Someone offers her a happiness pill, which she takes and swallows with a mouthful of beer. The pill is large. She can feel it lodged in her throat and swallows and swallows to shift it. Shortly, a pink and green ambience slides over her sight. She feels completely relaxed and content. Her whole world consists of music and movement. She dances with a girl who has waist length hair, squeezing her hard, only to discover it is a boy. He grimaces and pulls away, having thought she was a boy as well.
‘Come on!’ Terror is yelling in her ear.
‘Come where?’
‘Dominic Blair!’
‘Oh no! Terror, do we have to? I can’t walk!’
Sallyann’s protests are ignored. Terror drags her, protesting feebly, out into the daylight. She giggles at passers-by as Terror hauls her along the street.
‘What did you take in there?’
‘Happiness!’
‘Sal, you are a bitch. You wanna spoil my day for me? Is that it? Why couldn’t you wait until later, huh? You’re so selfish!’
‘I love you!’ Sallyann sings joyously.
‘Oh fuck off!’ Terror growls, tossing her head, and smacking Sallyann across the face with her long, beaded braids.
They jump on a tram, which will take them to Government Drive. Hundreds of other revellers are crammed on board. Feeling at one with the whole population at that moment, Sallyann sings and shouts, accepting kisses and caresses. Terror grumbles with her arms folded, her scowl as black as her skin.
The passengers alight in a colourful, sweating tumble at the north end of the Drive, in Eternity Circus. A company of fetishists are providing a pre-Blair display, led by a band of hand-drummers, who are being whipped by shaved youths in leather loin-bands. Towering dominatrices, in different skin-tight costumes of red PVC, march along like robots behind on six inch spike heels, their faces white, their lips a raw scarlet, their eyes concealed behind wrap-around shades. Men crawling on all fours in furry dog suits are being choked by tight leashes, wielded by women wearing rubber. One man squats to defecate, whimpering as the chain-link lead strikes home.
Terror is entranced. ‘Oooh! Lookit that! Lookit that!’
Eternity Circus, in the late afternoon, is already berserk with flashing hoardings. Alone in the centre, a stark purity: ‘The Temple is Built on Blood!’ Sallyann is beginning to wonder whether she’s hallucinating that particular slogan. It seems to her as if the figures on the steps of the ruin are dancing. Her earlier euphoria is beginning to cloy. A headache is coming on. At the corner of her vision, zigzag patterns flutter and spark.
Terror bites and scratches a path for them to the front of the crowd. They step over an unconscious girl, whose dress appears to have ripped off. The tail end of the fetishist parade scampers by, running close to the crowd, holding out their spike-dappled arms. Most people are ducking, squealing, away from the spikes, but others don’t: they aren’t squealing at all. Sallyann can feel an urge to go home stealing over her. She feels a little sick. A man standing next to her is thoughtfully rubbing a ragged cut on his chest, painting himself with blood. She yearns for the carefree intimacy of the music marquee. She doesn’t like the sight of blood.
Terror grips Sallyann’s arm hard. ‘Listen, listen,’ she says.
‘To what?’ The sound of the day is an incomprehensible whirl around Sallyann’s mind. It means nothing, but it smells of blood. ‘What?’
‘He’s coming!’ Terror hisses.
Blinking, Sallyann tries to peer up the Mall. Thousands of young girls, uptowners and estate kids alike, have muscled their way forward to the front ranks of the bobbing crowd. Every female body is strained to the right, rising and falling like dancing snakes, trying to catch the first glimpse of the King of the Carnival. Silver balloons are released in a hectic cloud from the windows of a building opposite. Each one bears the grinning semblance of Dominic Blair. A sound comes down the Mall, passing along like a plague; the sound of female voices raised in adoring hysteria. The scream passes over and around Sallyann’s body. She doesn’t know if it is real or not, but is sure she can feel it slithering over her skin like electricity or a phantom cold.
