Castles Made of Sand (12 page)

‘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 malleable 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
.

Unmasked, Aoxomoxoa and the Heads
(whitemusic.)

NME
album of the week
*****