Midnight Lamp Read Free

herding scurrying birds between them, until they met in a whirling crown of silver wings.
    ‘Hi,’ she said, with the far away eyes and otherworldly smile that cut his heart in two. ‘What are you doing out so early, mister?’
    ‘Smelly Hugh decided to give us a wake up call. Sage was asleep, so I came out here. Fuck . I told them, don’t call us: we’ll call Allie o nce a week , to prove we haven’t been kidnapped. I should chuck the thing.’
    The bi-location phone was a spin off from the Zen Self quest. The technology was unknown in Mexico, so the only phone they possessed was useless for anything except satellite-phreaking: but that was no great loss. They didn’t have anyone they wanted to talk to in the New World.
    ‘Don’t. There might be a real emergency at home and we wouldn’t know. You should have come beachcombing. I found a live sand dollar, and I think I saw a marbled godwit-’
    ‘You’re kidding. Sure it wasn’t a Common Loon?’
    They followed their own footprints through the dunes to the fishing camp called El Pabellón. They’d been staying in one of the cabins for a week or so. It was off season, and sports fishing in steep decline: hard to say what the other campers were doing here, except maybe hiding from creditors; or the police. The painter lady was under her striped awning, catching the morning light like Monet. Nothing moved in the township of middleaged bikers. The little tent belonging to the teenage runaways had fallen down again, leaving them shrouded in green nylon like dead bodies. The Clam Diggers, (locals, here to harvest shellfish for the restaurant trade) were monopolising the standpipe. Nevada and his old lady, proprietors of a wagon-ring of assorted, half-derelict vehicles, were up and about, toting shotguns. The kids were not in sight. The Nevada dogs stood up and woofed.
    ‘Hi, youse guys,’ called Nevada’s buckskinned and gypsy-bloused old lady. ‘You been on the beach already? How’s the world looking?’
    ‘Same as yesterday,’ Fiorinda called back. ‘Sand. Birds. Sky. Sea.’
    ‘She’s a poet, and she don’t know it,’ remarked snaggle-toothed, draggle-haired Nevada, grinning his shit-eating grin. ‘Hope she don’t blow it. You guys coming to the shindig tonight? You’d be very welcome.’
    They laughed, and said maybe, and passed on.
    Sage was reclining on the cabin’s only sunbed, with a sketchpad: but he’d made the coffee and beaten the eggs. They berated him, and agreed between them silently he mustn’t be left alone. The moment you leave him alone he starts doing too much. And so another quietly busy day begins. That’s the last of the cinnamon buns: better review the exchequer. Would you care to initial these accounts for me, Mr Preston? Why certainly, Ms Slater…
    Later, Ax walked up to the Transpeninsular Highway; to the little shack-store beside the Church of the Holy Family. The cinder cones of San Quintín floated over the north west, the cows in the beaten-earth field by the track were contemplating a vivid load of surplus tomatoes that had been dumped for them. Now that’s something you don’t see every day… Wonder if they like the taste? Of course, if you tried to buy tomatoes for human consumption around here it cost an arm and a leg. The death-wish contortions of post-modern agribusiness were no longer Ax’s concern, but he stopped to stare: thinking about a yacht called the Lorien . What a boat, thirty knots under sail , endless other passionate details, whispered through the long hospital nights (the Intensive Care Unit in Cardiff, that was the setting he remembered)…
    I want Sage to have his yacht.
    I’d buy you a jet-plane, baby, I’ve had it with green austerity—
    But they had no money, and soon this was going to be a problem that Ax must address. Sage and Fiorinda must never be asked to go on stage again. Ax would have to make a living. What are my skills? Ex-dictator, some experience of organised violence,