Midnight Lamp (2 page)

The kimono turned into another beach, under a dark sky. It turned into the weight of Sage’s body, dead in her arms. A hundred perceptions rose up: a thousand, uncountable, each with its specific freight of sensation and emotion, far too many of them vile, horrible…and oh, God, I’m not in Mexico. I am with the dead man. The very bad thing is happening to me right now, and this beach is me,
right now,
and me blanking it out…

She set her teeth, breathing shallow until the sea and sky returned. The hallucination was nothing, she could live with hallucinations, but the world was made of paper. If she moved her head, it was like trying to see into the corners of a room in a dream. Now she remembered: something had happened at Tyller Pystri. She had been getting better, Sage had been getting better, so they’d moved down to Cornwall, for the quiet convalescence that was meant to be the first installment of their happy ending. But something had happened, and she couldn’t remember what, but since then she’d been living in the paper world,
demented
not to put too fine a point on it. Not raving, tearing her hair or shitting herself (much, she hoped…) but just horribly sure that nothing was real. That of all the countless possible worlds that flickered through her dislocated mind, this beach on the Baja was simply an illusion, an escape from the foul choking, choking horror of what was really happening.

When she was thirteen, in the first of her terrible years, Fiorinda had discovered, or invented, a place inside herself where she could go to recover her strength, hiding in the aeons between one moment and the next. She’d tried in vain to do that trick since she’d found out she was in paper-world.
Therefore
, she must already be hiding.
Therefore
, this was still the second truly terrible year. Ax was dead (the crazies sent his chip home, stinking little shards of brain tissue and dried goop sticking to the sliver of silicon). Sage gone forever, gone beyond recall, and Fiorinda was in hell, gazing at sea and sky with the dead man fucking her: keeping her bargain, protecting her people

One day I’ll wake up from this, in bed with your carrion disguise, dear father, and only seconds will have passed. One day you’ll defeat me, and we’ll all be in hell together, I know that. But until then,
fuck you.

Ha. Other alternative: I’m in a padded cell. Just a little mixed-race girl from Neasden, whose absent father came back to get her pregnant, and she wasn’t tough enough to get over it, so in the end she lost her mind.

She stood up and started walking back, reflecting detachedly that she couldn’t make herself believe the padded cell option. She felt this was a plus.

All you can go on is what makes a situation bearable. I’m sure I’m better off convinced that I had wonderful lovers once; and that I’m serving a cause.

The fishermen had gone. Three dolphins leapt where the nets had been: Fiorinda paddled in the punishing cold water, and saw a round flat purple furry thing, scuffling by her toes. Hey,
it’s a sand-dollar!
This is what they look like when they are alive! She picked it up. A myriad bewildered little fingers wriggled: the purple fur was made of tiny tentacles. It was like a…a flattened- out sea urchin, a fused starfish. How cool! She set the creature back in its watery home, and watched it drift to the sand; feeling like a gentle god.

I’ll never tell them. If they are dead, at least they don’t have to know it.

She straightened, looked up: and
there
, not on the painted sky but far, far off in the darkness of her soul, she glimpsed the shining limb of a different answer, which for a moment she knew was real, but she could never reach it.

Something in the way—

Ax was also on the beach. He’d been talking to Smelly Hugh about Para, Smelly’s oldest daughter (named
Paralytic
, as that was what her father had been the night she was born). She now called herself
Paradoxa
, sensibly enough. She’d dropped out of Hedgeschool baccalaureat and announced she was joining a hardline Gaian group. She would no longer be using clothes, tools, or articulate language. She’d told her bewildered parents she wanted to recover from the disease of being human. ‘She loves animals,’ said poor Smelly. ‘An’ she’s dead clever. Me and Ammy, we thought she might be
a vet
. I get what she’s thinking. That we rebelled an’ everything, an’ now we’re telling her she can’t. But it’s different times. Everyone’s gotta be
responsible
, and the way we’re placed, we havta set an example. I just want you to tell her I’m not bein’ a fascist dad, Ax. I jus’ want her to do somethink worfwhile, not sittin’ on her bum-’

Ax knew Para quite well, and doubted if anything would deflect her from her chosen course, least of all a few words of wisdom from an ageing rockstar Godfather. But he’d made soothing noises, and Smelly had seemed comforted.

