Castles Made of Sand Read online

  ‘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?

  It was ‘Pain’, the original Fiorinda-song, with the stupid monochrome tune and the ridiculous teen-angst words; that she had never released, and never would, though fans yelled for it at gigs and sometimes got it. That she had scribbled in the middle of the night, under a 40-watt bulb in a hostel dormitory, when she was a lost, desperate, bitter little kid: wanting to tell the world what it’s like when pain is all there is (as if the world didn’t know). That she’d screeched out like a crazy prayer from the stage, all through Dissolution Summer. And put behind her, and been ashamed of—and here it was restored to her, by their art, the way it had felt when she wrote it, but different; but made beautiful.

  Live in the pain, deep inside the pain…

  Live for this moment…

  Tears stung her eyes. She turned a page with shaking fingers: invaded, heartwrung, staring at the print and seeing nothing, until the music ended. Ax put his guitar aside. Sage said he thought he’d go to bed. He’d sleep in the music room, as usual when he stayed. They had a spare bedroom, but it was unfurnished (they’d only moved into this place last May) and full of junk.

  ‘You want me to sort you out a duvet and stuff?’ said Ax.

  ‘S’okay. I know where to find things.’

  Sage prowled halfway to the door, big and graceful but undecided, as if he’d forgotten something but couldn’t remember what it was: not an unusual state for the perfect master of short-term memory loss. He came back, dropped on one knee beside the couch and kissed Ax gently on the lips. ‘G’night…’ He started to get up again, then changed his mind. The mask vanished. Sage’s natural face appeared, blue eyes wide and dreamy, that big soft beautiful mouth between solemn and smiling—

  ‘Thanks,’ said Ax. ‘I needed that.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Sage, and kissed him again, a deep kiss, a soul kiss, both of them getting into it, Ax’s fingers locked in Sage’s close-cropped yellow curls.

  Sage stood up.

  ‘G’night Fee,’ he said, and left them.

  ‘God,’ said Fiorinda, fascinated. ‘Why don’t you go after him?’

  Ax laughed, leaned back on the couch and stretched his arms.

  ‘Because, little cat, in the morning I’ll be sober, and so will he.’

  ‘Perhaps more to the point,’ suggested Fiorinda. Ax could be a bit of a chameleon. Aoxomoxoa, despite the wishful dreams of the nation’s gay community, was definitely one way only: in normal life. She peeped at her boyfriend over the top of that useful book. ‘If we go to bed and fuck now I’m going to feel extremely weird, knowing I’m supposed to be six foot six with a curly blond brush-cut.’

  ‘Hahaha. Lay off. Have respect for a man’s drug experience.’ Ax sighed, and smiled. ‘What happened with Sage’s mother? If I ever knew, I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘She left when he was ten or so. Got sick of the hippies-in-a-cottage drop-out dream, I think. He didn’t see her for years. He sees her now, sometimes. He says it’s like another incarnation. She’s not much interested and neither is he. He says.’

  ‘Oh. Sad… Still, it’s something to have had a happy childhood. Which I think he did, ’spite of his hands and all that. It grounds him, rock steady. Makes him someone…very secure, very safe to be with. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Hm. A lot of people wouldn’t instantly recognise Aoxomoxoa from that description.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But I do. Yes.’

  About noon the next day Ax came into the kitchen of the Brixton flat and found Sage, masked, eating toast and reading the newspapers that Ax (such a fogey!) had delivered to the door. Elsie the cat was on the top of the fridge, disgruntled. She didn’t like Sage. The feeling was mutual: Sage didn’t approve of pet animals.

  ‘Hi,’ said Ax, looking at the door of the fridge.

  ‘Mm,’ said Sage, concentrating on his paper.

  ‘Sleep okay?’

  ‘Yeah… She’s well again, isn’t she?’

  ‘Oh yeah, she’s fine. All better.’

