Castles Made of Sand (3 page)

‘What would you know,
fogey
? I like draining my cell metabolism, it gives the world a nice edge, also like getting my head blown off—’

‘Sage, pull yourself together. Coolest dudes. Can you do it? No falling over things?’

‘Coolest dudes. I will not to fall over anything. But now I need a shit.’

‘Trust you. Well, you can’t do it here. You can’t shit on a public beach.’

‘Why not? This would be a Rivermead GM turd, with unzip bugs. Be gone in an hour. Okay, okay, if it worries you. Ax, how you got to be the leader of the outlaw unwashed I will never know. I’ll be dead suburban, I’ll go and shit in the water. I hope a terrible wave doesn’t come and drown me.’

‘Then I’d be sorry—’ Ax stopped laughing. He could see this wave. ‘Hey, be careful.’

‘Calm down, there is no terrible wave. Maybe you better come and hold my hand.’

The party was being thrown by Allie Marlowe, the Dictator’s Queenpin administrator; a Brighton native. There was quite a crowd: core members of the Rock and Roll Reich mingling graciously with South Coast Countercultural luminaries, favoured media-folk, non-Few rockstars; other useful people. Ax and Sage caused a satisfying stir. They presented themselves to their hostess (an ill woman to cross, Allie: better make sure and be polite), who congratulated them for turning up. They then forgot about being the coolest dudes and stood at the bar, forgetting to drink and ignoring everyone, talking about Fiorinda.

In Dissolution Summer she’d been the Indie babystar with a past: recruited off the streets by DARK, infamous Teesside dike-rockers: outed by the music press as the daughter of Rufus O’Niall, veteran Irish megastar. Ax had known the ugly story about Fiorinda and her father, and admired the kid’s courage: but he’d never been inspired to check out the music, until she was his girlfriend.

‘I knew what DARK were like, and I knew
you’d
taken her under your wing, which I’m afraid did not give me confidence. I had to get hold of
No Reason
and listen to it when she wasn’t around, to find out whether she was total crap—’

‘Hahaha. Then you got a surprise.’

‘Yeah.’ Ax shook his head fondly. ‘Blew me away. Fantastic. But you knew.’

No Reason
, the debut album DARK had made with Fiorinda, had transformed the band’s fortunes. Without her they’d been a disaster with flashes of genius. With her, they became extraordinary: though still fully as volatile.

‘I knew,’ agreed Sage, the skull grinning sweet and rueful. ‘Oh yes, I knew the first time I saw her on stage. Fourteen years old, screaming like a banshee, having severe difficulty singing and playing a guitar at the same time—’

Ax grinned. ‘Well, it’s a situation I try to avoid, myself.’

‘But she was
the business
—’

‘Dunno why I bothered, looking back. It was about a year before she condescended to turn up at a Chosen Few gig.’

The Chosen Few, now generally known as the Chosen, because
the Few
meant something else, was Ax’s band: comprising two of his brothers, and his ex-girlfriend Milly Kettle on drums. They didn’t play a big part in the Reich.

Fiorinda stories from long ago, some of them new to Ax even now. Her epic fights with Charm Dudley, DARK’s rabid-tempered front woman. Her cut-crystal management style with the government suits. Her secrets. (Have you ever caught her writing a song? Nah. Nor me. Always happens when I’m off the premises.) The shock of her intelligence. How much they missed the arrogant, oblivious, cruelly damaged teenager they had known. How much they loved the person she had become.
The party chattered on. Across the room, above a frieze of heads, a big screen dsiplayed the Armada concert, finalé of the Boat People tour last summer. They watched Fiorinda and DARK, with Ax Preston as emergency stand-in guitarist: quite a change in demeanour for the Chosen’s sober, reserved virtuoso.

‘Did you plan to carry on like that?’ asked Sage, who’d been elsewhere that night.

‘No! I planned to blend in with the wallpaper, so that Charm would not hate me—’

‘Nyah. Not worth worrying about. Charm hates everyone, regardless.’

‘But with DARK, blending-in means—’

‘Go for it ’til you fall down bleeding at the nose and ears.’

‘Yeah. So it just happened.’

Their girl simply standing there, in the tight-waisted red and gold
Elizabeth
dress, red curls falling around her face. No can-can kicks, no cartwheels. This they didn’t like so much, as they knew what a feat of alcohol and raw courage was keeping her upright. But how the cameras loved her—

The scene changed, Fiorinda no more in sight, and they turned away at once.

