Band of Gypsys (25 page)

‘I am doing,’ said Ax.

He filled his lungs with gentle smoke, and got up on the arm of the chair to pour it into her mouth. A three-way snog developed. Ax was totally absorbed, getting near the point when he must have more, when he realised he’d lost them both—

‘What is it?’

No answer. The big cat and the little cat had raised their heads, and were tracking something he couldn’t see: very catlike behaviour. There wasn’t a sound in the room, apart from their breath. Not a rat scratched, not a board creaked, no blustering wind in the chimney. If it had been as quiet as this two nights ago, maybe they’d be in Paris now.

‘All right. I’ll buy it… What the fuck’s up? What can you see?’

The bodhisattva and the magician’s daughter exchanged a cautious glance.

‘
C’mon
. Don’t tell me there’s a ghost.’

‘Could be,’ said Sage, on a speculative note. ‘You could call it that.’

‘Maybe,’ agreed Fiorinda. ‘There’s something in here with us, anyway.’

‘What’s it look like?’

‘A black shape. Like something, not there, only moving.’

‘Terrific.’ Ax stared hard, and shook his head. ‘Well, I don’t get it. What kind of a ghost? Is it, like, a person…of some kind? Could we turn it?’

Sage shook his head. ‘Dunno. I suppose we could try.’

‘Better let it get used to us first,’ said Fiorinda. ‘I think it’s nervous.’

They moved to the bed and enclosed themselves in the curtains, in a cloud of dust (good job none of us has asthma). Were they still watched? They put the question out of their minds, got naked and pursued the heady bliss of this void, this freedom: no regrets, no obligations, only the threefold knot, their whole world.

‘My angels,’ mumbled Fiorinda, clambering between the cold damp sheets to sleep.

‘Fee, hey, you have to be in the middle.’

Fiorinda claimed she found sleeping in the middle demeaning, it made her feel like a disputed soft toy; also suffocated. But she didn’t put up much of a fight.

‘We forgot to turn off the lamps,’ said Ax.

He made the expedition, mildly wondering what it would feel like if he bumped into that moving black shape: returned safely to their warm bodies again, in a startling pitch darkness.

‘Oh,’ said Fiorinda. ‘The ghost’s gone.’

‘Yeah, figures,’ Ax was plunging toward sleep. ‘We probably scared it. Remember, Elsie would never stay in the room when we fucked—’

Elsie had been the original
little cat
, Ax’s pet cat, who’d lived with them on Brixton Hill. She’d been killed, in the Green Nazi time: Ax mourned her still, poor Ax, he falls in love so easily, and never forgets. Sage and Fiorinda were touched to hear her invoked. It seemed like a good omen.

Maybe the ghost came back and watched over them. Maybe they were in shock: and fear for their friends, terror for the way they might die here, locked in these rooms, had yet to reach them. They slept well, anyway.

The next morning breakfast was brought to their dining room by servants in black and white. Their luggage arrived. There were no concealed messages, but they could tell that Allie had chosen the books, the jewellery and toiletries. Allie’s hands had folded their clothes—and their friends should have been getting the hell out of England by now, they were comforted.

Later in the day, Greg and Lady Anne returned to hammer out the details of the contract. Ax’s offer had been accepted.

Rick’s Place

Fiorinda read through the copy. She held out her hand for a pen, removed one errant apostrophe and corrected ‘country’ to ‘county’. The journalist, a sun-wizened, middle-aged Australian rock expert called Keith Utamore, watched her. Around them, chaos reigned. The Yellow Drawing Room was being set up for the show. This had to happen every week, because Lady Anne insisted it be returned, as far as possible, to its pristine state between gigs. Artists and privileged guests were socialising, while the dancefloor crew manouevred the big turntable onto its bearings, a tricky job, and sound engineers tested their ability to focus on any conversation, at any table. The set for The Gintrap was getting cabled-up for their trademark retro kit.

‘Will there really be Oz tourists pouring in, clamouring for tickets?’

‘Huh?’ Keith looked puzzled, then he laughed. ‘Oh, no, no, that’s our style. Armchair travel, kind of gallows humour?
The Rough Guide
to places you’ll never see again. I do that a lot, on the World Music Round Up.’

She smiled and nodded. World Music, that puts us in our place. She’d never heard of Keith Utamore before tonight, but this just proved Fiorinda’s ignorance. He was huge in the real world, a friend of Joe Muldur’s, and the interview was for a massive Australasian radio/net show: which had the approval of the Great Peace.

The Yellow Drawing Room roared like the sea in a shell, dark and bright like a tv studio, although it would be summer daylight outdoors. She always looked first at the terrace windows when they came down, but there was never a chink in the heavy curtains. Never a glimpse of sky or lawns or trees. The ON AIR signs were getting tested now, flashing red, and alternating to CASH CROPS KILL in green.

Little of what happened here would get onto the actual show. Fiorinda hadn’t seen it, (she wasn’t sorry); but reports reached them. Even the guest bands’ numbers were faked elsewhere. But the screws liked their make believe to be thorough… There was something sinisterly childish about the whole deal. We had the Insanitude, so
they
have to have a hot night-club venue, only theirs is better, because it’s on tv, the old holy of holies, politicians’ Mecca. Which proves they won, and we lost.

The journo was looking at his slaughtered apostrophe.

‘The intro’s a first draft. You’ll have full approval before we broadcast. Are we ready to go?’

