Rainbow Bridge (26 page)

Strick’ly No Under 8teen’s.

They entered to a fanfare of trumpets. An attendant in a Grecian tunic, bearing Norman’s mixing desk on high, led them through the tiers where Rainbow Bridge’s in-crowd thronged. An honour guard, their hair dressed in high, ribboned towers, tossed tinsel confetti. Someone decided to cast his garment at Fiorinda’s feet, at once gowns started flying.
Make Love Not War!,
chanted the crowd.

‘Hope you’re getting all this, Norman,’ murmured Sage.

‘Of course I am! Ah, is this your music—?’

‘Nah. This is Gintrap.’

A section of the lowest tier had been roped off, a waiter showed them to their chairs. He wore a sequined codpiece, a glittery scalplock, a napkin folded over his arm; he took Norman’s order for iced champagne, (mind it’s French),
ad lib,
with a straight face. The club was so clouded with condensation it was like a steam bath. Through drifts of vapour they saw the dance floor, startlingly close. It was already crowded, but the stages that made islands in the ferment were empty.

‘How civilised!’ cried Norman, staring around. ‘What a splendid place! We could be in New York, don’t you think?… I have a confession. I visualised Rainbow Bridge as a fetid bothy, worker artists from the dregs of society thronging naked to commit raw acts of music and concept, deep in cold stinking mud—’

‘Ex’ackly like New York. You should’a told us, Norman. We could have done the naked fetid bothy thing in Hackney, with the AMID for a live audience.’

The director flung wide his arms, with perilous effect for his modesty in the shortie gown. ‘I was
naïve,
Sage! I don’t mind admitting it. But I was groping towards something, and now I know. This is the reality, this
is
my bothy!’

Toby was like a trapped bird, Joe a silent stoic. Norman had to talk.

‘I imagine this must be very like the setting of the shit-fest, at the Festival of Dissolution. Did you really eat human excrement, Aoxomoxoa?’

‘Yeah. Carn’ exac’ly remember why.’

‘Would you do it again?’

‘No!’

‘What strange music, is this
really
Gintrap? I didn’t know one could dance to them. Didn’t you write some folksong themes last year, Ax? Do you have them with you? What do English peasants and workers sing about?’

‘Birds in the bushes,’ said Fiorinda, smiling, feeling the night coming up on her, a bubbling in her blood. ‘Pasting the French. Not many here we go a-winnowing songs, we don’t really like work; but plenty of ghosts. We do good ghosts.’

The champagne arrived, with waiter-underlings bearing tureen of amazing iced fruits, and another of teeny black frogspawn on crushed ice, my God, it’s caviar.

‘Compliments of the Committee,’ said the waiter, laying silver forks, plastic dessert bowls. ‘We can’t find any lemons, we have lemon juice; it’s coming.’

‘Is there a card?,’ wondered Ax. ‘Any message?’

‘Look over the other side.’

Ax looked and there they were, on the other side of the Balcony. Gola, Harvey and entourage. ‘The number one crop beside Gola is Yevgeny Ivankov, Mr Preston,’ said the waiter. ‘He calls himself “
Major
Ivankov”, we think he’s real military. He’s the fixer. He knows where the caches are. The muscle man on the other side is Ospenko, he’s a bastard, and he’s a
suit
. They’re like policemen, you can always tell.’

‘What’s your name?’

The man opened champagne, and poured deftly. ‘It’s Bottom, sir.’

The Feds and their protégés wore old-money big white towels around their waists, no gowns. Harvey and Gola raised their own champagne glasses. Hard to make out the expressions, but the malign insolence came across all right.

‘Bottom,’ said Fiorinda, quietly. ‘Are you expecting trouble?’

‘No, ma’am… I can vouch for the champagne. I wouldn’t touch the rest.’

The recalcitrants could be planning a pitch invasion. The party animals were peaceable, and outgunned, but they could be here prepared to defend themselves.

‘Change of plan, compadres?’ wondered Sage; but not seriously. ‘The music’s a bit crap. Dunno, what say we go home, have an early night instead?’

Fiorinda shook her head. ‘We’re over the top.’

And there’s the bell. A huge clangour, crude and compelling. The honour guard had reformed, time for the garlanded victims to be lead to the altar—

‘Oh my God!’ cried Norman, smiting himself on the forehead. ‘I must be
losing
it! What will you be singing? We have the sample from ‘Hard’, and then what! This is terrible, how could I have let this happen!’

