Castles Made of Sand (2 page)

Sage keeping very still, very happy to be touched. The avatar mask, that phenomenally expressive veil of coherent light, grinning between sheepish and self-mocking—

‘I didn’t believe you bought it off someone you met in a bar, either. Not one of your more convincing yarns. So then I started noticing how much got done, behind the drunken oaf cover. The bit-by-bit slog that goes into those immersions of yours. You and the Heads touring like maniacs, and a stage act you couldn’t
survive
if you weren’t in constant training. It nagged at me. If he made that mask, and if he’s secretly so focused and organised, he’s not stuck for inner resources. Why is the stupid bugger impelled to spend half his life
so fucking hammered
that just walking across the room is a great big adventure?’

‘Bored, bored, bored.’

‘Not so bored now? Not so smashed so often, anyway.’

‘Carn’t fit it into my Ministerial diary, Sah. I never have the time to get decently trolleyed, too busy being a workaholic bureaucrat. It’s a disgrace.’

They collapsed into giggles. The situation they were in was so
ridiculous
.

‘You ever going to tell me why you used to pick on me like that?’ said Ax. ‘Mr billionaire-as-fuck megastar? It was a mystery to me why you bothered.’

‘Oh… Yeah, okay. I’ll tell you. We were a pair, equal and opposite. Ax Preston gets the critical acclaim and the cred, Sage gets the filthy money, and everyone’s convinced that’s just the way it ought to be. I was jealous. Envious. Resented it.’

Ax was amazed (he’d been imagining some slightly more grown-up grievance, all this time). ‘Is that what it was?
Really?
’

‘Really.’

‘Well,’ said Ax, after a moment, ‘now I know your stuff better, I don’t blame you. But it wasn’t my fault. You should’ve
behaved
more like Leonardo da Vinci.’

‘Ax, I’ll never beat you at this game.’

‘What game?’

‘Forgiving, understanding. Maybe the game is being good.’

‘Oh, I’m not good,’ said Ax. ‘I think
you
are good.’

They listened to the music for a while.

‘We don’t need the van,’ said Sage at last.

‘Nah.’

‘Don’t know why I brought it out.’ He tapped the phone implant on his wrist. ‘George… Hi, George, when you get to this, I’ve left the van by the road—’

George Merrick was the second-in-command of Sage’s band. Pause, while Sage looks out of the cab, peers around and finds nothing in the shattered vistas of Reading’s urban freeway system to fix in his mind. ‘Well, it’s somewhere. Not far. Take it back to the Meadow, will you? Thanks.’

The van belonged in the Travellers’ Meadow on Rivermead Festival Site, where thousands of staybehinds had been living like Bangladeshi slumdwellers since Dissolution Summer, three and a half years ago. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. In ways, the campers, in their lo-impact, alt.tech hippy squalor, were better off than the bricks and mortar people, now that the Crash had really begun to bite. They got down and stood checking each other over: tall Sage with a living skull for a head, skeleton-masked hands to match. Ax Preston, Dictator of England, in his old leather coat, milky-brown skin and smooth dark hair of non-specific non-white origins; looking a little lost without a guitar attached.

Maybe the absence of guitar’s the cause of the uncertainty crisis he’s suffering, worried frown in his pretty brown eyes—

‘Are you still up for this, Sage? No second thoughts?’

The skull grinned. ‘Not much option now, is there? Eh, Teflon-head?’

‘Oh. Oh yeah, right.’

‘Hahaha.’

They began to walk.

‘You know, Ax, I can always tell when you are completely out of your tree.’

‘Oh really, how is that?’

‘You become convinced you’re sober, an’ you start ordering me around.’

‘Do I? I’m sorry—’

‘Nah, it’s okay. I like it.’

Ax had driven down from London very early and left his car by Caversham Bridge, to avoid getting hassled by Staybehind Gate Police, over private transport hypocrisy. As they walked into the town centre—empty plate glass gleaming (where plate glass had survived); burned-out shells of fast-food outlets and car salesrooms—they discussed going to look for it. But they reached the station first so they settled for the train, and the quiet intensity of sitting side by side among strangers: touching hands, brushing shoulders, traversing the crowds at Clapham Junction with that magic thrill in the blood; barely speaking, occasionally sharing a smile of delight.

‘For once we can just enjoy this,’ Ax said.

‘Yeah. But it was there all the time.’

