Castles Made of Sand Read online

  Dilip stared at him. ‘I don’t believe it. Sage would never lift his hand to Ax.’

  ‘Maybe not. That’s not the way round it was going to be.’

  For a moment they faced each other—big George and the fragile mixmaster, no taller than Fiorinda—like duellists’ seconds, but with loyalties the opposite from what you’d expect. Then they shrugged and resumed watching the departure. Fiorinda in the back, Ax and Sage in the front. Off they go.

  ‘It’ll end in tears,’ sighed George.

  ‘Because it always does,’ agreed Dilip.

  But secretly they were hopeful. This isn’t your average no-brain rockstar menage à trois. This is the Triumvirate. Nothing is beyond their powers.

  When they reached Tyller Pystri, long after midnight, it transpired that Sage had forgotten to call Ruthie Maynor. The house was dank and cold. There was no electricity, and no water coming out of the taps. They made up Sage’s bed, crawled between the sheets and slept, clinging to each other like refugees in a burned-out cellar.

  The next day Fiorinda woke in sunlight. For a while she watched them, asleep in each other’s arms: Sage unmasked, Ax’s hair a dark, gleaming fan across the pillow. And how often do you see that? How often is Ax Preston relaxed enough to sleep in Fiorinda’s arms? Huh.

  Well, she thought. That’s the size of it.

  She got up and went out (remembering to leave them a note). In the garden she found a bed of wild strawberries, picked the ripe ones and carried them off, down the footpath that led to the stepping-stones across the Chy; and the short-cut to the village. Red berries, blue sky, yellow sun, the little river rushing and shining beside her, the larches and the hazels and the oak trees every shade of new tender green.

  Later they joined her at the pub called the Powdermill. There wasn’t going to be electricity for at least a week: North Cornwall Renewables was having trouble with the wrong kind of waves. The spring-fed water supply, however, could be fixed. Ax arranged to borrow some tools—but not today. They stayed at the pub until evening, drinking beer and eating bread and cheese (the only food on offer, alas, no crisps, no Bombay Mix), and then headed back by road: Sage and Ax trying to convince Fiorinda that Ax’s visit to Japan had not strictly broken the quarantine. Ax had just harmlessly proved that the quarantine could be broken.

  She was not impressed.

  ‘Just don’t do it again,’ she said. ‘Or if you do, I don’t want to know.’

  Could they stay? Why not? They had bottled water, firewood, rapeseed oil for the lamps. The water in the Chy wasn’t safe to drink (giardia): but they could boil it if they were stuck… A little shy with each other: Fiorinda lit a fire, because the house was still cold. Ax and Sage recommenced work on the abandoned jigsaw. Fiorinda fetched a book from the landing and curled in an armchair. The room grew warm and dusky. The two men sat back, leaning against the sofa.

  ‘Fiorinda,’ said Sage, ‘Did you eat my strawberries?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Told you,’ said Ax.

  ‘What’s wrong with me eating the strawberries? If you didn’t happen to be here, the slugs would have had them.’

  ‘Not so. Ruthie packs them up and sends them to me.’

  ‘God, that’s pathetic. You’re such a baby.’

  She ditched her book and jumped on him. Ax watched them giggling and tussling and felt a momentary pang, hey, unhand my girlfriend…Then he remembered all the times the three of them had been together, and Sage and Fiorinda not allowed to touch each other. Sage’s pain; Fiorinda’s pain, that he couldn’t even bear to think of. This is how it has to be. There’s no other option.

  He leaned over and cut in.

  ‘God, that feels weird,’ he complained. He was snogging a freshly stripped skull: Sage had put on the mask to go down the pub and forgotten to take it off. Fiorinda couldn’t care less, but Ax is such a fogey—

  ‘Sorry. Is that better, Sah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ax. ‘Much better.’

  How strange that three should be so different from two. The difference between a line from A to B and the whole world.

  The sex was as good as last time, in fact, mysteriously, it made last time better, reaching back to undo the knots of tension in that remembered night. They kept going for a long time: practical, greedy, instinctive, mostly silent, only laughing and talking in the pauses between takes. At last there was a longer pause, the three of them tumbled on the bed in a lax, sweat-greased tangle of limbs.

