Midnight Lamp Read online

  Copyright © Gwyneth Jones 2003, 2009

  Frontispiece © 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.

  First published in Great Britain in 2003 by

  Gollancz

  An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group

  Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane,

  London WC2H 9EA

  Second impression 2004

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 575 07470 1 (cased)

  ISBN 0 575 07471 X (trade paperback)

  Typeset by Deltatype Ltd, Birkenhead, Merseyside

  Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Jo Fletcher, Malcolm Edwards, Nick May, Bryan Talbot and Anne Sudworth, and my agent, Anthony Goff. Thanks to Peter Gwilliam and Gabriel Jones for full life support, to Stan Robinson and Karen J. Fowler for Californian hospitality, and to many other Californians who took the time to talk to me. Thanks to the community of Darwin, Inyo County, for standing in as Lavoisier; and to the Viridian Pope-Emperor for more information than you would believe possible. Grateful acknowledgement to the master filmmakers, especially John Huston and Ingmar Bergman, and to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, for a roadmovie soundtrack. This book is dedicated to all those who burn the Midnight Lamp.

  For full credits, lists, pictures, anecdotes and the annotated Midnight Lamp see:

  http://www.boldaslove.co.uk

  A rock is a rock, a tree is a tree,

  Shoot it in Griffith Park.

  Sam Goldwyn (attrib)

  Contents

  Prologue

  Something In The Way

  London Without Ax

  Bears Discover Fire

  Dead From The Waist Down

  #1: Bandit Queens

  Dead From The Waist Down

  #2: Equally Cursed And Blessed

  November Rain

  The Scientist

  Desperados

  Fiorinda’s House

  Precious Bane

  Coda: At The Gate Of The Year

  From:

  Harry Lopez

  To:

  Marshall Morgan

  Cc:

  Julia

  Hey, Marsh,

  Thanks for lunch, thanks for the green light, and you want something in writing. This is not a pitch. I don’t do pitches. I want to tell you a story. Have patience if I ramble.

  In the beginning there was the crash, (which is my Big Bang, I cannot know what was before). Over here, our problems were and remain plain old economic. Anyone over twenty five thinks the price of gas is a crime against humanity, and poor people try to club you to death as you scurry from your cab into the airport. In Western Europe it went into a runaway chain reaction. They had penniless crash victims, mom and pop types included, hordes of them, turned nomadic, wandering around like lemmings. They had the anti-capitalist, anti-GM, pro-Gaia, pro-paganism, magic-murky, Save Our Planet thing growing into a monster volk movement: shaping up to be the green nazis. They had lootin’ and a shootin’ and mad dog migrants from the poisoned lands. Governments fell. Armed forces and teachers and other useful persons just upped and quit. That’s the bgd.

  Then the story begins. It’s the story of the man who would be king. He’s called Ax Preston. He was recruited, along with several other rather amazing people, to what the British government called their Countercultural Think Tank. He was a guitarist, at the time, with a chipper little band called the Chosen Few from Taunton, Somerset (=deep in the sticks). He was twenty six. Next thing you know there was a blood-spattered coup, a veritable massacre in one of the royal parks, and Ax and his pals were hostages of the deranged hippie regime that had taken over England. They were kid rock musicians. One minute they were dreaming of a record deal, next thing, they were doused in the blood of revolution. But they were patriots. Ax told them they could use the music, and turn the awful situation round. And they did it! The catalogue of disasters that they beat would be unbelievable except it was all part of the same thing: collapse of the card house. It took Ax two years. When he was twenty eight he was the ruler of England, by the will of the people. I want to tell the story of how that happened. Ax Preston is a phenomenon of our times. I want to show him making hedonism and free will work, in a tsunami of brutish violence. But what makes it fabulous is that it was all done with the music.

  Ax would be king: but there’s more. There’s Fiorinda, the scary-smart babe-rocker with the abusive megastar dad. There’s Sage Pender, aka Aoxomoxoa, who needs no introduction. (Okay, you twisted my arm: introducing Sage. He’s the demon techno whose very existence irradiated my youth. He’s regarded as the Antichrist, in many parts of the USA. He invented immersion code. He’s God, in my opinion). There’s the relationship between these three, which is very slippery. Suffice it to say, the guys compete like wolverines disputing a kill, they share the girl and that’s not all they share. I love it when beautiful guys love each other passionately, but they’re not gay (this is not a proposition, btb). It’s very rock and roll, very glamorous and it gives me an immense Jungian thrill, a masculine romance with girls in it.

  And with guitar!

  No, we’re not going to go into what happened to them last summer. Nor what’s happening in England now. I want to end on a note of valedictory glory, a triumph that foreknows its fall, a sense that great deeds are evanescent as a dream, and that’s the way greatness should be. The Japanese have a word for it, Bushido. Ax’s England blossomed and died, it was brief and perfect.