  Bronchitis doesn’t sound like much, but it had dragged on and they’d been anxious. Some fantastic futuristic medicine survived in Crisis England, but simple things like routine antibiotics were gone. But Fiorinda’s a lot tougher than she looks, thank God. The fridge made no sudden moves. It was old-fashioned whiteware, though green enough in its habits. Unlike the fridge in Sage’s van, a futuristic womb-like thing with a superb energy audit. Ax picked off a magnet and placed it carefully in line with the chrome door handle.

  ‘Want to take back anything you said yesterday?’

  ‘Nothing I said, and nothing I did.’

  He risked a glance around. The living skull was giving him a look he’d never seen before, kind of a tender, outgoing mix of enigmatic smile. Sweet trick.

  ‘We have to talk,’ said Ax.

  ‘Yeah. But not this morning. Got to get to work. Later.’

  And off he went.

  Fiorinda returned to her desk in the Office at the Insanitude, the Rock and Roll Reich’s London headquarters, on a freezing cold day at the end of the month. The San’s righteous building management were refusing to turn the heating up, and advising everyone to wear more clothes: Fiorinda wore two cardigans, the top one fluffy and orange, which clashed splendidly with her hair, over a calf-length fifties antique in indigo moire satin: and was pleased with the look, like the dawn of a stormy day. She had an office of her own in Whitehall, as the Ceremonial Head of State’s first lady, but she never went near it from choice. She preferred the buzz of this gaudy, shabby room: with the makeshift clutter, the view over the Victoria Monument, Allie’s staff wandering to and fro, irritating shifts of taste on the sound system. Felt safer, too.

  So the queen was in her counting house, checking on various situations in her special areas of responsibility—the Volunteer Initiative, and the care of the Drop Out Hordes: the clueless thousands who had vanished from all record a
nd taken to the roads, in the economic collapse. Counterculturals looked after themselves, and accepted their alleged rockstar government as a useful fiction. The barmy army, Ax’s military, had their own organisation. The lost souls had nobody, and must be kept fed, sheltered and peacefully occupied. It was a challenge.

  Fuck, more agricultural labour camps in prospect: an ominous trend but hard to resist, the country must eat. Gone were the days when Fiorinda had to beg big employers to find pseudo-Keynsian make-work for her drop-outsShe cursed under her breath as she ran into the Ivan/Lara bulkheads. The Internet Commissioners, USbased firemen, had cut Europe off from the rest of the world, to stop the spread of a deadly virus. Maybe that was justified, and maybe they had to serve their time and prove they were clean. But did it have to mean Fiorinda couldn’t send an email to Westminster from the former Buckingham Palace? But on the whole, she was pleased to see, she had not been missed.

  On either side of the Balcony doors stood pasteboard blow-ups of two of the pictures for a new series of postal stamps. Ax on stage with DARK and Fiorinda, at the Armada concert, Sage spinning Fiorinda above his head, in the Battle of the Sexes Masque at Ax’s Inauguration last September. She stared at the images in absent wonder, caught by the strangeness of this predicament, this fate.

  The oxytocin serenade was still running through her head.

  Abruptly, she hit the keys that took her, anonymously, to the Magic Scrapbook, where Reich staff posted occult phenomena stories: and scanned the new material for something she hoped and believed she would never find. No cause for concern. She got out fast, before anyone passing happened to glance at her screen: peeled off her throat mic, tipped her earbead into a paperclip tray and closed her machine down.

  Anne-Marie Wing, the Few’s token hippy earth-mother, said the psychic powers of the New Age were being blocked by an unknown force. If that was true, it was nothing to do with Fiorinda. Not as far as she knew. She retrieved her saltbox—the polished birchwood apple that her gran had given her, long ago: never out of her sight, never far from her hand.

  Dropped the talisman into her bag, and went to join the others.

