Bold as Love

by Gwyneth Jones

  She wiped away the tears that were running down her face.

  ‘I’m so sorry for him.’

  Later, around midnight, they gathered in the Sunlight Bar. No staff: they were serving themselves. They’d come to find Ax, hoping that Ax home from the wars would have some brilliant solution, but Ax wasn’t doing them any good. He was in a booth by the terrace, Fiorinda in his arms and her head on his shoulder, neither of them taking much notice of anyone. Sage was in the window seat opposite, staring through dark glass into the night. The others, grouped around these three, were getting drunk but not at all merry, wreathed in cannabis smoke but not at all mellow. Gallows humour impelled them to discuss Bleeding Heart, the Heads’ new album, which was raking it in, usual Aoxomoxoa and the Heads style. And that hideous hit single, too.

  ‘What do you do with all your money Sage?’

  ‘Don’t think he spends it on clothes,’ muttered Allie.

  ‘It all goes on running that van,’ said Chip. ‘How many fossil fuel gallons to the millimetre?’

  ‘Van doesn’t run on petrol, so there.’

  ‘Doesn’t run at all, mostly,’ said George Merrick. ‘Can’t get greener than that.’

  ‘So where does the fortune go?’ insisted Verlaine. ‘What’s the secret vice?’

  ‘I give it away.’

  ‘What, all of it?’

  ‘Nah, just most of it.’

  What was ‘Who Knocks’ about? The lyrics weren’t provided, you had to piece them together. There’s this cannibal in a cellar, (it would have to be a cellar, wouldn’t it) sitting among bones and bits of flesh, that used to be beautiful girls, (spooky, delicate detail about the beauty of parts: hair, eyes, ears, etc). There’s a staircase with a door at the top. He’s watching this door, up there in the shadows. Someone’s knocking, it’s a woman he’s killed and eaten, she wants to come in, he’s very scared, should he let her in?

  Well, does he let her in or doesn’t he. We need to know, and it is not clear.

  ‘Can’t remember.’

  ‘You are so weird, Sage,’ said Anne-Marie. Since that night, the second utterly terrible night in their history, Anne-Marie and Smelly Hugh had switched camps; and been accepted, with reservations. Anne-Marie was okay, if she was a bit of a crystal swinging folkie: and Smelly wasn’t such a bad guy. ‘Why d’you have to do a song about a serial killer anyway?’

  ‘Tisn’t about a serial killer.’

  ‘How d’you know it isn’t? You just said you’ve forgotten what it’s about.’

  ‘Because I’m not a serial killer.’

  Sage had taken off his mask for the video session. The skull was back in place, but there wasn’t much sign of that glorious monster, Aoxomoxoa. The person there in the window, tired and still, absently fending off the banter, was much more like the Sage that Fiorinda and the Heads knew; and now Ax. But the guy in Who Knocks is meant to be me, he said: and implications blossomed like cancers. How far from Sage’s personal darkness to what Pigsty did? How far from those dead children to the heart of rock and roll?

  Everybody is thinking the same thing, thought Fiorinda. We went to that seminar, out of pique, or curiosity, or because those tree-hugging, car-trashing hippies were about to become important; or for some other reason that seemed important at the time. Really we were looking for our leader, and we found him. But the leader wasn’t Ax, it was Pigsty. That’s what we have to face now, delayed reaction, finally hitting us. Paul invented him, we accepted him. We went along.

  ‘Why’s he protecting the other bastards in the videos?’ said Dilip, eventually.

  ‘I don’t think he’s protecting them,’ said Ax. ‘I think they may be dead.’

  ‘He’s killed them, too?’

  ‘Not exactly. Remember the death row thing? Five of those prisoners were re-offending lifers, on paedophile charges. I think Pigsty’s movie-making friends may have been among them.’

  ‘God,’ said Sage: and then, frowning, ‘Why didn’t you tell DCI Holland that?’

  ‘Because I only just thought of it.’

  The emotional atmosphere deteriorated further, if that were possible.

  Abruptly, Sage jumped up, like a huge bouncing toy. ‘Ah, this is no good. C’mon, let’s go somewhere, out. Not the San. Let’s see if Allie can get us in somewhere cool and fashionable.’ The skull wore its craziest grin. ‘C’mon, come on. On your feet, out of here, all of you, let’s hit the town.’

