Rainbow Bridge Read Free

door on the past, Dian. It’s only superstition that makes you afraid of a place where something ugly happened once, to one of your rockstar royals. Rufus O’Niall was an unpleasant lunatic, and a war criminal. He’s dead; that’s all.’ ‘I’m n-not superstitious! I kept away from all that. I hated all that.’
    ‘Good.’ He watched her, with a gentle, urbane smile. ‘This is re-education, Dian. This is how it works. First you will learn to feign indifference, because you are an intelligent woman, you understand your position and you want to live. Then indifference to these delusions will become genuine, and your self-made troubles will be over. Why don’t you sit down?’
    Dian sat down.
    ‘Let’s continue our conversation. Dilip Krishnachandran, although by far the senior, was Aoxomoxoa’s disciple. Were they also lovers?’ He laughed at her expression. ‘Speak freely, I’m not easy to shock. Actually I’m thrilled by all the Reich’s Bohemian couplings. Life must have been so exciting.’
    She fled into the past. It was Boat People Summer, a year of disasters overcome: which had begun with the monster hippies in charge and an Islamic Separatist war in Yorkshire, and ended with the country at peace; storm and flood defied, the Rock and Roll Reich established. But this was a night in June. A tv studio, as glamorous as such places ever are: a cluster of prefabs in a Wandsworth car park. Dian had interviewed Aoxomoxoa and the Heads on her live show; Fiorinda and veteran rock critic Roxane Smith also appearing. He’d waylaid her after the show, in a makeshift corridor that smelled of carpet glue. He was eating hothouse grapes, tossing them into the open gullet of the living skull mask. Most rockstars are sad munchkins in the flesh. Dian was six foot, but Aoxomoxoa was easily six foot six, and hench . His shoulders in that fuck-you white singlet, sleek and massive and perfect. His nearness was making her head spin, and he knew it.
    Possibly the hottest rockstar on earth , and she could feel his body heat.
    ‘London’s so different now. I love the anarchy but I miss the neon—’
    ‘How about a fuck?’
    ‘Augh! Sage! You can’t do that. It’s outrageous. You can’t just, just—’
    ‘I jus’ did,’ he said, reasonably, in that slow, insolent Cornish surfie accent.
    ‘You’re such a clown.’
    ‘Not many people realise that.’
    He took off the mask and smiled, with the bluest eyes. His naked face wasn’t such a prize as it should have been. Sage and his brother Heads had taken off their skull masks on the show, a rare treat for the punters. But my God how sexy . She’d imagined this moment with better trimmings, she told herself the hearts and flowers would come. He wants me, possession is nine-tenths of the law, he thinks he’s smart but I’m smarter. No way she wouldn’t get the rest.
    ‘Your place or mine?’ she wondered, with a bold grin.
    ‘Yours. I don’ like sharing my own bed.’
    The band came trooping by, with a few mates. Big George Merrick, Sage’s second-in-command, cast a stone-faced skull glance of disapproval, then they were gone, and the blond bombshell moved in like a firestorm. His crippled hands, that she didn’t like to think about, were all over her. Everything blurred, the sharp edges of reality vanished.
    She had to recall the scene at the studio exactly as it had happened, down to the sting of George’s little disapproving look, or she didn’t get the shock of his first kiss, her most reliable sex aid, an aphrodisiac that never failed. Now she was free to improvise. Sage whispered tender things, how he’d dreamed of this moment, how he longed to spend his life with her. They went back to his place, after all, because he really loved her. He didn’t even want to do it on their first date, he wanted to wait, but his passion was unstoppable, he was feverishly undressing her—
    Wang had no occasion to resort to fantasy. He was in bed with a splendid, willing