Hallucinating (17 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

...goddess...

Durham is very different.

It is only a small place, at least, that bit occupying the hill where the River Wear curves into a tight loop; the rest of it is ruined and grey. But the old city, being tiny, has survived as a viable community, supported by agriculture in surrounding fields and by a certain amount of hunting.

This is a place of the Goddess. Durham Cathedral has been dedicated to her. But the New Pagan Troubadours do not yet know this extraordinary fact because they are arguing with guards at the single city gate, built new and tough to the north of the city-on-the-hill.

They are told, "Only special visitors, residents of the city, followers of the Goddess and official messengers can enter Durham."

"But,
man,
" Nulight protests, "this is
important.
We're on a quest, yeah? We're here for Britain. Hey, wanna hear our songs? We got four so far—half the wheel of the year, you
get
it? We're the real thing, man, the real deal—"

"Yes, yes," says the guard, who is having none of this. "Not good enough reasons, any of them."

Kappa and Jo step forward, and Jo says, "I think I know what you mean by special visitors—you mean women, don't you?"

The guard tries to hide his surprise at this guess.

"All right," Jo says, "I'll sign for these two." She jerks her thumb in the direction of Nulight and Sperm. "Me and Kappa'll take responsibility for them."

"Hmmm," mutters the guard. "All right. But no longer than a week. And don't forget to pay your respects at the Cathedral. You'll be drummed out of the city if you forget—and I mean with drums." He glances at Nulight. "You get it?"

"You're looking at a drummer," Nulight remarks.

"A talented amateur, no doubt," the guard replies.

So, documents signed and witnessed, they enter Durham City. Nulight is freaked. Damn loads of women! He feels like a foreigner. But he's not stared at in the stereotypical manner, he is allowed to roam free, for he is with two women. And it is Imbolc: women have more important matters to attend to, matters of Brigid. The foursome stop at an inn and pay a small fee to be allowed to camp in the garden at the back, where they tie up their ponies and lash the whippets to a tree; then they return to the front of the inn to see what they can see.

They begin to chill. Jo goes inside the inn to barter for supplies—the amount of stuff they have is low, thank Buddah spring is no more than a month away—while Kappa joins a group of women discussing something on a patch of lawn. Nulight and Sperm stand awkward, puppets without their strings, glancing this way and that. Nulight wonders if he is being sized up as the enemy, but Kappa waves the two men over, giving them permission to sit cross-legged behind the women's circle of which she is a part. She introduces them to the dozen or so women, then turns around and carries on with the conversation, which, mmm, interesting, is about the political, and in particular the revolutionary use of lyrics. The theme of this debate: can songs inspire and support political change?

Nulight listens in silence. Sperm, of course, also says nothing. Kappa, Nulight realises, is weaving into her thesis the concept of a quest for meaning, and when Jo comes out and joins the women she too embraces the quest format. Excellent. Already Kappa is working for the foursome, weaving the concept of
seeking
into the discussion. Then she turns around and asks, "What's the masculine view?"

Deep, dense silence, compounded by a dozen pairs of eyes looking at Nulight.

He does not know what to say. But then inspiration. Or memory. Something from out of his subconscious mind, anyway, that has been teased up by the combined action of all these words.

He says, "There is no masculine view. There can only be a human view of politics."

"Nulight's correct," Jo says. "The word derives from the Greek
polites,
citizen, which comes from
polis,
city. There's neither a masculine nor a feminine view."

"We are a city here," says one of the old women. "We are citizens."

"You're human," Jo points out.

The old woman nods. "Living on this scale, yes, we are."

Now Nulight's mind is seduced away by a thought, his attention departing the circle of women. This tiny fragment of conversation, these few words, have taken him into a private mental space, and it is inspirational, like before, months ago, when he conceived the idea of drawing songs up out of the land to create the form and content of the quest. But now he sees a wider applicability, stimulated by this tiny city, this microcosm of humanity, and he realises that he must forge something greater than a cycle of songs with which to confuse the aliens. He must also create a new format for British society. These two concepts are linked.

