Castles Made of Sand (24 page)

‘Not so easy come by, these days. What d’you think? What should we do?’

The room was kitchen-white-bright: electric light in here, not ATP. They looked at each other, baffled, saddened. Fiorinda had been sterilised without her consent when she was thirteen—after she’d given birth to her father’s child, the little boy who had died when he was three months old. They knew she longed for a baby, and believed it was possible the sterilisation could be reversed. But she hated doctors, and refused to consider
going to the whitecoats
.

‘I don’t care if she never has a kid,’ said Ax. ‘Well, okay, I’m lying. I’d give a lot to see her with my baby in her arms. Or yours, big cat.’ But Sage had Marlon. ‘But what I want is Fiorinda. She nearly died, the first time. Did you know that?’

‘Yeah.’ Sage poked at the jumble of poppers in the incense box, sorting out a few gentle downers. ‘But she was a child then. It would be different.’

‘I think she doesn’t want to go to the doctors because… It’s a fuck of a thing to get into, fertility treatment: talk to Felice. Leave aside the Green dilemma, you can give yourself years of pain and misery, and end up with nothing.’

‘Are we
sure
it’s the baby thing? What else happened tonight? She wore the suit. You know, that suit pisses her off. She’s not
Fiorinda
any more—’

‘I love her in it. Makes me so horny. Our babe in gentleman’s tailoring is the most erotic thing I’ve ever seen.’

‘Me too.’ They grinned at each other. ‘But I’ll
burn
it, if it gives her nightmares. I was talking about the Zen Self. Could it have been that?’

‘Nah. Why on earth…? Fuck, we’ll have to tell her she’s doing this.’

‘I don’t know: I don’t want to make a big deal over a couple of broken nights.’

‘Okay. See how we think in the morning.’

Sage came and sat down, pulled his chair close and put his arm round Ax’s shoulders. Ax leaned back against him (the oxytocin thrill of all physical contact, that lingers for months or years), reached for a lighter and sparked up.

‘You ever thought of giving up, Ax? There’s other ways to get high.’

‘Knock it off,’ said Mr Dictator, firmly.

Dian had sent them an early copy of her book. Congratulations were in order, and they better be tactfully phrased, the media babe is
proud
of this one. Here’s the sword in the stone, on the front. Ax sighed, leafing the pages…

‘Strange woman. Pop-journalists live on a planet all of their own.’

‘As rebel-icons it is our fate to become corpses in the mouths of the bourgeoisie.’

‘Don’t fucking start… I hope she never finds out about
why
we did Bridge House. The crass actuality of Fiorinda’s horsetrading.’

‘Nah, she’d spin it to make herself look good. Never pity them, Ax.’

They looked at the pictures, already touching and nostalgic as old family photos. ‘Are you
sure
you want a kid?’ Sage yawned. ‘You know, they can wake up howling fifteen times a night, and do it for months—’

‘I’m sure. But not if it’s going to fuck her up.’

‘So this is what you do,’ said Fiorinda, coldly.

She stood in the doorway, hollow-eyed and tousled. ‘You get together in secret, late at night, and discuss loopy Fiorinda. I’m so sorry about the fatherhood yearnings. You want to trade me in for a fully working model?’

The two men stared at her, guilty as charged.

Don’t answer. There is
no
correct answer.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘You had a nightmare,’ said Ax, cautiously.

‘Oh, I see. Have I been having nightmares often?’

‘One or two,’ Sage admitted. ‘It was me and Alain, wasn’t it? Pissing you off.’

Fiorinda gave him a sour smile. ‘That’s right, change the subject. Full marks for low cunning, let’s talk about something else than babies. Okay. Fine… You are kidding yourselves. There’s no
beyond all limits
. What happens after the total derangement of the senses is you settle down and become an institution.’

‘Please forgive us,’ said Ax. ‘We won’t do it again.’

‘Whatever it was. We are tactless oafs, but we love you.’

‘Oh shit, okay. I’m being horrible. Come back to bed. I love you too.’

She did not break their sleep again, but she was starting to remind them of the damaged teenager they had known. One evening a couple of weeks later Ax was alone in the flat, reading government papers and wondering where his girlfriend had got to. Sage was in Reading, occupied with the Zen Self. At last Fiorinda called. He asked her where she was: she said she was out, and it transpired that she meant out with someone else, yeah, and why not? She would not be home before morning, so don’t wait up and I’m switching my phone off now.

