Castles Made of Sand Read online

  Copyright © Gwyneth Jones 2002, 2008

  Frontispiece copyright © 2002 Bryan Talbot

  All rights reserved

  The right of Gwyneth Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  http://www.boldaslove.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2002 by

  Gollancz

  An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group

  Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane, London WC2H 9EA

  This edition published in Great Britain in 2003 by Gollancz

  A CIP record for this book

  is available from the British library

  ISBN 0 575 07395 0

  Typeset at The Spartan Press Ltd,

  Lymington, Hants

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  Here begin the terrors

  Here begin the marvels

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Acknowledgements, Dedications, Bibliography, Discography, Commentary and contact details can be found at

  http://www.boldaslove.co.uk

  Castles Made of Sand, Locations and Sources

  (Short version)

  LITERARY SOURCES:

  Ma Bohème, Arthur Rimbaud (Arthur Rimbaud Collected Poems, tr. Oliver Bernard, Penguin Classics); Led Zeppelin From Early Days To Page and Plant, Ritchie Yorke, Virgin Publishing; Verses from the Qur’an, A. J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted, London 1955 (quoted in Night, Horses and the Desert, an anthology of classic Arabian Literature, Robert Irwin, Allen Lane); The Ancient Celts, Barry Cunliffe, OUP; West Kennet Long Barrow Excavations (the Avebury Monuments DoE official handbook, HMSO); The Bone Cave Excavations Alveston, Gloucestershire (Time Team investigations); The Mabinogion tr. Gwyn Jones, Everyman; Arthurian Romances, Chrétien de Troyes, tr. D. D. R. Owen, Everyman; Le Morte D’Arthur Vol II, Sir Thomas Malory, Everyman; Mistress of Mistresses, E. R. Eddison, Ba1lantine; Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad; Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekov, ed. David Lan, RSC; ‘Green Tea’, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, and ‘The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar’, Edgar Alian Poe (Great Tales if Terror And The Supernatural, ed. Wise & Wagner, Hammond and Hammond); ‘The Scarlet House’, Angela Carter (A Book of Contemporary Nightmares, Michael Joseph). Special thanks to Betty Gwilliam and Jim McLaughlin for Irish dialogue.

  LOCATIONS:

  South Lakes Wild Animal Park, Dalton in Furness, Cumbria; Swadlincote, Derbyshire (courtesy of Miss Ann Halam); Lonely Planet Guide to Washington DC; The Rough Guide to Amsterdam; Padstow and District, North Cornwall; Ross Castle, Kilarney, Co. Kerry; & Focal Buiochais to the people of Baltimore and Inis Cléire, West Cork.

  Watch out for The Annotated Castles feature on the Bold As Love site, for Ax’s playlist, and a full chapter-by-chapter breakdown of sources and acknowledgements.

  http://www.boldaslove.co.uk

  Contents

  Prologue

  Sweetness And Light

  Unmasked

  Car Park Barbie

  The Grove

  Lithium

  One Of The Three

  Big In Brazil #2

  The Night Belongs To Fiorinda

  Love Minus Zero (No Limit)

  The Elephant’s Child

  PROLOGUE

  About four a.m. Fiorinda and Sage decided they’d better leave the Disabled Toilet, fond as they had become of the place. They woke Ax and persuaded him that this was a good idea. Cleaners, Ax. Folks with brooms and buckets; you don’t want to meet them. The Rivermead Centre seemed deserted, blank corridors echoing with departed revelry. In the car park (ominous clanging noises from somewhere, no other signs of life) Sage hugged them and set off into the dark. Almost immediately he came loping back, hands in his pockets, shoulders forward, a dearly familiar tall silhouette, to where they were standing bereft, not knowing what to do with themselves. No, no no, he said. This is wrong. We stick together. C’mon, come back to the van.

  They crossed the ghostly arena, with its shadow-buried rainbow of towered stages and marquees, and headed into the campground, still smashed enough that even Sage found his own back yard a puzzling wonderland. They could have gone on forever, they probably did go round in circles once or twice: on access lanes, or threading their way by paths only staybehinds used, between rows of tents that lay like sleeping animals: hand in hand, or in Indian file, brushing past spider-pearled thickets of Old Man’s Beard and Michaelmas daisies; discussing their route in rapt whispers. It would have been paradise to go on forever, through the chill, river-misted night…no need for a house or a home, sleep under a hedge somewhere with the stars rustling overhead.