But this is hubris, surely. And yet the idea
is
seductive, not least because here, in Durham, as they have found elsewhere, a community has been created on the human scale; and this is real life. Yet Britain was once a society on a massive, inhuman scale. Something, somehow, somewhere must change. No more the vast scale, no more the nation. Instead?
Diversity.

"... Nulight...?"

Diversity is the key. An interdependent multitude of communities made, yeah,
more
stable by their smallness, and by the fact that they are linked by the land, by the grace of the Earth.

"... Nulight..."

He sees people again. Somebody is calling his name. He can smell grass and perfume.

"Nulight, are you all right?"

Kappa. He nods at her. "Yeah... sure. Hey, never better."

"Did you hear the question?"

"Uh... no. Mind elsewhere, sorry."

Kappa scowls. "Replaying tracks from old Shpongle albums in your head, again?"

"No, no. Biodiversity."

Jo frowns. "They were never on your record label."

Nulight shakes his head. "Biodiversity, the
thing.
Ach, tell ya later."

The old woman rises at this and says, "It's time for our debate to end. Good day to you all."

The circle breaks up. Kappa waits until everybody has gone before telling Nulight, "I think you might have spoiled that."

"Hey, you invited me over. Anyway, I've had an idea."

"Not another one."

"Yeah. Politics, revolution. Making a new Britain is part of what we're doing to get rid of the aliens. It's all the same thing!"

Kappa shrugs. "Whatever. When it's a coherent theory, well, you tell me more then."

"I think we'd better follow those women to the Cathedral," Jo says.

"Can we come?" asks Nulight, indicating Sperm and himself.

"Follow at a distance," Kappa says sternly.

Nulight does this, getting more annoyed by the minute. Women are good, yeah, but this is ridiculous. Still, better not make a scene, might get thrown out of the city; the guard at the gate would love that.

The Cathedral is decorated hippy style. The stonework outside has been painted up to a height of about eight feet, mostly reds and greens, with a few purple lines pollocked over the top. What used to be the lawn around the building is now a mass of winter flowering shrubs, through which a few slate-slab paths wind, and it is these paths that the foursome follow as they make for the main entrance. They hear hand drums thudding. At the front of the Cathedral they find a group of two dozen women wearing rainbow smocks, laughing and suntanned and happy, all of them beating a 6/4 rhythm on the frame drums that they hold. Through these women Kappa and Jo walk: Nulight and Sperm are stopped, then led to a booth, where they are told to wait.

But then Nulight sees a familiar figure. He is amazed. Deputy Smark. The priest does not seem to have noticed the booth, and he walks towards the drumming women.

"He'll be stopped," Nulight tells Sperm.

Not so. The women do not make Deputy Smark halt.

Nulight is running towards the scene in seconds. "Hey, you!" he shouts. "Don't let him through, he's a man!"

Deputy Smark spins around, as if he genuinely has not noticed the booth. He faces Nulight with an expression of astonishment on his face, and asks, "What are you doing here?"

Nulight ignores the question. "Hey, you can't go in there—women only. Get lost."

One of the drumming women runs over and says, "This is Father Smark. Please leave him be. No, please! Everybody who worked at the Cathedral before the alien invasion has been allowed five years to sever their contact, before the Cathedral is properly and fully dedicated to the Goddess. Leave the poor man alone."

"This isn't a poor man!" Nulight cries. "He's, like, a.. a..."

Deputy Smark tells Nulight, "I'm going to enter the Cathedral, if you don't mind."

He turns and walks through the drumming women, and Nulight is left appalled.

The drumming woman glances at Nulight. "You need to chill out," she says. "For your information, we loath Christianity. But we respect what was once here, which is why we allowed the Christians five years to leave their place of worship."

"But, hey, look..."

"Yes?"

Nulight can think of nothing to say. He thinks, it's just not fair! But he can't say that because it sounds so childish. And the woman departs, to drum again.

Nulight returns to the booth, furious.

Far worse is to come.

...plainchant...

It turns out that while inside the Cathedral, Kappa and Jo heard an ancient Gregorian plainchant which they adapted to fit the New Pagan Troubadour ethos. This song excites them just as much as John Barleycorn, Autumn Lament, Samhain Memories and Midwinter White Midwinter Night; it is a song of land and of hope. But to Nulight it comes from an alien mindset, and that is what he is against.