He settled to his work again, feeling lonely and shaken.

There’d been a time in the past when Ax and Fiorinda had both played away relentlessly, and in the most hurtful way possible. So, not new bad news.

But
what’s happening
? What’s happening to my darling—?

Shortly Sage arrived, big and bouncy, growling about the fucking trains.

‘Where’s Fee?’

‘Out.’

‘Oh,’ said Sage, surprised. ‘Back soon?’

‘No.’ Ax kept his eyes on the documents. ‘She’s at the 69, with that Chinese drummer. Not sure of the name. Very pretty young guy. She won’t be home.’

‘
What?
’

‘You heard.’

‘Ax, I don’t get this. She asked me to come up tonight.’

‘Welcome to my world.’

‘Shit. What’s
wrong
? What the fuck is wrong?’

‘Don’t know. Could be that she’s nineteen, wild and free, whereas you are turning into an unavailable neuroscience nerd and I am a
fucking
bureaucrat.’

Ax went on reading. Sage, on the opposite couch, chewed the surviving joint of his right thumb and staring at the gas flames. Silence reigned.

At last Sage jumped up. ‘Ah, this is no good. Leave that. Get your coat, c’mon, you can drive me somewhere.’

Ax found himself guided, swiftly and surely (curiously, Sage was a good navigator when not behind the wheel) towards the south-west motorways.

‘Sage, what is this? I am
not
driving you to Cornwall.’

‘No, no. Devon will do fine.’

Ah well. What’s the point of being a rockstar dictator, if you can’t burn up some Private Transport Hypocrisy records once in a while. They reached Croyde at two in the morning. Sage led the way through the chill, sea-scented night, the sparkling moonlight, to a café with a weatherboard upper storey, and chucked gravel at a window. A woman’s torso appeared there rosily in lamplight, generous naked breasts, broad moon-apples eyeing them. She opened the window and leaned down.

‘Oh, hi, Sage.’

‘Hi, Mel. Keys, keys!’

‘Just a minute.’

She vanished, came back and chucked a bunch of keys into Sage’s cupped palms. The keys opened a cavernous workshop on the beach, smelling of wax and solvents; white dust hanging in the air. They suited up, took a couple of boards and headed for the water. Before the first plunge Ax was ready to rebel, IT IS FEBRUARY YOU MANIAC, but once he was in it the sea was thrilling: warmer than the air, full of tremendous life. The waves came in beautiful sets, straight as if drawn by a ruler, not big, but big enough. There was no rivalry, no competition, not tonight: it was pure joy.

When they’d had enough they sat on the beach, insulated by good suits and warmed by all that energy. The moon was fabulous. Ax sifted cold silky sand through his fingers. ‘Maybe we’re not quite over the hill yet.’

‘Nyah, this proves nothing. My dad’s over seventy and he surfs.’

‘Your dad is
over seventy
?’

‘Yeah. He’s seventy-five.’

‘He doesn’t look it!’

Sage’s dad was five foot eight or so, olive skin, silver-dusted jet-black hair: you could see he’d been the spit of Marlon Williams when he was a kid.

‘Mm,’ agreed Sage gloomily. ‘He doesn’t, does he? People will be taking him for my younger brother in a year or two.’

Ax grinned at the sea. ‘Fancy a fuck?’

Sage glanced at him sidelong, looked at the sky and laughed, glittering with mischief. ‘Shit. I was planning to jump on you.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Too late. It wouldn’t be the same. Well. There’s a mattress in the loft.’

The mattress was very seedy. The icy dark air wrapped them round. They lay together afterwards, intertwined, unwilling to move; while the cold crept over their sweated skin, and breathing slowed—

‘D’you think we’re taking this too seriously?’ whispered Ax.

‘No baby, I don’t. I never would have believed I’d end up in bed with a bloke, but you’re the love of my life. You and Fiorinda, both.
Nothing
else matters.’

‘I meant, the way she’s behaving. As if she’s really fucked off with us—’

‘Oh. Hahaha… Well, maybe. Maybe we just have to stop being boring.’

‘But you’re the love of my life too. You and Fiorinda.
Nothing
else matters.’

‘All we need to do is remember that.’

They pulled a disreputable rug over themselves, slept for an hour and zoomed back to London in the dark of dawn, a steady hundred and forty klicks around the potholes and the surface breaks. Sage, curled up in the passenger seat, opened an eye and mumbled plaintively, do you have to drive so fast?

