Rainbow Bridge (16 page)

‘Any idea how long before we set out, Norman?’

The impresario smiled enigmatically. ‘None at all.’

Ten minutes later a group of Chinese arrived, in religious robes and close-fitting dark caps. They were ushered into the cabin by private soldiers who stowed their bags for them, saluted and departed to their own segment of the snake. Norman had a chat in Chinese with the woman who appeared to be the leader of the group: all smiles but out of earshot, at the far end of the cabin. The robed men smiled and bowed, Norman returned to the rockstar end, looking positively exalted.

‘A Daoist nun and her missionaries,’ he explained. ‘They are
wonderful
people. They have a part to play in my drama, you’ll see.’

The nun and the missionaries took their seats, facing inwards, and locked themselves into the crashbar cradles. Norman resumed his perusal of sugar-candy Communism, Fiorinda and Joe resumed their gin-rummy. Sage stretched on the floor propped on one elbow, flipping the pages of Fiorinda’s tablet. After a while Ax realised with a lurch in his gut that the landship was in stealthy motion, without announcement, without a sound.

‘How long’s it going to take to get to Peterborough, Norman?’

‘We should be there by morning.’

A lo-rez map on the drinks machine bulkhead showed their inchworm progress. Ax watched the icon until he felt watched, and turned to see the nun and her missionaries gazing at him placidly, attentively. Playground tactics. He went to join Sage.

‘What are you up to, big cat?’

‘Oh, I thought I’d work on that song idea of yours.’

‘Which one?’

‘You know, “The Day Before the Revolution”? Isn’t that what you called it?’

‘
Mind if I join you?’

Fiorinda quit the gin-rummy tournament. Joe played patience: the rockstars worked, like model revolutionary artists. Ax had a tune, a bridge and some scraps of lyric. Sage, as was customary, had the design. A forward-looking anthem, and a return to our core message. The liferaft idea was never enough for the Reich. Futuristic Utopians, looking to a better world beyond the great dying; let’s get back there. Yeah. We want bold endeavour against the odds, the way we were in the glory days.

Don’t make it sound easy. Make it
profound
. Stir them up.

Ax’s title was swiftly dumped, but allowed to stay as the first couplet—

Always the day,

Before the Revolution

Sage’s contribution next,
Always the wave/Before the one to take—

‘I feel surfie imagery is too laid-back,’ said Fiorinda the scribe.

‘Nah, you’re wrong. This is English surfing, and it’s wintertime too. We’re bobbing up and down in the freezing cold, crying with frustration, yet consumed by longing. We
know
that wave will come, listen to the chords.’

‘I want
more
frustration,’ said Ax. ‘It hones our will to succeed.’

Always the way/and never the solution—

‘And then we open it to the universal—’

‘Not yet, Fee, not yet. We need the verse to end with a twist on what’s there already. There’s a wave, think of something else that breaks.’

‘How about
always on the
something
save/of a story that is bound to break?’

Fiorinda and Sage shook their heads. ‘Too vague, Ax. Meaningless.’

‘Meaningless is okay, but must sound deep, that does not sound deep.’

‘I’m bringing in a football metaphor.’

‘Like
you
know the slightest thing about football, Ax dear.’

Norman fetched himself a paper cup of green tea and came to lie on the floor. The sleeves of one of his multicoloured robes protruded like flippers from the cuffs of his padded coat. ‘Red four on black five, Joe. When were the glory days, by the way?’

‘From the September of Ax’s inauguration as dictator,’ said Fiorinda crisply, ‘To the November when he left to broker the Danube Dams question.’

‘A little over two years. How poetically brief. What was it like?’

Fiorinda, Tenniel chesspiece, looked up from the scratch of notes and words on her tablet. ‘It was hopeful, Norman. Europe was in ferment, terrifying things were happening. Floods and storms, crop failures, vast tracts of poisoned land, but it
felt hopeful
. Governments believed in us, it was exhilarating… Especially in Ax, because of the way he’d turned things in England around.’

She felt Toby’s eyes on her, a new brand of stalksperience, more personal, more rancorous. What the hell are we supposed to do with him?

‘But the “Celtics” turned on you, because you had not come to terms with the four olds, as we Chinese have done. Although now you are friends again.’ Norman winked at Ax. ‘They give you cool tattoos.’

‘The
Scots
gave me this,’ corrected Ax, touching his knotwork. ‘The Celtic

Movement was something else entirely. Nothing to do with our three “Celtic” nations. In the glory days it was a streetfight. Gangs of mad lads roaming around Bucharest, Berlin, Amsterdam. Look! There’s a Utopian! Deck ’im. Then it got nasty.’

