Rainbow Bridge (18 page)

‘I thought the curtsey was a neat satirical touch, me,’ ventured Aoxomoxoa.

‘You thought wrong. I am the director. Let’s keep that in mind.’

Name: Axl Preston.

Address: None

Age: 34

Flying cams, a little buzzing team of them apiece, followed Ax and Sage through the induction process. Do the interview. Hand over possessions, strip, get deloused and shampooed, pick up your ragpaper gown, submit to the medical—including body cavity search. Measured, weighed, dental exam, finger and toenails tended, tested for addiction and transmittable disease, vaccinated; biometrically tagged into the system. Issued with clean underwear and green overalls, Warren Fen wellies steam-heated to size on their feet. All this with Norman hopping around, framing his shots, crying
be more brutal
,
treat them the same as you would any lowlife vagrants…
(mortally offending the staff, who had been trained to be gentle, and wished to be depicted on their best behaviour).

It wasn’t so bad.

When they came out the other side a crowd had gathered, silent and uneasy, despite strict instructions to the contrary. The inmates did not know what to make of this stunt. Perhaps the Chinese invasion hadn’t meant much to them, probably they had enjoyed the spectacle of the bad guys getting executed. They weren’t sure they should put up with this treatment of Ax and Sage. Maybe they should throw stones, give that weird big Chinese wanker something to think about?

‘Wander off,’ shouted Sage. ‘We’re fine, it’s make-believe, you’re messing up the fucking video.’ The people drifted away; the stars retreated to sit on a doorstep, in the space between two round-shouldered, turf-roofed housing blocks. The murmur and shuffle at the end of their alley was like static from the past. The camps had always buzzed, especially in winter when unskilled farmwork was slack, but they suspected that Warren Fen was over-occupied. Could be okay, just the camps representing security to the rural populace. Or not.

‘Hey, detritus of history. How was it for you?’

‘Hey, other detritus. I’ve been handled worse.’

‘Me too,’ said Sage, with feeling.

Ax shook his rings out of his baggie of personal items. Right hand, the carnelian seal Fiorinda had given him; left ring finger, Sage’s Triumvirate ring. Thankfully, the manicurist had had the grace to spare his picking fingernails. He’d bummed a half-pack of cigarettes in the haemo clinic. He sparked up, and they passed the cancer stick between them, although Sage disliked tobacco.

‘Glad it’s not a slaphead camp.’

‘Mm. Yeah.’

Induction had been an unexpected danger. They’d had to insist that Fiorinda must be excused: Ms Slater doesn’t do nudity, and video-making in the female induction rooms is going to offend the Islamic community. Norman had taken it fairly well. He seemed a little scared of Fiorinda. They were supposed to be ‘on a break’, so they lowered their voices and never glanced at the flying cam that hovered, watching them with its faceted eyes, exotic insect perched on a breathable wattle-and-daub wall. They were not afraid to be watched. They could channel the sight of Chinese soldiers rifle-butting English concentration camp workers, and look as chastened as Norman’s dreams could desire…

So far, so predictable. Don’t ask if Norman’s propaganda rock show, for global release, is
really
going to include the body-cavity probing.

We know what’s going on. Speak to the audience.

‘What d’you think was upsetting the masses?’

‘I suppose they thought we were being humiliated.’

‘Do
you
feel as if you’ve been humiliated, babe?’

‘
No
,’ said Ax, passionately. ‘I do not! I think this is what we should have done ourselves. This is where we ought to have been last year, when we first knew how the Second Chamber bastards were treating people. Instead of staging our fucking Parisian Lennonesque bed-in “labour camps protest”.’

Sage took a pull on the cigarette. ‘No thanks to that, Ax. The Chinese I b’lieve I trust. They make us take the medicine, but they mean us well. If we’d walked into one of these places in the bad guys’ hands, we’d never have been seen again.’ He lowered his voice further, soft and deep; deceptively carrying. ‘D’you think we’ll be able to do anything on the side? For Wang Xili?’

‘Dunno. Mustn’t push it. We’ll make ourselves available, see what happens, follow any leads.’ Ax shook his head, and half-laughed. ‘I hope he likes the concerts. I’m not sure the General is
convinced
about rock music being the liturgy of history.’

‘Hahaha, nor am I, Daddyo; nor am I.’

