Bold as Love (47 page)

‘I do,’ growled Jordan. ‘I told you Ax, but you wouldn’t fucking listen.’

‘So much for tame punters,’ sighed Roxane.

‘Why not blast them with some really heavy IMMix. Blow their fuses?’

George and Bill’s grinning masks managed to look alarmed. ‘Better not, Fio.’

‘The effect of that could be unpredictable,’ said Peter.

The rain drummed and the wind howled, the sounds of battle rose in violence. Could they possibly have run into trouble, on a dance night in their own Blue Lagoon? But the Blue Lagoon was
not
their own. This was their weak spot, always had been. They did not belong here, they had no natural authority. Bunch of rockstars, media creations…‘We should
leave
,’ repeated Felice, urgently. th ‘We shouldn’t be here, it looks like we’re powerless—‘

The frenzied mass parted, four bearded, wild-haired figures emerged from of it. One of them was the guy Ax had spoken to at Blue Gate, wearing a bloodstained white scarf as a dishevelled turban, his eyes huge and crazy.

An uneasy quiet spread.

‘I’m Faud Hassim,’ he bellowed. ‘I’m here for you, Ax. You’re gonna fight me, barre-knuckled. You son of a pig, you uncut blashempous faker. Show us who’s the boss. Like you did in Yorkshire.’

His companions started a slow hand-clap.

The crowd waited to see what would happen, nearly all of it quieted now.

Ax just shook his head, and turned away.

Faz Hassim roared with laughter, launched himself at the nearest staybehind: grabbed the guy’s shoulders, nutted him savagely, and kicked him in the balls as he recoiled. The Assassins leapt back into the crowd, the melee recommenced, more rabid than ever

Jordan glared at his brother. ‘I’m getting Milly out of this.’

Milly, who was now visibly pregnant, said, ‘You’re not
getting
me anywhere, Jor. We’ll do what’s best.’ But she looked worried.

‘Call Thames Valley,’ said Dora, ‘We need the cops.’

‘She could right,’ said the manager. ‘This never happens, this is out of order. We could rack up casualties.’

‘Those wankers!’ snapped Ax. ‘They’ll either not turn up, or they’ll arrive with a fleet of Apaches and strafe the site. Shit, I suppose they do their best. But the police won’t want to mess with us, and I don’t blame them.’

‘Who’s us?’ muttered Verlaine. ‘That’s the trouble, isn’t it?’

Aoxomoxoa was saying nothing, leaning against a partition, hands in his pockets, the skull gazing mildly into space. Ax glanced at him with annoyance, took a turn up and down the stage; looked at Fiorinda. Apparently these three were in conference.

Fiorinda shrugged. ‘I think it’s just that kind of night, Ax.’

Sage went on silently looking as if he was waiting for someone to press the switch. ‘Oh, o
kay
,’ said Ax. ‘Go on, my recovering gunslinger. Sort ’em.’

The skull produced a rabid and beautiful grin. ‘DK. Give us a happy beat—’

The manager gave them some power back, Dilip took over the sound. The Heads and their chief came off the stage in one predatory rush, and went into the ruck like tigers, irresistible and glorious. Dora and Milly stayed well back. Fiorinda, Felice and Cherry stood up front, dodging missiles, and cheered.

‘You going down there?’ Rob asked Ax, his tone making it clear Rob was not.

‘Not unless it’s a matter of life and death,’ said Ax firmly. ‘Which it won’t be.’

Four Heads, plus another four skull-masked Heads crew-members, moved through the crowd, the peacekeepers rallying to them: breaking up fistfights, disarming bottle wielders, treating the home team and the aggressors (when these could be distinguished) with impartial ferocity. The obvious thing was to open the place up, give folks a chance to disperse. Sage reached the marquee wall. Another skull headed idiot, couldn’t tell who, had shinned up a scaffold pole to signal he was at the opposite side. They needed a through draught, or the tent would rip itself apart. He struggled with tackle, fending off a large and trolleyed black Assassin fan who wouldn’t give up—

‘I saw you on that tv without the mask!’ shrieked the overwrought black guy, pummelling wildly. ‘Hey, you an albino African, innit?’

‘Yeah, right, few million years back. Knock it off, huh, I’m trying to—’

‘Don’t mess with me. You’re a brother, or how come you got that flat nose? How come you got that yellow nappy hair?’

