Bold as Love

by Gwyneth Jones

  Sage went off with some local connections of his napalming pals. Ax stayed with the first bunch: managed to get them past the gobsmacked stage, get them talking. One particular kid was intensely up on the Chosen, eager to discuss what had been going on in the making of Dirigiste (which album he kept calling Dirigible, but never mind); picking up the references to past greats with heart-warming accuracy. It was a shame he couldn’t have the attention he deserved.

  Maybe another time.

  ‘You know what it was like for me?’ said one of them—young black man in a Deconstruction Tour teeshirt, shaken voice and shining eyes of someone who has seen the light—‘It was like, the world was in shades of grey, fuckin’ shades of grey. Suddenly it went into colour. Everything was green and alive, I was doing something worthwhile, the first time in my life. Fuckin’ magic, Ax!’

  ‘Not only green,’ said Ax. ‘That would be monotonous. If you’re going to have only green, you might as well have only grey. Extremists are all alike, we want variety.’ If he’d learned one thing on the Tour, it was how to talk pleasantly to drunken louts who had got idealism. How to understand that what for him was the aftermath of a hideous trainwreck was the major event of their lives, their righteous time, the moment when they had become real.

  ‘But what about this Islamic situation. What do you guys think of it?’

  The barmies and their Doncaster mates looked at each other.

  ‘They say we’re protecting the pimps,’ burst out the Dirigiste boy, ‘it’s not fuckin’ true, Ax.’

  ‘There’s plenty of Islamics that run girls,’ added a civilian, a bulky white youth with premature Rapster Hulk tendencies. ‘Fucks’ sake… It’s them, fuckin’ minicab drivers with big guns, they won’t fucking give up—’

  ‘That’s why we gotta get military: go for the nests, burn them out.’

  ‘The way it is now, it’s horrible. Most of what happens never gets on the news, I bet you don’t even know some of it, Ax. Nail bombs, car bombs, shootings, and all these dead girls.’

  ‘We knew this Paki, we knew he’d killed this girl, his cousin or something, for walking down the street. So we took one of his girls and we cut her, not badly you know, but enough so he’d understand, and we sent her—’

  ‘It’s no good, they won’t learn. There’s only one way, got to finish them off.’

  The barmy army lads were happy to explain what Gervase was planning, they knew no reason why not. The police were useless. All they wanted to do was play with their fuckin’ helicopters. No, the barmy army was going into the Islamic towns, in strength, with artillery, and… Shock and Awe, right? It was bloodcurdling. To these young men the idea of turning Leeds—Bradford into smoking rubble was not monstrous. Many of them had done time in the regulars, had seen active service: they were used to that culture. Or they were from the south, or from the other side of the Pennines, which made more difference than you’d think. Ax kept a straight face, listened, asked questions, and set about turning their feeling on the scorched earth plan around. It would need more than one conversation in a bar, but nothing like making a start.

  Eager to offer him the best they had, they brought out a little very pure smack and rolled it up. It was Islamic smack but they didn’t think Ax would mind. In a way it was like, proof that he was right. They could get on with the Islamists, still doing business with them. Someone offered to go and fetch Aoxomoxoa.

  ‘Nah,’ said Ax. ‘Leave him alone, he’s fine where he is.’

  ‘Oh yeah, he was a junkie wasn’t he. He hates the stuff, I read that.’

  Ax leaned back on the damp red banquette. Thinking, with great clarity, this is what you do. You get a buzz going, enough so that they buy the album. They buy the next two out of punter-inertia. By the time they realise your music is not what they thought, it’s too late, you’ve changed their minds. Ripping up motorways makes them feel so good about themselves, with luck they’ll take the next thing you ask them to do on trust… So there was heroin in Yorkshire. There was very little of it in the rest of England. Since legal drugs and government analysis started, anything you couldn’t grow in England or cook in a lab had disappeared, and Dissolution hadn’t helped. Someone had synthesised a good cocaine substitute (you really wouldn’t know the difference), but there was no satisfactory replacement for the classic hard stuff. Suddenly it struck him, with more force than the mellow hammer blow of the drug itself, that there was a problem here. A problem for the future. The third biggest economy in the world, or was it now the second? Are they going to let us, in Europe, get away with this legalising everything, uncoupling the drugs from the crime route? They are not. What then? Opium Wars. Now there’s a bad problem, but never mind, got to be a solution, it’ll come to me.

