Midnight Lamp (3 page)

They ignored him, but not in an unfriendly way.

‘D’you mind if I ask a question?’

The young woman turned on him a mask of beaten gold, pierced by a pair of eyes like clear grey stones, so like the cover image on her second solo album that his mouth went dry with excitement.
Yellow Girl
. It’s really her!

‘Go ahead. It’d better not be difficult. We have no brains.’

‘Why are you playing cricket, with a softball and a baseball bat?’

He was pleased with himself for spotting the game.

‘Oh, tha’s easy,’ said the languid giant, planting the bat in front of his stumps—stalks of bleached tamarisk root, capped by clam-shell bails. ‘We don’t have a cricket bat, an’ if we used a smaller ball I would never hit it. I’m useless.’

‘He’s lying,’ said Fiorinda. ‘We found the bat. We
had
a proper baseball, which we bought in Ensenada, but our demon bowler, er, pitcher, managed to bury it in the Pacific. It’s over there. If you’d like to fetch it for us, we’d be grateful.’ She pointed out into the ocean, smiling at him with great charm, and chilling strangeness.

‘You guys are English, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I recognised the accent. We haven’t seen many tourists from Crisis Europe, the last few years. Things have quieted down over there now, I guess?’

‘Much quieter,’ she agreed. ‘Practically back to business as usual. Except for Italy and, um, a few other hot spots.’

‘England’s still revolutionary, though, isn’t it. But you’re allowed to travel?’

‘As long as we promise not to eat at McDonalds.’

‘Okay,’ he said, nodding politely. ‘The name’s Harry. Harry Lopez.’ He held out his hand. They smiled, but didn’t take it. They didn’t offer their own names.

He went back to the campground, and looked into one of the toilet blocks. The showers and stalls had plastic curtains, no doors, but everything was clean. He tried a faucet and leapt back, cursing. The water was
boiling
. A little Mexican girl had appeared at the uncurtained door to the outside, with a black and tan puppy in her arms. She stared at him, scandalised.

‘These are dire and troubled times,’ he said to her, shaking his scalded fingers. ‘This could be the end of days. Do you believe that?’

He tried the other faucet. Something about F and C… Fuck! Also boiling.

‘This is the
ladies
room,’ said the little girl, in Spanish.

‘Do you have an office?
Oficina
?’

‘Strange bloke,’ said Fiorinda, meaning the man in the straw hat.

She had called a halt. Sage was obediently lying on their rug, while she sat beside him on the sand. They watched the world go by.

‘I dreamed of Fergal again last night.’

‘Oh yes?’

Sage didn’t know what to make of this development. Fergal Kearney was the Irish musician, casualty of the lifestyle, whose dead body had been used by Fiorinda’s father as his instrument of torture. She wouldn’t talk about what had happened to her, she had never known the real Fergal, why had she suddenly started talking about
him
?

‘He was sitting by my bed,’ said Fiorinda softly. ‘I didn’t
see
him, but he was there. It wasn’t a nightmare, Sage. He was on guard, keeping bad at bay. The strange thing is, I still knew he was really my father: and in my dream I didn’t mind. You know how all the people around you are really just patterns created by firing neurons in your head?’

‘Mm,’ said Sage.

She laughed, cold and sweet, and took his hand with chilling deliberation.

‘Hey, I’m not saying you don’t exist. I’m just saying, obviously that’s what ghosts of the dead are, too. My father is dead, and I killed him—’

‘Er, as I recall,
I
killed Rufus, babe.’

‘I helped to kill him, and I bloody well think I had a right. But I believe I want him to forgive me. I think when I imagine Fergal by my bed, on guard, it’s my mind’s way of telling me we did okay, that night at Drumbeg. We rescued Fergal from his private hell, and he’s grateful, and we even did Rufus some good, somehow. It’s my closet soppiness, sneaking out.’

‘Fee, you are amazing.’

‘Thank you so much… Sage, what’ll I do about not wanting to be famous any more? All the time we were trapped being leaders of the revolution I was secretly thinking,
fuck this, I need to tour Japan
. Now I can’t stand the idea, and I’m scared to have no grand plan. I think I’ll fall apart.’

‘Nyah. Remember what you told me, when I was grieving about being old, invalided-out, and never being Aoxomoxoa again? People talk a lot of crap about facing up to big lifechanges. Why bother? Spend a few years in denial, then accept the obvious when it’s old news, and hurts less.’

