Castles Made of Sand (35 page)

Alain’s eyes narrowed. ‘Oh yes. Another thing, what’s happened to Mr Phrasebook?
When
did you learn to speak French like a human being?’

‘He was speaking Polish earlier,’ said Arek, acutely. ‘I think it’s his chip.’

‘Nah, evening classes.’ However, the truth would be more annoying, and even in this empty world, annoying M. de Corlay remains a worthwhile project. ‘Oh, okay, it’s Serendip. I have a facet of Serendip on my chip, that’s who’s doing the ST. And it feels bizarre,’ he added, unaugmented, ‘so I’m going
au naturel
for the evening, if you don’t mind. English or nothing,’ A feeling like gentle claws withdrawing their grip.

‘
Nom d’un nom
,’ said Alain. ‘Possessed by the machine. Ax, what are you doing to us? You realise how the Celtics, those savages, how they’ll
love
this?’

‘Nyah, you’re just jealous.’

They all went out to a big bar on the Leidesplain and argued techno-greenery until the French decided they had better things to do. Arek stayed with Ax, eyeing up non-revolutionary pre-clubbers through a haze of cannabis smoke, and complaining of the dullness of life in Kracow, where Countercultural violence had never taken off—just endless bitching about the Quarantine. The music loop in the bar featured the dancemix of the Heads’ current single, ‘Heart On My Sleeve’. Also Fiorinda’s ‘Chocobo’. They came round incessantly.

‘How familiar it is, how
Polish
, this pointless factionism. Did you know, Ax, I am a Celt! The Ancient Celts were everywhere, a truly European
phenomenon
, I know I must not say race. My eyes are typically Celtic! I can be on both sides of the bloodbath! But who would have thought Western Europe would be the first to go? It’s unreal.’

‘Anyone who looked at a population density map, that’s who,’ said Ax.

‘You think it’s that simple?’

‘I think when the shit hits the fan, suddenly things get very simple, and that’s the worst fucking shit of all. The challenge is to keep things complicated.’

Here comes ‘Heart On My Sleeve’ again… Arek propped his chin on his hand and gazed at Ax, soulfully. ‘How did you do it, Ax? I have been trying to get Sage into bed for years, he has just laughed at me. Held me off with one hand, you know—’

Ax shrugged. ‘Try getting him killed a few times. Wreck his career, steal his girl, make him into a murderer. Worked for me.’

‘Oh dear, don’t tell me you two have fallen out. My perfect couple!’

Ax would have to find the right tone for answering questions about his lovers.

‘Nah, just joking. Nothing’s wrong. We’re fine.’

Arek shook his head. ‘It’s the girl. You should ditch the girl. She had made trouble between you, of course she has. Women always make trouble—’

‘You know,’ said Ax, ‘Sage is right. The gay nation stinks. Bunch of shit-for-brains self-centred misogynist wannabes. I fucking hate ’em.’

‘Okay, okay! I step off the holy ground! But my God, you must not part with Sage! He is your Charioteer. Your hero-companion, your guide in battle. That’s very Celtic!’

‘Arek, I wouldn’t mind just
not hearing
the word Celtic for a few hours.’

Someone came up. It was the US Correspondent. She wanted to introduce herself, which, at this juncture, Ax found extremely welcome. Arek grinned and winked. ‘Now I’ll go and find some other conversation for a while. You want to come along to the darkroom at De Olifant later, Ax? It might be fun, huh?’

The US correspondent was a futuristic-Utopian who’d been around in the chatrooms, before Ivan/Lara. She’d usually been dressed (so to speak) as the Addams Family butler. He tried not to look taken aback. He’d had ‘Lurch’ down as a female teenager, shy and bold, full of naïve enthusiasms, which appeared to be right. He hadn’t envisaged her weighing-in at sixteen stone (or thereabouts; and she wasn’t tall), with a sparse thatch of straw hair, a slab of whey face and tiny eyes almost devoid of brows or lashes. He offered a cigarette. She looked at the pack with alarm and said earnestly, ‘I think it’s
great
, the way you’re the eco-warrior king of England, and, but, but you smoke cigarettes and you take drugs and you drive a sports car. That’s so cool.’

Americans won’t say ‘Dictator’. They just won’t. It pissed Ax off no end to be associated with the departed royals, but he knew there was no use arguing.

‘It’s not a sports car. Let me buy you a drink, then.’