‘Lost tribes of Israel. Shit, KNOCK IT OFF—’

A wall-section came free, the storm burst in. Overwrought black guy grabbed some scaffold. A mass of heavy marquee fabric slammed into them, with such violence both men went flying, black guy still hanging on his scaffold. Sage, crashing onto his back, drenched as if he’d fallen in the river, saw that lump of quartz, flailing up in the apex like a huge, blunt bolas weight: swinging, catching, hauling on the shifted frame, propelled by the force of the wind…ah, shit…

‘SHIT. FUCK. I am trying to
give up
doing stuff like this—’

‘Don’t blame yourself man,’ said the black guy, as everything around them went sideways, in wet, howling, roc-wing flapping chaos. ‘These things happen.’

Ax left the wreckage of the Festival site in the morning. He had a gig he couldn’t miss. He took the train to London but drove to Hastings, storm damage having disrupted the railways. Got back late in the afternoon, and went straight to a tv studio to record for the
Laylat al Qadr
broadcast. The spiel more polished than it had been two years ago in the Garden Room at Pigsty’s hotel, but sounding to him even less convincing.

Stick together, be good to each other. If we can just get through this part—

Fiorinda was at Reading. That was okay, he’d always planned to spend this night alone.
Laylat al Qadr
, Night of Power, commemorates the night the Qur’an descended into the soul of the Prophet: an occasion for wakeful prayer and meditation. The scholars say no one can tell exactly when it should fall in Ramadan. Traditionally it was celebrated on the twenty seventh night, which was when Ax’s recorded spiel would be broadcast. But he’d decided to make his own private vigil also, and this seemed like the time. He cooked for himself and ate, sitting on the floor in the living room of the Brixton flat, watching tv: Elsie the cat in turn watching him attentively, ready to sneak onto his lap soon as she saw half a chance.

He was thinking it was a pity he disliked dates, it took the romance out of breaking the fast on this desert-arab food; when his phone rang. It was the nursing home. Laura Preston, the old lady he’d visited faithfully—except when utterly prevented—since he came back from the Deconstruction Tour, had died about two hours after he’d left. Not unexpected. She still took an interest and had a smile for him, but she’d been saying she was very tired; and she’d kept getting these chest infections. She’d been just on a hundred years’ old.

Yeah, he told himself, responding politely to the matron, It was time, she was ready. That was a good connection, and it’s over… But the loss shook him.

The smell of a geriatric home was one of his early memories. Must have been somewhere his mother had been working. Shrunken creatures lying under knitted blankets, a little boy stares in through the half-open door. Maybe I learned compassion there. Or maybe I just learned about trying to hold back the tide. That some people instinctively do this, and you fail in the end, whatever you do: but somehow it seems worthwhile.

Making the best of things, my mum would say.

He switched off the tv. Cleared away his meal, put Op 130 on the sound system, took out his India stone and brought it to the rug which he seemed to have adopted as the locus for his meditations. Fingernails on the left, and on the thumb and index finger of the right hand, kept invisibly short. The nails on the other three fingers must be exactly square and buffed smooth to perfection. Thinking about the government’s plan to hand over the Upper House to the CCM, launched so long ago, in another world. Which was still moving along, and which he couldn’t openly resist, but he didn’t like it. Pack the former House of Lords with self-important, quarrelsome Green Nazis, and make Ax accountable to them. Oh, terrific… And Benny Prem wanted watching, though any conspiracy against Ax looked toothless just at the moment.

Hadn’t yet thought of a way to get the punters to take the ATP treatment. And what about the ATP ‘batteries’? Difficult to resist, but they were a trap, just more of the same. Green power that gets made in a factory and you buy it from a shop; or a service provider. The radical change was lost. Ax was having megalomaniac thoughts about suppressing the things (because the market never will).

But that was stupid.

There ought to be a saying, to match
if you’re in a hole stop digging
. If the engine’s turning over, stop pushing. It’s time to jump on board and let yourself be carried, you’re no longer the motive force. Horrible feeling though. That was why he loved the Volvo. It had a stick and gears, and a mechanical engine; and he felt in charge. Ah well. As the music biz teaches us, lack of control is the chief misery of the struggle; loss of control the first price of success.

Unless your name’s Aoxomoxoa.