  The Few, Dictator Ax’s inner circle, survivors of the Countercultural Think Tank sat around the circle of battered schoolroom tables where they traditionally held conclave. The atmosphere was informal. Wine was being drunk, spliff passed, sodium chloride-free snackfood from the works canteen disparaged. Roxane Smith, ex-man and veteran music critic, wrapped in hir customary Dantesque velvet robes, was resting hir eyes with hir feet up. Kevin Verlaine, Rox’s young boyfriend, and Chip Desmond, Ver’s partner in an esoteric techno duo called The Adjuvants, were trying to get the Great Dictator to divulge his pulling moves. Rumour had it Ax Preston had been a smooooth operator, before he settled down and became a Politicised Rock God. Felice Hall, Cherry Dawkins and Dora Devine—aka the Powerbabes, horn section divas of the Snake Eyes Big Band—offered helpful jeers.

  ‘Sorry,’ sez Ax, grinning, ‘it’s been a long time. I can’t remember.’

  ‘Go after Sage, kiddie’ advised Felice, senior Babe. ‘He’s the sex machine.’

  ‘According to who—?’ Her fellow Powerbabes snickered.

  ‘Nah, Sage is useless.’ Verlaine removed a dashing Jimi Hendrix hat, and twisted up his silky brown ringlets, in approximation of Sage’s cropped head.

  ‘This is Sage, flirting. “Hey, Babe. I’m Aoxomoxoa, wanna fuck?”’

  ‘If it ever stops working,’ sez the king of the one night stand, unmoved. ‘I’ll let you know.’

  Rob Nelson, Snake Eyes front man and boyfriend to the Babes, raised the topic of a scurrilous sketch in the venerable Staybehinds vid-zine, Weal. Rob had been a music-biz activist, long before the shit hit the fan. He didn’t like being called a member of a fascist junta. Not even in jest.

  ‘Rob, dear boy,’ said Rox, opening half an eye, ‘if you must read your reviews, try to see the good in them. Weal is very flattering about the Few’s actual music.’

  ‘You think I care if they insult us? It’s not that: we’re successful, they have a right. I just don’t want to be taken out and shot in the next blood-fest, because some crypto-Celtic hippy freelance gave us a reputation we don’t deserve.’

  ‘I would hate that,’ agreed Sage.

  ‘You have to admit,’ said Fiorinda, taking her usual place between Ax and Sage. ‘If our beloved leader insists on calling himself Dictator—’

  ‘What can I say?’ Ax shrugged. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time. Relax, Rob. We’re getting into Education: they’ll see that and leave us alone out of pity.’

  ‘Hey,’ announced Chip, style-victim in retro-punk-chic, his hair a tiny rug of green and blue spikes on the top of his head. ‘Fiorinda’s back! Cool!’

  The rock and roll brat was invited to take a bow, which she wouldn’t. Her saltbox was passed around, to enliven the pondweed crackers.

  ‘Fiorinda,’ said Chip, gallantly, ‘you’re our survival tool.’

  ‘Thank you so much. Give me my box back.’

  ‘I worry about the A-list,’ said Dilip Krishnachandran, the slender, doe-eyed Mixmaster General: pushing fifty and still beautiful. ‘The great and the good, the shiny people, leaders of fashion. We were never in the rockstar chapter of that club, except Aoxomoxoa, sorry Sage. Now they want to join our gang and we should not refuse them, because our enemies won’t, and to the A-listers it’s all the same, Celtic ritual, whatever’s cool. But most unfortunately what we offer is not glamourous, and socially speaking they detect a lack of enthusiasm—’

  They’d spent the transition, which had begun for them in blood-daubed terror, slogging their guts out beside the army and the police: struggling to keep the peace. It was bizarre to come down from that long, strange trip and find fashionable society eager to fête them—

  ‘The Few only want to be with the Few, that’s what people say, and they are right. But how can we help it?’

  ‘We could try to make it less fucking obvious,’ muttered Allie Marlowe, who was sitting beside Dilip, ostentatiously catching up on some paperwork on her palmtop. The tetchy vibes were not in doubt.

