Bold as Love (46 page)

Fiorinda’s element is fire, she was born on 5th April, and now I realise her patron is obviously Lord Shiva. If you insist on a female aspect that should be Kali, but I see no necessity. Gender in a god is symbolic: and then, for all her girlishness, she is one of those girls who is little different from a supple boy. She does not bleed, for instance. Many young women in the normal world do not bleed nowadays, and mean nothing by it. But in the Counterculture and the music biz, among our powerbabes and earthmothers and rockchicks, this signals that she secretly disdains the Great Divide. The ancient music jiving him around, he added the caste-mark to her pure brow, astrological signs of the ram (stubborn, daring, sure-footed) to the green shawl cast lightly over her hair; and the flame-tongued wheel of Shiva—

And now for Ax. Who is an Aquarian (surprise!). Born on the 18th February, in the same year as Sage, which interestingly makes Aoxomoxoa the older, and by the way makes Ax a Dragon whereas the Beast of Bodmin is a Rabbit (but what do those Chinese know?). Ax’s element is air, the breath. His patron is Brahma, tainted with monotheism, the deity we Hindus neglect and quite right too, God is in all things, there is no god of the gods; but for this purpose he suits. See how it all fits in… And you are the waterbearer,
bhisti
, the singer not the song, the teacher not the lesson, lover of the world, and you are al-Amin, the trusted one, though no way am I putting anything Islamic into this painted image I take no risks, I have more sense than that. He added the appropriate symbols to Ax’s portrait and stepped back.

Very good. Like the apotheosis of a movie poster, exactly to rights, just what the spindoctor (that means Allie) ordered.
I’ve had them both, and they were both marvellous
… He cocked a wry eye at the skull. But not you, my lord, (in his mind he was speaking in Hindi, so
my lord
didn’t sound too weird). I don’t believe that’s because of the virus. Is it true that you never, ever have sexual feeling for another guy? How strange, but maybe so. So there they are, our royal family. He grinned, envisaging Sage as the big strong mother of the tribe, Ax the father of his people, Fiorinda their shining prince. But any permutation would be equally valid. Where do we go from here? Who knows? The world is our oyster. How extraordinary it is, this second Spring, the flame rekindled, and how many second Springs does that make, so far? How many times have I come back to life? Ah, who cares. Let them roll. The hard times and the good.

The full moon of August passed, with a homegrown staybehind lineup on Red Stage, and revellry in the arena. There were reports of another group of storms, coming in from the south west this time. One of the stranger losses of Ivan/Lara had been accurate weather forecasting. Information was being gathered in old fashioned ways: radio messages from ships at sea, watching to see if the cows were lying down, that sort of thing. But people took any storm warnings seriously. In Reading town the sandbags came out. On the Festival site the camp council laid more chicken wire, and citizens still clinging to real estate in the worst boggy bits were exhorted to move into the Leisure Centre. Some of the Travellers’ Meadow vans left the site. On the morning of the twenty sixth, Sage stood looking at the sky and chewing the stump of his right thumb. The barometer had dropped hard. There was an overcast and a gusting breeze, tugging at the ramshackle canvas walls of the annexe: sending one of those black polythene bundles, spooks of the campgrounds, flapping into the branches of the oak tree in the hedge.

‘Think we should move the van?’ said George.

‘I think we should move the camp,’ said Sage. ‘In a perfect world.’

A water meadow would have been a stupid place to put a permanent neo-mediaeval Third World township, even in what used to be the normal English climate. But these temporary, fucked up things happen, and set down roots, and you get attached to them.

‘Nah, we’ll stay. We’ve seen storms before.’ He looked at the oak again; and temporized. ‘Maybe we’ll move across the field. And take down the annexe.’

So they did that. It was a sad moment. The annexe had been left standing all the times they’d been away, it had been up without a break since the very beginning. Fiorinda used to sleep in there.

The twenty sixth was dance night in the Blue Lagoon, an event traditionally held the weekend after the full moon, and open to the favoured public, with invitation tickets like gold dust. It was bigger than the full moon fest itself this month. Aoxomoxoa and George were going to do a set, and everyone knew the Few would be down. Sage met Ax and Fiorinda at the station. They walked through town together.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Fine. Could you stop asking me that? The fast would be no trouble, it’s not meant to be penitential. It would be
good
, if I could share it with people doing the same thing.’

‘Then why don’t you?’ said Fiorinda. Without rancour, but clearly not for the first time.

