Rainbow Bridge (44 page)

‘Shit,’ said Rob, ‘the ginger beer isn’t in stone bottles. Send it back.’

‘Did people really have
stone bottles
?’ wondered Chez. ‘In modern times?’

‘Depends what you call modern, our kid,’ said Chip.

‘Are we supposed to look at all that until the mountaineers get back?’

‘Nah, they’ll be happy with the scraps. They aren’t big eaters.’

The summit was very suburban, from the cemented pillar that marked 978 metres, to the recycle bins and smart boards (no longer active). The half-moon wind-shelters were artfully arranged, so that large parties of intrepid loners could stare at the views, and not at each other. The breeze was strong and suddenly chill, mackerel cloud spun away over the high tops. They mugged at each other, crestfallen. Why are we surprised? England is a garden, of course it’s like this. One day these will be the sublime, ancient wind-shelters of the Elder Race. If they live that long.

‘I think we’re spooking them,’ said Ax.

‘The Few? I know, I can’t help it,’ said Fiorinda.

‘Nor can I. The only way I can do this is—’

‘Weirdly calm, a little dissociated. We have to watch that.’

My baby, my baby. He didn’t say
please don’t leave me
, to this one you can’t say that. Her leaving would be from the inside, a shell would remain, an agonised ghost. He took her face between his hands and kissed her, strands of copper against his mouth, a jolt of warmth and sweetness, smooth over bitter—

‘Eh, eh,
eeeh
!’ pleaded Coz, tired of being ignored.

Sage lifted her from Ax’s shoulders, out of the new baby-carrier, and wrapped her inside his jacket. ‘Were you cold little girl? Better now?’ But Coz did not want to be wrapped up. She reared, pushing herself up and away, as if she’d like to take flight. Eyes like saucers she gazed around, looked up at him and jerked her head, a fervent affirmative, and did it again.
Yes,
said Cosoleth, with every fibre of her being.
Yes!

Fiorinda and Ax came out of their private moment to admire this earnest display. ‘I think she likes the great outdoors.’

‘Look at that. Seventeen weeks and she’s communicating abstract ideas.’

‘No offence, Sage, but
me likes mountain
is not an abstract idea.’

‘She’s a person, not a textbook,’ said Fiorinda, uneasy at the suggestion her child was a prodigy. She’s
not
huge, she’s
not
superbright, she’s totally normal.

‘It’s practically abstract. What’s she getting out of it, huh?’

They retired to a wind-shelter, and let Coz ‘stand up’ with her baby feet on the rock, to her passionate joy. There you are, baby, snagged the highest peak in England, next stop Nanga Parbat. Fiorinda dealt out a ration of honey-oaties and water from her tapestry bag, and found the saltbox under her hand… I’ve always protected them. I’ve even shifted the 0s and 1s before now, and it worked out. Her grandmother, the old witch, had once said to her,
you are the salt of the earth
. Salt-laden soil in the devastated lands, where nothing grows. But without salt there’s no flavour in the world. I am health and destruction, hopelessly entangled, oh, that breeze is chill, it’s making me shiver.

‘I want to leave something here.’

‘Good idea,’ said Sage. ‘I doubt if we’ll be back.’

Ax chose a small reddish rock that seemed to have character. Fiorinda set a pinch of salt in a niche of the summit cairn; they laid Ax’s rock on top. White crystals flew to the four winds, but something stayed. Then they walked down to Lingmell Col, and joined the picnic. At Wasdale Head hotel—where the sybarites were in residence and delighted to see them—they hired a smart four-wheeler, and were back on Eskdale Moor long before dark.

This was the night of the last concert. Aoxomoxoa and the Heads played straight, wholesome rock and roll. Death on Horseback, morphed into the blue-eyed rock god, was channelling Janis for some reason: falling to his knees and belting out the torchsongs,
take it, take another little piece of my heart now baby…
Fiorinda, in her first stage appearance since the baby was born, had decided to turn into a Metal Mama, guesting with the ubiquitous Gintrap in baggy shorts and a punk tee, flirting blatantly with a dazzled Boje Strom. No ‘Winter Song’, no ‘Dark Water, Small Box, Flow,’ no ‘Hard’. No Triumvirate set, and Ax didn’t play at all. It was all rather puzzling, but that’s legends for you. The crowd went crazy anyway, determined not to be disappointed.

