Rainbow Bridge (57 page)

JOY

The Triumvirate left England and disappeared. No forwarding address, no trace. One night at the end of July they turned up in Brittany, at the old manor house in the shell of his pirate ancestor’s castle, where Alain de Corlay was spending the summer with Tam. They’d made a tactical withdrawal from Paris. Techno-Green Utopian politics were stormy, that season of the new world. It was a balmy night, the moon near the full. Alain was called to the gatehouse, and found his armed guards (indispensable, for a Techno-Green tribune of the people) bemused by the three gypsies and their child.

‘My God, what happened to you?’

‘We got banished,’ said the outlaw with the ponytail and the tattoo around his eye. A lean spotted beast in his arms yawned at Alain, completely placid.

‘No, but since February—’

They shrugged, they had no answer. The bronzed scarecrow with a ragged cap of yellow curls smiled like a gentle god. The young woman with her hair tied up in a scarf, skin like beaten gold and wild grey eyes, seemed in another world. Alain picked up the baby, thinking he’d carry her upstairs. He’d hardly begun when a little voice beside his ear said carefully
je peux fai’ les marches.

Sage took the little girl. ‘Let her do it,’ he said. ‘It’s quicker in the long run.’

Cosoleth climbed the stairs, a determined little animal on her four paws. Fiorinda saw a bat through one of the narrow windows, but Ax missed it. The three were magical company, in the strangest sense: wide-eyed ghosts. Alain and Tam were using the terrace on the stump of the old donjon as their living room. They had eaten, but the table was still laid. Tam and Alain reported on events in England: how the 2
^nd
AMID withdrawal had been smooth and complete, how Rob and two Babes had been inaugurated President, Party Secretary, and Head of the Utopian Techno Green Committee. How Cherry Dawkins had declined public office, but she and the Adjuvants had begun to have a cult following like you wouldn’t believe. The Triumvirate ate leftovers, drank wine, welcomed spliff, and seemed like castaways who have forgotten how to talk except to each other. They offered a few anecdotes, good ones, from their vanishment.

Cosoleth, who had been fed on bread soaked in milk, finally ran out of patience, grizzling. Fiorinda said she would put the baby to bed (and Alain remembered how adroitly the rock and roll brat would disappear, when social occasions bored her…). She took the nappy bag and Coz into the house, where the staff would show her to a room that had been prepared for the guests.

‘She’s pregnant!’ announced Tam, who was using a new biometric gadget, an entertaining conversation piece.

Sage leapt from his chair and across the terrace, with truly appalling speed and power. ‘Leave her the fuck alone!’, he snarled, in Tamagotchi’s face. He stared around like a tiger, eyes blazing; made for the balustrade and disappeared over it. They heard him crashing down the creepers, and then silence.

…

‘Those things are going to cause such interesting scenes,’ said Alain to Tam. ‘Are you sure you want to be so obvious?’

‘We know she’s pregnant,’ said Ax. ‘The problem is she can’t do natural birth. She had Coz by Caesarean. Sage is scared, excuse him, he’s a wild man.’

‘Fiorinda refuses to have a Caesarean!’ exclaimed Alain, horrified.

‘No, no no.’ Ax was lying on the chaise longue, Min curled on his belly. His hair was loose, he’d taken off his boots, his feet were bare. He waved his hands, like,
so it goes
. ‘We have no Sphere ID. We can’t go to a hospital.’

‘Oh, my God!’, said Tam. ‘
She
did that to you?’

‘Hahaha. You’re kidding. We did it to ourselves.’

‘But
why
?’ cried Alain.

‘It’s the way we want to live.’

Alain wanted to tell Ax that the whole thing was sublimely unjust. In the presence of this wild, strange spirit—with the feral air of a wolf indoors, secretly alert, checking for exits—he felt a shocking nostalgia for the man he had known. He wanted to talk to Ax Preston again.

‘Ax,
why don’t you three just hold a gun to the woman’s head?
Since you can easily do that, and you know I know this. Where’s the harm? Very few people would know, enough would know to protect each other. We could do it.’