‘You din’t mind me calling? Ammy said I shouldn’t. She says, they’re on holiday, leave them in peace. But I thought, this is his thing, Ax won’t mind—’

Smelly Hugh was a punk philosopher. He didn’t think twice about the miracles of futuristic technology. He zoomed over to Mexico on the astral plane, smelt the ocean, and winked out of sight, right back to London—

Doubtless he’d pop up again, next time he had a worry.

Thanks for trying, AM.

Alone on the water margin Ax sat turning the b-loc headset in his hands, wondering if he should chuck it in the sea, wondering how much more he could take of Smelly Hugh. Who brought with him, mercilessly, the others, the forty million lives Ax had tried to save… The taste of failure was like bile in his mouth. He would never be free of it.

Back in England, the suits had finally accepted that he was not going to change his mind. He had been dictator, a temporary measure for a very rough patch. He’d made it clear that he was not going to stay on as “Green President”, a rubber stamp for the Neo-Neudalists. They were approaching Ax’s brother Jordan: just like the great dictator, hero-of-the-revolution only better: easier to handle, not liable to confuse the people. Jor was reportedly tempted. He’d already taken over the band. All their lives, anything Ax had that looked good, Jordan thought it was owed him. Reportedly, he was holding out for his big brother’s approval. And Ax knew all this because he was such a fucking damned fool, jealous rejected lover, he couldn’t let go, couldn’t walk away—

He had to choke down the pain and fury, because Fiorinda had appeared in the distance. They walked towards each other, herding scurrying birds between them, until they met in a whirling crown of silver wings.

‘Hi,’ she said, with the far away eyes and otherworldly smile that cut his heart in two. ‘What are
you
doing out so early, mister?’

‘Smelly Hugh decided to give us a wake up call. Sage was asleep, so I came out here.
Fuck
. I told them, don’t call us: we’ll call Allie o
nce a week
, to prove we haven’t been kidnapped. I should chuck the thing.’

The bi-location phone was a spin off from the Zen Self quest. The technology was unknown in Mexico, so the only phone they possessed was useless for anything except satellite-phreaking: but that was no great loss. They didn’t have anyone they wanted to talk to in the New World.

‘Don’t. There might be a real emergency at home and we wouldn’t know. You should have come beachcombing. I found a live sand dollar, and I
think
I saw a marbled godwit-’

‘You’re kidding. Sure it wasn’t a Common Loon?’

They followed their own footprints through the dunes to the fishing camp called El Pabellón. They’d been staying in one of the cabins for a week or so. It was off season, and sports fishing in steep decline: hard to say what the other campers were doing here, except maybe hiding from creditors; or the police. The painter lady was under her striped awning, catching the morning light like Monet. Nothing moved in the township of middleaged bikers. The little tent belonging to the teenage runaways had fallen down again, leaving them shrouded in green nylon like dead bodies. The Clam Diggers, (locals, here to harvest shellfish for the restaurant trade) were monopolising the standpipe. Nevada and his old lady, proprietors of a wagon-ring of assorted, half-derelict vehicles, were up and about, toting shotguns. The kids were not in sight. The Nevada dogs stood up and woofed.

‘Hi, youse guys,’ called Nevada’s buckskinned and gypsy-bloused old lady. ‘You been on the beach already? How’s the world looking?’

‘Same as yesterday,’ Fiorinda called back. ‘Sand. Birds. Sky. Sea.’

‘She’s a poet, and she don’t know it,’ remarked snaggle-toothed, draggle-haired Nevada, grinning his shit-eating grin. ‘Hope she don’t blow it. You guys coming to the shindig tonight? You’d be very welcome.’

They laughed, and said maybe, and passed on.

Sage was reclining on the cabin’s only sunbed, with a sketchpad: but he’d made the coffee and beaten the eggs. They berated him, and agreed between them silently he
mustn’t
be left alone. The moment you leave him alone he starts doing too much. And so another quietly busy day begins. That’s the last of the cinnamon buns: better review the exchequer. Would you care to initial these accounts for me, Mr Preston? Why certainly, Ms Slater…

Later, Ax walked up to the Transpeninsular Highway; to the little shack-store beside the Church of the Holy Family. The cinder cones of San Quintín floated over the north west, the cows in the beaten-earth field by the track were contemplating a vivid load of surplus tomatoes that had been dumped for them. Now that’s something you don’t see every day… Wonder if they like the taste? Of course, if you tried to buy tomatoes for human consumption around here it cost an arm and a leg. The death-wish contortions of post-modern agribusiness were no longer Ax’s concern, but he stopped to stare: thinking about a yacht called the
Lorien
.
What a boat, thirty knots under sail
, endless other passionate details, whispered through the long hospital nights (the Intensive Care Unit in Cardiff, that was the setting he remembered)…

I want Sage to have his yacht.