The passing trade (dwellers in the Western Fells, from villages and farms and even little towns of the coastal plain) strode casually off into the midnight dark. Steadmen and Hearthwomen chanted the night hymns and retired to their pavilions. The eleven hundred bedded down, singing Leonard Cohen songs and having banner-fights. In the bar tent someone out of sight explained the words of ‘Sweet, Dirty’ rather drunk and loud; presumably trying to pull. ‘Yeah, but, yeah, it’s like
saying
, see, that sexual love an’ pleasure keeps us sane or we’d go crazy.
The sweet and dirty hidden power to carry on.
To carry on, you get it? It’s a play on words. Mindless reproduction, hijacked to make the fucking horror of being human bearable—’

Ah, the secrets of the Empyrean, to what base uses are you put.

At Mr Preston’s table the mood was depressed, the dead-dog conversation trivial and low-spirited. ‘Gay man in a girl’s body my arse,’ growled George. ‘She fancies herself as a rockstar’s wife, that one. I know the type.’

Peter, owlish, shook his head sadly. ‘Poor Minty. Bill always told her he was against marriage on principle. It’s wrong to tell lies.’

Ax had heard of this awful crime, ‘wanting to be a rockstar wife’, in a version where the scheming broad was Mary Williams, and the accusation in very poor taste. He’d never known George or Peter to have a good word for Bill’s previous steady girl, the appalling Minty LaTour, before this. He rubbed Min’s throat, deciding silence was golden.

‘Marlon with that hippy child,’ remarked Alain: passing the spliff to Mathilde. ‘What is her name? Silver? I still think of her as Aoxomoxoa’s toddler mascot, you are all like blood-relatives, it seems distasteful—’

Naomi, who had ditched the Eurotrash-dolly look for gunslinger-black, cast a sour glance around the many-coloured hangings, the soft lights. ‘What kind of a filthy rebel dive is this? I detest the whole concept of this Shield Ring, it’s an excrescence of English, organic, sandalled gentility.’ The sometime Tamagotchi’s taste in décor ran to first series
Star Trek
and David Lynch’s
Dune
. She’s a French absurdist intellectual. How can we ever find a middle way?

‘This is reality,’ sighed Märtha-Louise, the Nordic folklorist and Crown Princess. ‘The
one world
state
we dreamed of in the chatrooms of the Crisis was fantasy: God has called our bluff. This is our dream come true, translated into real politics. This is how the World State gets born, this is how it feels.’

The faded warmth of the July night recalled what summer’s end must always mean now. The English Counterculture annihilated, Roumania brutally overrun. The internationals would be leaving in the morning. They couldn’t talk about the Triumvirate’s boss fight because the air has ears; it was the last time these friends would meet, and there was nothing to discuss. The future of Europe, done that. They wanted to ask Ax where Fiorinda had got to, and was everything okay? Better not. What was it all for, all our struggle? For what, for what? A Chinese world, at the best.

Muß es sein? Es muß sein.

Around three a.m. Fiorinda availed herself of the campground’s dainty, spotless ladies’
sanitaires.
Luxe, luxe, the soap, the towels. Really! It’s Dubai before the end of oil. Not that Fiorinda had ever been to Dubai… Knew that place was the gates of hell, even when I was a rabid drunken sixteen-year-old. The hospitality of a simple nation of fucking billionaires
.
She picked her way by rustling starlight from banner to banner, through murmurs of sleepy conversation and random bursts of noisy laughter. Firefly glints in the outer darkness showed where the guards were posted. Guards, against what, wolves? Mad sheep? But eleven hundred campers need some kind of militia, or rabid drunken sixteen-year-olds would torch the marquees. Left at the Green Griffin, on past the Duck (the mutilated, sacred Duck). Where’s our Psycho Chihuahua got to? Ah, there it is, and here they are.

Min’s eyes glowed and vanished as the cat checked her out. Ax lay on his side, one arm over the soft basket where Coz was just a little nose and her woolly hat. She knelt beside them, milk stinging her breasts as she breathed the baby’s scent. Don’t bother, tits. I’m
not
going to wake the baby for an alcoholic snack.

Oh my Ax, my darling Ax—

‘That you, Fee?’

Sage was sitting there awake, a black outline, watching her. She went around and sat by him, shucking off her bag. ‘Yeah. This is me.’

‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Socialising. Is that a crime?’ She set her water bottle by the bedroll, checked her saltbox with a touch, and started taking off her boots. ‘Seeking a change from Bronze Age Lutherans, idiot kids and kiss-your-hand patriarchal eco-warriors, I went down to the blacktop where the tourbuses are parked. I had to wait for an escort party to walk back, that’s why I’m late. There are ghosts on the corpse road, you know.’

