Free Band of Gypsys by Gwyneth Jones Page A

like cherries… Dilip sighed and stretched. In golden California, nearly a year ago, he’d been sure he was developing AIDS. Here he was still, in reasonable health: and single again, to his regret but it was something he couldn’t explain to her. Half a life spent dedicated to the fun , and waiting to die. You glimpse, in a moment of weakness maybe, the fun of taking control of your own death, and the idea won’t go away… He lives alone , thought Allie, across the room. Everybody’s wondering, but nothing went wrong. DK’s a good friend, great in bed, but he lives alone, end of story. She was becoming someone she hated, the well-groomed woman who gets middle-aged giving her life to an organisation. I want to be loved .
    Out of old habit she reviewed everything that could go wrong with this day, and shuddered. With this day, or with this return to England?
    Rob, Felice and Dora were glad to be home. Things had settled down. The long-running Radical Rock commune on the Lambeth Road had lost its scuzz of White-Refugee desperanto violence. They were sure Ax could do business with the CounterCultural Rebel MPs, and a workable future could be hammered out. But the old fault-lines re-asserted themselves. This b-loc stunt, bound to upset the moderates, the element we should be wooing, was it really a good ploy? Ax was always too much influenced by the weird scientists, DK, Chip and Verlaine, Sage and his band. They exchanged a sad and furtive grin, because Cherry Dawkins, junior Babe, was with Chip and Ver again: not sitting with us. She’s turning into Geek-Girl, crossing the divide, over there rubbernecking the tech operation.
    Chip missed Fiorinda’s favourite party frocks, always previously displayed on the music room walls. In fact none of her totems were visible, not the sacred scruffy secondhand Martin, or her red boots. Even her piano was shrouded in midnight velvet.
    ‘Fiorinda-space has stripped down and gone public.’
    ‘But we’re not allowed to access her secret keys,’ noted Cherry. ‘The message is conflicted. She lets us common folk in, yet she denies us access.’
    ‘Idiots. The semiotics will change when I unpack.’
    Ax sat crosslegged on a rug that belonged elsewhere, the music room carpet hadn’t come out of storage, rolling up Bristol Bud. He’d never get used to buying marijuana cigarettes in a packet, with mild government health warning attached. He lined up the neat spliffs in his smokes tin: and sighed. Can’t put this off any longer.
    ‘Can we leave you guys to it for a while?’
    ‘Yeah, fine Ax,’ said the b-loc gaffer. ‘We won’t need you for another two hours.’ They never do. They just like to make you get out of bed.
    Everyone stood up, including Marlon. ‘No,’ said Sage. ‘Not you, Mar.’
    ‘But Dad—’
    ‘You heard me. Stay here and keep an eye on the fest tv for us.’
    The boy subsided, muttering don’t talk to me as if I was a fucking pet animal . But he said this in Welsh, a language his father (allegedly) did not understand.
    Marlon cruised, while the caterers plated up and the technicians did whatever they did at desks and boards. Every choice just bounced him back to the four EB channels: English Broadcasting, Government tv. He lingered a while with a programme on the history of the Rock and Roll Reich. It was one long rock festival, apparently. Ax, Fiorinda, his dad and their mates rocking and rolling in various fields and ramshackle venues: far away from anything like civil unrest. Usually it was pissing down. Some bad guys called ‘the green nazis’ were defeated in a voiceover, ‘in the last days of the chaotic years of transition’. Then the Second Chamber, religious and natural leaders of the native English Counterculture restored England to peace and plenty, and elected ‘rockstar radical Ax Preston’ as funky President, because they were in touch with the people, for whom Ax was a popular romantic figure—
    Unbelievable , muttered the