Midnight Lamp (6 page)

‘This I know. But no one in Europe thinks it can be done?’

‘Mm. Bearing in mind “no-one” means the handful of people, theorising right out on the edge, who have even heard of the idea… If you want my personal opinion, I think they wanted to do the work, fusion consciousness is incredibly sexy, so they emphasised the mass destruction idea to get Defense Department funding. It may not be the most ethical route, but it is well-trodden. They have the biggest, fastest hardware, they have license to whack a team of military volunteers full of nasty, scary, wrecking-ball neurosteroids. I expect they’re getting somewhere, but probably not the so-called Neurobomb.’

‘D’you think it’s true that they got hold of Rufus’s head?’

The ‘Green Nazi’ European Celtics had planned for Rufus to decimate the population of Europe. When Fiorinda and Sage had brought back the magician’s severed head, from his Irish stronghold, and presented it to the enemy, the bastards who’d taken over in Ax’s absence had found this a convincing argument. Resistance to Ax’s come-back invasion had collapsed, peace had ensued: but the severed head had vanished in the shuffle.

Sage glanced at Fiorinda. ‘I don’t think it will have done them any good.’

They’d spent seven years on an insane roller-coaster, and ten months licking their wounds, oblivious of the world. Maybe they’d been fools to think they could cross the ocean and leave it all behind: but they were disconcerted. In Europe, the death of a senior Irish/American celebrity, (known ‘Green Nazi’ sympathiser) had been quietly buried, by everyone including the
Gardia
.

We know how to handle these things at home, what’s this Harry Lopez doing, doesn’t he know when silence is best?

‘I remember a Fat Man,’ said Ax, after a pause for thought. ‘It comes back to me… Wasn’t that the nickname they gave to one of the first atom bombs, devices, whatever? And there was a Little Boy, too. But Lopez said,
Fat Boy.
’

‘It’s another nickname. It’s what the Celtic “druidic science” lunatics were aiming for with Rufus. Fiorinda knows.’ They looked at the babe, but she was still idly plonking keys. ‘You take a natural-born magic psychopath, of which thank God, so far Rufus is the only example. You pump up the volume with the rocket fuel he gets from human sacrifice, and he goes critical, like a nuclear pile.’

‘And the “‘It’s a
Good
Life’ scenario?”’

‘Same. “It’s a
Good
Life” is a classic science fiction story, about a little boy, born with a mean mutant brain. Whatever he wants, he can make it so. Everybody has to grovel to this kid, because if he tells you to turn inside out, then you will. If he tells the sun to explode, then it will. It’s what happens when the Fat Boy’s up and running, it’s the doomsday, runaway chain reaction. It isn’t proven, it’s just a weird possibility.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘Well, there you go. Fiorinda and I thought we were assassinating Adolf Hitler, to prevent the Holocaust. It turns out we were making a futile attempt to suppress the discovery of nuclear fission. What a bust.’

‘Shit. So much for Rufus as our
private
nightmare.’

‘It’s private enough. There are millions or billions who’ve heard of Ax Preston and the Reich, my dear. Very, very few who know what happened to the world last summer; or what’s going on right now at Vireo Lake.’

‘And a kid cartoon-movie producer is one of them. I find that most bizarre.’

Sage nodded. ‘Most bizarre.’

‘Can’t help wondering what’s behind it.’

‘I suppose we’ll find out what’s behind it when we get to Hollywood,’ said Fiorinda.

Both men started, and turned to her, shocked and guilty.

‘Oh, no sweetheart,’ protested Ax. ‘That’s not what we’re discussing.’

‘No, no! We aren’t thinking of
taking
the gig, we’re just talking—’

‘For fuck’s sake.’ Fiorinda brought both hands down on the keys with a jarring clangour. ‘You want to go with your Harry Lopez, I can hear it. You just don’t want to take me, because I’m in a bad state. I killed my own father. I used my m-magic, (God, how I hate that word), which I had vowed and sworn I would never do. How can I live with myself, if that was all for nothing, if there’s another monster?’

‘Fiorinda, hey, there isn’t another monster.’

‘Oh? But the man in the hat said the Pentagon is building a Fat Boy.’

