Castles Made of Sand Read online

  What they were asking of Fiorinda wasn’t easy.

  When she was twelve, this amazing girl had been pregnant in horrible circumstances. When she was thirteen years and three months old, she saw her baby die. She was only eighteen now, still a damaged child. How could they risk hurting her? Risk adding to that damage in any way? They’d agreed that they were sure enough of their love to ask the question. If she said yes then they’d take it carefully, be ready to back off at any moment. They’d agreed that the three of them must be lovers together, equals, not two rockstars sharing the girl. Fuck that! On the oxytocin showing, Ax and Sage should have no problem getting physical. To some extent, see how it goes.

  Are you really okay for that? Ax had asked.

  Oh yeah, he says, the mask almost as blank as Hallowe’en. I took the drug with you, didn’t I? And then he stalks off without once touching me. Weird.

  So far so good on that aspect. Sage! What a storm of soft ferocity. Like being assaulted by a giant albino tiger cub. A giant tiger cub that loves you very much, but still—

  Sage’s size and strength must never become an issue, have to watch that.

  His brave girl, leaping into Sage’s arms as if into deep water.

  But why was it with Sage, that conversation? He saw himself walking with her: a beach, a street, doesn’t matter, holding her hand, shall we do it? We love him so much, we must make Sage our lover. They would have been very happy and very sad, saying goodbye to what they’d had: why didn’t I do that?

  He hadn’t had the courage to face what he might see in her eyes—

  The sky was ironbound. The branches of the thorn were covered in half-furled fists of green, ice crystals hanging from them, sometimes a bud encased in a complete crystal sphere. Every time he took his hands out of his pockets to wipe his eyes and mop his nose, the wind burned them. He had to stop crying so he could go back to Tyller Pystri before they started to worry, but the tears kept coming. She’d never leave me, but she loved him first, only she was a kid and she didn’t realise… I’ve known it for I don’t know how long, and this is the solution. She loves me. But she won’t be my little cat anymore. She’ll be Sage’s baby now.

  He knew he had found the only way to save himself from unimaginable pain, but he just couldn’t stand it.

  He heard the bike and thought nothing of it, not attuned to the rarity of such a sound out in the Cornwall countryside, three years after the end of the world.

  At last Ax realised he’d have to go back anyway. He let himself in, went to the bathroom and splashed his face. It was the wind. It made my eyes water, fucking cold out there…

  Very quiet in here.

  Fiorinda was sitting on the bed, wearing her orange cardie over the red and blue chiffon dress and skinny faded denims, same as she’d been wearing last night. Her hair was a mess. She looked half-asleep, almost dazed.

  ‘Where’s Sage?’

  ‘He’s gone. Back to Reading.’

  ‘What? Did something happen? Did Allie call?’

  ‘No. He’s just gone.’

  ‘But how?’ said Ax, fixing on the practical impossibility. ‘The car’s still here.’

  ‘He took his bike.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ He looked at the windows, as if he might catch a glimpse of Sage’s Triumph careering away down narrow, ill-kept lanes. ‘I hate that fucking bike. There’s black ice everywhere—’

  He came and sat beside her. ‘Fiorinda. What went wrong?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Okay,’ said Ax, with reserve, ‘if there’s stuff you don’t want to tell me, I understand.’

  ‘No!’ wailed Fiorinda. ‘He said, “I’m going back to Reading because I can’t do the threesome thing”, and then he left, and now you know as much as I do.’

  ‘Shit… Do you think that was really the first time he ever got sexual with another guy?’

  ‘Yes. But.’

  There wasn’t a single thing she could say that would be true to both of them.

  He put his arms round her and they clung to each other, heartbroken. ‘Sssh, ssh. Don’t cry. It’ll be nothing. I’ll talk to him.’

  ‘You can try,’ said Fiorinda. ‘It won’t do any good.’

  They drove to Reading. Sage wasn’t there. He’d been and gone.

  ‘Sage?’

  ‘Hi Ax,’

  ‘Sage, can we talk?’

  ‘We’re talking.’

  ‘Fuck. Sage, please. This is horrible.’

  ‘It’s not horrible. I tried your idea, I can’t do it, that’s all. Everything’s fine, everything goes back to normal. Now leave me alone, I’m working.’