Poor Faz. Something so heartbreaking about the way he’d stood there, crazy drunk, uttering his ridiculous challenge. Yet though the incident seemed nothing now, completely upstaged by the weather, it had been dangerous: the unbridgeable gap between Ax and his friends, and the real Counterculture, suddenly, shockingly visible. Is there a solution? Maybe not. Lucky that Sage and Fiorinda had known how to turn it around. Yeah, there’s such a thing as good violence, exhilerating, face-saving, cathartic: but Ax would never understand that code. He paused in his finicky work with the oilstone, thinking of Sage. So fucking wise, sometimes. Yet still capable of insisting you come and admire the impressively large turd he has just laid. And Fiorinda: stubborn, secretive little cat, with that brain, that voice; that cool, steely integrity.

It was strange to look back and see how quickly the triple alliance had been formed. Almost from the first meeting of the Counter Cultural Think Tank they’d been together, running rings round Paul Javert, their friends occasionally catching up. Ax Preston and Aoxomoxoa, and that extraordinary little girl, exercising faculties the music biz had left to atrophy. None of them, not even Ax, having any idea where this was heading. Sage at those sessions frequently so hammered you wondered how he could see straight, but it never shut him up: while Fiorinda was quietly stealing Ax’s heart away—

Like something out of a fairytale. I fucked her when I didn’t know I loved her, and now look at my darling. Her beautiful smile, her graceful body, glimpses of Fiorinda, rising through the frost and snow. He could almost wish to have that time back, only to know how much he was going to love her; though God knows it hadn’t been easy. To touch her hair again, as on that first night. To hold her naked in his arms, and kiss her little breasts, for the first time again.

Perhaps he shouldn’t be thinking about his girlfriend’s breasts. Even if it was with pure affection and no carnality, much. Theoretically he should be praying.

Keep me on the straight path.

But he could not recover the mindset of Ax-in-Yorkshire, struggling towards Islam. Things had happened so thick and fast, tonight
accept
seemed like just a word. He had never prayed for the success of his enterprise, it didn’t seem right.
Insha’llah.
In the end he just sat: listening to the Beethoven and wishing he could have his nice life back, a pretty-good guitarist with a pretty-good, non-commercial little band. The cat on his lap curled tight and purring hard. Oh well, he thought. I have two best friends who don’t stand no shit. As long as they’ll put up with me, I’ll know I haven’t turned into a complete monster.

Later, he went and fetched the Qur’an and began to recite. He didn’t need the printed Arabic, he had it all in memory, but he took comfort in the ritual.

When he got back to Reading he left the car up the road, to avoid the inevitable personal transport hypocrisy flak. On the south bank, at Caversham Bridge, people were miserably watching fallen trees getting hauled out of the water, that lovely big poplar among them. But the flood had subsided. Every storm is different. This one seemed to have had a short-lived, vindictive interest in one particular reach of the Thames—as if it had been planning revenge, while Ax and his friends were off on the east coast, scoring points against its buddies. He walked into the site through the main entrance, Storm Damage PA coming to meet him across the devastated camping fields: Fiorinda singing, in duet with someone, that they
came across a child of god, he was walking along the road
… Interupts herself to respond to remarks that can’t be made out; rueful laughter, messages (is Evan Curran of California on site? Evan, if you come over here, someone wants to wish you a happy birthday). Who’s that harmonising with her? Not Sage. Oh, it’s George. Good work getting the PA functional again so quickly.
Stardust, golden
…

PLEASE, No more wet gear to the Leisure Centre, FUCK IT.

We’ve run out of space.

On the fence at the gates to the arena, someone had created an installation of dead birds: glittering speckled starlings; chaffinches, a blackbird, a pitiful yellow and slate smear that had been a bluetit; and here’s a swan, huge wings outspread, like a murdered angel.

Lot of damage. Only the Zen Self tent seemed untouched. Red Stage was okay but looking strangely lopsided, oh, one of the towers gone. Near the site of the Blue Lagoon, where Storm Damage PA had its outdoor headquarters, he found Dilip, Chip and Verlaine and the Heads: sitting around a bonfire with some ZenSelfers and others. He arrived just as George and Fiorinda returned from their PA slot; and joined the atmosphere of shocked, bereft and weary people—whose own home has been wrecked this time; who had finally become the victims, not the audience, not the defenders.

‘Oh well,’ said Chip. ‘We’ll have to put on the show right here in the barn.’

‘Very poor,’ said Verlaine. ‘It’s not funny, Chip. The campground’s
gone
.’