‘You know,’ remarked Sage, ‘I
really
don’t like Charm Dudley, but it must have been a hell of a thing. I kept thinking, back then,
Fiorinda forever
, but I’m fucking glad that firestorm of a superstar brat didn’t happen to my band.’

They laughed, and talked of other things, only for the pleasure of coming back to her. Nice little country we’ve got hold of here, a little battered but still afloat. What are we going to do with it? Leave governing to the government, our job is the hearts and minds… The next big problem, as Ax saw it, was the Ancient British tendency, except they didn’t call themselves that now. Called themselves the Celtics, in alignment with a Pan-European movement of the same name. Anti-science, ultra-Green, covertly racist and dangerously attractive. The Celtics didn’t
want
economic recovery for the masses, mediated by futuristic-utopian sustainable tech: as all that sort of thing was against the will of Gaia—

It was a hijack. You didn’t hear Ireland, Scotland and Wales calling themselves the ‘Celtic nations’ any more. They didn’t wish to be associated. But needless to say, the sinister romantics had their fans at Westminster, and Ax’s own so-called subjects were deeply divided. So how to combat the Neo-Feudalist creep? Without starting a civil war in the Counterculture?

Ax had come up with the idea of an education scheme. Futuristic-Utopian arts and crafts.
Masterclasses; training in music tech from superstars. Pop-cultural history in hedgeschool kindergartens. Bring in the rest of the Arts. Outreach to the general public, get some irresistible albums out. Rock and Roll meant something different now, for everyone trapped in Gulag Europe by the data quarantine. Not crowd control (disguised as the hedonistic soundtrack of the revolution), but a connection with the lost world. Psychological landscape, belief in the return of modern civilisation—

‘D’you think an education scheme is going to
work
?’

‘Truthfully, no,’ said Ax. ‘I always think my ideas for social engineering are ridiculously stupid and childish. But then I look at
real
government initiatives, supposedly designed by the grown-ups, you know? And fuck, I’m no worse.’

Sage laughed. ‘Well, okay, I’m in. You got us this far.’

‘I wish you’d
sing
more,’ sighed Ax. ‘You have such a great voice. There are songs I’d love to hear you do, and so would the punters.
But no, you prefer to hide behind those fucking circus stunts that scare me to death, and I’m sure you’re going to kill yourself—’

‘I am not going to kill myself. Look, if I sing, I have to take care of the voice, they don’t take care of themselves, an’
the body
(yeah, laugh, my stock-in-trade) is already a time-consuming hobby. Why don’t
you
sing more?’

‘Because I can’t.’

‘Now that is nonsense
—
’

The pauses became longer. Sentences fell into pools of engrossing silence. They left the spot where they’d taken root, went out on deck and stood leaning against the rail, backs to the water, elbows touching, breathing slow, sinking deeper and deeper into the feeling—

‘Sage?’

‘Ax.’

‘Let’s go home.’

Fiorinda had had the flu for Christmas, gone back to work too soon and succumbed to an attack of bronchitis. The after-effects were enough to keep her at home on a chilly, damp February night. Well, she wouldn’t have known where to put herself at Allie’s gig, in the circumstances.

So this is what happens. You are poorly, so your boyfriend abandons you to spend the day with his best mate, and they’re going to your best girlfriend’s party out of their heads on
hideous mind-destroying drugs
—

She’d meant to go to bed early. At midnight she was sitting up reading, drinking red wine and trying not to worry. When friends take oxytocin, the intimacy drug, things have been known to go horribly wrong. Especially when the friends are the same sex, and heterosexual (or more or less heterosexual, darling Ax…) Fiorinda hated modern drugs anyway. Taking massive doses of enhanced human biochemicals for fun sounded to her like—feeding cows on dead cows. You don’t need the scientific details, if you have any sense you just
know
it’s a terrible idea.

They’ll be okay. Sage will be in charge, because it is drugs. Or Ax will be in charge, because Sage loves that. Anyway one of them will be in charge. They always do that, very clever; or maybe it’s genetic, a male thing, to avoid—

The entryphone chimed: she had to go down and let them in.

‘Sorry,’ said Ax, on the doorstep, ‘couldn’t find my key.’

‘You don’t have a key, idiot. You look at the ID thing with your eyes. What are you doing back here, futile creatures? You can’t have a pair bond with three in it.’

‘We’re not interested in any other kind,’ Sage kissed the tip of her nose.

