Authors: Gwyneth Jones
Bold as Love
CopyrightCopyright © Gwyneth Jones 2001, 2008
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.
This edition first published in Great Britain in 2001 by
Gollancz
An imprint of Orion Books Ltd
Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane, London WC2H 9EA
A CIP record for this book is available
from the British Library
Typeset at The Spartan Press Ltd,
Lymington, Hants
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Visit the official Insanitude Website: http://www.boldaslove.co.uk
for more information plus acknowledgements, outtakes,
lyrics, tour dates, merchandising, trivia, discography.
Epigraph“All Mythology masters and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in and through the imagination; hence it disappears as soon as man gains mastery over the forces of nature…”
KARL MARX
But, on the other hand…
PROLOGUE
The sun was setting in a flood of scarlet and gold, as a small white van cruised to a halt on the Caversham Road. Heraldic colour arced majestically over the Thames valley, glowing in the edging windscreens and blanking out the visors of the traffic cops. The van,
Anansi’s Jamaica Kitchen
, was driven by a calm, amiable Rasta who seemed to have been training himself from birth for trials like this: the impatience of a tailback, the heavy hand of site security, the uncertainties of arrival. ‘Rare pretty sunset,’ he remarked, smiling like a gentle god at the motorcyle cop who had come snarling up beside them. ‘You interested in politics, Fio?’
His passenger was a young white woman—a very young woman, no more than fifteen or sixteen, he guessed—dressed in green, with a stubborn face and a mass of dark red hair knotted back under her scarf. She wore a yellow ribbon tied round one sleeve, indicating that she was not up for sex, and a broken chain—it looked like a few silver links from an identity bracelet—pinned to her breast, saying that she approved of the Dissolution of the Act of Union. She’d slung her bedroll into the back, with the kitchen and cooking supplies; she held an acoustic guitar in a battered case in her arms. She wasn’t talkative. He’d learned very little about her, except for those two signs and the name Fiorinda. He seemed to remember that name on the programme, but he wasn’t going to ask her was she a performer. That’s never a cool question. Maybe she was, maybe she was one of thousands, roadworn rags—and—feathers kind of white girl.
‘Not in the least,’ she said.
He smiled at her cut—glass vowels. ‘Nor me. I’m here to cook my food and sell my food, meet my friends, avoid my enemies.’ The van eased along another car—length, and stopped again. There certainly were a shocking number of private transport hypocrites, turning up for this organic—holistic poltically—engaged countercultural rock fest. White Van Man slid a glance at the young woman’s breast. ‘But you’ wearin’ the broken chain?’
‘You can approve of something without being interested in it,’ said Fiorinda. ‘I do that all the time.’ She lifted her chin, roused from the forbidding abstraction into which she’d retreated almost as soon as she climbed into the cab.
‘You may as well drop me off now.’
It had dawned on her that it was ridiculous to stay in the traffic line.
‘Sure thing.’
White Van Man reached across and opened the door; which was old and cranky and answered only its master’s touch. The van was moving slower than walking pace, no need to apply the brakes. Fiorinda tumbled out, and he tipped the bedroll after her. ‘Thanks for the lift.’ She joined the moving crowd on the pavement, and walked away quickly.
The main gates to the site appeared: the taste—free Leisure Centre buildings, a green bank covered with hawkers and their litter; smiling but determined stewards in dayglo bibs. Fiorinda slowed and came to a stand, the crowd parting around her as she gazed over their heads, stony—eyed, at the vast beauty of the sky. She eased the bedroll on her back and swerved away.
A short time later she was sitting under a poplar tree beside the river Thames, her back to the water, face towards the fence that separated normal life from the Festival campground. The soundtrack of that other world drifted out to her: a thumping dance beat, the wail of an electric guitar, a didgeridoo, a crying child, a dog barking, a growling engine; all multiplied and sampled down into anonymous aural mulch. She took off her boots and retrieved the backstage pass that had been hidden in the toe of the left one. In her other boot she had money. Her sleeping bag was wrapped in a heavy polythene sheet that served as roof and floor, house and shelter and defensible territory. She had everything she needed…except, it seemed, the mere will to cross the boundary and join that
fair field full of folk.
She stowed the pass away and sat with her chin on her knees, rubbing at her toes.