‘We’ll decide later,’ Sage cast over his shoulder. ‘CGI it.’

‘I never do that!’

They were gone, in a wave of glory, tinsel and paper flowers—

Norman reached for his desk, struggling for the calm he needed.

‘You’ll never be able to publish,’ whispered Toby, malevolently. ‘You think you’re touching the void tonight, but you’ll be erased. Like everything of mine.’

‘I know that!’ snapped Norman. ‘Of course I know that! Leave me alone!’

Red Stage, which was mainstage, was a fighting ring. It stood at the east end of the dance floor, just like at Reading. Other stages, different conceits, rose like reefs from the sea of flesh. They were still empty. The MC on her tall umpire’s chair wore a towel round her neck and a ref’s whistle on a chain. Is it always sex in here, or do they have other gladiatorial events? Food fights? Naked ballroom dancing?

And there’s the bell again, tolling for the reckless, the abandon and forsake.

Nothing but this hard floor, no props, no bordello bed? Damn right: this is for athletes. Fiorinda saw a bentwood stool in the stewards’ corner and went to sit there, disposing her cloak of feathers over her body, arms along the ropes, slim ankles crossed at ease. Her hair was a burnished storm, her skin like candle flame; she smiled on the crowd and thought of Dissolution Summer’s bonfires.

Sage and Ax stood in the centre of the ring, arms loosely around each other’s necks, hard on hard. They were not sky clad. Breasts and thighs were bound in silver ribbons; catching light from the looping, interminable strings of coloured diode bulbs. The scars that sectioned Aoxomoxoa’s white flank were livid. The crowd couldn’t see the crease across Ax’s copper breast, where a bullet might have ended his career at an early stage, except for Richard Kent’s intervention.

‘Hey,’ said Sage. ‘Forgot to ask, did you ever fuck for an audience before?’

‘Hard to say. The datasphere’s full of us in action, some of it looks real.’

They kissed, deep and slow. ‘I did once go screwing with another guy for a while,’ remarked Ax. ‘We’d collect a few girls, we’d do them and the rest would be cheering us on, it was terrific. But we never touched each other, only the babes.’

‘Yeah?’ Sage had not known this. ‘Who was the bloke? Anyone I know?’

‘Hahaha.’

Oh, it was me… In Yorkshire, long ago.

One eye in the mirror of that crowd, and there’s the bell—

‘Fucking glad they didn’t ask me to do this with a guitar round my neck.’

‘Are we galley slaves, Ax?’

‘
Yeah,
’ whispered Ax, with intense satisfaction. ‘We are slaves now.’

‘Did you ever?’ Norman adjusted his gown. The tiger and the wolf, erotically embraced, made a thrilling sight, and what a diptych this would be with Warren Fen, the two great truths of rock! The one man who rules the crowd, and the superb, male on male, homoerotic dance…‘Joe? When, ahem, when they threw you out of the shelter, did you wish they’d invite you to stay and make up a foursome?’

‘It crossed my mind,’ said Joe, staring at the fighting ring, transfixed. ‘In a s-stupid way, but n-no. I couldn’t have, I couldn’t handle that.’

‘Hmph. They’re only human, you know.’

Norman thought of the emperor, and recoiled from blasphemy. But it was time for his second entry.
Now
, for Fiorinda—

Frosty Tucker’s powerful, raw soprano rose, apparently from somewhere in the Arena crowd, filled the air and took on immensity; infinite bleak authority.

I don’t believe in anything, except the cold and the equations.

If God were a young girl, that’s what God would sound like.

She let the feathered cloak fall, raised her arms and clasped her hands, silver ribbons bound between her breasts and above her thickened waist. The crowd gasped and murmured, and
roared
their appreciation. The homage shook her, but eat shit, bad guys. Not only a living goddess, a pregnant living goddess. You are
so
screwed
. She could tell that her lovers were covertly anxious, but come on. Far more of an issue if you two had stage fright! Ah, my galley slaves, I see there’s no fear of that.

Thank God I’m pregnant actually. The only time in my life I’ll ever have the tits or bum to be a porn star. She crossed the floor with a shimmy in her step and a smile like starlight, remembering what Wandering Billy said. Nor shrine, nor stone, nor sacrifice, we are a right place. Pictures of matchstick men and you, always.