‘DON’T kiss my nose! I HATE it when you do that!’

But he had followed Ax upstairs, laughing.

In the big living-room they were walking around, beaming weirdly. Ax had taken off his coat and Sage his outer scummy sweater. Fiorinda returned to her book. She’d been asleep when Ax left for Reading (pretending to be asleep, to signal her disapproval). ‘Is that what you were wearing at Allie’s party? She
will
have been impressed.’ There was nothing wrong with Ax’s dark red suit except that it was a little shabby, which should be a virtue these days. Sage wore his beloved slick, Imipolex, one-shouldered black dungarees (easy for hosing down), over a dreadful Hard Fun Tour hoodie, itinerary dates illegible with age. It might once have been grey. Or maybe mud-brown.

‘Uh, yeah?’

‘Are we not modish enough? Maybe that’s what was up with her.’

‘She didn’t
say
anything—’

‘I don’t remember whether she said anything. But I received tetchy vibes.’

‘Oh, surely not,’ said Fiorinda. ‘She wouldn’t have wasted her fire.’

Fiorinda was occupying one couch, along with Ax’s cat, who was fast asleep on a cushion. They took the other: Sage stretched out, Ax propped against it on the hearth rug, in front of the old flame-effect gas stove. ‘Is this room warm enough?’ asked Sage. ‘Can we turn that up? You have to keep warm, Fee.’

‘I am very cosy. Leave the stove alone, both of you. The state you are in, you’ll set the place on fire. Is it turning out the way you expected?’

Sage looks at Ax, Ax looks at Sage. They have a little staring match: breathing in synchrony. She’s not going to get an answer. They’ve forgotten the question, or neither of them is going to be the first to back down and say yes; or no.

‘What’s it
feel
like,’ she asked (her attitude softened by the fact that nothing seemed to have gone horribly wrong), ‘doing oxytocin?’

‘Depends who you are and who you’re taking it with,’ said Sage, disengaging from the stare to grin at the ceiling: a skull in a soppy dream. ‘If you’re me, and taking it with Ax, it feels not unlike being three years old and spending a happy day pottering around, doing nothing much, with your mother.’

‘I’d go with that,’ said Ax, smiling at his huge infant. ‘Only different.’

‘I may throw up.’ She wondered about Allie’s party. ‘
Could
you behave normally if you wanted to?’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Ax. ‘It’s very mild, really.’

‘Are we not behaving normally?’ asked Sage. They started laughing like fools: then stopped, gazing at each other with such grave happiness—

‘I should go to bed and leave you to it.’

She did not throw up; or go to bed. She stayed, pretending to read, unable to tear herself away, and they didn’t seem to mind. Ax fetched an acoustic guitar, and made sure it was in tune. He started to play, looking at Sage expectantly. She was so flustered by the situation it wasn’t until Sage began to sing that she recognised ‘Stonecold’, Fiorinda’s own paradoxical, teenage-vagrant anthem, her first big hit, her first
big
song. What on earth’s going on?

She hid behind her book, wishing she hadn’t tied up her hair, depriving herself of her usual retreat… They played the song through, then they stopped and discussed the chords, the key-changes, the melody: bitching gently about the time last year, when ‘Stonecold’, along with Fiorinda’s solo album,
Friction
, had wiped the floor with the opposition, Ax and Sage included.

Weird how people keep buying music, in the midst of catastrophes.

Fucking babystars, they said, grinning sweetly. Makes yer sick. Thank God she never did that aerobics video. Then the song again, word perfect, note perfect, and ‘Stonecold’ is a
good
song, not a forced rhyme or an off syllable: her own music that still gave her goosebumps, the shivering feeling of power running through her—

‘Is this okay?’ said Sage, as if suddenly realising they had an audience.

Fiorinda nodded, keeping her nose in her book.

When they’d finished with ‘Stonecold’, they did ‘Rest Harrow’. Fiorinda gets ecological (and she’d never realised how much of Sage there was in that song, hayseed, plough boy, until she heard him sing it). Then another, less familiar track from
Friction
, and another, each song getting the same loving attention. Ax adding to the guitar part, how could he not, but never taking over, always staying close to what she’d written. The oxy must be good stuff. They didn’t steal her wine, or light a spliff, they just went on playing and singing Fiorinda’s music. She’d had
no idea
they could do this. She forgot to be embarrassed and simply listened; and watched. So beautiful together, locked into each other, her tiger and her wolf.
A longer pause. What next?