‘I can’t because
that’s not my situation
. I can’t disappear into the Islamic community, totally the wrong message. I have to face it, I’m on my own and I always will be, things like this.’

The two of them rolled their eyes and sighed. Ax set his teeth, and changed the subject. ‘So, did you get your shirt back?’

‘Nah,’ said Sage, ‘I think I’ve given up. Every time I ask her she has some new excuse. I bet the kids have sold it.’ This was the black iridescent shirt Sage had lent to Silver Wing when he rescued her, a favourite of his; which had never come back.

‘Either that,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Or AM’s been using it as a fertility charm. She looked very worried, I noticed, when you told her you don’t make babies.’

At Blue Gate there was a mill of wannabe guests trying to finesse themselves into the party. Someone came up to Ax and said, ‘Hey, Ax, you got a moment to get me past your fuckin’ private police force?’

‘Yeah, okay,’ said Ax.

Ax talked to site security; and they passed on.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Sage, without much interest.

‘Does he come from Taunton?’ wondered Fiorinda. ‘Sounded like it.’

‘No, he’s from Bridgwater. A much hipper burg. You didn’t recognise him?’

They shook their heads.

‘Fuck, another nail in my coffin. That was Faz Hassim.’

‘Oh yeah, now you mention it, I vaguely did recognise him—‘

‘Who’s Faz Hassim?’ asked Fiorinda.

‘Fronts a no-talent guitar band called the Assassins. Woolly-anarchist Counterculturals, useter get some media attention, before your time babe.’

‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ said Ax gloomily. ‘I wonder why he’s here. He hates the Few. Oh well, it’s a free country. Whatever that stupid expression is supposed to mean—’

The Assassins had been hard to miss in the West Country, when the Chosen Few were starting out. At first there’d been a bond, both bands being basically non-white, rare enough in the West; and because of Ax’s politics. But the Chosen had got successful, in their modest way, while Islam’s original Countercultural rockers had stayed hungry. It was the usual thing. Any kind of success means you’ve sold out, and people who claim they’ve no fucking interest in being commercial still manage to hate you for it. Sad, but inevitable.

‘Assassins means the crusties are in town,’ mused Sage. ‘Could mean trouble with our lot.’

‘Not necessarily. There’s plenty of crusty-tendencies among the Reading staybehinds.’

A hippie is a Countercultural with political rationale. A crusty is an aggressively or else helplessly unhygienic ditto: with extra righteousness or extra nuisance value, depending on your point of view. Fiorinda thought her own thoughts while they went a few rounds on crusty versus hippie rock bands, behaviour of, relative derangement and combustibility, swopped sides a couple of times. A pleasant background noise, amazing how many factoids men store.

In the Blue Lagoon a group of distinguished staybehinds were supervising the inauguration of a huge chunk of quartz; before the partygoers were let in. It was being hoist into the apex of the marquee, roped like a calf.

‘It’s gonna soak up all the negative ions and protons and stuff,’ explained Smelly Hugh, proudly. ‘We brought it down in the bus.’

‘Vibes, Hugh,’ said Sage, ‘The scientific term is vibes.’

‘Oh, right. It give us some weird dreams, I’m telling you. Like visions. No fuckin word of a lie. And the dogs wouldn’t shut up.’

‘I have a vision in which I see that bastard dropping on someone’s head,’ said Ax.

‘What is a bastard?’ asked Silver Wing, toying idly with a stanley knife she’d lifted from a hoister’s gadget belt. ‘Exactly, in this context?’

‘Useter mean, someone whose parents weren’t married,’ Sage explained, ‘That’s become obsolete. Nowadays, means any shit you don’t like. Give the guy his knife back.’

‘I see. Like fucker doesn’t mean sex. No, I
need
this knife.’

‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ said Fiorinda, apparently referring to the quartz getting hoisted; and walked away before anyone could ask her to explain.

Allie wasn’t coming, nor was Roxane. Everyone else was in the backstage bar. Shane and Jordan and Milly had heard that the Assassins planned on being here, and were full of this bad news. Jordan was very unhappy indeed when he found out what Ax had done. He wanted Faz and his compadres chucked off the site.

‘For crimes they might commit?’ said Ax. ‘Oh fuck off. They’d have got in anyway, they’re not exactly outsiders around here. He did that door-police number to wind me up.’

‘It’s the fasting month, though,’ said Chip wisely. ‘So they won’t make trouble.’