  They moved into an easier configuration. ‘Was there some wine?’ mumbled Sage.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ said Fiorinda.

  They turned instantly to watch. Fiorinda walking away from you, naked in the firelight, there can’t be enough chances in a lifetime. Shoulder to shoulder, they glanced at each other, sharing the delight: and how appalling now to think how differently this could have ended: Ax not here in this room tonight, Sage with some other woman—

  ‘Oh. I’m afraid it’s a touch more than chambréed. Anyone for claret soup?’

  ‘Never mind, bring it here.’

  She brought warm wine. Ax went and found some glasses. They toasted each other and settled again, Fiorinda curled up between them, her head on Ax’s ribs.

  ‘Anyone hungry?’ said Ax after a while.

  Fiorinda giggled. ‘Ax is hungry.’

  ‘Okay, guilty. Ax is hungry. Sage, is there anything in that kitchen of yours that can be eaten, like, easily? Without any soaking of lentils or scraping of roots?’

  ‘There’s what we bought in the garage shop last night. Bread, butter, bacon. Can’t remember. Tomatoes? There are tins. I don’t feel like doing anything.’

  ‘I fetched the wine,’ said Fiorinda.

  In the end they all got dressed, or half-dressed, and made the expedition together: Sage carrying the babe, because the stone flags were cold for her little feet, or some such excuse. He set her on the counter by the fridge and tracked down the groceries, which they’d secured by knocking up the garage shop people in the middle of the night. Bread, butter, a pan for the bacon, check the gas cylinder, light the gas, slice some tomatoes, the tomatoes are a little frisky, but it’s not beyond him… He looked over his shoulder. Ax and Fiorinda were kissing, Fiorinda still on the counter, her slender ankles and rosy heels locked in the small of Mr Dictator’s beautiful, copper-coloured naked back.

  ‘Hey. Why am I doing this?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Fiorinda, winding a strand of Ax’s hair around her fingers, giving herself a silky dark moustache. ‘Why are you?’

  ‘Carry on,’ said Ax. ‘You’re doing fine.’

  ‘Tuh.’ He carried on, but he couldn’t stop looking at them, kept casting envious glances: finally he deserted the frying pan and came raiding.

  ‘Let me have him. I want him—’

  Sage takes possession, but these two can’t snog quietly like normal human beings. They have to start racketing around Tyller Pystri’s old-fashioned, perilously cluttered kitchen, laughing, falling against the dresser, the table, the chairs, the things hanging on the walls, both of them delighting in Sage’s size and strength, as if it’s the greatest glory of the universe—

  ‘Out!’ yelled Fiorinda. ‘Get out of here! You’re going to BREAK things!’

  She finished cooking the bacon, made the sandwiches, put them on a tray and brought them back to the living room. Sage and Ax were on the bed, naked, still grappling. Are they fucking or fighting? Looks like a bit of both. ‘Idiots,’ murmured Fiorinda. She knelt beside the fire and took a bite of sandwich. God. Delicious. The best bacon sandwich in the world, ever.

  Better give them space. Hopefully they’re not going to hurt each other, the tiger and the wolf, but they’re not holding back. Fiorinda put down the sandwich, pulled her dress over her head, tossed it and got up on the bed. What she meant to do was quietly masturbate, in the penumbra of their sweat, heat and movement. Instead she was captured, a hand gently covering her eyelids: ooh, I’m not supposed to
know who? Come on. You are not exactly identical twins… It didn’t matter. They were all three lost in a blind world, reaching a new, incredible peak of three-in-oneness, for ever and ever and ever, feels like as far as anyone can go, without never coming back at all—

  When she opened her eyes they were looking at her anxiously.

  ‘Are you okay Fee—?’

  ‘Maybe that was too much, maybe we won’t do that again—’

  ‘I loved it. What do you want me to do, turn cartwheels?’ Then she decided she did feel like a fragile, broken flower: deliciously broken, but absolutely finished. She burrowed under the duvet. ‘I’m fine and now I’m going to sleep.’

  ‘Hey, Fiorinda,’ crooned Sage, ‘don’t you want to smoke a cigarette with us?’

  ‘I keep telling you, little cat. It’s guys who are supposed to do that.’

  ‘leavemealoneI’masleep.’

  ‘Spliff?’ said Ax.

  ‘Yeah.’