‘
Yeah
.’

She was home before them. She came out into the stairwell as they let themselves in down below.

‘Hi,’ said Sage, ‘did you fuck your pretty Chinese kid?’

They stood looking up: eyes shining, purely delighted to see her back safe.

Her heart turned over. She couldn’t believe she had been trying to hurt them. She realised that the words that might have burst from her…
I think my father is trying to make me pregnant again…
were completely and utterly mad, and there was no way in the world she would ever speak them—

‘Yes I did,’ she said, in a small voice. ‘But I don’t know why. I’m an idiot.’

They bounded up the stairs and hugged her. ‘I don’t mind if you want to fuck other people,’ said Sage. ‘Well, I do, but that’s my business. As long as you come home—’

‘You missed a
great
night out,’ Ax told her, between kisses. ‘Stick with us, sweetheart. We’re not dead yet. We’ll show you a good time.’

And everything was good and wonderful again, for a while.

In March Kevin Verlaine had a bad snapshot trip. This was a first. The rest of them had all taken a hammering, despite the most careful mood-control and pre-medication. The afterburn from a bad one was horrendous, though you lost the actual memory very quickly. (In a way, Ax had been lucky.
Physical
symptoms meant you just must not touch the stuff.) Only Ver had escaped. They’d teased him about the purity of his life; but now no longer.

He was so distressed they had to keep him in the recovery room, deep inside the eau-de-Nil dome. Sage sat up with him (Ver couldn’t bear to have anyone else): wearing the living skull mask; which the patient found comforting. Hour on hour, listening to the kid’s incoherent despair, and telling him, over and over,
there’s no new bad news
. Whatever you saw, it’s always been there. The world is the same as it was yesterday. You lived with it then, you can live with it now…

By morning Ver was calm and Sage was exhausted. They ate breakfast together, alone, because the patient was still fragile—Rivermead yoghurt, Welsh honey, fresh bread; and the weak malted ale that was the current romantic alternative to coffee: Staybehind breakfast beverage of choice.

‘Sage,’ said Verlaine, ‘does Ax know about the
Flowers for Algernon
scenario?’

Flowers for Algernon
was the nethead term for what might happen—if you kept a primitive pre-Crisis chip in your head for too long. Yes, Ax knew the risks. No, he would not consider getting rid of the thing. He
needed
his chip. Sage felt a prickle of unease… Verlaine had cut his long hair recently, not short enough to be an annoying
imitation
of his idol; but getting there. Silky brown curls clustered close around his head. He looked innocent as a child.

‘He knows. Tell me about it. Fucker thinks he’s the exception to every rule. What put that into your head, Ver?’

‘Something I saw on the snapshot. I don’t think his chip had
failed
, that wasn’t what gave me the horrors, but something—’

This was another first. It was nearly twenty hours since Kevin Verlaine had taken the neural aligner and made his brief, elliptical voyage to the State of All States. He wasn’t supposed to remember a thing by this time—and it didn’t matter, anyway. Everything they knew said the snapshot ‘visions’ were noise, not signal. They were not glimpses of the actual future (if there is such a thing); or past, or present. You wake up from sobbing at your lover’s deathbed, with a host of circumstantial detail, but it doesn’t mean
you were there
, it’s some kind of metaphor the neurons have invented.

No one here gets out alive, we knew that already—

‘Oh really?’ Sage, zinging to full attention, kept his tone perfectly casual. Fuck. If only Verlaine were still hooked up.
This we have to see
, it could mean nothing, but I need to know what is going on inside that curly head, right now—

At that moment something came into the sunlit green honeycomb cell, filling every angle of the walls, every atom of the air. A limitless sweetness, bathing all of existence; an intensity, a perfume, a sound, a delicious taste. Synasthesia. Sage and Verlaine smiled at each other, involuntarily, more tender than lovers.

The world is terrible: and yet when we have approached
the whole
of all that is, the penumbra of that contact falls on us as this ravishing delight—

That’s the Zen Self. That’s what keeps people addicted to the quest.

The visitation passed. ‘Shall we log that?’ asked Verlaine.

‘Yeah. How d’you feel now?’

‘Oh, better.’

‘D’you remember what you were just saying?’

‘No… What was I saying?’

‘I can’t remember either,’ Sage lied. ‘Come on, let’s check you out.’