  Sage, being reasonably sober, tired of the defoliation enthusiasts and came back to check on Ax. When he spotted what was going on he went off alone to prop up the bar. There isn’t a single woman in the place, he noticed. Strange, I thought we were the feminists. Someone came up beside him, and gave a huge fake start of astonishment.

  ‘Oh my God. Has this place just gone costume or are you really Aoxomoxoa?’

  ‘I’m Aoxomoxoa.’

  ‘My God! Could you stand there, while I run home and fetch my copy of Morpho?… And you could sign it or, oh no you don’t do that, well just touch it or something. My God, if I’d known—’

  ‘I’m staying for a while. You can find me again.’ Sage did not get off on being a gay icon, and he was not at this moment in the best of tempers: however, the skull grinned benignly, the skeletal hands accepted a cigarette from the guy—who seemed genuinely trembling with delight. ‘So, how do you feel about having the Green Liberation army in town?’

  The gay guy—thirty something and fresh faced, limp brown hair in a fashionable bowl cut—hesitated, leaned close. ‘It sucks. Having the barmy army in town sucks. Listen, let me tell you—’

  Somewhat later Ax was alone. His soldiers had left him to get back on duty and the civilians had gone with them. He was thinking over the facts and inferences he’d picked up, ordering and sorting, reviewing possibilities, when Sage appeared and sat beside him, looking big and wired.

  ‘Hi, rockstar. Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Hi, other rockstar. Around. Being worshiped. I haven’t felt so famous for quite a while. I came back before, but you were busy so I went away again.’ Empty sockets, black in this low light, surveyed the remains of the club crowd. ‘Ax, I don’t think I like our side.’

  ‘Nor do I. That’s partly why we have to be here, straighten them out.’

  ‘Oh yeah? You’re going to straighten them out are you, smackhead?’

  ‘It’s none of your business, Sage.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ The skull flashed him an ugly glance.

  The discussion might have continued, but it was interrupted by the sound of gunfire. They looked at each other. The steady firing broke off, then started up again appreciably closer.

  ‘Hmm’ said Sage. ‘Sounds interesting. Let’s get outside.’ They made for the exit, through a jostling crowd.

  ‘Glad I didn’t check my coat,’ muttered Ax.

  The street was in near to complete darkness, municipal lighting a casualty either of the Tour or the power crisis, but a compact group of men could be made out coming towards them, up the roadway between the High Street Generic stores. They ran and dropped, alternate rows: fired, jumped up and came rushing on. Many seemed to have white scarves wrapped round their heads. This was the enemy. Three police helicopters rattled overhead, glittering like giant dragonflies above a pool: but it was the barmies who were returning fire, from alleys and roofs and upper floors of buildings. The ordered volleys gave the scene a stylised, choreographed quality: you looked for the film crew.

  A barmy army squaddie came running, laden. He seemed very relieved to have found them, thrust an assault rifle at each of them and gabbled a mouthful of instructions, orders, something… No use, they couldn’t understand
his accent. He was gone, the video kept on unfolding, but they had no script, and no ideas for improvisation. They stood amazed: oblivious of danger.

  ‘I think Pig sent you up here to be killed,’ shouted Sage, through the racket, ‘Gervase is down to arrange the hit. And me, on account of the Pig is convinced we are best mates.’

  ‘I don’t know how the fuck he got that impression. But you could be right.’

  Ax looked at the weapon he’d been given. It was a British Army Issue SA80, box fresh. The feel of it, its weight and heft, brought a flood of olfactory illusion. He could smell blood, the warm metallic butchershop reek of Massacre Night.

  ‘We better head for that office block.’

  When they reached the block they found it livelier than they had left it, full of the bustling disorder familiar to Ax from the Tour. No sign of Gervase. Someone took them to a big room in the basement, where a burly young-middle-aged black man was drinking tea over a table full of OS maps, computer terminals and landline phones. He was wearing the combat uniform of a British Army Infantry major, a discreet pink triangle replacing the bar of colours on his tunic. With him was an elderly gent in more casual dress.

