Bold as Love (43 page)

They’d originally planned to hold the grand finale in Bradford Civic Centre. Before setting out they’d switched the venue to Humberside, the date to coincide with the estimated arrival time of the final ships; and left Allie’s team to fix it all up. The venue was at Cleethorpes: a former amusement park called Pleasure Island, where a CCM campground had come into being in Dissolution Year.

The ‘Festival’ had been a local affair, the campground little more than a few long-term tents planted among the rides; and the seaside-fun karaoke bar turned into a Countercultural rock venue. All that had changed. The boating lake in the middle of the site, drained as a health hazard when the park fell into disrepair, was now the centre of the arena. Big screens had been erected, marquees and pavilions, and a towered stage. Some of the white knuckle rides had been fixed up and set running (irresistible, but NOT A GOOD IDEA). On the morning of the concert, with the crowds already pouring in, and an ugly mix of adrenalin, criminal intent and punters in their thousands ready to ignite, Fiorinda and DARK were in the Olde England section, in conference with Doug Hutton, chief of tour security, in an impromptu dressing room decorated with fragments of defunct kiddie-rides. A giant teacup, the huge head of a plastic caterpillar with a very sinister grin; when Ax arrived.

Fiorinda and Cafren had discharged themselves from hospital, regrouped with DARK and persuaded Fiorinda’s guards to escort them to Humberside overnight, in the good old tourbus. Everyone had been drinking hard, and they were determined to go on.

‘What the fuck are you doing here!’ yelled Ax.

‘We have a gig,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Like it says in the programme.’

Doug and his lieutenants, caught between two awesome fires, muttered excuses and left—

‘Fiorinda, I’m still in two minds whether to cancel. This place is a fucking death trap, I wish I’d seen it before… Don’t you understand what’s happened, the past two days?’

‘Yes I do. That’s why I’m here.’

‘Shit. Are you crazy? Listen, they meant to kill you. We don’t know when those mines were planted,
but we know when the bastards switched them on.
They were watching the tv, they saw you on the beach, and
then
they sent the signal—’

Fiorinda shrugged. ‘Ouch. Yes, I spotted that. It isn’t relevant, Ax. What’s relevant is that the punters need a shot of theatre,
now,
before anything else bad happens and shifts the balance further. And we’re the ones to give it to them, because we got blown up—’

‘In football terms,’ said Gauri, earnestly, ‘wor side’s a goal down. We have to regain possession. We canna let the sad bastards take the advantage off us—’

‘I want to play,’ said Cafren Free, speaking low. ‘I want to do this, for Tom.’

‘It’s not your decision, Ax,’ said Charm, belligerently.

‘You’re fucking out of your heads!’

‘You could be right,’ agreed Fiorinda, grinning fiercely. ‘So WHAT?’

‘We’ve talked to Doug,’ said Fil, attempting to sound rational. ‘He reckons the risk is rickable, I mean manangerable.’

‘Yeah, he says that, because Fiorinda has the security crew hypnotised. The site is full of dangerous lunatics, real bad guys, a lot of them planning to be in the mosh… Fuck, I don’t believe this. How can you sing with broken ribs?’

‘They’re not
broken,
only cracked
.
Anyway, I’ve got that sorted. Miracles of modern medicine.’

Suddenly he was distracted, staring at her. ‘You can hear me.’

‘Er, yeah.’

‘Then why didn’t you CALL me, TELL me about this plan.’

‘It comes and goes. I think the alcohol helps. Ax, trust me. I know what I’m doing. Me, cynical manipulative crowd pleaser.’

She saw him weaken, and held out her arms. He hugged her carefully, kissing her hair, her bruised face. ‘My lovely girl, you’ll drive me crazy, okay, go ahead, not that I could stop you.’

‘One other thing,’ said Fiorinda, smiling up at him sweetly, pissed as a pickled pack rat. ‘Charm can be Tom. She’s an okay bassist. But we’ll need a lead guitar.’

‘Doesn’t have to be any good,’ said Cafren, reassuringly. ‘Anyone can be wor’ Charmain. Three chords and a horrible attitude: that’s all you need.’

Fiorinda and Ax on stage together. It made sense, if anything was going to work. He couldn’t believe DARK’s frontwoman would stand for it.

‘Is that okay with you, Charm?’

Charm glared at him. ‘Don’t fucking take it as a precedent.’