  Silence. The big, impressively messy studio at the top of the converted warehouse, the Heads’ London stronghold, filling up with this pitiful silence—

  ‘Okay,’ said Ax’s voice at last, ‘I’ll call you later. Sage, I love you.’

  Gone.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Sage. ‘I love you too.’

  He genuinely had been working. He pulled off the eyewrap and spun his chair away from the boards so he could stare out of the window that overlooked Battersea Reach. I was all right, Ax, I was good. I was living with my situation. I was even happy. Until you came along with your damned very generous offer, Sah, and now every thought of her is poisoned.

  I don’t think you’d better tell me how many… Her grey eyes flashing on him that glance of hurt reproach. Totally outrageous, totally unjust reproach, what was I supposed to do, brat? But oh how sweet. But he must not think of her, because he could still taste the scent of her skin, he could feel her teeth and tongue, the small, warm weight of her little breasts. Thinking of her, of the details of Fiorinda, which had been his consolation, would bring on the maddening, humiliating, adolescent problem of an erection he could not will down.

  Damn you, Ax.

  Testosterone’s a good drug if you have something hard and positive to do with it. If not, well, a no-brainer, blocked power surge, foul irritability. He could dose himself out of this state, easily, but he would not. Masking the symptoms is a fool’s game. It’ll pass.

  He thought of putting his fist through the window.

  But he’d only feel like an idiot, and then have to get it fixed.

  What a crappy, adult way to think. Shame on you, Aoxomoxoa.

  Probably couldn’t break the glass, anyway. It was supposed to be bulletproof.

  TWO

  Unmasked

  This was the year that the fuel crisis hit rock bottom. European fossil reserves were in dire straits: foreign supplies, already beyond the country’s means, had been put utterly out of reach by the complications of data quarantine, and Renewables were not bridging the gap. Travel was a nightmare, powercuts lasted weeks. The proverbial Major Credit Cards had vanished along with foreign oil; ATMs, back online at last after Ivan/Lara, doled out new currency notes in huge denominations, with ever less spending power. Malaria, TB and other long-vanquished diseases, plus the frightening new bugs, defied public health measures. The British Resistance Movement pursued a nagging terrorist campaign in the rural hinterland; and there was a serious campaign to make witchcraft once more a criminal offence.

  Yet Ax Preston’s Dictatorship still counted as a miraculous success. Violence and civil unrest burned throughout Continental Europe: the English, who had suffered the first, worst revolutionary violence, lived at peace with their Rock and Roll Reich. The party atmosphere, the glamour and the optimism maintained by Ax and his partners, and the Few, prevailed over hardship. The Counterculture happy, extremism defanged, the masses (the vast majority of whom were living like puritan Greens because they had no option) shared the buoyant mood.

  It was just as well the public didn’t know their sacred icons were in trouble. The Few themselves knew only that a trip to Cornwall had been cut short, and that suddenly there was something badly wrong. The three were professional about it, no open rift, but everyone was scared. If the Triumvirate collapsed, how long could anythi
ng in this fragile house of cards survive?

  The anniversary of Dissolution came and went, with bio-degradable bunting in the streets, cheering crowds and all the trimmings; Fiorinda’s nineteenth birthday slipped by. The Triumvirate attended their monthly meeting Benny Preminder, Parlimentary Secretary for CounterCultural Liaison. Arguably, this post was obsolete now that the official Leader of the Counterculture was Head of State: but Benny was the type that hangs on. He’d been implicated up to his neck in Paul Javert’s bloody coup—but unlike his boss he’d survived the faked “terrorist attack” that changed the world. Benny had managed to be somewhere else when the gunmen opened fire at a government reception in Hyde Park, one December evening. The so-called investigation hadn’t touched him, either: and here he still was.

  Ax said it was just too bad. Until he knew exactly what made the slimeball so bulletproof, he wasn’t going to mess with him. Plus, whatever his motives, Benny the Liasion was a prime source of insider information. Given that Ax was determined to keep the Westminster Government at arm’s length, they needed all the dirt they could get on that nest of vipers—

  So here they sat in Benny’s nicely-appointed, over-warm office, discussing public surveillance. Most of the old England’s staggering CCTV network had been wrecked in the Deconstruction Tour—the countrywide rampage of Green Violence that Ax had managed (to an extent); though none of it had been his idea… Control of what remained was an asset, however: and Benny knew some people who’d like to take it on. If Benny could broker a deal?