‘He said
something
like that,’ admitted Sage. ‘It can’t be
true
. You’d need to start with a phenomenal natural magician—’

‘
I know,
’ snapped Fiorinda. ‘I haven’t been in a coma.’ She stared at them, pushing back the clotted masses of her hair with both hands, the pupils of her grey eyes wildly dilated. ‘Just nuts. I’ve been trying to protect you,’ she said, wonderingly. ‘To reach a place of safety, but I could not get there. Oh my God, and maybe now I know why!’

Electrified, they realised it was
Fiorinda
looking at them, speaking to them.
Fiorinda
, back from wherever she’d been wandering-

‘You don’t need to protect us,’ said Sage, intensely still, as if an unwary breath might send this bird out into the dark again. ‘It’s over, babe. You did it. You protected everybody. You did
brilliantly
, and now you’re safe with us.’

Fiorinda’s pupils snapped back, and she let go of her hair. ‘Safe…?’ The clipped, crystalline vowels of her childhood, always well to the fore when she was exasperated, had never sounded so sweet- ‘Is that what you call it?
Look
. Ax can never touch me sexually, because next time I might
strike him dead
. I don’t believe I could harm you, Sage, but I’m not mad about the idea of therapeutic rape, and I think you know it. We should go to Hollywood. What’s the alternative?’

‘We don’t have to go back to England,’ said Ax, quickly. ‘We’ll find somewhere else—’

‘What, another beach where we can be nice to each other, get excited about shellfish and tick off the bird book? How long’s that going to last? You two feel sorry for me now, but you’ll get bored, Ax. You’ll dump us and run away, like you did before—’

‘Fiorinda, how can you say that? I
did not
dump you. You were miserable, Sage hated me, I was in the way. I left because I wanted you two to be happy.’

‘
Did you fuck
want us to be happy. You wanted us to come running after you, and it backfired, because you’d forgotten you had us so well trained we would never dare. All right, you couldn’t have known you would be kidnapped, but walking out like that was a cry for help, in an
unbelievably
stupid form—’

Sage was staring at Ax in naked hurt. ‘I’d follow you anywhere,’ he said. ‘I’ll do whatever you want me to do, be whatever you want me to be. Fiorinda was unhappy, that’s all I knew, that’s what you saw in me. I never
hated
you.’

‘Could we stop this?’ said Ax, ‘Please could we stop this? It does no good.’

‘We could stop,’ offered Fiorinda, after a moment.

She crossed the room, pulled up a chair at their table: took Ax’s hand and reached out to Sage. The rings they wore, braided white and red and yellow British gold, gleamed in the dusty sunlight. They weren’t wedding rings, perish the thought, but they were a declaration. We are not going to break up again. We’ve tried that solution, and it is worse than the problem.

‘I’ve been giving you hell, haven’t I?’

‘No!’

‘You give us
heaven
,’ said Sage, passionately.

‘Idiot… I know I’m in a bad state, all right? But I think we have to say yes. We have to go to Hollywood. Look at it this way. Our pension fund is fucked, and we can’t live happily ever after. We might as well get back in the game.’

‘You’d better tell Harry,’ said Sage to Ax. ‘He’ll be thrilled.’

There were two beds in the cabin, a single and a double. The single was Fiorinda’s. Sage and Ax slept on the double in their sleeping bags, like soldiers in a bivvy. On the shelf by her head, Fiorinda could see the outlines of her best shells, and the ‘Ax n’ Sage n’ Fiorinda’ miniatures that Ax had bought when he was in the US for the data quarantine deal; which had been returned to him, along with his other belongings, after he was rescued. Her saltbox wasn’t there: her heart jumped, then she realised it was beside her. She tucked her hand around the polished wooden apple, the talisman of her hated magic, which she did not dare to part with, how irrational can you get. The door of the cabin was open, and Sage was sitting there. Moonlight gleamed on his close-cropped head, and caught the wide, pared-down angles of his cheek and jaw.

‘Sage?’ She wrapped a shawl over the big teeshirt she was using as a nightgown, and went to join him. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d sit up, in case Fergal needed back up.’ He leaned his head against the wall. She saw the glint of tears in his thick golden lashes.

‘You believe in Fergal?’

‘Why not? The world’s a strange place.’ He sighed. ‘Our Willy Loman is afraid of me…ain’t that a joke. I don’t know what he thinks I’m going to do.’

‘You could use sarcasm,’ said Fiorinda. ‘You’re good at that.’

She wanted to tell him that he was beautiful, and strong, without the bulging muscles, and she loved him just as much. She knew he wouldn’t listen. They were all clinging to their separate hurts, even the bodhisattva.

