t want
you
getting sick—’

‘I’ve been seropositive for fifteen years, Ax. It’s my problem. I have never made it anyone else’s problem. Just BACK OFF—’

Rain drummed on the canvas, barmies tramped to and fro humping stuff and banging up partitions, pointless argument was the last thing Ax needed.

‘Fuck’s sake, give me a break. I’m not insulting you, I’m begging you. Please. Be my Fiorinda substitute. I can’t protect her. Let me keep
someone
I love safe.’

He collapsed, head in his hands, on a roll of heavy duty bubble wrap.

Dilip sighed, sat down next to him, and put an arm round his shoulders.

‘Ax, you are a sneaky bastard. Okay, okay, you win. As always.’

The suits had wanted Ax’s advice on whether they should keep quiet about the cholera. He thought it hardly mattered. Too late now. They should have kept quiet weeks ago, and let the country discover the size of the problem ship by ship. People will stand amazing pressure if you increase it gradually.

The whole fucking situation almost made him wish he was a war lord again.

But in a week, ten days at most, all the ships should be in. They’d have made it to the other side without utter disaster, and they could start to shake down.

There was a flexible screen taped up on the canvas wall of the marquee, showing crisis coverage. (Everyone who had access to working tv watched the coverage, obsessively). Dilip and Ax sat staring, blank with exhaustion, at Aoxomoxoa in a studio somewhere, in biker leathers and a black iridescent shirt, looking like some great oil-mired seabird. A Settlement Centre on fire, bodies being carried. Fiorinda on the stage at Newcastle, doing ‘Sparrow Child’, the new single from
Friction
that Worm (formerly, lambtonworm.com) had released this week. Haunting melody, insistent catch, Fiorinda’s truly beautiful voice, as different as possible from anything else on the album: something for the silent majority. In a moment she’ll leap into thrash again, she’ll dive into that terrifying pit, giving herself to the crowd with utter
, don’t care if I live or die
abandon. Something for the desperate.

The kid is being amazing. She’s performing miracles.

Sleeping in doorways, I have been a sparrow child
I was hiding in your city, because your world out there’s so wild—

Ax hated that song. He couldn’t hear it without seeing a thirteen year old kid adrift on the streets of London, a dead baby in her arms. But no question it worked on the punters. We could still win.

If we can just get through this part—

Fiorinda got mislaid after a gig DARK did in Scarborough. It was an accident waiting to happen, so much confusion, someone was bound to get left behind some time. When she extricated herself from the crowd, hours after the show, the circus had left without her, and her Oltech phone was on the bus. She teamed up with a German band called Konigen, from Munich. They’d signed for the tour expecting something very different from this experience. They’d had the idea that Ax’s England was
peace and love man, hippies with beads
, but ‘this is just like home,’ they said happily. ‘This is so familiar!’ They’d come over with Medecins Sans Frontières, part of the Boat People’s camp-following: aid workers, rock bands, disaster-tourists, media folk, some sharing the conditions on the ships, some using virus-free light aircraft. She drove north with them, drinking hard, singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and swapping CCM crisis stories while the sun came up in bruised glory over the sea. They stopped in Whitby, where the vampires come from, and couldn’t get anything to eat; went on drinking instead. Fiorinda was speaking German quite well by the time they reached Redcar, where the gallant Bavarians had business at a reception camp.

They were acquiring hashish, (excellent hashish as it turned out). Fiorinda walked about in her rainjacket, between rows of instant prefabs huddled in a stark grey field, looking at the little families in their strange clothes, lot of hard faced women. Blowing in here like thistledown—

She’d been on a PR visit to one of these places. She hadn’t paid attention, the celeb visitor role was too horrible. Now she was thinking silent majority thoughts, neither paranoid nor compassionate, just stupid:
why on earth do you want to come and live here? You must be out of your minds. B
ut they had come from places where things were much, much worse.

Who’s going to drive them home? No one. This is home.

Before long one of the aid workers came up and said, er, are you Fiorinda?

She admitted she was, because it seemed daft to lie about it, and got them to try and contact the tour. They couldn’t get through, and she couldn’t remember where DARK was supposed to end up tonight. The Bavarians were no use, they’d abandoned mobile telecoms as a thing of the past. She decided she’d better get to Gateshead. Konigen were happy to drive her, but it took time: what with getting lost, and trying to find a callbox that worked, running out of alco fuel (for the van, not for themselves); and the roads being potholed by Deconstruction Tour damage, and a couple of detours around trouble.

They reached the circus’s camp in Beggar’s Wood about seven in the evening. Konigen took off to visit the Angel of the North. Fiorinda found DARK, reclaimed her phone, had a stand up fight (verbal) with Charm about whose fault that had been, and sat outdoors of the catering tent, dazed and miserable, wondering why Ax didn’t call her. The Festival hadn’t kicked off yet, but there were familiar faces and vans around: techies, road crews, Anansi’s Jamaica Kitchen. She’d told everyone to
leave her the fuck alone
, so everyone was doing that, or else everyone was too busy anyway—

She was trying to summon up the energy to go and get a shower and change, when a motorbike roared up. Sage jumped off, grabbed her, shook her down for the phone,
switched it on
, and started yelling at her furiously. Fiorinda hadn’t realised the phone was switched off, but she was too shattered to respond any way except by yelling back. She
did
know how fucking serious things were, she
was not
crazy, she knew what she was doing
—

‘You DO NOT! I only found out you were here because Rob called me, why the fuck couldn’t you call people yourself? You’ve been out of touch for
eighteen hours
. You take off without telling anyone, you won’t listen to anyone. Supposing you run into a firefight, on one of these impromptu walkabouts? Supposing next time you do one of those
fucking
stage dives, some overwrought bastard decides he’s going to do Fiorinda, how cool, gets you down and rapes you?
Suppose he starts a fashion
—? How are you going to stop them, who’s going to be able to reach you to haul you out—’

‘Doesn’t sound like a bad idea!’ shrieked Fiorinda. ‘I’m just a valuable piece of meat, fair game unless I’m locked away. Obviously you’re thinking the same as this
overwrought bastard
, and if that’s what you think, what do I care who else—’

At this point Rob Nelson managed to get between them, literally holding them apart, one hand reaching up and planted on Sage’s chest, the other hauling on Fiorinda’s shoulder—

‘Hey, hey,
hey!
Stop this! Sage, you are being unbelievably tactless! And
you—’

The right words failed him. ‘You need to eat something. Come on indoors.’

When Sage followed them into the tent, few minutes later, Rob had a plate of chicken, rice and peas in front of her. His arm was around her, (all bones, shaking with fatigue, it felt like an exhausted little bird he was holding); while Rupert the White Van Man tried to get her to eat.

Sage sat at the table, big and awkward, skull looking very contrite indeed.

‘I’m sorry, Fee. That was horrible. I’ve just been so scared
.
’

‘You and Ax,’ she said, balefully, ‘were in Yorkshire for three months. I was as scared as you’ve been today, every fucking moment. It’s not nice, is it?’

‘No, it’s not nice.’

His barmy army pager started to bleep. He took it out, read the message.