  ‘Genuinely sorry about that, Allie,’ said Ax.

  ‘Don’t worry, Ax,’ said Allie darkly. ‘I know whose fault it was.’

  ‘Remind me,’ sighed Roxane, opening half an eye again, ‘what outrageous crime has Sage committed this time? The casualties? The damage to property?’

  Chip rolled his eyes. ‘You were there, Rox. You saw him. He failed to mingle!’

  ‘Unforgiveable,’ sighed Dilip, taking the spliff Chip passed to him.

  ‘Dunno why you’re blaming Sage,’ remarked Fiorinda. ‘The oxy was Ax’s idea.’

  ‘This is true,’ confessed Ax. ‘I led him astray.’

  ‘Nah. I claim equal responsibility,’ declared Sage. ‘And I too am truly sorry. Turning up drugged to a cocktail party, my, my. What was I thinking of—?’

  ‘You can all fuck off,’ growled Allie. ‘That party was important.’

  Yeah, yeah. We know.

  Fiorinda heard relief in her friends’ laughter: and knew the real topic of concern. Sigh. Who needs the paps with this lot breathing down your neck? And when did I acquire a family? I hate families. Relax, sisters and brothers, Ax’n’ Sage’s adventure with the love drug had Fiorinda’s seal of approval.

  But maybe the Few had a right, considering how bad things had been, how bad things could easily become. The Triumvirate, England’s sacred icons, must be united. What a position to be in, and it can’t be helped, and where will it end?

  The oxytocin serenade—

  Shortly, Sage’s brother Heads turned up, along with a couple of illustrious non-Few musicians. The mediafolk arrived, the press conference began. Rock and Roll Reich education: the new idea. Chip and Verlaine played merrily with the concept of Rock Cultural History. For we have our rabid rulers and our huddled masses. Our scientists and our artists, our dynasties and our battlefields: our bourgeois
ie, our sufragettes. Peter Grant for Bismark, Jimmy Page for zee Kaiser!

  The Beatles were our Mozart, Jimi Hendrix our Beethoven.*

  Everyone knows Dylan is Shakespeare, but here in England we could have, Thom Yorke for Thomas Hardy, Polly Harvey for Virginia Woolf!

  Madonna is the Margaret Thatcher of Rock!

  Then Ax came in with the statesman message. If someone doesn’t teach the children of the drop-out hordes something, there’s an appalling problem in ten, fifteen years’ time. We can reach them, same means as the Crisis Management Gigs: teach ‘em basic life skills, give them a worldview, through the music. The history of this music, the human rights protests and the Utopian movements that have always been entangled with it. And before you tell me, yes, of course we’re handing this down from on high, not waiting for the lost souls to invent their own culture. It’s the way things work.

  ‘Will the Counterculture buy it, Ax?’ asked a Radio Three journalist, seriously. ‘Aren’t they going to say Rock it isn’t British music? It isn’t natural, it isn’t folk, it’s from the heart of the evil empire?’

  ‘For the record, I don’t see the US as an “evil empire”. I hate that line. But no nation has a monopoly, and no mode either. There are folk roots in Rock. The music goes around and around, like all art: high culture into pop culture and back again.’

  ‘We’re English,’ said Felice. ‘Our ancestors are everywhere.’

  ‘The Utopian thinking too,’ added Roxane Smith. ‘You know, Anil, the original arts colony at Woodstock, where tradition says the “Woodstock”concert was held (of course, that’s not quite the case) was founded by followers of John Ruskin, in imitation of the English Arts and Crafts movement.’

  ‘A movement which was itself entangled with nineteenth century Utopians of India and Pakistan—’ agreed the radio man, helpfully.

  The Few had made more friends in radio than in the other broadcast media: not only because of the music, but because radio tends to survive in a meltdown.

  ‘But won’t people be saying, “how can rockstars, with their culture of excess, “teach the children well”? And wasn’t all that sixties idealism naïve and corrupt?’