The atmosphere was forbidding, the black outline didn’t stir.

‘Don’t do it, Fee.’

‘Do what?’

‘Boje… Haven’t we got enough trouble?’

‘I wasn’t
planning
to do him,’ said Fiorinda, wounded. ‘You always think the worst of me.’ She laid her head on her arms, on her drawn-up knees. ‘All right, I’m drunk, I stayed out late. So shoot me. I used to be a rockstar, you know.’

‘Me too.’

‘I
hate
watching my tongue, charming and anodyne, carefully answering every question with the right lie from the lie list, the whole fucking time.’

‘C’mon, Fiorinda. When you were fourteen and setting out on your brilliant career you had an iron-clad agenda. What’s the difference, except this is arguably a bigger deal?’ He sighed. ‘I was un-fucking-touchable when I was a rockstar. Doing things that had never been done before. Don’t remember I was any happier for it—’

Fiorinda dug in her bag for her smokes tin, took out a spliff and lit it. They sat on the edge of the groundsheet, Aoxomoxoa and his brat; their guitar-man sleeping beside them, the bodies of the campers stretching off on every side. It could have been any shipwrecked night of the Reich. But this was someone else’s movie now, from which they would not escape. They had come back from California, all three of them vowing that they would beat the Second Chamber, and then they would quit. But what’s the use in rifling through the litter of broken dreams, they must have always known it was a life sentence. It would be easier if they didn’t have the hateful feeling that Elder Sister was competition. The man of destiny announces his latest mighty ally has sexual intent; which can’t be refused. Then not another word on the subject. What are we supposed to make of that, Ax?

Ax stirred, and turned over. ‘Fio, ah, safe back, thank God.’

He sat up, from sleep into their silence. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t ever leave me.
Please
don’t leave me.’ Fiorinda handed him the spliff. They smoked without a word, the tiger and the wolf leaning together, Ax with his arm around Fiorinda’s shoulders, holding her close.

no regrets. Just thinking about that midnight train to Georgia.

The Glory Of The Garden

The dinner guests took their champagne glasses down to the tarn. Happily the evening was fine, though the day, which had been spent breaking up the Landsturm, had been overcast. They would be able to eat on the terrace and enjoy the views. ‘The Lodge was a keeper’s cottage,’ said Master Ridley, the chestnut centaur. ‘The rooms are adequate, but rather dark, it’s not the best place to be indoors in summer.’

‘Is it true that it’s haunted?’

‘I’ve never seen anything unexpected, but there’s an atmosphere.’

The founders of the Shield Ring were taking their first opportunity to entertain the Triumvirate: Ax’s administrator, Allie Marlowe, and the Welshman, Iwan Turner, were the only other guests. Walter strolled with Mr Preston, and told him about Julius Hecht, the third of the Shield Ring Brothers: the Ruskinite philosopher who had inspired them, and left his university post in Denmark when they invited him to join their enterprise. ‘He still walks the fells but he’s ninety this year; we husband his strength. Thou’lt hear him talk over dinner, he’s a great preacher, and a brilliant conversationalist—’

Ms Marlowe and Fiorinda walked ahead along the shore, arm-in-arm: jet-black ringlets mingling with the red curls, Ms Marlowe’s burgundy gauze tunic brushing Fiorinda’s green silk skirts,
both beautiful, one a gazelle
, thought Walter. And the other’s a lioness. They were perfect foils for each other, Ms Marlowe’s fragile olive pallor against her friend’s golden vigour. The two men smiled, sharing frank appreciation of two lovely women, a fine wine. The music of a folk ensemble floated through the cypress hedge. The big tents, the mule trains and internationals were gone, but the campers were still out there.

‘We think of replacing the Lodge, building another Brantwood here, a centre of excellence. But we’ll see how that goes.’ The centaur paused, with a thoughtful look. ‘We like tha way of doing business, Mr Preston. Tha don’t
push
, dost tha?’

‘No,’ said Ax. ‘I don’t push. But it’s time we started talking.’

‘Aye. It’s time.’

The rest of the party stood at the end of a wooden jetty, where a rowing boat was moored. Fish rose, kissing the peach-bloom reflection of sunset into spinning ripples. ‘Brown trout and perch,’ said Simon Hartsfern. ‘Dost tha fish, Mr Pender?’