  Ax stared. ‘Richard!’

  ‘Ax! There you are. We were getting worried. Good to see you again—’

  ‘Sage,’ said Ax, grinning with relief, ‘Otherwise known as Aoxomoxoa, this is Richard Kent, friend of mine from the Deconstruction Tour. I’m glad to see you too, Richard.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Richard Kent, holding out a hand, fascinated to discover that Aoxomoxoa really did wear that mask in private life, as it were.

  The star kept his hands to himself. ‘I didn’t know the regular army was here.’

  ‘I resigned my commission last year, because I felt I could and should be part of Ax’s new wave.’ Richard shrugged. ‘Now it seems I’m in the army again.’

  ‘Where’s Gervase?’ asked Ax.

  ‘Ah, unfortunate. Beauvel-Horton was killed a few hours ago, a drive-by.’

  ‘Shame,’ said Sage. ‘We hardly had a chance to get to know him.’

  ‘I don’t think you missed much. This my lover, by the way, Cornelius Samson.’ The elderly gent looked like he deeply disapproved of the skull mask, but he nodded. ‘Another regular soldier, before he retired. But we’ve seen the light. Or jumped on the bandwagon, if you prefer.’

  Ax had been wondering how to deal with the question of those British Army SA80s. Was he supposed to pretend he didn’t know what was going on? It would have been hard, if things were made so fucking obvious, and he’d been dealing with Gervase. With Richard and Corny he was on familiar ground. On the Tour, there’d always been a great deal that must be left unsaid. Those who understood one another had worked together, over and around the criminally insane.

  There was a burst of renewed gunfire, somewhere up above. ‘It’ll be over soon,’ said Richard. ‘This is the pattern. Terrorist tactics by day, in-your-face shooting up the streets by night. The shootists come from towns just north of here, or Doncaster itself, but we can’t stop them getting in, not without building some kind of Berlin Wall. A house to house search might do the trick, but we haven’t the authority for that, nor do we want it. We have a problem, Ax. This is new to us. We never had to tackle organised armed opposition on the Tour, and we’re finding no solutions. Thank God the President sent you along. We’ve been begging him to do that, as you probably know.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ax sat down at the table. ‘Okay, I have an objective, not a solution. I want to get the violence away from the population. What about those famous moors, wilderness with a challenging microclimate, good venue for war games.’

  Richard sat down too. ‘Get them out of town? How? This is outright war, near as damn it, and this is how modern warfare works. Terrorism, street bombs, soft targets. Centres of population are what it’s about.’

  ‘Then we’ll invent post-modern warfare. Time someone did, the present version stinks. We’ve got a situation where certain cities and towns are no-go areas, in effect an Islamic territory within Yorkshire. That’s bad, but we can use it. We blockade those cities and towns. Everything that has to go in and out: water, sewage, power, we can get at those. There are mine workings that have been linked to the gas supply, to channel off the methane: we can use them. We can cut off their water, make their toilets back-up, spread farm slurry on their market gardens. We fuck them up so they have to come out and get us, and do it selectively enough that we don’t cause a humanitarian crisis, much—’

  ‘No more blowing up trains, though.’

  ‘Definitely not. I never meant to blow up any trains, it just happened. We might waylay some consumer-goods freight trucks though, that’s always fun.’

  Sage quietly took a chair. He watched, and listened, as the major and the elderly gent pored over their maps, on paper and on monitor screens; Ax relentlessly telling them the details (but they didn’t seem to mind) and showing them what could be done. Just astonishing: Massacre Night again, but this was Ax among friends. To see him like this, this focused power, put a different perspective on things. Hippie orderlies came and handed out more tea. The police liasion officer, a sober, taciturn guy called Kieran Matthews, turned up, with other barmy army de facto officers. They all listened, and made difficulties.

  ‘It’s a shame your green maniacs got away from you, and trashed the Air Force bases up here, Ax,’ complained one barmy commander. ‘God knows no one wants this to escalate. But if the conventional forces have to move in, they’ll want local air power.’

  Richard and Cornelius looked at each other and laughed.