Fiorinda looked into the alley, and came and sat down. They stank of disinfectant, but she felt that morale was good, despite of the telltale cigarette. Wound tight; but good. ‘How did it go? Did you get tattooed?’

‘Penned, not inked.’ Ax turned his wrist, to show her his National Insurance number on the inside. ‘We get inked at our monthly review; if our neighbours give us a good report. I knew mine,’ he added proudly. ‘Sage they had to track down.’

‘Fuck off. Can I help it if I’ve never had a proper job?’

‘I hope Norman understands it’s only in jest. Some people find the English sense of humour
difficult…
The Second Chamber made these places hateful, but really Warren Fen’s okay. Not at all like a nazi concentration camp.’

‘They don’t mean anything by it. What’s happening now?’

‘Norman and Joe and Toby skipped the showers, which I think is
disgraceful
. They’re at the guesthouse, where our bags have been taken. The soldiers are guarding the loot. They have piled it in an outdoor market; I think that’s a poor idea. The nun and her missionaries seem to be keeping an eye on the soldiers.’ Fiorinda wrapped her arms around her knees. ‘Ax, Sage, may I say, formally, I’m sorry I wimped out. I feel I’ve missed an opportunity. I should have done it.’

‘No you shouldn’t,’ said Ax. ‘Allow us to be the pin-ups, for once.’

‘We are proud. We’re definitely buying the teeshirt.’

The tiger and the wolf laughed until they choked.

The relentless north-east wind of the fens found their hiding place. It lapped them in raw, wet cold, fingering all their bones. Two little girls in short frocks, with bare blueish legs scampered by; the smaller of them clutching the choke-chain of a large Alsatian dog. A woman in threadbare jeans, and a nylon puffa jacket sprouting down from every seam, came hurrying after them. She smiled uncertainly, hesitated and seemed about to speak: but she passed on.

‘What do we do now?’

Ax mashed out the cigarette on the sole of his wellie, and pocketed the fag end. There was not a scrap of litter on the coloured-pebble paving of Warren Fen’s alleys; let’s keep it that way. Got to get some more of those, he thought. ‘Touch base with Norman, then go walkabout. I’ve a feeling there’s a lot of people in here who haven’t been through the showers. Let’s see if any of them will talk to us.’

Speaking Bitterness

Lieutenant Colonel Soong had rather liked the statement of the aid supplies, sitting out there in the open, protected by nothing more than Chinese prestige and a few honest common soldiers. But after a discussion with the Daoist nun he took Fiorinda’s advice, and the loot was shoehorned into storage. Freed from guard duty, the soldiers went on a minor rampage; having spotted signs of delusion and even Countercultural belief. A lucky horseshoe was torn down, there were several incidents of corn dollies and dream catchers being ripped from front doors; obsolete coin scooped from congealing water fountains. The officers were ordered to put a stop to it, while the Triumvirate made a swift appearance on the camp public address tv, saying the AMID soldiers were under their protection. Happily these measures seemed to work.

Hester and Jack reported that most of their security staff had vanished, as soon as news of the invasion reached Anglia, and it had been a good riddance. A lot of them had been right bastards, brought in by the Second Chamber. Warren Fen had become an Open Access camp, as a result of the Paris Protest. In the aftermath of 18
^th
October they’d closed the gates again, but they’d had to compromise, or they’d have been besieged. They’d replaced the missing guards by deputising useful inmates; but that was a problem too. You had to recruit the hard nuts, or they’d make trouble anyway… They couldn’t hazard a guess about the overcrowding. Everything had been upside down. They didn’t know who was in the camp that shouldn’t be.

‘Long as they keep the peace,’ Jack reasoned, ‘we’re better off ignoring them.’

Hester, cadaverous where Jack was lean, serious where her partner was chirpy, put it more directly; while avoiding the term ‘actives’. ‘We’re forced into it, Sir. We’re not
supporting
them. But we have to live here!’

Stel and Mackie might be thirty-five, maybe older. They’d never been hippies, no idea of nomad freedom. They’d just been in debt when the Crash came, failed to climb the slippery pole back to safety; ended up on the streets. So here they were in the Learning Resources common room, Badger Close, Westberry, Warren Fen: warm and dry, surrounded by the best in human culture, telling their tale of woe to a tall curly-headed blond, who used to be a scrapping, ugly-tempered drunk, a red-headed woman who was once a street kid, her baby dead, on the run from her abusive father; and a coloured lad from a Somerset sink estate, ex-soldier, hard bastard—

‘They held me down,’ said Mackie. He had lost an eye at some point. The empty socket gave him two faces: half death’s head, half weather-beaten old lag. ‘They beat me up and held me down, while they raped the wife.’

