Midnight Lamp by Gwyneth Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

the keys with a jarring clangour. ‘You want to go with your Harry Lopez, I can hear it. You just don’t want to take me, because I’m in a bad state. I killed my own father. I used my m-magic, (God, how I hate that word), which I had vowed and sworn I would never do. How can I live with myself, if that was all for nothing, if there’s another monster?’
    ‘Fiorinda, hey, there isn’t another monster.’
    ‘Oh? But the man in the hat said the Pentagon is building a Fat Boy.’
    ‘He said something like that,’ admitted Sage. ‘It can’t be true . You’d need to start with a phenomenal natural magician—’
    ‘ I know, ’ snapped Fiorinda. ‘I haven’t been in a coma.’ She stared at them, pushing back the clotted masses of her hair with both hands, the pupils of her grey eyes wildly dilated. ‘Just nuts. I’ve been trying to protect you,’ she said, wonderingly. ‘To reach a place of safety, but I could not get there. Oh my God, and maybe now I know why!’
    Electrified, they realised it was Fiorinda looking at them, speaking to them. Fiorinda , back from wherever she’d been wandering-
    ‘You don’t need to protect us,’ said Sage, intensely still, as if an unwary breath might send this bird out into the dark again. ‘It’s over, babe. You did it. You protected everybody. You did brilliantly , and now you’re safe with us.’
    Fiorinda’s pupils snapped back, and she let go of her hair. ‘Safe…?’ The clipped, crystalline vowels of her childhood, always well to the fore when she was exasperated, had never sounded so sweet- ‘Is that what you call it? Look . Ax can never touch me sexually, because next time I might strike him dead . I don’t believe I could harm you, Sage, but I’m not mad about the idea of therapeutic rape, and I think you know it. We should go to Hollywood. What’s the alternative?’
    ‘We don’t have to go back to England,’ said Ax, quickly. ‘We’ll find somewhere else—’
    ‘What, another beach where we can be nice to each other, get excited about shellfish and tick off the bird book? How long’s that going to last? You two feel sorry for me now, but you’ll get bored, Ax. You’ll dump us and run away, like you did before—’
    ‘Fiorinda, how can you say that? I did not dump you. You were miserable, Sage hated me, I was in the way. I left because I wanted you two to be happy.’
    ‘ Did you fuck want us to be happy. You wanted us to come running after you, and it backfired, because you’d forgotten you had us so well trained we would never dare. All right, you couldn’t have known you would be kidnapped, but walking out like that was a cry for help, in an unbelievably stupid form—’
    Sage was staring at Ax in naked hurt. ‘I’d follow you anywhere,’ he said. ‘I’ll do whatever you want me to do, be whatever you want me to be. Fiorinda was unhappy, that’s all I knew, that’s what you saw in me. I never hated you.’
    ‘Could we stop this?’ said Ax, ‘Please could we stop this? It does no good.’
    ‘We could stop,’ offered Fiorinda, after a moment.
    She crossed the room, pulled up a chair at their table: took Ax’s hand and reached out to Sage. The rings they wore, braided white and red and yellow British gold, gleamed in the dusty sunlight. They weren’t wedding rings, perish the thought, but they were a declaration. We are not going to break up again. We’ve tried that solution, and it is worse than the problem.
    ‘I’ve been giving you hell, haven’t I?’
    ‘No!’
    ‘You give us heaven ,’ said Sage, passionately.
    ‘Idiot… I know I’m in a bad state, all right? But I think we have to say yes. We have to go to Hollywood. Look at it this way. Our pension fund is fucked, and we can’t live happily ever after. We might as well get back in the game.’
    ‘You’d better tell Harry,’ said Sage to Ax. ‘He’ll be thrilled.’
    There were two beds in the cabin, a single and a double. The single was Fiorinda’s.