  Instead they reached the van, which was full of people, mostly unknown to the proprietor (as far as he could tell). They tiptoed past a couple of staybehind women having a hushed, early-hours conversation, stepped over the bodies on the floor in Sage’s room (the boss’s actual bed had remained sacred), and slept in the midst of the crowd. Many hours later Ax and Fiorinda woke alone, fully dressed, surrounded by digital hardware, and followed the scent of frying bacon to the kitchen—where Sage and his brother Heads, George and Bill and Peter, (all four skullmasked as usual), George Merrick’s wife Laurel, Bill Trevor’s posh girlfriend Minty LaTour, plus a grab-bag of Heads crewpersons, were cooking and eating a huge fried breakfast.

  Sage was cheerful and sweet, but a distance had been re-established.

  From there it was straight back to business as usual. The newly inaugurated Dictator and his girlfriend had to get to London, and establish a modus vivendi with the suits. The Heads zoomed off to Truro, where they’d promised a free gig for the Cornish (most of whom had no tv reception at present, so they’d missed the big concert). The show must go on, while none of the ongoing emergencies let up. The three leaders of the Rock and Roll Reich didn’t have another chance to examine their private life, all through the winter. But at last there came a pause, an equilibrium. At last a chance to take stock, count the bruises, relax a little. A dangerous time.

  ONE

  Sweetness And Light

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Haydn. Okay?’

  ‘Yeah, fine. Cruise, Sage.’

  ‘Tisn’t working.’

  ‘I wonder…’, muttered Ax. The Heads reckoned their boss was only safe to drive unaided when he was so wrecked he knew he was in trouble, which was not the case this morning. Still, there was a lot more room per vehicle on the roads these days, despite bomb-crater-sized potholes and long stretches where the surface had been hacked off by the righteous and never replaced. The van’s erratic glide wasn’t going to meet much opposition. Let him do without the autopilot, if it makes him happy. This is a holiday.

  ‘I think I fell in love with you,’ he said, ‘the night we did the concert at the end of the Islamic Campaign. You remember?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Sage, you are having me on. Cast your mind back. Bradford Civic Centre, end of January last year. Arabian Nights décor, inadequate stage crew. We’d been running around the Yorkshire Dales with a bunch of hippy guerrillas for three months, playing live-ammunition wargames with the Islamic Separatists. I sell my soul to make peace, we agree to do an armistice gig for both the armies. No bands, just you and me: Aoxomoxoa on noise, stunt-dives and horrible special effects, Ax Preston on guitar. Worked out pretty well, considering.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn’t mean, I don’t remember. I meant, what, only then, Ax? Now you have hurt my feelings.’ The living skull turned to him, grinning in blithe affection.

  If truth be known, he’d rather have had the guy’s natural face today but—

  ‘Shit! Watch the road—!’

  Unfortun
ate that they should have hit a patch of traffic at that moment. Horns blared. A woman with a horse and cart was left yelling furiously… Well, strictly speaking, horse and cart rigs should keep to the left hand lane but—

  ‘Sage, I think I’ll drive.’

  ‘No, no, no. My van. I drive.’

  ‘Fuck. How old are you? Three and a half? Listen, if we were in a sports car I think I might let you kill me, but you could take out twenty innocent bystanders with this thing. I’m going to drive. Stop the van! NO! (he corrected himself, urgently), PULL OVER! Get off the roadway, then stop the van. DO IT, Sage—’

  But when the great grey space capsule was parked on the hard shoulder (Sage having accomplished this feat without incident), Ax stayed where he was. The cab filled and brimmed with stately, joyful music, they smiled at each other: time was away and somewhere else.

  ‘Nah,’ said Sage at last, ‘can’t be true. You can’t have fallen for me only that night. I have never felt more understood in my life than I did then, first time on stage with you. You must’ve been practising.’

  ‘Maybe it was love at first sight.’

  ‘Hahaha. I don’t think so!’