‘I’m sorry about
therapeutic rape.
That was horrible. Forget I said that.’

He wiped his eyes. ‘I’ll try to put it out of my mind.’

They watched the moonlight and listened to the ocean.

‘I will never forget El Pabellón,’ whispered Fiorinda.

‘Fiorinda, listen to me. I know what’s happening to you, and I can help.’

‘Don’t. Stop it.’

‘
Listen
. I know what it’s like to be aware that all the horror is still going on, and you are still there in it, still doing the worst things you did, and bearing the worst things you had to bear. And I have done some bad, bad things… I can help you to the other side, I can take you to
guai-yi
. It’s the only way, my baby. You’ve travelled too far. You have to reach shelter now.’

‘I keep trying to remember things from
before
,’ she said, avoiding his eyes. ‘I keep thinking if I could remember being normal, I would get better from being…being in a bad state, and we would be happy. It doesn’t work, because one thing I always know is that if my magic doesn’t exist then you’re dead, Sage. You died on the beach at Drumbeg. I go round and round, I have some hateful imaginings, but it doesn’t matter how I figure it, none of this is real. It’s a toy I made. That’s what I have to learn to live with.’

‘Fee. That’s
not
how it is. You’ve forgotten. Let me show you.’

There was a pulse in the air, stronger than the murmur of the Pacific. She found herself thinking, dare I take my life from this man’s hands? Dare I let him pick me up and carry me? It’s not for nothing that one of his best mates,
his collaborator
, has Asperger’s so bad that… Peter Stannen couldn’t survive in the normal world, without the Heads to look after him. And it’s not just that he’s male to the point of screwy. Sage was strange before he went near the Zen Self: liable to go off into obsessions, and drug himself insensible because he can’t resist the way it soothes his racing brain… The more she thought of his strangeness, the more she pitied him; and the more she loved him.

But oh no. I want my life to be my own.

‘Oh no,’ she said, smiling into his eyes. ‘No you don’t, Sage. You are not going to talk me down from this. I shall make my own way. This is mine.’

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’ll respect that, but I’m here. Whenever you need me.’

Ax stirred, and sat up. ‘Are you two okay?’

‘Yes,’ said Sage.

‘Very okay,’ said Fiorinda.

‘Come back to bed.’

They kept Harry waiting a day, and then they wanted to leave at once. It was agreed that they would drive down to El Rosario, the three in their Mexican hired car, Harry in his Compact. They would meet there, do the business, and Harry would explain how they were going to cross the border. They did not have visas. They had not intended to visit the States. For the former rulers of the Reich to try and get into the US as tourists would have been embarrassing all round. But that was all fixed, apparently. Ax and Sage kept asking each other, in glances they hoped she didn’t see,
are we doing the right thing
? But Harry’s news had snapped her back into herself, and anything that did that had to be pursued. If Hollywood turned out to be a bad move, then fuck it. We’ll have three first class tickets home, please… They didn’t think very hard about Harry’s pitch.

They packed up early in the morning. Fiorinda found the hermit crab and took it down to the sea.
Bon voyage
, little ragged claw: and there go the pelicans…one, two, and goodbye. I’m going to the USA, she thought, frightened because she knew Ax and Sage were not frightened, and they ought to be
.

Maybe America will make me free.

Harry came to the cabin, while Fiorinda was on the beach and Ax was at the
Oficina
. He was still wearing the hat, but with a visible air of defiance. Sage had a mean impulse to start on the moustache. He had to remind himself that this pink-cheeked young man had no idea what he’d done to offend. He knew nothing about Fiorinda’s state of mental health, and he wasn’t going to find out from Sage; or Ax.
She
won’t break down. She’s a trouper. What’s going on with her will be our private nightmare.

‘Sage,’ said Harry, ‘I should mention to you about the back up. There’ll be an escort. The guys will be discreet, but they’ll never be far away, from now on.’

Sage was absurdly pleased to have been cast as the hulking minder. But no thanks, Harry. We don’t like to have other people’s servants hanging around us. Especially not if they’re armed. ‘We don’t need that. Call them off.’

‘Huh? Look, there’s not going to be trouble, but the studio would feel better, it’s customary on a journey of this kind.’

‘The times we live in. I said no. It’s not the right message, we’re supposed to be pacifists, are we not? We drove across Mexico alone, we’re not scared.’