  ‘Yeah, I was sorry about that,’ said Ax evenly. ‘Those fighters are so pretty.’

  He looked up, and around the table, including Sage in his glance. ‘A lot of things got away from me on the Tour,’ he said. ‘Things I’ll live with forever, in the dark of night. But I trashed the fighter bases on purpose. I knew about this situation, obviously. I didn’t want the Islamics or the Air Force to have the use of them. Let’s understand each other, I wanted it to be hard for any full blown violent-opposition-group conflict to get going in England. To me that was as important as the green agenda.’

  The barmies nodded gravely, apparently unaware that they themselves were a dangerous paramilitary force Ax was determined to forestall.

  ‘You did a remarkable job,’ said Richard. ‘As we now discover.’

  ‘Yeah, right, but Ax, we’re a nation state. Green is good but we gotta be able to defend ourselves, you havta see that—’

  ‘I see it. First we have to stay a nation state, which begins to look doubtful.’

  Silence around the table.

  ‘Fabius Maximus,’ said the elderly gent at last. ‘Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator, dealing with Hannibal’s invading army, in 216BC or thereabouts. Avoided the kind of battle they were trying to force on him, wore them down by cutting off their supplies. Much the same as what Ax has in mind, mutatis mutandis. Who, by delaying, saved the city and the people of Rome.’

  ‘If you say so. Yeah, delay.’ Ax looked deflated, the never-in-doubt power gone out of him. ‘That’s all I’ve got. Move the fighting out, let the police police the streets, get life normal as possible again. Let’s see how it works out.’

  The police liasion officer said he had to go. He shook Ax’s hand. ‘I’m glad to have met you, Sir. We’ll be in close contact, but if there’s anything I can do—’

  ‘There’s one thing,’ said Richard, when Matthews had gone, ‘I have to point out, Ax. If we become guerrillas, we’ll be forcing them to become an army.’

  ‘That’s happened,’ said Ax. ‘I just saw it. That’s the situation. Better engage with it.’

  So they talked on, identifying targets; ingenious ways to use the landscape. The crunch came in the morning, when after a few hours’ sleep they had to start implementing Ax’s plan. The barmy army, conveniently, was already organised into guerrilla sized groups, each a judicious mix of cl
ueless amateurs, ex-army or TA types and green-violence vets. When they moved out into the countryside, the rockstars went with them. Same as the Few and the gigs, the community service, Olwen’s projects. They had to be there. There was no way they could stay back in Doncaster sticking pins in a map, and retain artistic credibility. So those SA80s were not video props. They were real. They must be used.

  In October Sage turned up missing after a skirmish over a water pipeline. They went back for him. They’d have done it for any one, but the idea of having to carry on without Sage upset everybody, not least the Ax. They had him located him in the cellar of a house in an abandoned moorland village; that had been blown up by home-made mortars. The only approach allowed by the steep and narrow street—ancient cobbles under frayed tarmac—was covered by a sniper in the church tower. Shots came out of the body of the church as they moved through the churchyard. Ax walked, in the strange emptiness surrounding the sparse pattern of fire, around the building; found a door and blew out the lock with a short burst that was lost in the other noise. None of the Islamists in the nave saw him, as he crept up the stairs. There he found the young man, alone with his high powered rifle in a dusty space broken up by big diagonal rafters. Sixteen or seventeen years’ old, the same age as Fiorinda: blooming with new muscle and height. He’d dropped the rifle. Maybe he’d run out of ammunition, it didn’t look like a weapon that would take kindly to the kitchen sink ammo that was coming on the market. He had no way out, unless he jumped through a high window. No one had thought about his exit, fucking poor planning; he’s a marksman, he’s valuable. He clutched a grenade, about to pull the pin, yeah.

  ‘Allah Akbar!’ yelled this angry young man, fine dark eyes alight; serene.

  God is great.

  I don’t want to live at this price, thought Ax. I don’t want to. But the assault rifle—a first, he’d never before used it where he could and must know what happened on the other end—came up of its own accord: a terrific racket, Ax splattered in blood and tissue and fragments of bone. He snatched up the grenade, tossed it into the grey winter graveyard, stayed alive.