Castles Made of Sand Read Free

something to save his country from the dark. He’d become the leader of the CCM through nightmare circumstances—after the Dissolution of the United Kingdom, and the collapse of the first, bloody and terrible Green Revolution regime. When the suits offered him the Head of State job he’d accepted: but he’d refused to be called President. He preferred a title that reflected the real situation.
    ‘Times and times,’ he said, turning the ring. ‘I prayed to God we’d make it this far, and I didn’t see how we could. Now I know that everything since Dissolution was the easy part. Now we have to keep it all going. Fuck.’
    ‘No need to think about it tonight. Take the evening off.’
    ‘What did we do with the shopping?’
    ‘Can’t remember. Something. Does it matter?’
    ‘Not at all.’
    He didn’t eat, thought Ax. He never eats enough. Not a gram more than he must, to keep that fabulous body in shape. But I am not going to nag. He took Sage’s left hand, missing the fourth and fifth fingers, and measured it against his own. The right was worse off, having lost index and second finger and half a thumb. Skeletal ghosts that masked the gaps… Meningitis and septicaemia had done the damage. He thought of a ten month old baby, can’t even talk, sick unto death. They put him to sleep, he wakes up and what’s happened to his hands ?
    The little boy who refuses to eat, because he can’t stand the clumsiness of his maimed paws. Ah, God. Unbearable pity.
    ‘How d’you decide how long to make the missing fingers?’
    ‘These are my real hands.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘The masks are copies of my bones the way they would have grown. It’s not hard to work out. Now ask me why I don’t wear fake normal hands.’
    ‘You can’t fake anything. Remind me not to try and turn you into a diplomat.’
    ‘Hahaha. I can lie. I do it all the time.’
    ‘You can talk bullshit; there’s a subtle difference. I wish I’d known you before.’
    ‘You did. You didn’t like me much.’
    ‘I mean long ago. My life has had its ups and downs, but tonight it strikes me forcibly that you have been horribly unhappy, for years at a time . I never put it together before. I wish I’d been there, to stop things from hurting you.’
    ‘I deserved most of it,’ said Sage. ‘Not the meningitis, obviously, but the rest. If you’d known me when I was a teenage junkie you would not have liked me, Ax. But I know what you mean. Me, I have a desperate need to time travel and punch out the playground racists—that you’ve never told me about, but I know the fucking South-West of this fucking country.’
    Ax was from Taunton, Sage was Cornish. ‘I’d have liked you,’ said Ax, ‘if I’d known you. We should have been together; total waste of time that we weren’t.’
    ‘Never leave me, Ax.’
    ‘I won’t.’
    They laughed, dropped the handclasp and looked away from each other, smiling. ‘The racism didn’t bother me,’ said Ax. ‘Much. I was okay with it by the time I was ten. I resign myself to work around stuff like that. You write horrors like the Arbeit Macht Frei immersions, as you told me once, because you want to see the world as hideous, miserable and terrible as it really is, and still find it loveable— ’
    ‘Did I say that? I must have been pissed.’
    ‘Pissed enough to trust me, briefly, on that anomalous night out. Then you were straight back to giving me unmitigated shit, any chance you got. But you’d changed, next time our paths really crossed, in Dissolution Summer. Still winding me up the whole time, and habitually plastered, but not finding the world such a difficult place to love. If you don’t mind me saying so.’
    ‘Yeah, well, that was Fiorinda. I’d met Fiorinda, year before all of this shit started. In March, in Amsterdam… She turned everything around.’
    When the three of them joined Paul Javert’s Countercultural Think Tank (not even Ax having any idea what the doomed Home Secretary was