‘Did I say that? I am a vicious brat.’ She sighed, ‘Well, yeah, benign neglect. That’s how I’m dealing with the
other
major problem, never having a baby—’

Fiorinda had been sterilised without her consent when she was thirteen, after she’d given birth to her father’s child, the little boy who had died at three months. It was a treatment that could be reversed.

‘You don’t
know
you’re never going to have a baby.’

‘Yes I do, Sage. How could a creature like me have a baby? It was okay when I thought my father was just some bastard of a megastar who didn’t mind seducing his own daughter. Now I know what he really was, how could I possibly contemplate passing on those genes?’ She frowned at the sparkling ocean. ‘Unless, um, unless as I sometimes think, I imagined the whole thing? I don’t mean the Crisis, or running the revolution, I mean, the rest of it?’

She’d let go of his hand. He took hers, ready to back off at the slightest flinch. But she did not flinch, and surely that was a good sign.

‘Sorry, babe. It was all real. I was there, trust me.’

‘What crocks we are,’ said Fiorinda, after a moment. ‘The three of us. Me with my gross memories and my monster of a dead dad. You, had to turn back at the threshold of heaven, and never going to be the king of the lads again. Ax, with his post-traumatic hostage stress, and what’s worse, he doesn’t believe in saving the world anymore. Sage, can we make him happy? Just you and me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did I say, also completely penniless?’

‘I don’t mind being broke. I like it.’

‘Oh sure, my one-bowl, one-robe pilgrim. What about the yacht, hm?’

‘Tha’s different.’

She smiled at him tenderly, and took his hand to her face, rubbing her cold cheek against his knuckles. My darling, he thought. My sweet girl. You put on a good act, corny but brave: but you don’t even know I’m here. They folded the rug, collected their bat and the softball, and went to look for Ax.

On quiet nights they would play and sing on their terrace after dark; for their own amusement. The shindig drove them indoors, but then the hermit crab, which had been lost in the cabin for days, started to make excruciating ragged-claw noises. The whole Baja heaves with geo-thermal power, but the fishing camp electric light was low and peevish. They searched under beds and in corners with their wind-up torch, to no avail, and this woke them up so thoroughly they decided to go back outside. The Clam Diggers chorus was rendering Beatles Greatest Hits, backed by a miserable machine-beat bassline, and deconstructive interference from the old bikers’ Jazz ensemble. The communal bonfire painted orange shadows above the tamarisks, the Nevada dogs howled, the Pacific sighed. The former rulers of England sat shrouded in rugs and watched the bold cactus mice, who’d come out to hunt scraps.

‘I don’t know where the fuck it hides,’ grumbled Ax. ‘We haven’t
got
any furniture. Hey, look at that one. Commando mouse—’

‘We should build them an obstacle course,’ said Sage.

‘We should join the shindig,’ suggested Fiorinda, cheerfully. ‘Since we’re going to get the benefit of it anyway. I bet Mr Strange with the straw hat will be there. The Nevadas are always looking for new blood.’

‘I’m tired,’ said Sage. ‘Don’t feel like it.’

Ax caught his eye, in the light of the camping lantern. Silently, they’d agreed not to worry about the man in the straw hat. Say nothing to make her anxious. But fear brushed him with a stealthy hand, and suddenly he realised what unbelievable good fortune he still possessed. Just to be with them, to be
alive
, and loving them—

‘Nah, me neither. The claw’s probably asleep by now.’

Every dusk the firewood arrived in a red pickup. Campers gathered in the town square, an open space with a ring of logs and stones around the bonfire site. The horse-boys and their sister tossed out bundles of hardwood root and scrap timber. Señor El Pabellón, a square-built man with a handsome moustache, took the money. His wife (presumably), who ran the campsite office, stayed in the cab with the old lady who was (probably) her mother-in-law, and made critical observations, in a rapid but none too discreet undertone. The hippie woman is too old to wear her hair down her back, she looks ridiculous, and her children are brats. The painter is a stupid old lady with no talent. That young man in the straw hat is a strange one. He looks like a debt collector.

‘No, you don’t want that one,’ said Señor El Pabellón to Fiorinda, in English, ‘There are nails in the wood, take this one, it’s heavier… You’d like a horse ride tomorrow?’

‘Caballo no me gusta,’ said Fiorinda, ‘Caballo demasiado grande, soy pequeño.’

Señor El Pabellón laughed, and winked at Ax. ‘Ah, she’s learning Spanish! The horse is big, and she is small yes: but my horses are gentle, eh. Tell her that.’