I’d buy you a jet-plane, baby, I’ve had it with green austerity—

But they had no money, and soon this was going to be a problem that Ax must address. Sage and Fiorinda must never be asked to go on stage again. Ax would have to make a living. What are my skills? Ex-dictator, some experience of organised violence, not-bad guitarist, horrendously in debt.

This needs thought.

Make a list
: One pack flour tortillas (NB, not the brand that tastes of soap). Maize meal for Fiorinda’s excellent stove-top corn bread; eggs. Veg, whatever they have fresh. Tinned fruit, any kind but pineapple which we all hate, the cinammon buns she likes. Little elastic bands to mend the Nevada kids’ stunt kite. What’s the Spanish for that?

I wonder exactly how much a boat like the
Lorien
would cost?

Fuck it. We won’t starve. We can live on clams and steal the cows’ tomatoes.

It dawned on him that he’d started to think in terms of
never
going back to England. What, just vanish from the screen…? He turned his head, to avoid getting choked by dust as a blue off-roader Compact rumbled by, and looked after it; idly curious. US plates, surfie stickers in the rear window, longboards on the roof. There aren’t any waves, he thought.

New campers? They better fit in with the ambience.

The driver of the Compact pulled up at the entrance to the fishing camp, and got out. Above the gateway, which possessed no gates, a marlin leapt in blue and white mosaic: leprous with deleted pixels, flanked by red and yellow butterflies. A hand-painted sign advertised cabins, RV hook-ups, cocktails, firewood, surf-fishing, dry suit hire and Horse rides. Beyond the gateway a row of battered
talapas,
straw thatched beach umbrellas, stood outside a flat-roofed, pastel building; possibly a bar. Nothing stirred when he peered into the dark interior.

‘Anyone home?’

No answer, only the sound of the ocean.

Cautiously, he explored. The scurvy RV camp was noontide silent. There were dish-aerials, most of them big enough to be illegal; a recycling plant beside a midden of scrap plastic and metals. Stacks of dessicated clam shells, pyramids of beer bottles, a skeletal
thing
made of thousands of old pens: ballpoints, felt-tips, gel-tips, rollerballs. A large grey iguana stared him out, sideways, from under one of the trailers; everything had an air of post-futuristic dereliction and outlawry. Two of the dogs in the biggest compound, (command post?) stood up, rattling their chains: a German Shepherd and something like an Irish Setter, but bigger, and having deeply malevolent yellow eyes. He retreated.

Beyond a giant mutant tamarisk hedge, festooned with sun-drained rainbow pennants, he found a row of cabins. The first had a shiny jeep and a boat trailer outside. The rest were padlocked and clearly unoccupied, except for the one at the end. He listened, glanced around, and moved closer. A towel hanging from a line, a dishpan of murky water, full of submerged underwear. A sketchpad, held down by a slab of plastic-cased hardware, lay on a trailer-park sunbed that had seen better days.

Doubt assailed him. Why would they be living like this?

He bent over the pad, careful to touch nothing. On the top leaf he saw an unfinished portrait, male, half profile…and the hardware was a portable videographics desk, of alien but hi-spec design.

Oh yes. What do the English say?

Gotcha
.

Out on the beach, beyond the gap in the dunes, there were figures in the landscape. Kids ran around, local people were digging clams. He tipped his straw hat to the back of his head and strolled. A tall, very slender white guy was playing a ball game, with a young woman whose ragged red hair whipped to and fro like the pennants on the tamarisk hedge. She wore a body glove and knee length denims. The man wore a loose white shirt and pants that accentuated his willowy height and languid movements. His hair was cropped yellow curls, eyes invisible behind aviator shades. They each wore a ring on the third finger of the left hand: but he couldn’t get a good look. He watched the game.