Fiorinda and Cafren went back to bus to rest. When they came out again (having spent their time drinking instead of resting) the Olde Englishe Theme Park street, that had become the backstage of this thing, was a mill of strangers, mainly male, many of them openly carrying weapons. Fiorinda, walking among her guards, saw Ax with a couple of barmy army officers, talking to some big guys in digital masks. Ax in that rather wonderful dark red suit with the nehru jacket, smiling easily. He was unarmed, of course, but he had a guitar slung over his shoulder, (his Flying Vee, not the Les Paul), none too subtle reminder of a different sign of mastery: the British Army assault rifle Ax Preston had used in the Islamic Campaign. The guitar-man as warlord. Follow me. Keep the peace. Or take on me and my army.

Their eyes met.

So this is where we’re at. This is your role, and this is mine.

‘Better get on, Fio,’ said one of the security men, respectful but uneasy: not happy about her being out in the open.

In a hotel suite in York, Allie present only as a wandering voice, the Few had discussed the stage effects for this gig, which they’d decided to call the Armada Concert. Verlaine had been distressed about the lack of logic: Elizabethan Armada bad thing, bad invasion of foreigners. Surely that was the opposite—?

‘No, no, Ver,’ Fiorinda had explained to him. ‘Armada good because we won, and romantic historical thing. This Armada therefore also good. D’you get it?’

‘But we, er, whoever ‘we’ was, I’m a Papist myself, we
didn’t
win. They got blown off course by a storm and ended up wrecked in Ireland and places—’

‘This is the British-I’m-sorry-I-mean-English public,’ said Sage. ‘Logic? You are kidding.’

‘A lot of the punters won’t get off on Elizabeth the First,’ pointed out Anne-Marie, worriedly. ‘They’re not re-enactment nuts—’

‘Doesn’t matter. She’s been on tv. A lot of folks
will
get off: and feel included.’

‘There’ll be big screens in the Park,’ said Allie’s voice. ‘At Leeds, and at Reading. We’re working on the rest, we should have reasonable coverage—’

And Fiorinda, the Crisis Sweetheart, will be dressed up as the Virgin Queen.

The red and gold dress, long tight sleeves and small waist, full skirts below the knee. The square neck was cut high enough to hide most of the bruises; the boned bodice would keep her back straight, and help her breathing. The sporting-injuries doctor had injected some kind of jelly into her back, that would float around her cracked bones and render them more or less innocuous. He’d warned her it would have to be sucked out again, or the ribs wouldn’t heal, and this would be painful: but fuck tomorrow. Fiorinda sat in front of the dressing room mirror, drinking tequila and thinking of her lovely moonstone, opaline organza, spattered with blood and human flesh. Definitely an ex-dress, that one. ‘Ouch,’ she said, ‘I know why you’re here, Ingrid. There’s no way I could have dressed myself tonight. But is there anything you can do about my face?’

Ingrid slipped a make-up bandeau around her hair. ‘It’s gonna to hurt a bit.’

‘Hahaha. Never mind. I will try not to squeal.’

She waited for the band to get settled: Cafren wearing the Battleship Potemkin sailor cap at a jaunty angle, Charm looking furiously out of it, scaring the stage crew… I guarantee we’re going to screw up, hope we don’t wreck everything. Such a hissing and whooshing in her ears, wish that would go away. What a lot of faces. So many people, here and in the Park, and at Leeds, at Reading, at Wembley, wherever else anyone had tv. She’d reached the stage where she didn’t feel drunk, she could just barely remember that there was something called normal and this was different. Borne up, shattered, spread like a thin Fiorinda-film over all those screens… She walked on stage, took a mic from a stand and went right to the front. The huge triumphant roar that had greeted DARK’s appearence died away. Calm little grin—

The Fiorinda Appreciation Society had convened with fervent attention in the wings. Allie was there, and Roxane: all the Chosen, most of the Few.

‘She’s smashed,’ murmured Dilip anxiously. He’d just arrived from London.

‘Fraid so,’ agreed Ax. ‘They all are. Completely hammered. It’s okay, they’ve er, reached a plateau. I wouldn’t care to try it myself, but DARK have done this before, you know.’

‘All too often,’ muttered one of the music press types, insinuating pair, who’d been adopted by DARK on the tour. ‘True fanatics reckon they can tell the difference. Most people can’t.’

The onstage screens were showing Spanish galleons and the Virgin Queen, blown up and intercut with the people-stuffed hulks of the present, and the refugees coming ashore, from the grey thankless waters of that bad old North Sea. No laser beams, no fabulous fx. If they’d been available, it wouldn’t have been the right message.