  They pulled trousers on again before they moved to the hearth: not so much to mark a line between sex and friendship, as from a futile sense that they ought to be prepared. Nakedness feels so vulnerable. ‘I have post-traumatic stress,’ confessed Ax. ‘Always, everywhere, at the back of my mind, I’m waiting for a bunch of gunmen to burst into the room, and start blazing away.’

  ‘And not a thing we can do about it,’ agreed Sage. ‘Yeah. Me too.’

  This is the enduring legacy of Massacre Night, the night the world ended and this bizarre afterlife began. They’d seen worse since, and higher body counts: been to war and become soldiers, dealing out death themselves. But nothing compares with the memory of the first sight of violent death; the first horror of their helplessness.

  ‘Nah,’ Sage decided, after a moment. ‘We’re safe. If they were going to burst in tonight, they’d have been here ’bout half an hour ago.’

  ‘And that would have been a real shame.’

  They grinned at each other. ‘Wrong on both sides?’ offered Sage.

  ‘Wrong on both sides.’

  A hand clasp on it.

  They shared the spliff in peaceful silence. Sage went out to take a piss. Ax moved around the room, mending the fire, tidying things, putting out the lamps (fucking lucky we didn’t smash one). Sage came back and stood gazing down at the hearth, enraptured. What’s he looking at? A mouse-nibbled bacon sandwich.

  ‘You’re soft in the head about that girl, Sage.’

  ‘I certainly am.’ And about you too, babe, he thought, but I plan to try and keep the extent of that to myself. You push me around quite enough as it is. ‘The sky’s cleared. Good stars. Want to come out in the garden? We could choose a few of the best ones, an’ pull them down to put in her hair?’

  ‘Yeah. Good idea—’ But no. ‘No, I can’t. I can’t leave her.’

  Not for five minutes. Now Sage came to see what Ax was seeing: a tangle of red curls, a creamy shoulder, the tip of her nose.

  ‘Sage, do you have guns in the house?’

  Sage hesitated, knowing Mr Dictator’s opinion on firearms. ‘Er, yes.’

  ‘Thought so. Within easy reach?’

  ‘You want to get sorted now?’

  Ax shook his head, disgusted that he felt better knowing they could defend her. She doesn’t want that kind of defence. She wants the world where she was free and my equal, which she believes is lost forever, and I can’t give her that.

  ‘No. Just wanted to know.’

  ‘Hey, Ax. Stop looking like that.’ Sage hugged him, and it’s strange how much more vulnerable, yet also (thank God) more protectable Mr Dictator feels in his arms than that fragile girl. ‘Sssh. Live for the moment. I love you, Fee loves you, let’s get into bed and I will be your teddy bear.’

  ‘Looks like Fiorinda’s bagged the middle.’

  ‘We can work around that.’

  Fiorinda was thinking: Tyller Pystri must belong to all of us. The Brixton flat is Ax’s territory, Sage has the van. Shit, this is not tenable. I will have to have a place of my own. She couldn’t remember, right now, why the idea filled her with dread. But things happen as they must…and drifted into oblivion, to the murmur of those two West Country voices, the one from further west a little deeper, a little sweeter: but really, on the edge of sleep, almost impossible to tell them apart.

  Fiorinda and Ax had fun fixing the water supply. Sage refused to take them to Tintagel, for fear of tourists, but they visited the standing stone and the waterfall pool, and climbed down the cliff path to the cove at the end of the track: but couldn’t take a bracing dip for masses of very unromantic stinking kelp. It’s usually like this in the summer, said the native son smugly. Keeps the tourists at bay. (There aren’t any tourists, at all: but this doesn’t get through to him.) On the last day they walked for miles along the South-West path, the sea another country laid out in silver and turquoise beneath the cliffs, larks shouting, the turf at their feet glowing with yellow trefoil, rustling with harebells. They came to a headland where there had been an Iron Age fort, out to the end of the promentory and sat among the flowers.

  ‘I wonder what Rivermead will be like in a hundred years’ time,’ said Fiorinda. ‘If not drowned, I mean.’

  ‘Part of the city,’ said Sage, ‘with a futuristic forcefield dome over the arena, tent-inspired architecture and all our wild and free ephemera set in stone. Reading will be the capital by then. London’s shrinking, you know.’