‘The Green Nazis and their final solution, led by a vile, despicable English Countercultural cabal. Rufus O’Niall, horrible fellow, was involved somehow?’

‘You bet. My father was in it up to his neck.’

Norman looked from one to another, big eyes round with respect. ‘You know, it really is a
miracle
that the three of you are still alive.’

No comment seemed advisable.

Ax cleared his throat. ‘Okay, Are we agreed so far, partners?
Always on the desperate save, of a story that is bound to break
—’

‘No!’ Fiorinda swooped on the tab, which Ax had stolen. ‘That’s STUPID.’

‘How fascinating to watch the artistic struggle. What a privilege—’

‘Yeah, watch and learn, Norman,’ growled Ax. ‘This is the way it works. Any suggestion of mine gets
ripped to shreds
, happens every time—’

‘If that’s what you call getting ripped to shreds, Ax,’ remarked Joe, folding his failed solitaire and shuffling. ‘It casts a new light on those screaming fights you used to have with Jordan, when you were fronting the Chosen Few.’

Ouch, a wrong step. Ax’s brother Jordan was a hostage in the South West like the rest of the Preston family; currently with non-person status. He should not be mentioned. The rehabilitees trembled. Sage’s father was in London, under tacit house arrest; the rest of his family untouched as yet. Fiorinda had no blood relatives in England. Her grandmother the witch had died—thank God—in her secure nursing home, in the last days of the Second Chamber regime. But all the Few were hostage.

Norman merely looked interested. ‘I thought you never wrote lyrics for the Chosen, Ax? Weren’t Jordan and Milly the wordsmiths?’

‘Great myths of the Reich,’ explained Fiorinda, ‘Ax never wrote the lyrics, no, he preferred to
rewrite
them. It used to drive Jordan nuts.’

The nun and her missionaries paid close attention, like people trying to follow a soap opera in a foreign language. The icon on the bulkhead screen was in Chigwell, moving imperceptibly, as if time had gone into reverse and they were back in gridlock days. Imagine a black January sleet out there, the rivers of scarlet and white edging on their clutches, probably a tailback right around the M25—

‘Hahaha. I was going to say how impressed I was with the speed of your agreements… How about a recreational smoke, my rockstars?’

Joe, Ax, Sage and Fiorinda looked at each other. This was unexpected.

‘If you’re sure that would be okay,’ said Ax, cautiously.

‘Oh, of course. Other ranks are not permitted recreationals, but we artists have a dispensation. It’s my own blend of crystal and bud, with a
tiny
smidge of fine tobacco, from a very good firm in HK. You’ll love it.’

‘I better ask the holy woman, she might object.’

Before Norman could demur, Ax crossed to the forward seats and ducked down beside the ‘Daoist nun’ to ask permission:
jie-jie,
would you mind if we smoked some cannabis? The woman’s seamed, serene face opened in a cheerful smile. ‘Go ahead.’ Daoism was an approved religion: maybe she was a real nun, a famous mystic, it would be within Norman Soong’s style. But her ‘missionaries’ had an air that made him think of Secret Service minders. A fugitive memory tugged at him, he had called her ‘elder sister’; what did that recall—? Gone again.

Norman produced a beautiful smoking kit, and fussed with cutting and lighting a green-skinned cannabis cigar. Fiorinda accepted it, blew smoke rings and watched them rise, auditioning verbs for the stately movement of this ophidian. It does not slither, it does not slide or glide, it surges like rock, at sedimentary speed, stops for a few million years, oozed majestically onward—

‘You need to be ripped to shreds, Ax,’ said Norman. ‘Stripped naked. A chastening
artistic
experience, to nurture your maturity as a wild music legend.’

Fiorinda and Sage got the giggles. Rockstar, maturity, not in same sentence.

‘All the mature rockstars I know,’ said Ax, ‘are solid bourgeois. Conservative views, rather odd clothes, fretting about their kids’ education—’

‘This isn’t the twentieth century, Norman. Rock music’s respectable.’

‘To be a legend you have to be a bastard,’ remarked Joe, laying his cards. ‘It’s not like “power corrupts”, it’s more like the only way it can happen. Like they’re marked, ruthless and nasty from the get-go. Trust me, I’m a journalist. Okay, Dylan, the greatest of all time. Was he a good man? I don’t think so. Ax is too nice.’

‘You’re embittered by your profession,’ said Aoxomoxoa, grinning.