‘I let them get on with it,’ said Stella, ‘in the hope they’d leave the kids alone.’

‘Six of them, I think. I dunno, six or ten.’

‘But they didn’t,’ whispered Stella, bowing her head on her gnarled hands.

The neighbours, crowding round to hear the details again, freshly told in this august company, murmured in pity.
Bastards
.
It’s th’ Gaians, they hate families
;
breeders
they call us
.
It’s the yobs, the young lads, they get hold of hard liquor and they revert to animals
… Mackie and Stella used to have five children, two of them together, three from other partners. Now they had three. Maybe nothing to do with the invasion, no reason, necessarily. Some campers are predators, that’s all.

‘You think the men were strangers, not inmates?’ said Ax.

‘I dunno,’ whispered Stella. She looked around suspiciously; decided on discretion. ‘They weren’t fucking Chinese, though. You can stick the fucking Resistance. It warn’t any Chinky soldier that killed my little Fio.’

‘What the hell do we want with more fighting?’ drawled Sage. ‘It makes no sense. Haven’t we got enough trouble?’

Tucker the bus driver sat in the background, listening and saying nothing.

Fiorinda took a break. She found a toytown, miniature labour camp: turf mounds, communal spaces; doe-eyed clueless creatures popping in and out of a multitude of little dark holes. The rabbits hadn’t been trashed, good sign. Warren Fen was functioning, just about. But there was trouble, they were harbouring suspect characters; and nobody would talk… What a life we all live, and there’s no answer except to pay off the biggest bastards, look as if you like it. Fuck, fuck. Helpless irrational hatred of Norman Soong and the Chinese soldiers shook her.

Frosty Tucker the boat-bus jockey, sturdy young aristocrat of the waterlands, came up shyly and leaned on the fence. Her dandelion-puff hair, the colour of gilded silver, tumbled rich and loose in a drizzle that was turning to sleet.

Frosty’s hair was her delight, she wanted the living goddess to see it. She had a monkey face, whey skin and snot-coloured eyes, but fuck it, the hair was fantastic.

Bastards, bastards, bastards,
muttered Fiorinda.

‘Why don’t you ill-look the bad lads, Miss? I wish you
would.
’

The Daoist nun, who had been strolling around, indulging her curiosity, had also followed Fiorinda. She waited, out of sight, to see how the rockstar would deal with this perilous and disgraceful suggestion.

‘If I
could
, I’d be worse than them,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Wouldn’t I? You don’t want that. And other bastards would go on bashing babies’ heads in, anyway.’

‘I s’ppose. Two wrongs don’t make a right.’

Well said, blue-skinned, jade-eyed child.

Some minutes into the stomping, hand-clapping start of the gig in Westberry Stadium, Norman Soong realised that he knew what the words, when they came, were going to be. He understood that he’d been gently
wound up
, as the English say. He really couldn’t blame himself. Who in the world outside England knew the Triumvirate’s whole catalogue? It had often been
impossible
to get hold of their music.

The stadium was a roaring cave of darkness, the cantilevered rain canopies drawn together overhead, precipitous tiers of seats packed. The only point of reference on stage was a tiny glowing core of red, the cigarette tucked into Ax Preston’s guitar strings… No one had fully explained to Norman that the state-run camps had every provision for rock concerts. He had not believed Allie Marlowe when she said there was nothing to arrange; she’d ended (insolently) by failing to return his calls. The stars had been equally off-hand: now he understood. Westberry stadium was a temple of the Reich, the sacred machinery just rolled into action. There was nothing for Norman to do but sit in the director’s box, with his personnel and fractious, redundant artist-technicians; while the stadium’s own flying cams, digital pick-ups, editing desk, ministered to his every need.

Lights. And there’s Ax in his mulberry-red suit, Aoxomoxoa in a sweeping black-and-white kimono over white jeans and tee. Fiorinda wearing “Chinese London’s” New Look, one of those hieratic, high-waisted tunics; in cloth-of-gold. Just the thing to delight the labour camp’s feminine tendency, both female and male—