  ‘That’s if Ax wins his game,’ said Fiorinda. ‘If Ax loses, the watermeadow by the Thames will belong to the otters and herons again, except for a few smoky huts. Might will be right, women will be property and the peasants will be revolting, just the natural way things ought to be.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be a choice,’ said Ax stubbornly. ‘we can stay civilised and still get back to the garden… But I’m sorry I got you into this, both of you. It’s not your fight.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry,’ said Fiorinda. ‘We’re volunteers.’

  ‘We’re with you, Ax.’

  They clasped hands and stayed there for a long time, looking into the west.

  Benny Preminder missed his monthly Liaison meeting. No picture postcard for him, nothing but a curt message, hardly civil, from Ms Marlowe, the Triumvirate are taking a little break. At the appointed time he sat alone in his office, smarting. The Triumvirate! Benny remembered when they hadn’t even been famous.

  I made them. They were C-list popstars. But no one remembers that now.

  He took out the dossier from its drawer. (No big secret, why shouldn’t he keep a Triumvirate scrapbook? Doesn’t everyone?) He had some beautiful pictures of Fiorinda that he knew were fakes, but he had kept them anyway. A thrill went through him as he glanced at the forbidden. Forbidden, but licenced by what seemed to Benny a higher authority than the tiger or the wolf… And here were the notes, brief and concise. April. (Cuitos.) Mr Preston pays lip-service to “democratic government”, but remains in final control of law and order. May. (Giamonos.) They are secure in power. The only threat to the Rock and Roll Reich is the instability of the Westminster gang. What was his news this time? June. (Samivisionos.) The Triumvirate took a holiday.

  He didn’t know why, but he could feel a great change.

  Back at the start of this adventure, when Paul Javert was still his boss and long before Ax Preston made himself Dictator, Benny had been directed to explore the wilder shores of the Counterculture. They didn’t all wear beads and dreadlocks, he’d found places where he could fit in. He’d been told to look for dirt, but dirt was not exactly what he had found. Nothing had come of his researches, nothing that Paul could use; but then later Benny had found himself blessed. He could think of no other way to describe it. He had began to know, occasionally, that there were things he should do (like keeping this dossier). He did them, and everything stayed sweet.

  Once, he’d seen himself as a kingmaker. He didn’t crave the limelight, he’d planned to be guiding hand behind Ax Preston, or some other, more malleab
le candidate. When he’d realised he had a new master, he’d imagined he could still play that role. He knew better now: but sometimes emotional satisfaction is worth more than power.

  He would see their downfall, this had been clearly promised—

  He knew that presence he felt was in his mind, but it seemed to fill the room.

  He had no idea who his secret master was, whether it was someone he met everyday, or a demon (he laughed at himself) from another dimension. He had decided it would be wiser not to try and find out. He had locked the door against his secretary. He kept this room swept free of surveillance, not trusting the routine security service, using his own expertise. He put the book away (the dossier was nothing, a focus, a ritual): took out his box of props and lit an incense-studded candle. He should be naked: but better not, just in case of interuption. What message must I send? He didn’t fully understand, but he knew. Kneeling by his desk, he looped the knotted cord around his wrists in token of submission, and fumbled a cut on the underside of his forearm, letting a little blood flow. Bowing his head, he whispered, in the ancient language that Ax Preston was trying in vain to suppress:

  Come, master, come lord. Come soon. The fruit is ripe.

  THREE

  Car Park Barbie

  (Was: Sweetness and Light)

  Unmasked, Aoxomoxoa and the Heads

  (whitemusic.)

  NME album of the week *****

  Rock and Roll Music, witch’s brew of magic power chords, hijacked tech and untramelled hedonism, is the essential soundtrack of the revolution, and anyone who needed to be told that by the high culture authorities makes us puke… But even political correctness is a poor excuse for this fearless stunt-dive into a bucketful of tasteful ditties for the over-seventies. How the king of weird could make such anodyne choices leaves us reeling in the years, and finding Aoxomoxoa’s Desert Island Discs leave much to be desired. The sentiment-fest is only relieved by two new tunes and a plaintive a capella rendition of ‘The Diarrhoea Song’, that the world could have done without. Yes, that’s Fiorinda on the vocals