Free Bold as Love by Gwyneth Jones Page B

grey under the dungarees, he had a yellow ribbon tied around one sleeve.
    ‘Why are you suddenly wearing that?’
    The skull smiled enigmatically. Neat trick.
    ‘Felt like it.’
    Fiorinda suspected some oblique, sarcastic reference to the Ax Preston development. She was sleeping with the enemy and she was sure Sage was pissed off, though he hadn’t said a word. But the skull looked innocent, and the meat, raw and bloody as it was, worked on her salivary glands. She attempted, for pride’s sake, an assault on Head Ideology. ‘Let me cook? C’mon, you bought it, you butchered it. If I don’t cook it, how can I eat?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Please, please, I won’t do anything frilly, I swear.’
    ‘Nah,’ said George, coming out of the van bearing an iceberg lettuce wrapped in clingfilm and a blackened cooking pot; a litre of tequila from the Heads’ vast store of alcohol tucked under his arm. ‘You won’t do it right, Fio. You know you won’t. Look, we got you a lettuce. You could have ten sheep for the price of this.’
    The barbecue was laden with charcoal: the charcoal soused with paraffin and lighter fuel. Cack commenced the cooking by hurling a lighted match and leaping backwards, and the chops were thrown onto the flames. George dealt with the potatoes: Fiorinda was ordered to sit down quiet and stop fussin’ around.
    ‘No, no, don’t let her sit down! We’re not ready! Shit, we gotta get genteel with this babe. We gotta get suburban , she’s not rock-brat trash no more—’
    Sage and Bill rushed up. Bill spread a clean sheet of newspaper with a flourish, and arranged a square of cardboard beside it. Sage dropped to his knees and presented a pastel-patterned serviette, rolled up in a napkin ring . ‘Lunch is served, Mrs Preston, ma’am.’
    ‘You bastards.’
    ‘Hahaha,’
    ‘You are so full of shit , Sage. Lay off!’
    But she felt forgiven.
    Soon everyone was sitting around the barbecue, gnawing meat and passing the lettuce from hand to hand. Fio brought out her saltbox, which all the Heads except Sage shared with an air of guilty indulgence: and it was surprising how good the meal tasted, although Luke did complain that the lettuce was chewy. However this was found to be the result of his taking bites out of the side still wrapped in clingfilm. Bill put the kettle on for tea, while the potatoes bubbled sulkily. Potatoes always take too long. Fiorinda lay in the grass under the oaktree that she thought of as their own, (dapple leaves on the annexe roof); and smiled to notice the blackened kettle sitting among the greasy flames, beside the blackened cooking pot. That strange experience in the Zen tent kept repeating on her, loaded with a dread so large and vague she couldn’t get a handle on it…something about, my whole life, gone? What, gone ? She willed it away. This was life, good as it gets: dejeuner sur l’herbe , complete with amiably sexist male company, mutton fat, tequila, paraffin and bruised grass—
    ‘We could have a sheep every day,’ mused George. ‘Except they shit a lot in the van.’
    ‘Except we don’t need it,’ Cack pointed out. ‘You should only kill what you need. We don’t fucking need to eat meat. It’s cruel. There’s plenty of calories in alcohol.’
    ‘What are you going to do with the rest, Sage? It won’t fit in your fridge.’
    ‘Sell it, trade it, give it away.’ They finished the tequila. Sage, who had eaten enough to build up his energy but not to repletion, started rifling in a Japanese incense box with the letters NDogs burned into the lid, standing for endogenous psychotropics . ‘I feel like bein’ overwhelmed by emotion. I’m gonna do some oxytocin, go down the arena and pair-bond with something.’
    ‘But Sage, you’re wearing the yellow ribbon. You can’t pair-bond without sex. That’s silly.’
    ‘You’re true, Fio, you’re true. Fuck, I’ll take something else. What’s the rest of you having?’
    ‘I hate modern drugs,’ said