  In the lost past they had not been friends. They’d had one of those personality-clash feuds beloved of the music biz media: Aoxomoxoa, of Aoxomoxoa and the Heads, shameless commercial techno-wizard (aka Sage Pender), always picking a fight with Ax Preston, the modest, critically acclaimed guitar-man.

  ‘Okay, not love,’ Ax conceded (though from this vantage point, all of it looked like loving). ‘Intrigued at first sight. Or from an early date. Remember when I took you out drinking after you’d been slagging off my band on the tv? Complacent nostalgia wank-aid for dreary little left wing acne-suckers—’

  ‘It all comes back to you.’

  ‘Oh, I remember every word. That was when I first really looked at this—’ He reached over and traced the eyesockets and cheekbones of the skull. ‘There’s a lot of digital masks around. This is something else. It’s a serious piece of coding, and an amazing work of art.’

  Sage keeping very still, very happy to be touched. The avatar mask, that phenomenally expressive veil of coherent light, grinning between sheepish and self-mocking—

  ‘I didn’t believe you bought it off someone you met in a bar, either. Not one of your more convincing yarns. So then I started noticing how much got done, behind the drunken oaf cover. The bit-by-bit slog that goes into those immersions of yours. You and the Heads touring like maniacs, and a stage act you couldn’t survive if you weren’t in constant training. It nagged at me. If he made that mask, and if he’s secretly so focused and organised, he’s not stuck for inner resources. Why is the stupid bugger impelled to spend half his life so fucking hammered that just walking across the room is a great big adventure?’

  ‘Bored, bored, bored.’

  ‘Not so bored now? Not so smashed so often, anyway.’

  ‘Carn’t fit it into my Ministerial diary, Sah. I never have the time to get decently trolleyed, too busy being a workaholic bureaucrat. It’s a disgrace.’

  They collapsed into giggles. The situation they were in was so ridiculous.

  ‘You ever going to tell me why you used to pick on me like that?’ said Ax. ‘Mr billionaire-as-fuck megastar? It was a mystery to me why you bothered.’

  ‘Oh… Yeah, okay. I’ll tell you. We were a pair, equal and opposite. Ax Preston gets the critical acclaim and the cred, Sage gets the filthy money, and everyone’s convinced that’s just the way it ought to be. I was jealous. Envious. Resented it.’

  Ax was amazed (he’d been imagining some slightly more grown-up grievance, all this time). ‘Is that what it was? Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Well,’ said Ax, after a moment, ‘now I know your stuff better, I don’t blame you. But it wasn’t my fault. You should’ve behaved more like Leonardo da Vinci.’

  ‘Ax, I’ll never beat you at this game.’

  ‘What game?’

  ‘Forgiving, understanding. Maybe the game is being good.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not good,’ said Ax. ‘I think you are good.’

  They listened to the music for a while.

  ‘We don’t need the van,’ said Sage at last.

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Don’t know why I brought it out.’ He tapped the phone implant on his wrist. ‘George… Hi, George, when you get to this, I’ve left the van by the road—’

  George Merrick was the second-in-command of Sage’s band. Pause, while Sage looks out of the cab, peers around and finds nothing in the shattered vistas of Reading’s urban freeway system to fix in his mind. ‘Well, it’s somewhere. Not far. Take it back to the Meadow, will you? Thanks.’

  The van belonged in the Travellers’ Meadow on Rivermead Festival Site, where thousands of staybehinds had been living like Bangladeshi slumdwellers since Dissolution Summer, three and a half years ago. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. In ways, the campers, in their lo-impact, alt.tech hippy squalor, were better off than the bricks and mortar people, now that the Crash had really begun to bite. They got down and stood checking each other over: tall Sage with a living skull for a head, skeleton-masked hands to match. Ax Preston, Dictator of England, in his old leather coat, milky-brown skin and smooth dark hair of non-specific non-white origins; looking a little lost without a guitar attached.

  Maybe the absence of guitar’s the cause of the uncertainty crisis he’s suffering, worried frown in his pretty brown eyes—

  ‘Are you still up for this, Sage? No second thoughts?’

  The skull grinned. ‘Not much option now, is there? Eh, Teflon-head?’

  ‘Oh. Oh yeah, right.’

  ‘Hahaha.’

  They began to walk.

  ‘You know, Ax, I can always tell when you are completely out of your tree.’