‘Oh no. No! I’ll buy. It’s wonderful to meet you, er, Ax—’

They chatted. Her real name (sorry, her original name) was Kathryn Adams.

She was a journalist, kind of, by profession. He detected hero worship, for which he wasn’t in the mood: but she disarmed him, somehow. Within a few minutes she’d explained her appearance. She’d been a trisomy, a Down’s Syndrome. ‘My parents had the learning difficulties fixed, but not the cosmetic problems because they’re Christians, and now I’m grown, I’ve decided I like looking like this. I like being invisible.’ He didn’t doubt the story. Expensive futuristic stuff, that kind of therapy: but she smelled of serious money. Invisible? Not exactly, but ‘Lurch’ was a very smart cookie, and nobody would guess; nobody would
look
at her too often. What a decision. Ax did not think of himself as vain, but he couldn’t imagine it. Made you wonder about those filthy rich parents, what they’d done to their kid’s self-image… In the end she had to get back to her hotel. Ax found Arek, who had got himself totally smashed, and hauled him out of a fracas with a bunch of Belgian hippies—something about the European Flag, and the good name of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

I can do this, thought Ax. In Bucharest he’d been an automaton, performing the ‘Ax Preston’ routines and feeling nothing. He’d been afraid of Amsterdam, where there’d be people he knew. But he was okay. Walking on knives, but he was fine. He was good.

Next morning at the Tropen, Ax was eating his breakfast, alone at a table in the museum café. Alain sat down, bright-eyed and malign.

‘So, you left the Milky Bar Kid home alone? Was that wise, my friend?’

Ax ate his black rice pudding. Shards of soft, fresh coconut on top, fucking ace. What it is to be off the offshore island. ‘Why wouldn’t it be wise?’

The little Breton put his head on one side, eyes snapping with
Schadenfreude
(or whatever is the French for that). ‘Hm… I should tell you, when I was in Reading last, I said to Sage if he and Fiorinda needed a place to run, they could come to me.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Ax was unmoved. ‘What did he say?’

‘He didn’t say anything. He hit me. With force. Then he picked me off the floor and we went on with our conversation as if nothing had happened.’

‘We drop the subject,’ said Ax, grinning.

‘Of course. You trust him, that’s your business. Not another word.’

The days passed. The European Crisis opened up before him. There were scuffles between technos and Celtics; that led to conference-goers being banned from every decent club round the Rembrandtsplein. There was a live album recorded at the Paradiso, Ax playing guitar in a Floods Conference supergroup: a very mixed bag. The Van Gogh Museum was stormed by art-for-a-cause locals (street theatre, no damage to a major tourist attraction). Ax managed to avoid the English contingent, and the rest of the British nations, by the simple expedient of becoming the spokesperson for the techno-greens, a role that everybody seemed to think belonged to him anyway.

He felt like a visitor from another planet, because no one knew what was going on in his head. No one knew that in his heart he had quit the job that made him famous. Maybe his secret freedom made it easier for him to take on the Conference. He knew he was doing well. The quarantine debate went like a dream, and yeah, of course he was aware that the US correspondent was in the audience. Alain jeered at Ax’s ‘tendresse’ for the Ugly American (and general sucking-up to Uncle Sam), but Ax ignored him. The kid was interesting, whoever she was: he liked her.

One freezing night, alone for a change, he bumped into a music-biz delegate from Dublin who told him that Feargal Kearney was rumoured to be dead. Vanished from the Irish scene about two years ago, and died in a rehab clinic somewhere on the wrong side of the Quarantine. Ax was guilty of not liking Fergal much. When someone ‘accidentally’ shafts you, in some needling way,
every time you talk to him
, then on some level he’s hostile, even if he did save your life. But he didn’t contradict the story—just in case Fergal really had faked his own demise. They’d never got to the bottom of how their defector had acquired the David Sale evidence. It was always possible that he’d left serious enemies behind him in Ireland.

Another day he went with Arek to the Stopera, to see one of the stranger signs of these times. In the underpass between the Town Hall and the Musiektheater, the Amsterdammers kept an exhibit showing Netherlands sea-levels. There was a woman standing by the plaque representing ‘Normal Amsterdam’, the basic sea-level of Europe. She was swathed in grey, she wore a wreath of dead flowers and birds, her face was blurred: she was about three metres tall.

‘Can you see her?’ asked Arek.

‘Yeah.’

‘What do you think? Is it a hoax? An art-for-a-cause stunt? A trick of the light?’