‘This is better.’ Ax combed back the hair from his temples, the old gesture, and gazed at the moon, smiling. ‘You haven’t thought it through, we have. Stay on the Elder Sister bandwaggon, Alain. It’s a
good
waggon. Be a prag.’

Sage reappeared, from the terrace windows. He must have come in through the tower door again, and up the stairs. He was cheerful, on the point of laughter. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That was really stupid.’ Fiorinda came after him. Now there was a distinct atmosphere of fuck, a musk of sex in the air between the three.

‘Shall we go to bed?’ suggested Ax.

They said goodnight and took their belongings indoors.

Alain and Tam decided to call it a night as well.

These two had never been lovers, just fuck-buddies once or twice, and it had been a long time ago. Yet they had spent more time under the same roof than most of the notorious couples of the Euro Crisis (including the trio who had just left); and probably that would continue. They were partners. Thoughts of permanence were in the air. When your wildest dreams have entered the mainstream and are being mangled by its degrading maw, it’s time to take stock. In public, we dance to the remixes of tracks we knew in their original versions. In private we begin to prefer, like old criminals, the company of friends who remember what it was like. They moved the chaise longue and the armchairs indoors to protect them from damp, and shared a nightcap.

‘Do you envy them?’ wondered Alain.

‘Not at all. But I understand them.’

The visitors left after a few days, no forwarding address.

5 Vine Cottages,
Nr Testor,
Bodmin
North Cornwall
PL30

Dear Mr Pender,

Life goes on happily here, everyone’s pretty well. Dolly at the Powdermill had her pups, and there’s some argument about who’s going to get them. You asked after the wolf colony. They haven’t got themselves into any trouble since the old dog-wolf was found killed, (which we think we know was NOT the work of a mystery big cat) and they are busy rearing the alpha pair’s cubs, of which “Wolfwatch” is as proud as if we were staging the Olympics. They’ve certainly put Bodmin on the map!, but as long as it’s only virtual tourists, I’m not complaining. We hear from George, and Bill is getting married, but of course you will know about that. Peter is back home with his aunts just now, he’s missing you very much, poor man. Your mother is well, she tells me she hasn’t been in touch, and longs for your address. Marlon came down once, with his girlfriend, a new one, you won’t know her. She seems a nice enough girl. When you get round to it, I need to know whether the barn conversion is to go ahead, or do you want the cottage kept just as it was, until you can get here again? Should I ask your father about that?

You’ll be pleased to know that the garden is standing up well to our storms. The Roger Hall hedge suffered, the night the winds were very high indeed, but I have cut it back hard and I believe it will recover. Nobody will be buying firewood in the Chy valley for this winter, and we’re crossing our fingers. It would be hard if they wouldn’t let us burn our logs, adding insult to injury. Tyller Pystri lost a chimneypot, I’ve had it replaced, but no trees except the big old flowering plum, which was coming to the end of its natural span, tho’ it will be sadly missed. I have in mind a replacement, I will send you the nursery catalogue with the place marked, as soon as you can give me an IP address. The Stepping Stones are already covered, they say that’s a sign of another long cold winter but I don’t know, the “signs” of our weather must be out of date now, mustn’t they, with all this climate change. By the way, I found Cosoleth’s spiderweb picture, and I would like to send it to her, along with some little clothes I’ve put together, and some very nice shoes I hope will fit, though I’m guessing at the size. It would be lovely if you could send me a photo, someway. Tell her love from Ruthie, and I hope she’s being a good girl.

My very dear love to you all, even that rascal Min

Ruth Maynor

Ax tracked down the right house after what seemed like hours of hunting up and down tiny earth-paved alleys, almost identical to each other. The midwife was neither old nor young: desert age, a seamed face swathed in indigo, bright eyes, a firm wide mouth. She seemed to live alone, was that weird? He wanted to know what she was like because he had to trust her, but she wasn’t interested in social contact. She ignored him, and gathered her things together.

‘It might be a difficult birth.’

‘Hmmph.’ The desert woman paused, picked up the lamp, and took a good suspicious look at this stranger. ‘Has she been cut?’ she inquired, narrow-eyed.

