Bold as Love (45 page)

One of the Zen Selfers murmured urgently. Sage’s mouth and (weirdly, this wasn’t in the manual) his eyes, had started to swell. The perfect, naked, gymnast’s shoulders were shrinking and twisting. ‘Shit,’ muttered Olwen. ‘Sage, I’m stopping this now.’

The doppelganger vanished. The Zen Selfers checked that their guinea pig seemed to have come to no harm, and proceeded to unhook him. Dilip, Chip and Ver interrogated Olwen Devi, wanting to know what real-world applications she saw for the mirroring, what did it mean in Zen Self terms, how long before both mirror and original could be functioning at once…and what would that feel like? Their eyes were shining. The question each really wanted to ask, middle aged mixmaster as eager as the kids, was,
when can I have a turn?
‘The obvious applications would be medical,’ said Olwen. ‘If we could make the procedure safe enough.’

Three skull-headed idiots went into a huddle, off in a geodesic corner.

‘I don’t like it,’ said George. ‘Did you see his hands?’

‘Sage fucking did,’ said Bill. ‘And didn’t say a word. I don’t like that.’

‘We got to watch this. Something here smells like a shit of an addictive drug.’

Silence, while they thought up psycho-Luddite contingency plans. George had the answer. ‘Okay, if it looks like trouble we play the smack card. Tell him fucking with this stuff makes ’im behave unpleasant.’

‘Tell ’im it’s makin’ him be unpleasant to
Fiorinda!
’ Peter added triumphantly.

George and Bill looked at him, forbearance for the afflicted. He can’t help it. Peter, although he never really deserved to be called Cack, is, in fact, an alien lifeform. ‘Nah,’ said Bill. ‘I couldn’t do that to the boss. Not the way things stand.’

They were absorbed, like this: the Heads in their concern for Sage, Dilip and Chip and Ver in their longing for that eternal one step beyond, when something entered the lab, which was still permeated by the energy field that had contained the mirroring. It entered the space and entered them all: an astonishing sweetness, without limit, inclusive, penetrating, bathing all perception and every memory, every facet of time and being… Dilip saw that Sage was sitting up on the cot, still unmasked, eyes deeply intent and lips a little parted—

Then it was gone, it had passed.

‘Wow!’ breathed Chip.
‘What was that?’

The Zen Selfers kept their cool. They knew about these rare, tantalising visitations. Sage and his friends stared at each other, grinning in open amazement and delight. And these seven, Olwen Devi noticed, had passed the first test without even realising that it was there.

‘That was the Zen Self,’ she said, smiling faintly. ‘So now you know.’

The weather changed, the sun began to shine. Reading Festival site, more crowded than ever with the extra campers from far away, dried out and started to have a Summer of Love: non-stop partying, drug-fueled political discussions, random acts of senseless beauty. The Heads were back in Travellers’ Meadow. Anne-Marie Wing—who’d moved to Reading to be near Sage, her hero since he rescued Silver Wing—set up house with her kids in a hospitality bender: had failed to get a Meadow pitch, to the Heads’ immense relief. Sage worked on his plans for the concert, at one point managing to get all the Few together for a day-long rehearsal in the Blue Lagoon. This turned out to be a gruelling experience, and a convincing demonstration of why the Heads called their drunken giant toddler genius
the boss
. Suppose anyone had still been wondering.

‘Again, again,’ grumbled Chip. ‘Who does he think we are? Teletubbies?’

‘I am disillusioned,’ said Ver. ‘Surely slavedriving is against the Ideology.’

Bill Trevor, with the tech crew, was not sympathetic. ‘Hard fun
is
the Ideology, dickless. You thought our stage act was innate or somethin’? We work like shit for him so we can get out there and do it, chainsaws an’ all, whatever state we are in,’ (And deal with whatever fuckups the boss throws at us, he might have added. But never let the truth get in the way of a good wind-up).

Back on the tiered seats, Allie was going over merchandising orders with Ax. The red
It’s The Ecology, Stupid
singlet, a favourite because Ax often wore it, was causing problems. ‘It’d help if you’d wear something else.’

‘I don’t want to. I will not do that kind of crap. Thin end of the wedge. Whyn’t you get them to do a faded one. Then you’d have two versions.’

‘What we need is for you to be seen around in one, or maybe a couple, of the other shirts. Even a different colour would help.’

‘Okay, pretend we discussed it, and
then
I said no. Let’s move on.’

Ramadan was not exactly making Ax impossible, not yet. Just tetchy.

They both looked up to watch Fiorinda, as she hooked her safety harness and launched herself in a swallow dive from the scaffolding—caught by Sage and held, effortlessly, arm’s length above his head. ‘Shit,’ he said, spinning her around. ‘Hollow bones, she must have!’