Fiorinda could ride, but she didn’t like horses. She sleeps with the blond, said the wife. Nah, she sleeps with neither, said the mother-in-law.
El guero
is some kind of celibate priest, and the Indio is like her brother. It’s a mystery.

True enough, thought Ax, paying for the bundle without the nails. And you two mean old bats know fucking well I can understand you. But he wasn’t offended. He’d lived in the public eye a long time: you develop a tolerance.

‘Hey, are you coming down tonight?’ asked Nevada’s old lady, heaving up her bundles. ‘Free food. We’re laying on barbecue,’ she added persuasively.

Fiorinda looked at Ax. ‘Shall we?’

His premonition had faded, and he hated to be the control freak. Whatever she wants, she must have. ‘Okay by me. Let’s ask Sage.’

Harry had discovered that they were known as Red, Mr Guitar and Blondie. They were liked, their musical talents had been noted, but they were hard to get. By their ladidah accents they came from ‘New England’—which to the campers meant the north eastern seaboard of the USA. Or else they were Canadians, or even Australian; but not Irish. Red and Mr Guitar were seen as the couple, with Blondie tagging along, but there was a minority in favour of Guitar and Blondie, with Red as their ‘beard’. One romantic variant had Red an heiress hiding from the media, Blondie as her dissolute brother dying of AIDS, and Mr Guitar as the trained assassin bodyguard.

I’ll file that one!

In the
Oficina
, for a small cash payment, he’d had sight of a single European Union passport, suspiciously fresh and new, issued to a Daniel Brown. Like hell.

He was astonished that nobody had recognised those three faces. It made him doubt the evidence of his eyes; and of the technical data. Maybe you could pass Fiorinda on the street, if she was dressed down and not deploying that terrific stage presence. Maybe you could pass Ax Preston (though you’d sure as hell remember him). You might not spot that the willowy blond in aviator shades had once been musclebound techno-wizard Aoxomoxoa, of Aoxomoxoa and the Heads, of five Grammys just the year before last, and personally the inventor of ‘immersion’ code.
Auteur
of a horrific, hallucinatory string of albums, banned in twelve states. But together! How could anyone miss them?

Briefly, he’d felt crushed. No one knew about these people, no one cared, his big idea was a dog. But the denizens of this caravanserai were wilfully ignorant, self-selected out of so many loops. Whereas one of the people who
shared
Harry’s delusion was Kathryn’s uncle Fred. He need not worry. What he had here was not a private obsession, it was
an
untapped motherlode
.

‘There will be wars, and the rumour of wars,’ he muttered, loitering by the trestle table where the barbecue was laid out, eating coleslaw from a paper plate and eyeing the inexplicable thing built from worn out pens: which stalked in the shadows, dangerously unstable. The bonfire was lit, the crowd moved over. He saw Ax and Fiorinda arrive, with guitars. Sage was talking to the pen-thing’s keepers, a young guy-couple who looked like slumming MIT mavins.

This is it
. How unbelievably romantic.

He found a place on a log of driftwood, between a grizzled biker and the spooky, spectral teenagers. Ax had a semi-acoustic. Fiorinda was handling the legendary Ax Preston Les Paul. (Harry was no guitar buff, but a classic Gibson he could spot). They had those futuristic little Oltech amps patched on the soundboxes, hm, they’ve hung onto the high tech, these vagabonds… Without any fuss, Ax started to play, and it was ‘Riq’, a very sexy instrumental from the glory days of the English Dictatorship.

My God, Harry thought. Can anyone beat this? I’m listening to Ax Preston,
live
, in a Baja RV camp, surrounded by pension-stretching nomad seniors!

The campers chatted through ‘Riq’. Then they seemed to realise they’d got something good, and started yelling for their favourites. They wanted ‘The Boxer’, they wanted ‘Mr Tambourine Man’—

Harry could have killed them. The English Triumvirate simply complied, with a set of Reader’s Digest Favourite Twentieth Century Folksongs (someone’s got a thing for The Beatles…); relieved only by Sage and Fiorinda duetting on an unplugged version of ‘Stonecold’, the
Fiorinda
punk anthem which had become a standard even in the New World. In ‘Stonecold’ Harry ruined the experience for himself by realising he had a chance to stare without being noticed. He gave the side of his head a discreet tap, blinking to focus his gaze. He was wary of making it obvious. Eye socket digital devices
might
be okay, or he could be surrounded by eco-maniac Fundamentalists. As a rule of thumb, Harry had observed that the fewer houses you can see, the higher the concentration of lunatics.