‘No—’

‘Is this her first? Is she
very
young?’

I must look like a real charmer, thought Ax. Maybe it was the tattoo, made him look like a bandit. ‘No, it’s not that.’

It was very dark outside. The midwife asked Ax for directions and then led the way. She walked briskly, with a straight-backed, flowing pace that made him revise her age downwards, and didn’t speak until they’d reached the wide street—much faster than Ax could have found his way. Trees in a square. He glimpsed a shop, with a stand outside where newspapers lay folded. A blue and white painted building with a cross: Coptic Christians. He already knew where the mosque was.

‘She has had other children?’

‘This is her third child.’

‘Hmph. Has she had sons?’

‘Her first child was a son, but he died. She was very young then. The second baby was born by Caesarean, by section?’

‘Hm. We’ll see. If it looks like trouble, I can call the emergency hospital.’

Ax nodded. At this juncture, fuck the outlaw freedom. He was planning to flash the
access all areas
pass if need be, and nobody was going to stop him. The bus arrived and they got on it. A sleepy conductor took their fares, Ax paid for the midwife. They had not discussed charges, and he hoped this was a good sign. She does the doctoring first and then asks about the money. She’ll get paid. The bus was half empty, decrepit, serviceable. He looked out of the windows at a ribbon development pinpricked with golden lights. Is that a market? He thought of staying here, finding his way around, buying bread and milk, taking Cos to that square with the trees. My big blond cat causing a sensation, but they’d soon get used to him.

‘Where are you from?’ said the midwife.

Ax shook his head. ‘Nowhere, really. But my mother’s people came from, ooh, within a hundred miles of here.’

‘Hmph.’

You must leave England, you must leave Europe. With all the wild world to choose from they were still clinging to the skirts of the Mediterranean. It would be a terrible wrench to cross one of the great oceans, it would feel irrevocable. After this, when Fiorinda’s baby was old enough to travel, they would make some decisions. He thought about Clapham Junction, the long echoey tunnel, hurrying people, stalls laden with cakes, coffee, glossy magazines; stairways leading reliably to destinations he needed. He had always felt
secure
at Clapham. You get there, you know you can get back to Reading, back to Brixton.

Oh, this is the stop. It wasn’t so far after all.

The house their friend at the bus station had found for them had an outer room and an inner room, an outhouse bathroom, a water pump with a turbine, and one haphazard flowerbed. It was set in a high-walled orchard that belonged to someone else. It was clean, there’d been nothing but dust in it; apparently it had been standing empty. Cosoleth pattered in and out of the back room, singing. She liked being up in the middle of the night. Min had found a window he could leap through and was outdoors looking for pebbles to hoard.

‘D’you think he can jump over that wall?’

‘Min’s solid, Fiorinda. He’s fixed on us. An’ Coz cannot reach the latch of the house door, so she’s not going to do a runner. How are you doing?’

They had bought a string bed, and paid for it to be carried here and installed, in the corner opposite the single window: which was now a black square hung on the clay-red plastered wall, luminous blackness shining on their lamplight. Sage was sitting up on the bed, propped against the wall, Fiorinda in his arms. She felt queasy and tired, nagged by these pains, disinclined to do anything. Don’t want to walk around, do the squatting, the breathing exercises, just want to lie here against Sage’s breast and feel the beat of his heart, the hard muscle and bone I know so well; listening to the pit pat of my little girl’s feet, and her sweet little voice. C’mon, oh mighty childbirth hormones, carry me away.

‘How about some more tea?’

‘No, don’t leave me. Don’t be
frightened
Sage. It’s going to be all right.’

‘I’m not.’

Ax looked after Coz in the front room while the baby was being born. They spread the camping mattresses and hugged, comforting each other. Min crouched at the inner door lashing his tail, and occasionally letting out a heartbroken yowl. He didn’t like closed doors, and he was disturbed by Fiorinda’s effortful, fierce cries. Cosoleth seemed to take Ax’s word for it that everything was going according to plan.