  Such spyware as the Tour had spared was run by the police, in righteous partnership with ranking barmy army officers: militarised hippy heroes of the Islamic Campaign. Ax said Benny should be talking to the Home Office.

  ‘I wouldn’t try it, if I were you,’ drawled Sage, the skull doing between scary great oaf and bored stupid. ‘We never argue with the barmy army, tha’s not how it works. They get on okay with the police, seems like. Better leave it.’

  Benny dimpled. He was very sleek, these days. Not a trace of the style-free Government puppy, so annoying and clueless in the Think Tank days.

  ‘Come on, you guys. This is Benny you’re talking to. The barmy army is your obedient servant, you can do what you like with those mad dogs. You and I both know that you could take over the bureaucracy any time.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ said Ax. ‘I like legitimate government.’

  Luckily I hate birthdays, thought Fiorinda, bare feet tucked up in one of Benny’s armchairs, staring out of the window. She rarely spoke in these sessions, and got away with it because Benny was convinced her function was purely decorative. She could not stand the bastard: he choked her breath, she saw him through a mist of other people’s blood. The sky over Whitehall was sullen and low, weighed down by the fumes of wood and coal fires. Benny’s eyes slid over her: recalling hideous meetings when Benny Prem had been right-hand slime to Pigsty Liver, Paul Javert’s monster protégé, the first Green President. And now it’s Ax. Is this an improvement? Blitz spirit in the streets, on Dissolution Day. Celebrating what? God, what a waste of time. Civilisation is over. Why can’t we just let go?

  Benny had accepted his rebuff calmly, evidently he was paid to ask the questions: not on results. Now he was marvelling over the latest Drop-Out figures, the prediction that the plague of nomadism was likely to affect thrity per cent of the population of Western Europe. That’s bigger than the Black Death! I mean, wow, fucking weird!’

  He gazed at the three with his wistful, uneasy smile.

  ‘But who’s counting?’ said Sage, studying the ceiling.

  ‘Not weird at all,’ said Fiorinda, still looking out of the window. ‘It’s the climax vegetation of global capitalism. The peat bog of economic growth. People think of forests as climax vegetation, because the trees look big and successful. But the final result of all the explosive boom and bust has to be a flatline. Stands to thermodynamics, really.’

  ‘Thermodynamics? Peat bogs? I’m afraid I don’t follow.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Just nonsense’

  Benny attempts at being matey fell very flat with Sage and Fiorinda, and he always seemed genuinely bewildered. You’d swear he didn’t remember that he’d helped to organise that killing spree in which several of their friends had perished. And Benny was right, it really didn’t matter anymore. New world, new rules… At last the allotted twenty minutes were up. Fiorinda, who had been watching the clock when she wasn’t staring out of the window, put her boots on. Benny made his usual attempt to prolong the chat, gave up in the face of more than usual resistance: buzzed his secretary and stood to usher them out.

  ‘I’ll see you all at Beltane, then.’

  They stared at him.

  ‘Beltane?’ repeated Benny, carefully, as if wondering if he’d pronounced it right…‘At Reading? You famous rockstars will be on stage, but I’ll be there!’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ax, ‘you mean the Mayday Concert. Sorry, Benny. I don’t do the Ancient British calendar. It’s not my style.’

  ‘Shit, Ax,’ said Fiorinda, out in the corridor (and oblivious of bugs, because she didn’t care). ‘How could you turn him down? I bet there was a timeshare in a villa in Tuscany in that CCTV thing.’

  ‘I read the small print.’

  ‘Beltane,’ said Sage. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

  Trust Benny to have caught the Celtic bug.

  ‘That’s exactly why it’s good to have him around. Benny tells us more than he ever realises about what’s going on around here. I’ll explain to him about avoiding neo-primitive buzzwords. He’ll understand. He’s committed to our solution, in his weird way—’

  Fiorinda sighed in exasperation. ‘Benny Prem is committed to the main chance. Someday soon he won’t be subtly letting us know about the latest plot against the Reich, he’ll be telling the coup-merchants how to get rid of us.’