  Next day at the Insanitude, in the room the Few had refitted as their office, with the windows overlooking the Victoria Monument, everyone pitched in to bring As up to date. A ring of scuffed tables and chairs, secondhand classroom furniture bought very cheaply, had become their forum. Ax and Sage took places on either side of Fiorinda. The alert, don’t-even-think-about-it physical presence they’d brought back from Yorkshire made them look like her bodyguards.

  The government was keen to co-operate with Ax’s Crisis Management plans, not so keen on funding. Luckily the dangerous element in the drop out hordes, still growing, still roaming around looking for action, seemed happy, for the moment, with free gigs, good works, beer money; the occasional dodgy vegetable curry. In some regions the Volunteer Initiative was working well, some not so good. There was a danger that employers would use the volunteers as free labour and dump their unskilled staff, simply exacerbating the problem.

  ‘It doesn’t happen much,’ said Fiorinda. ‘They give our drop-outs simple chores, that do not cause much damage, and displace no one.’

  ‘Good, that’s good. Better than I’d hoped.’

  ‘They like the romantic packaging, but they know they’re buying into a protection racket. Do just what the Countercultural Movement wants, or else.’

  ‘Right,’ said Ax, grinning. ‘Wouldn’t want it otherwise. We need them scared.’

  The Few laughed, very glad to have Ax back, to have these three installed: a wall nothing was going to get through, an inevitable triumvirate.

  Pigsty was formally charged and taken into custody. Fiorinda persuaded him to co-operate with the psychiatric assessment. She went on visiting him, in the remand centre at Lloyd Park in Croydon, the Category A public sector prison that had replaced the disgraced Wormwood Scrubs. The story in the media grew in baroque detail, but the expected eruption of Countercultural violence did not happen, not even in Saul Burnet’s native Northampton.

  The Chosen came up to London and had a terrible conference with their frontman and with Kit Minnitt, the band’s manager. But then, instead of quitting, Ax started gigging with them, driving down to the West after dark, meeting the others wherever they were playing. No advertising, people just arrived and found Ax on stage, and were thrilled: and the fingers still worked, though it seemed to Ax that they should not. They began to plan the album, their first since Dirigiste, that would become Put Out The Fire—the valedictory, the personal goodbye from the Chosen to a lost world, that seemed to belong to everyone who’d been travelling with them through these two years. The title was not a reference to the end of the Islamic Campaign, but to a classic Who track. It meant, that song is over. There’s no going back.

  It was amazing how normal life seemed in this interlude; normal in terms of what they’d started to call normal. Slave for manager Ax. Do your shift on the hospital cleaning, the hedge planting, the classroom aiding; whatever’s going. Late at night, if you get the chance, do some drugs and get on the town with Aoxomoxoa. Lean on the big strange guy’s ferocious energy, like all those global punters, until he pounces on some willing unknown, and disappears with her. As Dilip said, watching Sage on the pull was like flat racing: over too quick to be entertainment.

  ‘Have you noticed,’ said Verlaine to Chip, ‘how he keeps away from her on the dancefloor? Because when he’s smashed out of his brain he can’t trust himself—’

  ‘He keeps away from me too,’ sighed Chip, ‘I tries not to take it personal. You are way off, Pippin. Haven’t you noticed him and Ax? It’s classic, innit. The end
less one night stands, the mask, the outrageous homophobic remarks—’

  ‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ said Verlaine unkindly. ‘I’m right.’

  They’d been missing their telly, for which they had no time under Ax’s regime. Triumvirate watching was shaping up as an excellent soap—substitute.

  Ax went to visit his old lady in Hastings, the one he’d met at the Volunteer Initiative launch. Her name was Laura Preston, nice coincidence. She was ninety nine now, and still glad to be alive. She said she thought bringing back National Service was a good idea, but there ought to be something for the girls. His postcards from Yorkshire were up on her wall.

  Then the shrinks said Pig was sane. He would stand trial, and it was time to talk the thing out.