‘No,’ said Ax. ‘I could be wrong, but no.’

No one knew what she meant. The
grey lady
had simply appeared. She had become the Conference mascot, but no one claimed responsibility. She was insubstantial, but unlike a traditional ghost she turned up on photographic film and other recording media. Ax thought of the unpleasant apparition he and Sage had once met in Yorkshire. This was broad daylight but the feeling was the same: a compelling presence, a bending of reality.

‘She’s crying for us,’ suggested Arek. ‘She is Gaia, weeping for our fate.’

‘More likely she’s crying for herself. I don’t know that Gaia is on our side.’

‘But why now? Ax, what is happening to this stupid world? An economic crash and
pouf
, there are ghosts in the streets. I don’t think I like it.’

‘You don’t have any problem with the Blessed Virgin Mary.’

They turned and made their way through the
grey lady
’s small, permanent crowd. Maybe if she stayed she would become a shrine. ‘That’s different,’ said Arek. ‘The spiritual should be spiritual. Visions are supposed to be in the heart, and good Catholics know this, though we like our fairytales. This is
wrong,
it feels dangerous. You keep telling me our crisis is a normal market adjustment, Ax, but this is not normal. Serious laws are being broken!’

Ax shrugged. ‘It has to happen occasionally. A new model will come along.’

As he cut his swathe through the Conference, making it work because that was automatic, the pain began to overwhelm him. Every time he made one of those painful open-line calls he could not stop himself from hoping that Fiorinda would cut through the bland, damn the eavesdroppers, and beg him to come home. Every time he returned to the Tarom dormitory late at night he imagined that Sage would be there, a dearly familiar tall shadow rising from one of the scruffy armchairs in the unlit lobby,
hi rockstar, just thought I’d drop by…

Why didn’t they come to him?

They were pretending they didn’t know there was anything wrong, but they were lying: he could hear it in their voices. He forgot that he’d walked away so the lovers could be happy, all he knew was his burning pain. The video-birthday-card (which reached him in the first week of March) destroyed him. Fiorinda and Sage in the music room in Brixton, singing ‘Ain’t Misbehaving…’ So beautiful together. If he could have reached them, he’d have killed them both with his bare hands. He was in company, he had to look pleased. Late that night he went up to the Tarom roof (the only privacy available). The Rijksmuseum was strung with fairylights; there were people skating in the dark. He smashed the disc, ground it under his heel, then crawled around picking up the fragments, because this was all he had left of his darlings; and cried, and cried, and cried.

The Conference came to an end. The
grey lady
might remain until deep waters drowned her, but the cheap hotels were emptying, hippy caravanserai were being dismantled. All the coverage was retrospective now. Tell us, Mr Preston? Who came out on on top, the Celtics or the technos? Where’s the next round going to be held? What has the Conference achieved? Where are we going? Six o’clock one morning, in the rain, Ax sat on a bench looking up at the house where Rene Déscartes had once stayed, in hiding from the world.
Everyone in this town except me is thinking about business…
But Ax had no philosophy to fill his empty head. Throwing the Sweet Track Jade into the sea had been a cowardly childish gesture. He knew he had to go back to England and resign, make it official, and then what?

He had no plans.

I’m over, he thought. I’m
finished
, and this is how it feels.

Later he met Lurch for breakfast in the Ekeko café at the Tropen. The US Correspondent was staying at the Amstel Inter’Continental, a fact she’d touchingly tried to keep from her impoverished European pals. The Light Hall was being prepared for a new exhibition. They took a nostalgic stroll through the dioramas, this entrancing giant dolls’ house so haunted by the great dying: the slaughtered forests, the bleached corals, the eroded soils. The dancing, the funerary rites: everything must go. She asked him about Sage and Fiorinda. Everyone did that, naturally. The hot couple of the hour—

‘They have a pact not to write about the relationship, don’t they? How does that work? I mean, all musicians write love songs. Is it legally binding?’

‘I don’t know how it works. I don’t write lyrics, I’m out of it.’

‘What about “Heart On My Sleeve”? How can Fiorinda think that isn’t about sex?’

‘It’s the relationship that’s off-limits, sex is okay. Or it could be,’ added Ax, for whom the topic was galling as well as miserable, ‘she thought it was about someone else.’

‘Where did you think you were heading, setting up the Rock and Roll Reich?’

‘Lurch, to tell the truth, a lot of things happened by chance.’