  I’m sending you Unmasked, and Yellow Girl, and Sweet Track, Ax’s only solo album, and not easy to get, even tho’ the fucking data quarantine has supposedly given up trying to isolate us from European Revolutionary Culture. (I’ve sent them, they’re on this letter, just press and play). You also have to hear the Aoxomoxoa and the Heads mix of Little Wing, which came about because one day Sage said to Ax, the reason why Jimi Hendrix is not revered like Beethoven, is because the mass market has to be turned on to something or it doesn’t survive, and you can’t dance to ‘Little Wing’. It is BLAZING. It explains our whole global culture.

  Please Marsh, let me make this movie in style, no scrimping, c’mon, c’mon. It’s surefire, fantastically good looking, and the best idea I ever had.

  Yours, most respectfully and sincerely,

  Harry

  Enrico Ernesto Fortunato Curtis-Lopez de la Concha

  From:

  Harry Lopez

  To:

  Marshall Morgan

  Cc:

  Julia

  It’s not a problem. I know he hasn’t returned a call since he resigned. I’m onto it. I can get hold of him. Don’t ask me how, because I can’t tell you, just trust me. Mr Preston is coming to Hollywood. It can be done, it will be done. I have an offer he can’t refuse, right here in my pocket.

  Harry

  1

  Something In The Way

  On a beach on the Pacific coast of Baja, Mexico, two small boys were exercising the tourist-horses. Shore birds in bewildering variety played chicken with the waves, racing in and out above their reflections in the wet sand; over the dunes a turkey vulture coasted on broad black wings. All else was lost in a shining, opalescent haze. Into this stainless world there came a young woman, emerging from the mist as a stick-thin figure with a raggedy cloud of red hair, yellow suntan that gave up at the base of her throat, and an expression of dogged, mutinous calm. The boys galloped towards her, shouting in Spanish as they drew level, did she want a ride? ‘No!’ she shouted back, in English. �
�Not now, and not the other fifty times you asked me.’ The boys laughed, the big brown horses danced on the spot, wheeled around and thundered away.

  Fiorinda continued her promenade, noting sandpipers, sanderlings, busy little dunlins, elegant terns, whimbrels, dowitchers and curlews; ooh, possibly a marbled godwit. The mist, parting ahead of her, disclosed three fishermen in shortie dry suits and parkas, hauling on a net. A handful of flip-flopping things glittered in the long expanse. Plenty more fish in the sea, she thought, is a concept to bemuse the children of this century.

  Ideas and memories rose up and fell away like the spindrift. The pale sweep of the sands reminded her of Tyne and Wear, the cold north east coast of England, where she had found friends, acceptance, a reason for living; after she’d escaped from her hateful childhood. This beach at the end of the Western World was more beautiful and more desolate: and there went the pelicans, one, two, eight…fourteen of them today, in stately procession just above the blunt sawteeth, out where the ocean turned navy blue and solid. South in the morning, north in the evening, regl’r as clockwork. What do they do down there, she wondered? When I’ve lived here for a thousand years, I’ll take my shoes and follow them. But now she’d reached the upturned, derelict fishing boat which marked the end of her habitual stroll. She sat down in its shelter, and rubbed her cold bare toes.

  So here I am back in the modern world, after seven years in fairyland. Traffic fumes, cable tv, air travel, internet connections, swimming pools, movies—and everything that happened to us vanishes like a dream. It must have been a dream. Our Crisis was real, part of the Global-Economic-Meltdown, but my boyfriend, my guitar-man with the delusions of responsibility for everything in the world, ever, was never the king of England. My father didn’t rip Sage to pieces, on the beach at Roaring Water Bay.

  She debated with herself whether Ax had been celebrity enough to be a terrorist target, whether he’d really spent a year as the hostage of a drug cartel (bunch of crazies) in the Yucutan; and decided maybe yes, because here she was in Mexico, and she distinctly remembered the big aeroplane (first time she’d been on a big plane in her life). So Ax had made his deposition in Mexico City, and here they were on the Baja, very broke, having wandered across Mexico because Sage remembered surfing on this coast, long ago. There was no surf at this season. No swimming, because the water was ice cold. No scenery, and April weather like a chilly Spring in Margate, except for the fearsome UV.

  But here they had come to rest.

  Were we really the leaders of the Rock and Roll Reich? Did we hold all England, and then the whole world itself, in the palm of our eager, scrawny, calloused, Indie-musician hands?

  Nah. That’s a nonsense story.

  The flank of the old boat had sucked heat from the fierce morning sun, it was warm against her spine though the air was cold. She leaned back, with a sigh of deliberate content. A glimpse, out of the corner of her eye, forced itself on her attention. She must turn her head. She must see a crumpled heap lying on the sand, which had been smooth a moment before. It was her green and white kimono, which she’d worn the night she gave herself to the dead man, in trade for her friends’ lives. She was sure that gown had been burned, but there it was, large as life, sand clogging the skirts. The sight of it made her feel as if someone was pouring concrete down her throat.

  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 once a week, to prove we haven’t been kidnapped. I should chuck the thing.’