‘She shouldn’t be doing that,’ complained Allie. ‘Her ribs.’

‘Hey, George! Catch!’

Allie gave a yelp. ‘Ax!
Stop
them!’

‘You break my girlfriend, maestro,’ called Ax, ‘You buy me a new one.’

‘Understood! Sah!’

‘Sage we really don’t get this. Is it Oltech—’

‘Or is it secret, old-techno-geezers code? Where’s the Transporter room?’

‘Is it going to be under the stage?’

‘We don’t mind being dissolved into particles. We just want to be told.’

Chip and Verlaine were at the stage, aggrieved and determined. Sage set Fiorinda on her feet and came to the front. ‘What the fuck are you talking about? Pass me your notes.’ The scribbled-over, sellotaped sheets of print out were handed up. Sage looked at them, and the skull mask got mean, ‘I don’t see any problem. Hey, if you two don’t want to play, it’s very simple. You can piss off and stop wasting my time. Nothing is compulsory.’

‘It’s after
Under My Thumb
,’ Chip persisted bravely, ‘and Allie and Fiorinda with the firehoses. Where we get beamed up.’

‘
What
?’

Chip and Verlaine backed off, looking scared. Sage walked away, studying the ragged sheets, all intimidating bigness and dangerously tested self-control. People retreated out of his path.

‘Ah!
’

He jumped down, held up a masked left hand. ‘Pen? Anybody?’; took the pen, and added a few swift lines to the musical notation. ‘There. You see the quavers? I wasn’t sure how I wanted them joined up in beats here. Which we call beamed up. Now it’s done, fuck it. You happy?’

‘Er, yeah,’ said Verlaine. ‘Yeah,’ agreed Chip, faintly.

‘Good.’ The boss levitated back onto the stage. ‘Serves you right for being able to read my writing, what insolence. Allie, c’mon. Your turn.’

‘When I first met him,’ said Ax. ‘He had me convinced he couldn’t read music.’

‘When
I
first met him,’ said Allie, ‘he had me convinced he couldn’t read.’

‘Well, you better get up there. We’ll finish this later.’

At dusk he let them go. They changed their clothes, took food and walked out towards the boneyard, following the same path as Fiorinda and Sage had taken on the day of Luke’s memorial service: over the stile, through the hedge, into the other world. The south bank of the Thames was common ground, amicably (for the most part) shared by townsfolk and campers. There was very little artificial light. The town itself was much darker than it would have been three years ago; the festival site’s lo-impact twinkling lost in deep blue twilight. They strolled downstream to where the bank was wide, and settled around a big poplar tree. Passers-by studiously paid no special attention to the picnicers: Stone Age Fame. Ax watched Fiorinda and Silver Wing having a crabwalking competition, the littler kids trying to copy them, flopping about like stranded mudskippers. George and Sage joined him.

‘Did you guys teach her this stuff?’

‘Nah,’ said Sage.

‘We taught her a spot ’er tumbling,’ said George. ‘She could walk on her hands and shit when we met her, says she always could.’

‘She’s a fuckin’
dream
compared to most of this shower,’ said Sage. ‘But a few more sessions of vicious bullying should do it. How’s Ramadan going?’

‘Slowly.’

It was the sixth night of the holy month, and the white young moon was high in the sky. Something had come up at Reading: they’d been offered the Leisure Centre buildings. Some green-is-good business persons had agreed to bankroll a new facility for the townspeople. On a brownfield site, of course. The problem was the Few would have to find some money, without robbing the Volunteer Initiative or any of their other concerns.

‘What we could do,’ said Anne-Marie, grinning shyly at her hero, ‘is we could bottle Sage an’ Ax’s come and sell it to rich Americans, by snail mail order, for designer babies.’

‘Don’t think they’d be impressed. There’s nothen in it.’

‘Same here,’ said Ax. ‘I’m not an active member of the gene pool.’

‘What about, er, cheek-scrapings?’ suggested Verlaine. ‘They don’t need sperm, all they need is DNA isn’t it?’

Neither of the candidates had an answer to this, except to look disgusted.

‘We’ll stick with teeshirts,’ said Allie. ‘Think of the lawsuits.’

‘Imagine if the customer got a normal sized, quiet and retiring Sage—’

‘We could git Anne-Marie to cast a spell,’ suggested Smelly Hugh. Hugh wasn’t allowed to share Anne-Marie’s bender, he wasn’t house-trained. But he’d come down for a conjugal, in the funky tourbus belonging to their new band. ‘To fetch the money.’

‘Do you think you could do that, AM?’ asked Milly, curiously. ‘I mean,
really?
’

Anne-Marie Wing, Merseyside Chinese-Irish, dedicated Countercultural, seemed to believe in everything, from Daoist-Tantric ritual to Crustified-Anarcho-Syndicalism, a source of fascination to the others, how did she keep
track
? At this she looked wise and superior. ‘Maybe I could, but I don’t do that stuff. I never would. It turns on you.’