  Saul Burnet’s parents were members of a magical cult: not mainstream Satanist or Pagan, something of the group’s own invention. He was sexually and violently abused by both his parents, and others, when he was four and five and six years’ old. Then his parents split up, he went to live with his maternal grandparents and had no further contact with that lifestyle. In his early twenties he began to collect kiddie porn, and was drawn into the world of sexual violence against children. He got scared when some of his confederates were arrested, and gave it all up. When he returned to the habit, and started using the house on Ruskin Road, he avoided all former contacts. No one, not even his closest associates, knew what was going on. He would take children there, assault them in the cellar that he’d set up to look like the room that had dominated his childhood; and record the action. He had to frighten them, hurt them and particularly immobilise them, or he didn’t get a good experience. But he knew it was wrong and he only did it when he really needed to do it.

  He’d been forced to do away with four children during the past five years, due to the stress of the Organs’ success, and then Paul Javert’s Think Tank, and all that had followed. On each occasion, although he admitted he’d tortured them, the death had been an accident that he could explain. He had tried to preserve them, because that was what seemed right, like the ancient Egyptians. He believed that his wife must have been secretly filming him, and that was how she had found out about the house.

  ‘Four bodies have been found,’ Fiorinda went on. ‘Three little girls and a boy, where he said they would be. No more, though the police have taken the place apart. In most respects Pigsty’s version checks out, except his story of how he procured.’ She gazed ahead of her for a moment, this word gave Fiorinda trouble. Her bodyguards, though they did not stir or look at her, seemed to the rest of the circle to have moved closer…‘procured the children. He says he “bought them off the internet”, but the details aren’t convincing. He’s protecting his sources. So that’s it. Everything I’ve told you has yet to be fully investigated, proved, names named; stand up in court. But it will. Including the torture, to the point of death. Nobody, not the police or Pigsty’s defence team, has any doubt of what’s going to happen.’

  ‘That’s why he hated cameras,’ murmured Roxane. ‘The fear of getting caught.’

  Fiorinda gave Rox a puzzled look. ‘No. It’s because he hates to be reminded. Cameras make him feel sick.’

  ‘The trial won’t come up for months,’ said Ax. ‘It could be a year, or two. But as the law stands, and the way Pigsty has reacted, he’s going to die.’

  ‘Maybe it’s what he wants,’ said Dilip quietly, while the rest stayed silent.

  ‘I’m quite sure it is,’ Fiorinda had started some careful crosshatching in the margin of her printed notes. She spoke without looking up.

  ‘But what do we want,’ said Ax. ‘Should he die, or should he live? Well?’

  The office was barred to its normal traffic, no one in here today but the remains of the Counter Cultural Think Tank. It was February. Weak, clear, morning sunshine streamed through the naked windows: made a glowing aureole of Fiorinda’s hair and bathed Ax’s long fingered, well-knit hands in silver; but left untouched the rosy darkness of the skull’s blank eyes.

  ‘Will you go on wearing the mask, Sage?’ asked Roxane, suddenly.

  Three other deathsheads turned on hir as one, displeased at being separated from their chief. ‘It’s a fair question,’ said Sage. ‘We’ve talked about it. Yeah, we’ll keep the masks. If we stop wearing them, that says the next weird-looking person you meet is probably a murdering paedophile Satanist. We better reverse the drugs legislation, fold the volunteer programme, go back to worshipping at Tescos, let gun culture and green concrete agribusiness have their wicked way. Clear the campgrounds, shoot down any resistance. I don’t think that makes much sense.’

  ‘A good answer.’

  ‘Probably have to have some kind of global ban on the Heads’ music too. Then I wouldn’t be rich an’ famous any more, and I wouldn’t like that at all.’

  ‘But I asked you something,’ said Ax, with a faint smile. ‘I mean it. I want to know what you all think.’

  Rob looked disgusted. ‘How can we answer that? It’s not our business.’

  ‘It might be.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Felice, ‘I’m not in favour of a life for a life. I didn’t like it when they brought the death penalty back, before I ever knew what was coming. But you just came back from a shooting war that started half way up the M1, Ax. People die by violence all the time in this city, and all the cities of England. This is our times, we got the law for these times. You say he’s ours. Dilip says, he’s ours. I hear you. But I’m sorry, I don’t see the death of one sick, murdering bastard, who doesn’t even want to live, is a big issue.’