‘I know.’

By mid-afternoon they were in Brighton. Neither of them knew the town, but the gazetteer on Ax’s warehouse implant (though out of date) helped them to fool around. It was so rare, such a treat to be idle together,
the strains of their own music not infrequently washing over them, as they prowled the fashion shoplets: two stunningly recognisable faces (one face, one mask) so studiously unrecognised it was like a cloak of invisibility. The Dictator and his friends never had to worry about invasion of privacy: Stone Age Fame, Fiorinda called it.

So this was Ax’s England. In Reading the violence was more obvious. Here, in a town which had always been Countercultural heartland, change looked more permanent. The music and video effects that acted as urban décor were cutting-edge, but the Shopping Mall Generics had vanished. Private cars had gone, or turned up ingeniously recycled. Asphalt, brick and concrete had been torn up to let the weeds and wilderness in. There were marks of privation, obviously. The ‘see a queue, join a queue’ mentality prevailed. But the crowds were peaceful, there were buskers but no beggars; and not a weapon in sight. Considering the events of recent years, that last was a major triumph.

At sunset the only street lighting was by ATP patches: cell metabolism energy, bio-activated by the fingertips of passers-by who had taken the treatment, Sage among them. They ate (Ax ate. Sage, typically, ignored some food), and went down to the beach. Evening crowds flowed on the promenade behind them, but they were alone on the shingle.

It was cold, the air was still, the sea murmured in a tawny dusk.

Sage folded himself, cross-legged, in one of his giant pixie poses. Ax sat wrapped in his leather coat, trusty old friend, examining an antique ring on his right hand. It was a birthday present from Fiorinda, he wasn’t used to wearing it. The carnelian bevel had an inscription in Arabic:
this too will pass
. She gives me Solomon’s ring…and is that a threat or a promise, my Fiorinda? I think it’s a promise. Everything will pass, but not your love for me, my love for you.

It was the twenty-first of February, he was just twenty-nine years old. He’d been Ceremonial Head of State for six months; the official leader of the mighty CCM, the English Countercultural Movement for a little longer.

Ax was not now, nor had he ever been, a Green Nazi, a hippie, or even an Eco-Warrior. He’d once been a pretty-good guitarist, with the delusion that he could do something to save his country from the dark. He’d become the leader of the CCM through nightmare circumstances—after the Dissolution of the United Kingdom, and the collapse of the first, bloody and terrible Green Revolution regime. When the suits offered him the Head of State job he’d accepted: but he’d refused to be called President. He preferred a title that reflected the real situation.

‘Times and times,’ he said, turning the ring. ‘I prayed to God we’d make it this far, and I didn’t see how we could. Now I know that everything since Dissolution was the easy part. Now we have to keep it all going. Fuck.’

‘No need to think about it tonight. Take the evening off.’

‘What did we do with the shopping?’

‘Can’t remember. Something. Does it matter?’

‘Not at all.’

He didn’t eat, thought Ax. He never eats enough. Not a gram more than he must, to keep that fabulous body in shape. But I am not going to nag. He took Sage’s left hand, missing the fourth and fifth fingers, and measured it against his own. The right was worse off, having lost index and second finger and half a thumb. Skeletal ghosts that masked the gaps… Meningitis and septicaemia had done the damage. He thought of a ten month old baby, can’t even talk, sick unto death. They put him to sleep, he wakes up and
what’s
happened to his hands
?

The little boy who refuses to eat, because he can’t stand the clumsiness of his maimed paws. Ah, God. Unbearable pity.

‘How d’you decide how long to make the missing fingers?’

‘These are my real hands.’

‘What?’

‘The masks are copies of my bones the way they would have grown. It’s not hard to work out. Now ask me why I don’t wear fake normal hands.’

‘You can’t fake anything. Remind me not to try and turn you into a diplomat.’

‘Hahaha. I can lie. I do it all the time.’

‘You can talk bullshit; there’s a subtle difference. I wish I’d known you before.’

‘You did. You didn’t like me much.’

‘I
mean
long ago. My life has had its ups and downs, but tonight it strikes me forcibly that you have been horribly unhappy, for
years at a time
. I never put it together before. I wish I’d been there, to stop things from hurting you.’