‘But she’s got the gift,’ insisted Hugh. ‘She can see auras. She’s bin teaching me, but I ’avn’t quite got it yet.’

‘So tell us our auras?’ suggested Allie. ‘It’s colours, isn’t it? Sage ought to be red. All that aggression.’

‘I
am not
aggressive. Just watch it, you—’

‘Oh no,’ said Anne Marie seriously. ‘Sage is mainly blue.
Ax
is red.’

That got a laugh. No prizes for spotting Ax’s favourite colour. Or knowing that lazy-dressing Aoxomoxoa, if he strayed from the black or white he wore on stage (for obvious reasons), never got further than grey, or occasionally blue. ‘What about Fiorinda?’ wondered Verlaine. ‘Let me guess. She’s green, huh?’ They all looked at Fiorinda, sitting by the water, the green silk of her dress (that beloved dress, a collection of tatters over her yellow choli blouse and yellow underskirt) darkly shadowed in the twilight.

‘Oh, Fiorinda—’ said Anne Marie: and for some reason broke off, shrugging. ‘Doesn’t need me to tell her,’ she finished, looking away.

It was here, thought Fiorinda. Just here, the day I arrived for the Festival of Dissolution. I took off my boots, I heard the three witches talking about the man who would be king. And now this is where we’re at. Back where it all began, another battle won. Still in a disaster movie, things still getting worse (the refugee crisis was nothing like
solved, i
t had simply joined the rest of the ongoing crises). But we reach pools of equilibrium and this is one. Suddenly her heart thumped.
Where’s Ax
? Where is the master of all this, the rock-lord enthroned?

But if there was a centre to the group it was in the roots of the poplar tree, where someone had planted an Oltech campers’ lantern. Silver Wing and her sister Pearl sat there giggling, grabbing at the insects that blundered into the light. Ax was out on the margins with Rob, collecting the kids’ picnic debris: and trying to stay clear of the cannabis and tobacco smoke. It was nicotine starvation that hit him worst. She went and slipped her arm around him, leaned her head on his shoulder.

‘What’s the matter? Something wrong, little cat?’

‘Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all.’

Always be my Ax. If I dared to wish for anything, that would be my wish.

Strange how things you thought would last forever can slip away while you are too occupied to notice; and you don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone. In the van, one warm evening, George and Aoxomoxoa sat at that cluttered kitchen table. Bill and Peter separately off on their own business. Sage having come back after spending the night and day elsewhere on site to find George in a morose and valedictory mood, shot glass and a whisky bottle in front of him. They were both masked, of course.

‘I always knew,’ said George, ‘that one day you’d be over Mary, and then I’d lose you, some way. I never thought,
never,
it would be to another guy.’

For more than a decade they’d been playing this elaborate game together, since the boss was seventeen and George Merrick twenty one years’ old. How many hours of fun is that?

‘Can’t you both be my best mate?’ said the giant toddler, bewildered. Then (commonsense kicking in).
‘George,
what is this? What are you on about?’

‘Ah, nothin’ boss. Getting maudlin.’

‘Thas’ from drinking alone. C’mon, on your feet. Let’s go find some company.’

Dilip, in his tower block eyrie, was preparing artwork for the concert,
Let It Bleed
in his ears very loud. He’d moved out of the Insanitude after Allie left, chiefly because he was buggered if was going to be the only member of the Few on permanent call there. No fixed abode since. The life he’d left behind, when he came down to London for Dissolution summer, felt like old clothes. He’d tried to go back and he couldn’t do it. Ax would not let him camp in the Park: so here he was camping out in a room walled in windows, the City spread below, in a flat that belonged to a woman who’d been a lover long, long ago.

Good to be so high up. Dilip loved being high.

He worked in gouache on board: always painted his pictures before scanning them and applying the digital arts. Three faces rose from the sweeping curves of the
trimurti
. Can’t let those broadsheet assholes steal our babies, we must have eclectic, beads-and-sitars Countercultural hagiography. Now which is which of this she and he and he? No prizes for assigning the patronage of the Lord Protector. He bent to the board, applying his own Vaisnavite mark to Aoxomoxoa’s skull. He’d have liked to depict Sage without the mask, but that would not be true to life. ‘Ram Ram, Ram Ram…and not afraid of the sight of blood, either,’ he murmured, (thinking of goats with their throats cut, in the heat of Madurai). ‘A trait that may yet be useful again.’ Sage’s sign is Capricorn, stonefish, goatfish. His birthday is January 8th, his elements are water and earth, his patron deity is Visnu.