Her feet were sore. The silver—sequined filigree of her outer skirts needed mending, and her longest underskirt was sticky with mud. The weather was clear now but it had been filthy earlier, and farther north. She wanted a real bed, a proper bathroom with a flush toilet and a room with walls: none of which she was going to find down by this riverside. The light of that extravagent sunset flowed over her, so low and strong that it confused every outline: but shortly she became aware that there were three people right in front of her, crouching in the trees and bushes that blocked her view. She heard the snap of a struck match.
‘Watch out sisters,’ said a woman’s harsh voice. ‘Think Iran, in the days when the Shah fell. You’ll submit to his charm, slave for his cause, die on his barricades. Then after the revolution you’ll end up chained to the stove in peekaboo panties, all over again.’
‘Barefoot and not even pregnant,’ added someone else. ‘He’s into population control, I heard.’ There was a general chuckle.
‘Is he setting this up himself, or is someone pushing him?’ asked a third.
‘He’s acting innocent,’ said the first voice. ‘You know what a low profile he’s been playing. But it’s all scripted, every bite and shite. Think Julius Caesar.
Offer me the crown a few times. I’ll refuse, I’ll deny every rumour, then I’ll reluctantly accept…
’ She grunted, and went on. ‘Of course he’s been targeted. Headhunted by the secret rulers. He has backers, groomers, bankrollers, all of that. But it wouldn’t happen if he didn’t want it.’
Fiorinda crept closer, listening intently; trying to see the speakers without being seen. There were three women, sitting in a row, passing a blackened old pipe between them. One of them had a shock of silver—white hair tied up on top of her head, another had a broad back and was dressed in dark red. More than that she couldn’t tell. A rich, fecal smell arose. She drew back from the impromptu latrine, and walked quickly to the path that gave campers access to the riverside. When the three had finished their pipe and their business, she was waiting for them.
At the end of this year three hundred years of history would be undone. The United Kingdom would be dissolved. Ulster had already joined Federal Ireland: now the three nations of Mainland Britain would become, finally, officially, separate states. In London the Westminster parliament was being kept from its summer recess by the law and order crisis; and by the struggle to make the process of dissolution look organised. Meanwhile the Counterculturals had gathered in Hyde Park, at Glastonbury, at all the traditional sites around the country; and notably here at Reading. It was supposed to be a peaceful two week rock festival. The media folk were hoping for trouble, and doing their best to whip it up. Maybe their efforts were unnecessary. The newstyle Countercultural Movement had exploded in growth in the last few years. The Extreme Greens were out for some real part in the new government of England, and they already knew that violence didn’t diminish their popular appeal. Grass roots activists (militant travellers, eco—terrorists, animal rights extremists, road—wreckers, aggression—hippies) would surely be eager to use this showcase. But Fiorinda didn’t care about any of that. She had come to Reading following a rumour, on a mission half of longing, half of vengeance. The conversation she’d overheard had convinced her she was on a fresh trail. He was here. She would find him, she would face him. She wasn’t interested in anything else.
The Salt Box
The Christmas that she was nine years old, Fiorinda’s gran gave her a strange present. It was a round box of plain, polished birch. It had a snug fitting lid, which opened to show a space about as big as a turkish coffee cup, lined in darker apple—wood and full of sparkling white grains. Gran handed this over, unwrapped, when Fiorinda brought her breakfast tray to the basement on Christmas morning. Gran was not bedridden, but she liked to spend much of her time under the covers, tucked up like a nesting animal.
‘Is it drugs?’ asked the little girl.
‘No! It’s salt. Taste, go on, try some. And look here.’ Gran turned the box over, and twisted off the base to reveal another cavity, contain a soft mass like yellowish cotton wool, and what looked to the child vaguely like the dismantled workings of a mousetrap. ‘That’s so you can strike a light without matches.’
‘Is it magic?’
The old lady chuckled evasively. ‘Why would I waste magic on
you
, you little heathen?’
Gran was a witch, a Wiccan. Her damp rooms in the basement of Fiorinda’s mother’s house were hung with magical things: glitter balls, crystals, plastic dolls, sequinned scarves, bunches of herbs. People came to her for spells or to have their fortunes told—discreetly using the garden door, so they didn’t have to meet Fiorinda’s Mum. The child viewed her grandmother’s profession with indifference. Already, Fiorinda didn’t believe in anything.