  ‘Well,’ said Sage, ‘I got code to write. Talk to you later.’

  Lengthening that deliberate stride he zoomed away, leaving them standing.

  This was Sage’s idea of ‘back to normal’. He did what had to be done, he turned up for all his gigs: and never came near them otherwise.

  Someone peeked out of an office door, and quickly closed it again. There was a hiss of whispering, suddenly cut off. His neighbours measured the time the Triumvirate spent in Benny’s office by the second: they were madly envious. The dim-lit Whitehall corridor was a wild wood, alive with feral eyes and stealthy movement. Ax and Fiorinda looked at each other, personal heartbreak and appalling responsibility merging.

  Without Sage, the burden of what they had become was impossible.

  In reality, the Education Scheme was nothing new or startling. The Few had been giving masterclasses, and the Volunteer Initiative had been running hedgeschool kindergartens since before the Inauguration. But it was colourful, it was inclusive, and at least it gave the media something else to talk about, besides shocking ‘Celtic’ animal sacrifice at Stonehenge, and the spirituality of head-to-toe tattooing.

  Rob and Ax attended a musicology seminar at Goldsmiths and returned, by the vagaries of Crisis Conditions public transport, to the Snake Eyes urban commune on Lambeth Road—hotbed of music radicalism since Dissolution Summer. It was a noisy place, usually, but the basement was quiet that evening. They settled with beers and spliff and reminiscence, and spent awhile chewing over the absurdities of Rock and Roll academia.

  ‘Snake Eyes means losers,’ grumbled Rob. ‘We were the beautiful losers, that was our thing. Righteous, non-star, never-going-to-sell-out Black music. And now look. You’ve made us into the establishment, Ax.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Mr Preston, gloomily. ‘It just happened.’

  Inspired by beer and nostalgia, feeling close to the days when it was Ax and Rob who’d been best mates, Rob felt inspired to take a hand. Ax bottles things up, that’s his problem. When he found out about Milly and Jordan he never confided in anyone, never lost his temper. He just carri
ed on, because the band must come first. But the Chosen Few were never the same after that.

  ‘You know, Ax, Sage is a great guy, and I love him—’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘But he’s white. There’s nothing wrong with being white, but there’s a cultural difference, a different attitude to life, and, er, relationships. You can’t handle him the way you would a brother—’

  ‘Milly’s white,’ said Ax, narrow-eyed. Sage is a great guy and I love him was not Rob’s normal conversational style. ‘So is Verlaine, so’s Rox. Fiorinda looks white, as long as you keep her out of the sun. Where’s this going?’

  ‘Huh? No offence—’

  ‘I’m sure you’d prefer it if I didn’t do guys at all. That would be more politically correct, wouldn’t it? For a brother.’

  Rob was staggered. He’d never worried about Ax’s occasional prelediction. Why the hell would he, given his own home life? He was about to protest he’d rather be called a fascist than homophobic, when he realised what he’d just been told. Oh, fuck—

  ‘Hey, I’m sorry. Uh, I didn’t know it was like that. Shit, the Babes told me, but I didn’t believe it, I mean, uh, not that we’ve been talkingbehindyour—’

  Ax was thinking of the nights he’d slept in this basement in Dissolution Summern his first nights with Fiorinda, and now he couldn’t even treasure the memories. Rob, chunky and dark and earnest in his sharp green suit, sat there all gob-smacke concern, and Ax, who hated violence, had difficulty refraining from punching the bastard out—

  ‘Rob, fuck’s sake, take foot out of mouth.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I never thought I’d have to say this to you.’

  Rob braced himself. He was in deep shit. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Mind your own business.’

  Olwen Devi, the Rock and Roll Reich’s chief scientist, was ready to white-label her latest invention. Ax went down to Reading to talk about it, on an April day when he knew that Sage would be on the Rivermead site. If he could catch his friend alone, off guard (and, let it be said, without Fiorinda), he knew he’d be able to turn this hateful situation around.