The Rock and Roll Queen of England looked pointedly at her glass. Keith refilled it with Rick’s Place vodka, yellow and warm as piss. There was no bar, only a stingy ration of wine and water on each table: but the servants would bring liquor, for a price. A snake of cable crawled over his feet, shouts of panic came from the struggling dancefloor. At the next table a man in an evening jacket that he wore with easy grace, with slick, jaw-length dark hair and skin the colour of milky tea, had joined the Scottish party: two bands and hangers-on, who were touring together but didn’t seem to be mates—

Fiorinda knocked back a healthy slug. She could put that stuff away.

‘Sure, but we should move from here.’

Keith wanted to stay close to Mr Preston, ‘This seems a quiet spot.’

‘You’ll talk to Ax later. Trust me, any time you see blokes wearing skirts over their trews, I mean strides, like that, it’s best to give them space. See the unnaturally white guy with the very black hair and, strangely, no tattoos? That’s Phil MacLean. The Sikh woman at the end of the table, her name’s Campbell, although she may not look it. They’re desperate re-enactment nuts, they have a grudge going back at least three hundred years, and practically every time the bands run into each other, it gets physical. They’re regulars, so I know. They had a real barney one time.’

Fiorinda snagged the vodka and the glasses. Keith Utamore perforce followed, looking over his shoulder. ‘Then why do they sit together—?’

‘They’re Scottish.’ She signalled to a couple of burly waiters, who carried a table to the outer regions of the universe. ‘There. Now we’ll be fine.’

‘Could we clear up a couple of things first, so I don’t fall over myself? “Rick’s Place”, that isn’t the real name of the show, is it? In the English tv listings, I noticed it’s called “Merry We Meet.”’

‘Mm,’ agreed Fiorinda, screwing up her face.

‘“Rick’s Place” is better, yeah.’ They laughed. ‘Is that a reference to the classic movie,
Casablanca
? The
Café American
, Play it again Sam—?’

‘Romance, plots and counterplots on the sidelines of a global war,’ agreed Fiorinda. ‘Haha, yes, of course.’

Mr Utamore nodded, still curious. ‘Okay, who is “Rick”? There’s nobody called “Richard” among the Few.’

‘Ax is Rick. It’s a twisted English joke about incarcerated monarchs.’

‘Ah! The Mediaeval Richard II!
Let us sit upon the ground, and tell sad stories of the death of kings
—!’ Keith caught himself, consternated.

‘Gallows humour,’ said Fiorinda, with a charming grin. ‘We do it too.’

‘Shall we begin?’

KEITH UTAMORE
: Fiorinda, may I say how wonderful it is to be speaking to you, after having followed your meteoric career, and played so much of your music for the audiences of the Pacrim and the southern oceans… ‘Stonecold’, ‘Sparrowchild’, ‘Wholesale’… Great songs, many great songs, the anthems of an era. And then ‘
Yellow Girl’
, one of the top female singer songwriter albums of the century. You have the music in you, princess. And for the soundists out there without a picture, let me tell you, I’m a lucky man, sitting beside a very beautiful, gracious lady, in the most amazing English stately home, which is being transformed into a tv studio nightclub, as we speak…

FIORINDA
: As we speak, portable dancefloors are suffering disasters

KEITH UTAMORE
: Cables are strangling each other. Well, it’s beauty before age, because I’ve snagged the lady first… Do you ever do interviews in trio?

FIORINDA
: Not often. There’s too many strands, with three active musicians.

KEITH UTAMORE
: And recently, another strand. Could we talk about the new supergroup. That came about in the US, last year, didn’t it? How did the Few, in separate outfits all through the Reich, become the Band of Gypsys?

FIORINDA
: We didn’t call ourselves that. We’ve never called our supergroup set anything. A pirate producer used the name Band of Gypsys for a download package, and the music media took it up. I don’t really like it.

KEITH UTAMORE
: But the Hendrix association must appeal to Ax?

FIORINDA
: Yeah, except it’s a negative sort of association… I don’t think the ‘supergroup’ has a name. We’ve always played together, mix and match, different combinations. If what we do now has a name it should be all of our band names, run together. Like one of those very long chemicals.

KEITH UTAMORE
: I was hoping to see this ‘very long chemical’ tonight, and tape them, but apparently that’s not to be.

FIORINDA
: Maybe later in the series. But we have Gintrap for you, and Sovra Campbell, and the Phil MacLean Band, back for a second visit, and very welcome… Ah, there you go, you see, the Scots don’t have band names. It’s a trend. There’s Gintrap, okay, but they’re very retro lads.

KEITH UTAMORE
: I’ve been hearing a lot about Gintrap.

FIORINDA
: And tonight we have the Chosen too, which is quite an occasion.

Sage had waylaid the Preston family in the show’s Green Room, while Fiorinda entertained the journo, and Ax was occupied with the Scots—a perfunctory antechamber, closet-sized by Wallingham standards, that nobody else was using. Glum sheet-steel maidens in fluted draperies paraded, lifesize, along the peacock blue walls. There were hard chairs, refugees from some government waiting room, a side table set with pitchers of beer, cheap English wine and stacked paper cups. Sage wore evening dress, the uniform for the hosts of Rick’s Place. The Chosen wore the jeans and jumpers look they’d always favoured onstage: expensive nothing-special. They were wary. They didn’t often find themselves alone with Aoxomoxoa. A very tall, weirdly good-looking techno-geek, dressed like a waiter, throws himself on the mercy of four suspicious, down to earth West Country musicians—