‘Not so,’ Ax told him. ‘If you fight in a good cause, it’s fine. Better the day, better the deed, is the Islamic attitude. Not that Faz was ever conventionally devout. But I don’t think it’ll come to anything.’

Party night at the Blue Lagoon. The traditional shake-down for weapons slowing the queue to get in, as outside guests got argumentative: brisk traffic at the drugs-testing. There were about a hundred licensed brands of mild hallucinogens, serotonin-boosters, cannabis cigarettes and rolling grass available at any off-licence. Not to mention the doom-warning, sultry-packaged hard stuffs. Naturally the Counterculturals preferred dodgy contraband: but they loved getting their gear checked. Made them feel all sensible.

George was setting up in the DJs’ box. The Few had moved onto the stage.

‘Hey, Silver, wanna mind Sage’s boards for me?’

‘Oh yay!’ squealed the little girl, leaping to her feet.

‘George!’ yelled Anne-Marie, ‘Don’t you DARE! She’s eight years old, what the fuck do you think you’re doing, she can’t handle Sage’s stuff!’

‘Yeah,’ sez George, malignly. ‘Kid ought to be in bed, couldn’t agree more. Since she’s not, she may as well make ’erself useful.’

Heads fans staking claim to space at the front were regaled by the sight of a little girl wearing a patchwork smock and butterfly wings perched up behind Aoxomoxoa’s desk, a wrap around her head and every appearence of being in charge: until Sage came along from his shift on former-Class A testing.

‘Hard drugs are the kind that make you hard hearted,’ remarked the child.

‘You should be in bed. Go away.’

‘You never take any of those sort of drugs anymore, do you Sage?’

‘Maybe not. What’s it to you?’ Her black, Chinese eyes gazed up at him: dead inscrutable. ‘Hmm. No need go shouting about that to my public, Silver.’

‘Your secret is safe with me,’ said the imp, and darted away.

Leaving him to consider, until the set began and performance took over, his personal situation: hard fun indeed, maybe never going to get any easier, and yet he would stay with this thing, wherever it might lead. That was certain.

Fiorinda was right next to the trouble when it began. She’d been talking to a big leather-clad woman with a tattooed face, a staybehind poet: hoping to fill in some gaps on the Assassins thing. She was unimpressed by factoids, but she found the expression
before your time, babe,
annoying. She’d had an earful about Glastonbury versus Reading, and the merits of the openly meaningless populist rock vibe, like your stuff Fiorinda; as opposed to the crypto-corporate hippies… It was not an easy conversation to follow, in the midst of Aoxomoxoa and George. She’d suggested they dance, then suddenly there was a stumbling wave, barging into them. Another surge and they could see the fight, lurching through Sage’s visuals, spreading fast. The big staybehind was built like a truck. She grabbed Fiorinda, without a word, and barged her way through to the stage: planted a kiss on Fio’s lips, boosted her up into safety; and plunged into the affray.

Fiorinda put on her dark glasses, losing the huge sound and wild illusions too abruptly for comfort. ‘Shit, what’s got into them? I wanted to dance. What’s the use in coming to a party and not dancing?’

Everyone was wearing IMMix blocking glasses up here, and looking like vampires’ night out. But the fight on the floor was rapidly turning not funny.

‘It’s the wind,’ said Anne-Marie. ‘It always makes my kids crazy—’

Finally the demon DJs noticed something, put on a relatively soothing loop and left the desks, to examine the situation.

It shouldn’t have been the Few’s business, but from their vantage point they could see that the resident peacekeepers were not doing much peacekeeping. Many site security persons, in their lilac and yellow flashed teeshirts, were getting very unprofessionally involved. The lights came up, the IMMix system cut out. The Lagoon’s current manager, a skinny thirty-something from Brighton with ginger dreadlocks, appeared; and stood there looking depressed.

‘Shit is right,’ said Felice, senior powerbabe: disgusted. ‘They’re anarchists, aren’t they? This is their idea of fun, we should just leave.’

‘But if there’s women and kids, guys too, that don’t want to be fighting—’ protested Dora, the tender-hearted responsible citizen.

‘It’s pissing with rain,’ Dilip pointed out. ‘Roll up the walls. That’ll do it.’

‘Try rolling up the walls in this wind, the whole fucking thing probly’ go,’ said the manager. ‘Anyway, how’re you gonna? There’s no button you can press, we’re lo-tech, got to crank them up mechanically. We have difficult situation, Ax. Don’t know where this is coming from. We don’t have fights!’