Remember when we said we’d get married?

And there’s the last bell. Ax sat back on his heels, his cock still standing, feeling a weird rush of gratitude towards Norman Soong. Not that he’d want to make a habit of this: but something in him had been released, new pathways opening. The sexual figures we are, the
submission
of that explains everything. But the place he’d been, with his lovers and the crowd and the music, fell from him. He saw the Fed military advisers looking down, and leapt to his feet. He didn’t know what he was going to say until he said it.

‘Okay,’ he yelled. ‘You up there! Gunrunners! We’ve kept our side of the bargain, you’ll find you’re going to keep yours. Listen to me. Once before I asked the people of England to turn their backs on civil war; and they did it. I asked them to support the weak, feed the poor, welcome the stranger, dig potatoes, scrub hospital floors, and they
fucking buckled down and did it
, because they knew we were at the line, and we had to hold on or go under.’ One of Norman’s cams buzzed him, he batted it away. ‘And
now
, I’m telling them to give you the push. We are spoken for. Get out of our house! Go home and take your gas pipes with you!’

The Balcony erupted, leaping on the simplicity of Ax’s catch with joy. ‘Go home Rasputin!’ they yelled. Bodies swarmed over the leaders of the Resistance and their backers, in an unstoppable fleshly tide. ‘Go home, Rasputin! Ra Ra Rasputin!’

Norman was a frantic sorcerer’s apprentice, although he knew Toby was right and it was for nothing. Joe had joined a conga line. A band of revellers pounced on Toby Starborn, and led him away. Norman saw it happen, out of the corner of one many-faceted eye; he assumed that Toby left willingly.

They took him to the Arena. Between the drug-test counter and the condom machines they disrobed him, giggling at his healing wound, at the plug he still had to use, to keep open the hole he pissed through. Of course they assumed the body-sculpture was Toby’s own idea. He ran away from them, and found his way to the plinth around the Pit. There was a roaring riot and a lot of fucking going on. The lifeguards were yelling GO HOME RASPUTIN, keeping an eye on Balcony divers, and craning for a glimpse of Ax Preston’s cock. Nobody was paying attention to the abyss, where the mouth of the Black Shaft opened in the Arena floor.

Negative to Red Stage’s positive, it was a suicide venue, the party animals accepted that; but in fact there weren’t too many jumpers. A punter spotted Toby, crouched on the wrong side of the chain fence. Hey, he shouted (it was screaming pitch). Are you okay there, nice looking half and half kid?

Toby wailed, and made his leap into the unknown.

The Executive Committee had not planned to disrupt the ceremony. They feared a backlash among their supporters, and they weren’t immune to superstitious dread. But they’d sent an execution squad to the prison house. The squad had arrived to find their concierge outside, a limbless trunk, his arms and legs bizarrely knotted behind his back. ‘Don’t go in there!’ he keened at them, through the pain. They went in, and found a single dark robed figure, apparently at prayer. They got no further.

Hours later, when the coffin cell had been opened from Orange Level, when Richard and Cornelius had been drawn out, and the stinking, filthy bodies cut free from each other; the searchers were still looking for Toby. It was a decent formality, observed without resentment. They didn’t expect to find him.

Voices echoed in the wet dark under Red Level, smoke from rag-and-rape-oil flares trailed through lances of electric torchlight. If you don’ find them straight off you never do; said the voices. They get washed out to sea, who knows where all these drains go? Sage was alone. He had waders, but the cold was penetrating and he was reeling from that performance; not in a bad way, just want to let it bleed awhile. He spotted the body, caught in a mass of fibrous, floating debris; like a fish in a net.

‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Over here!’

He strode through icy water, his torch beam showing vaults of small, yellowish brick, gaping black channel mouths; slick mud beaches. He was gripped by a conviction that he’d been here before, as if he’d visited this moment in a snapshot vision. He’d been feeling déjà since he’d talked to the distressed bloke in the tinsel breech-clout, last person to have seen the artist alive… Toby’s body swayed in the current like flower stems. He felt for a pulse, expecting none.

‘Over here!’ he yelled, and took the weight in his arms.

Toby coughed water, his eyes opened, his lips moved, drowsily.

‘
I have seen her whom I lived to praise. I lived for this.’

Sage shouted again for the lifeguards.

‘Hang on Toby, help’s coming.’