  ‘Good point,’ said Sage.

  The other Babes made it known that they were with Felice.

  ‘What about you, Sage,’ asked Cherry. ‘What’s your choice?’

  ‘I’ve spent the last couple of months playing paintball with live ammunition, in defence of the nation state. It was a lot of fun, but I don’t know: somehow I still can’t stick judicial murder. I vote for life.’

  ‘I say he lives,’ said Roxane grimly. ‘I hate the death penalty. It stinks.’

  ‘Lives,’ said Chip, his round cherub face almost looking grown up.

  ‘Life without parole,’ said Verlaine. ‘It’s the only way.’

  ‘He would be better off dead,’ said Dilip. ‘Back to the clay, remoulded in the hands of the Divine. But that’s too bad. We cannot let him go, we must carry him round our necks like the albatross, we cannot pretend he didn’t happen, we have to keep him by us over the years, assimilate, accept, who knows, maybe redeem our shame, our boss. Life.’

  ‘He should die,’ said Fereshteh, in a low voice. She wasn’t wearing the burqa, only the hejab scarf. She never wore the burqa again, but the change was hard on her. Her liquid dark eyes looked to Fiorinda for support, but found none: she quickly lowered her glance, trying to make a veil of just not looking at anyone.

  ‘Fiorinda?’ said Ax.

  ‘I think it is cruel,’ she answered, concentrating on her crosshatching, the clipped accent well to the fore. ‘I think it is torture, because I don’t believe he can recover or repent. He’s not capable of that, Dilip. But he has to live.’

  Ax kept talking it around. In the end they all said live. Even the Babes and their man, even Smelly Hugh. Even Fereshteh: because that was the answer Ax wanted. It was ruthless attrition. He didn’t go after their hearts and minds, just their assent. They didn’t have to mean it, he was satisfied to nag them into saying the right thing. That’s Ax, thought Sage. Always the art of the possible, always willing to take partial, fucked up and temporary, if that’s what he can get. How strange that that’s what makes him such a formidable guy—the way he’s prepared to settle for a fuck-up.

  ‘Okay,’ said Ax, at last. ‘I said, it might be our business. Or my business. I saw the er, the real Prime Minister again, yesterday.’ His expression was reserved, bleak: not a hint of triumph. ‘He made me an offer. Not unexpected, but…well, I made him a counter offer. I told him I want a referendum on
the death penalty, and if the people vote for capital punishment, I won’t accept the Presidency. For the record, he says it’s not out of the question, in the life of this Parliament. There’s been a “revulsion of feeling”, on that issue, among others. I told him that’s not good enough. I need an answer now, or they can find someone else to babysit the CCM, and pick another Funky Green Ceremonial Head of State.’

  They had known the Presidency was on the cards. For everyone except Sage and Fiorinda, the rest was a shock.

  ‘This is important,’ said Ax. ‘The guys offering me this job know the truth about Massacre Night. They may not have known about the children, but they knew Pigsty was a cold-blooded murderer when they hired him. Now they’re glad of the chance to be rid of the monster. I want the Presidency, I admit. I think I can use that position. But I’m not quite hypocrite enough to try and build the Good State over Pigsty’s dead body.’

  ‘A referendum takes forever to organise,’ protested Roxane. ‘The CCM won’t wait. They’ll play hell if they don’t see you installed soon—’

  ‘Day and a half to pass a bill,’ said Fiorinda, doodling hard. ‘If there’s a will to do it, and cross party support. A month or so to print slips and mobilise the polling stations. Electronic voting is fucked-up and discredited, but the traditional method is on the shelf, and in working order. It’s like the corporate music biz. If they don’t care, they’ll sit on your stuff for years. If they’re keen, it’s hyped and out all over the world in a week.’

  ‘So, they’ll be voting on whether or not to retain the death penalty?’

  ‘They’ll know what they’re voting for.’ said Sage. ‘We’ll make sure of that.’

  ‘Sage,’ said Fiorinda, getting next to him and away from Ax, as the meeting broke up. ‘Are you registered to vote anywhere?’

  The skull looked a little shifty. ‘Not sure. I might be, down in Cornwall.’