‘Nobody’s good,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Not the way you mean.’

Ax drew in a lungful of fragrant smoke and thought about it. ‘I dunno, count my off-stage activities, I might scrape by as nasty. I’ve killed people, Joe—’

He looked at his hands, these bloodstained hands. ‘Not addle-head gangsta style, either. In cold blood, for reasons of state; does that make me not a bastard?’

‘You’ve had to make shit decisions, you mean. Sorry, that
is
different.’

The conversation expanded, tardislike, four people in the back of the tourbus, ranking the bastardy of legends, disputing the nature of good and evil… Norman Soong’s full dark eyes moved from face to face, intent. Toby lay buried under faux-fur; maybe he’d fallen asleep.

‘One pill makes you larger,’ crooned Joe, under his breath, ‘one pill makes you small, and a hookah-smoking caterpillar, has given us the call—’

‘Okay,’ Sage rediscovered the tab, ‘
Always on the desperate save
. Terrible. Ah well, something better will come to us on stage. I’m wiping this rubbish.’

Norman gasped in horror. ‘Give that to me at once, Aoxomoxoa!’

‘Wha’s the matter? We never keep our rough notes, what for?’

Norman secured the tablet and curled himself protectively around it, fishing bits out of the trash, a coiled, multicoloured, inquisitive bolster of a being. ‘This is really rather wonderful, this lyric in process. So full of restless negation. You are empty, you are raw. You are ready to face the naked onslaught of the masses—’

Toby Starborn sat up. ‘I’d like to ask you wankers something. I’d like to know if you call that CRAP art? Or is it propaganda?’

‘Propaganda isn’t a bad word with us, Toby.’ said Fiorinda, cut-crystal. ‘It’s what we do, always has been. Spreading the word. Art for a cause.’

‘FUCK you all! FUCK your drivel!!! You disgust me!’ Toby shot to his feet, kicked his rug across the floor, and stormed out of the cabin.

There was a startled silence. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ wondered Sage.

Norman glanced at the missionary party, tapped himself on the side of the head and beckoned his rockstars and his mediaman to come closer.

‘This is off the record, it’s not a suitable topic, but I think Toby’s wound is bothering him. It’s healing well, but there’s bound to be discomfort.’

‘His wound?’ repeated Ax (for some reason flashing on mutilated bodies).

Norman winced. ‘Quietly! You see, Toby’s had himself castrated.’

‘Had himself
what
?’ cried Joe. ‘You mean, he, actually—?’

‘Sssh, ssh! This
not
a suitable topic. Yes, the full meat and potatoes chop. He didn’t want me to tell you, but it’s affecting his mood. You’d better know, so you’ll be tolerant, but don’t tell him I told you, and don’t, er,
comment
.’

‘That’s extreme,’ said Ax, quietly. ‘What inspired the body sculpture?’

‘Ah.’ The rock director pressed a large fist to his lips and gazed at them over his knuckles. ‘I really…well, if I have to spell it out, you told me yourself Ax, Toby was a professed Pagan, and a favoured pet of the regime. He’s also a genius. He was, shall we say he was offered a choice. He chose to live.’

Jee-sus
.

Fiorinda felt the shock that went through the men like a hot cheesewire.

‘I’m supporting him,’ said Norman. ‘I’ve been through my own changes, as you know: I can help him to adjust. I arranged for him to join us, he may not do much work but his name will be on the credits, that’s the main thing.’ Norman got up, a flustered cousin caterpillar. ‘I
love
your dialogue, by the way. All of you. Natural, relaxed; a little daring. You know this game
backwards
. I’m delighted with you.’ He flapped a hand at them. ‘I must go after him. Remember, don’t you say anything!’

Norman’s reality stars resumed their conversation, their ability to act naturally under pressure somewhat dented.

Towards dawn Ax woke in the same diffuse light, his partners asleep beside him; a sleeping Joe Muldur, a motionless heap of faux-fur that was Toby. There were berths on the landship but they were for private soldiers. Norman had advised against them; unless you liked being buried alive. The nun and her missionaries slept in their crash-cradles, as if still waiting for lift-off. He tiptoed past them to the toilet, took a piss, rinsed his mouth; washed, and slipped out onto the deck. Flooded fields gleamed, shock heads of leafless trees. The escort vehicles had drawn close, their riding lights like the glowing rims of flying saucers, hovering over the sodden landscape. There’d been no explanation for the inchworm pace, but he could see the reason for this halt. There was a firefight going on, ahead and to the left: to the west.