‘I deserved most of it,’ said Sage. ‘Not the meningitis, obviously, but the rest. If you’d known me when I was a teenage junkie you would not have liked me, Ax. But I know what you mean. Me, I have a desperate need to time travel and punch out the playground racists—that you’ve never told me about, but I know the fucking South-West of this fucking country.’

Ax was from Taunton, Sage was Cornish. ‘I’d have liked you,’ said Ax, ‘if I’d known you. We should have been together; total waste of time that we weren’t.’

‘Never leave me, Ax.’

‘I won’t.’

They laughed, dropped the handclasp and looked away from each other, smiling. ‘The racism didn’t bother me,’ said Ax. ‘Much. I was okay with it by the time I was ten. I resign myself to work around stuff like that.
You
write horrors like the
Arbeit Macht Frei
immersions, as you told me once, because you want
to see the world as hideous, miserable and terrible as it really is, and still find it loveable—
’

‘Did I say that? I must have been pissed.’

‘Pissed enough to trust me, briefly, on that anomalous night out. Then you were straight back to giving me unmitigated shit, any chance you got. But you’d changed, next time our paths really crossed, in Dissolution Summer. Still winding me up the whole time, and habitually plastered, but not finding the world such a difficult place to love. If you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘Yeah, well, that was Fiorinda. I’d met Fiorinda, year before all of this shit started. In March, in Amsterdam… She turned everything around.’

When the three of them joined Paul Javert’s Countercultural Think Tank (not even Ax having any idea what the doomed Home Secretary was planning), Fiorinda had been sixteen. Sage’d been playing the big brother, waiting for her to grow up, and it’d been Ax who’d made the crucial move. It had only gradually dawned on him, through the terrifying cascade of disaster that followed, that he’d cut Sage out… That Aoxomoxoa the sex-machine, the laddish fool you’d think couldn’t deceive a fly, was secretly, passionately, permanently in love.

The problem was on the agenda, the unspoken agenda of the drug they’d taken, and both of them knew it: but the words wouldn’t come. They faced each other in silence, the skull’s frontal bones glimmering with a faint silver light. The look moved into a kiss, hard to say who initiated that, and then, irresistibly, into plenty more than a single kiss. Ax wanted it all, then he wanted out, and caught an alarming glimpse of what it might be like if he
ever really
had to fight this supple giant. They flung apart from each other, breathing hard—

‘
Don’t ever do that to me
’, snarled Ax.

‘Do what?’ demanded Sage, on his back with an arm flung across his face. ‘Who? Did what to whom? You absolutely sure that wasn’t your idea?’

Ax chucked pebbles at the sea. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘sorry. Two sides to it.’

He heaved a sigh, moved over and shifted his friend’s arm. The mask looked up, doing a heartrending line in
alone, conflicted and confused
. ‘Hey, stop that. Not the whipped puppy dog. Knock it off, you’re scaring me.’

‘How do I know what’s the right face to make? Me, oversized blundering oaf.’

Ax lay down, settling his head on Sage’s shoulder. ‘If you are so lost in the complex world of grown-up human emotions, maestro, who made the mask?’

‘Doesn’t mean anything. A lot of that emotional mapping is join the dots, mechanical. Wood ants could build an avatar mask.’

‘
Wood ants
. Tuh.’

The sea swooshed in and out. They stayed like that for a while, very happy.

Ax sat up and fetched out his smokes tin.

The Brighton Pier was dark. The cocktail party on the restored West Pier, the gig they were meant to attend, was in full swing, all that lacy, artfully restored old ironwork lit like the Titanic on ghost-crab legs; like a beached starship. Tinsel-faint wafts of music escaped from the sound-proofing. ‘Now listen,’ said Ax, lighting the spliff and handing it, ‘we’re going to Allie’s party, and I put it to you that we walk in there tonight, the two coolest dudes in the
known universe
.’

‘I thought you didn’t like being famous.’

‘Usually I don’t. But this isn’t celebrity culture, this is undeniable fact. Far as our island nation goes, right now, we fucking
are
the two coolest dudes in the known universe. Just for once, why don’t we get some fun out of it?’

‘An’ no sarcastic rock and roll brat around, to make her deflating little remarks. Yeah, let’s go for it. Fuck, what is in this? It’s blowing my head off.’

‘That’s because you’ve hardly eaten a thing all day. I’ve been watching you. It’s only Bristol skunk, and you couldn’t leave the street lighting alone, could you? You
cannot
drain your cell metabolism like that, and then not eat—’