‘History lesson,’ shouted Fiorinda. ‘Listen to this. ’Bout four hundred and thirty years ago, another Armada set out to invade our country. They never made it. It was a stormy summer, like this one: they got blown away. The weather’s not going to save us now. We have to save ourselves, and four hundred thousand desperate neighbours of ours. But we can do it. We can face the challenge, and this Armada will not destroy us either—’

She broke off, and stared at the crowd for a long moment. The Fiorinda Appreciation Society held its breath. Has she dried? What shall we do, why doesn’t she—

‘You know, that summer, people told the queen of England she should stay indoors, hide behind bodyguards, for fear of the mob. People have been saying the same to me. I think you know why. I’m not the queen of England, I’m just a singer with a rock and roll band, but I feel the same way as she did.
Fuck
that. Hey,
Let tyrants fear
. I have always so behaved myself that under God I have placed my chiefest strength in the goodwill of my faithful and loving people—’

‘She’s quoting. What’s she quoting?’ demanded the other music press type, wide-eyed.

‘She’s taking a riff from Elizabeth the First’s speech to the troops at Tilbury,’ said Roxane Smith, ‘If I remember rightly. You might want to note the date, Joe. It was August the fifth, 1588. Of course, the speech was written for publication and much later. What Elizbeth actually said, how she looked, her mood, we’ll never know. Ax, was this planned? Did you know about this?’

Ax shook his head. ‘Not until just now.’

Smelly Hugh looked bemused. ‘Uh, is it bad? Is there a copyright issue?’

Fiorinda, on stage, was yelling, (more or less in the words attributed to that other consummate performer, great lady), that she would rather be dead than distrust the crowd, that she was here to live or die with them, to lay down her honor and her blood, even in the dust—

‘Don’t worry about it, Hugh,’ said Ax. ‘She can get away with anything.’

‘And I THINK FOUL SCORN that any prince of Europe should dare to imagine we can’t hack this thing because we can. Without violence, without shame. We’ll get through it.’

She had to wait, grinning, a long time before they’d let her speak again.

‘Hey, I forgot. There was something about being a weak and feeble woman.’

Renewed shouting, louder than ever: Fiorinda!
Fiorinda!

‘Okay, okay, I’ll get on with it. So you know, we’re missing a guitarist. I’ve asked someone to help us out. Be nice. He hasn’t had much chance to rehearse.’

‘’Scuse me,’ said Ax, ‘think I’m on.’

After the Armada concert the barmy army was winding down, getting ready to leave the remaining problems (the British Resistance and their mines, residual crowd control) to the conventional authorities. Sage went to say goodbye to Richard, and found him in the operations room with Corny, his long-time partner, presiding over a barmy staff officers’ debriefing. His entrance caused a stir, something new and different from the usual,
hey, look, it’s Aoxomoxoa
! It was going to take him a while to live down that stunt in the trailer park.

‘We’re off, Richard, okay? I mean, permission to quit, Sah.’

‘Of course,’ said Richard, ‘Oh, Sage, wait a moment, there is just one thing.’

The vision in biker leathers turned back, that fearsomely beautiful mask frowning a little.

‘What?’

‘We think you look lovely in your fascist uniform.’

DARK went to Teesside, the tour circus headed for London. Ax and Fiorinda stayed behind, in the Pleasure Island campground. Continentals, and Boat People counterculturals from as far away as Central Asia and the Sub-Sahara, had converged on the last concert site, all wanting to talk to Ax… About dam-busting, coastal erosion, volcanoes going off in the Ring of Fire; what this year without a summer would mean to CCM Crisis Europe. Fiorinda didn’t take much part in these conversations. Desperation control, she would do. Foreign policy, no. On the fifth night after the concert, as the last ships were trying to dock at Immingham, another storm arrived. It was short but fierce. There wasn’t much lo-impact accommodation left standing. They spent the next day visiting the afflicted and helping out at hippie soup-kitchens, ending up bivouaced in an army-surplus ridge tent, two fields back from the shore. Ax was fast asleep. Fiorinda sat beside him, leaning against a slippery, prickly straw bale, wrapped in a blanket. She’d had the jelly sucked out. Her ribs were aching madly, she couldn’t get comfortable lying down. Recumbent bodies lay around her, dimly lit by ATP patches taped to the canvas walls. She could hear the sea, sullenly roaring. She was thinking of the last Boat People, in their Friday-afternoon prefabs. The first batches of instant housing had been wonderful, but things had gone steadily downhill—

‘Hey, brat.’