He calls a band meeting.

"Look, I'm sorry," he begins, "but we can't have Christian stuff in a pagan band."

Kappa shakes her head. "You haven't understood, that's all. The melody is far older than Saint Augustine, it was taken by the locals here, centuries before we were around. There's nothing wrong with that."

"You can't prove it's pre-Christian," Nulight asserts.

"I don't need to. This
is
the song—it's an Imbolc song, or Candlemas as they call it. Sperm's worked out the chords and everything."

Nulight is shaking his head now. "I'm sorry. No can do. Either the song goes or I go."

Kappa frowns. "All right. You go."

Nulight doesn't think about what he says next, because he has prepared his speech. "Then I'm splitting up the band. Sorry, and all that. The quest has failed. Musical differences. Believe me, man, I'm just as disappointed as you are."

He walks out of the inn and returns to the camp in the back garden, where he strokes the noses of Ricochet and Rubycon, then pats the mutts. He is devastated. It is over. Kappa comes out to remonstrate with him, but he refuses to speak with her. He finds his trumpet and walks away.

At the city wall he plays the Last Post. He does not care if nobody hears him. This is a solo for himself.

Some time passes. The sun sinks low. He watches the guards patrolling, and he is tempted to speak with them, but he knows they will just laugh in macho stylee. How ironic that the women here deem it necessary to hire male muscle.

Evening time. He wanders. He takes the last few magic mushrooms from the tin in his pocket and chomps them, then wanders some more until he is by a grove of birch trees set against the city wall, where he lies down and gazes at the sky.

And later the aliens appear.

The psilocybin is affecting his sensorium, allowing him to perceive what is not visible—at least, not most days. And now he can see everything, and he feels light, floating maybe, supported by the gentle green fingers of the cold grass. And he sees the coloured tracks left by the alien ships in orbit, green and red and orange and purple, brighter than he remembered, sharp, almost as if those blue bastards were cutting the sky with their foul craft, circling above Gaia and shouting down in bullying voices. And his hatred is invigorated and he loathes the blue bastards, and he recalls what they did to him at Stonehenge, in Berlin, and at that fateful moment when they used the implant in his right hand to kick start the invasion... no! He will not let them stay. And he will fight to create something intimate and wholly human that cannot be remixed by the aliens.

And he will carry on with the quest.

Time is passing and his mind is returning to Gaia, to cold wind and damp grass and rustling twigs and branches around him. Back to reality.

But his mind is invigorated still. He walks back to the tents at the inn.

Jo and Sperm are there, but Kappa is back at the Cathedral. Nulight launches into his new manifesto. "Hey, look, I'm not splitting the band." This next bit is hard to say. "It's not mine to split anyway, yeah? It's something of all four of us. Sorry, I went mad for a few minutes, of course the quest continues. We just gotta decide about this fifth song."

Sperm makes a rare verbal offering. "The songs are choosing us," he says. "We know they're right when we hear them. It's just that... well, the songs are always here, they're always about, but we happen to be right for them and so they're selecting us as we pass by."

Nulight nods. This is correct theory. "Yeah... sure. Hey, Kappa's still at the Cathedral?"

"She'll be back soon," Jo says.

Nulight waits in their tent, and when Kappa returns—suspicious, annoyed—he relates what has been said, and then apologises. "We don't split this band," he says. "We're part of the land now, part of culture, and we can't just split ourselves off."

"You mean you can't split yourself off."

Nulights nods. "Sweets, I'm sorry. I got it wrong."

"You must learn to become a pragmatist while retaining your revolutionary beliefs. I've done it. It's possible. Follow my example."

"I'm always watching you, sweets."

Kappa smiles when she hears this, and they kiss and make up.

...Chant For Imbolc...

So a fifth song is added to the four. They rehearse it a few times and it melds on to what they already have. It is right. With difficulty, Nulight swallows his pride and creates a percussion part to play alongside. That's not easy for him, but he knows he has to do it so that the other three members of the band know he is back with them. For he is back with them.