  ‘Oh really, how is that?’

  ‘You become convinced you’re sober, an’ you start ordering me around.’

  ‘Do I? I’m sorry—’

  ‘Nah, it’s okay. I like it.’

  Ax had driven down from London very early and left his car by Caversham Bridge, to avoid getting hassled by Staybehind Gate Police, over private transport hypocrisy. As they walked into the town centre—empty plate glass gleaming (where plate glass had survived); burned-out shells of fast-food outlets and car salesrooms—they discussed going to look for it. But they reached the station first so they settled for the train, and the quiet intensity of sitting side by side among strangers: touching hands, brushing shoulders, traversing the crowds at Clapham Junction with that magic thrill in the blood; barely speaking, occasionally sharing a smile of delight.

  ‘For once we can just enjoy this,’ Ax said.

  ‘Yeah. But it was there all the time.’

  ‘I know.’

  By mid-afternoon they were in Brighton. Neither of them knew the town, but the gazetteer on Ax’s warehouse implant (though out of date) helped them to fool around. It was so rare, such a treat to be idle together, the strains of their own music not infrequently washing over them, as they prowled the fashion shoplets: two stunningly recognisable faces (one face, one mask) so studiously unrecognised it was like a cloak of invisibility. The Dictator and his friends never had to worry about invasion of privacy: Stone Age Fame, Fiorinda called it.

  So this was Ax’s England. In Reading the violence was more obvious. Here, in a town which had always been Countercultural heartland, change looked more permanent. The music and video effects that acted as urban décor were cutting-edge, but the Shopping Mall Generics had vanished. Private cars had gone, or turned up ingeniously recycled. Asphalt, brick and concrete had been torn up to let the weeds and wilderness in. There were marks of privation, obviously. The ‘see a queue, join a queue’ mentality prevailed. But the crowds were peaceful, there were buskers but no beggars; and not a weapon in sight. Considering the events of recent years, that last was a major triumph.

  At sunset the only street lighting was by ATP p
atches: cell metabolism energy, bio-activated by the fingertips of passers-by who had taken the treatment, Sage among them. They ate (Ax ate. Sage, typically, ignored some food), and went down to the beach. Evening crowds flowed on the promenade behind them, but they were alone on the shingle.

  It was cold, the air was still, the sea murmured in a tawny dusk.

  Sage folded himself, cross-legged, in one of his giant pixie poses. Ax sat wrapped in his leather coat, trusty old friend, examining an antique ring on his right hand. It was a birthday present from Fiorinda, he wasn’t used to wearing it. The carnelian bevel had an inscription in Arabic: this too will pass. She gives me Solomon’s ring…and is that a threat or a promise, my Fiorinda? I think it’s a promise. Everything will pass, but not your love for me, my love for you.

  It was the twenty-first of February, he was just twenty-nine years old. He’d been Ceremonial Head of State for six months; the official leader of the mighty CCM, the English Countercultural Movement for a little longer.

  Ax was not now, nor had he ever been, a Green Nazi, a hippie, or even an Eco-Warrior. He’d once been a pretty-good guitarist, with the delusion that he could do something to save his country from the dark. He’d become the leader of the CCM through nightmare circumstances—after the Dissolution of the United Kingdom, and the collapse of the first, bloody and terrible Green Revolution regime. When the suits offered him the Head of State job he’d accepted: but he’d refused to be called President. He preferred a title that reflected the real situation.

  ‘Times and times,’ he said, turning the ring. ‘I prayed to God we’d make it this far, and I didn’t see how we could. Now I know that everything since Dissolution was the easy part. Now we have to keep it all going. Fuck.’

  ‘No need to think about it tonight. Take the evening off.’

  ‘What did we do with the shopping?’

  ‘Can’t remember. Something. Does it matter?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  He didn’t eat, thought Ax. He never eats enough. Not a gram more than he must, to keep that fabulous body in shape. But I am not going to nag. He took Sage’s left hand, missing the fourth and fifth fingers, and measured it against his own. The right was worse off, having lost index and second finger and half a thumb. Skeletal ghosts that masked the gaps… Meningitis and septicaemia had done the damage. He thought of a ten month old baby, can’t even talk, sick unto death. They put him to sleep, he wakes up and what’s happened to his hands?