First come the dancers. They are dressed in transparent body suits of a dark green colour, covered with fluttering rags of greeny grey and black. They whirl with tambourines, a soundtrack issuing from the tiny yet powerful speakers adhering to their bodies. Samples of African drums are sequenced through; it seems to shake the atoms of Sallyann’s body. Next come a group of running children. Every race of the globe is represented. The children wear t-shirts advertising various soft and alcoholic drinks; adverts placed by the sponsors of Dominic Blair. They hand out glossy holographic pictures of Blair to anyone whose reaching hands they can thrust them into. Then comes a choir of neo-pagan singers, dressed in white robes, carrying palm leaves and crowned with ivy. They are singing about a king. The crowd seems to know the words; soon, they are chanting too. And finally, the great float of the King himself comes into view. It is high; a great leviathan of a vehicle, its wheels concealed by yards and yards of pale floating material, so that it appears to glide rather than roll its way slowly down the Drive. It is covered with dancers and singers, fire-eaters, jugglers, and mime artists. From their midst rises a dais, and upon the dais reposes the King of Carnival: Dominic Blair in person.
As the float crawls forward, the crowds close in behind it, following it in a great shambling mass. Just before the vehicle passes the place where Sallyann and Terror are standing, a great flock of black and white doves is released from behind Blair’s throne. The youth stands up, raises both hands, salutes the crowd. Around him, the air is full of the sound of wings. Jets of perfume and dry ice are expelled from behind the wheels of the float.
He is beautiful, Sallyann thinks. Blair’s body is lithe and slim. He is naked to the waist but garlanded with flowers. His honey blond hair cascades over his shoulders, his perfect face reposes in a blissful smile. That smile encompasses the whole world. For a moment, Sallyann understands why people love him. Then Mel’s voice grates into her consciousness: ‘He was grown in a vat. No one’s that perfect. If they’ve made the breakthrough they claim they have, then they’ve used it grow Dominic Blair!’
Is that possible?
Against her will, Sallyann is gathered up into the enormous crowd that is now following the float down to Ecstasy Common. She couldn’t escape if she tried. She can’t even move her arms. The crowd carries her forward. She tries to look for Terror and one of the huge hoardings at the side of the mall catches her eyes: ‘The Temple is Built on Blood!’ Terror is nowhere to be seen.
At the Common, a fleet of ambulances, supplied by various Health companies, attend to those girls who have fainted and who can afford the fee. Others lie discarded like abused whores around the edge of the boundary wire.
Once she has been disgorged through the gates of the Common, Sallyann is free to move around a little. The crowd disperses into the wide space of green, while the float is now a distant speck, travelling towards the gigantic sound stage further down the field. Numbly, Sallyann follows the movement of the crowd. She is tired. She is beyond caring that her friend has brought her to this. She cannot be angry, or even annoyed. The estate, the roof of the biker house, Danny, all seem unreal to her. She can’t imagine how she’ll ever find her way back.
There are far too many people present, all of them girls, for Sallyann to get too close to the stage. Looking round herself, she can’t see a single male in the crowd. She helps herself to a free drink from one of the gratuity stalls. It is thin, sour wine that stings her stomach immediately. As she drinks, a paper flyer blows along the ground and sticks to her leg. She bends to remove it, reads it in doing so. ‘The Temple is Built on Blood.’
‘What is happening to me?’ she asks aloud.
Then the PA howls into life and a thirty foot video screen fizzes into action at the back of the stage. At first it plays popular commercials, the top ten; best-selling confectionery, clothe
s, beers and footwear. Company anthems are echoed by the crowd; bodies swaying, arms held high. A black-skinned girl dances past and waves her arms at Sallyann.
‘How are ya?’ she yells.
Sallyann can’t remember if she knows the girl or not. ‘The Temple is Built on Blood!’ she says.
‘Go with it!’ advises the girl and whirls away.
On stage, the music has changed; throbbing New Age afro-jive. The crowd of women rocks to its rhythm. Sallyann drinks her wine, leaning against the booth. She says, ‘It’s crazy,’ to the young woman dispensing the drinks. The woman pulls a sour face.
‘Yeah.’
Sallyann grins. ‘Ask me what I’m doing here!’ she says.
The woman shakes her head. ‘Kid, I know what you’re doing here! You want another drink or are you going to knock my booth over? Move along, will ya!’
Sallyann sneers, gives the woman the finger and strolls away. ‘Fuck you!’ she adds, turning back for a moment.
Night has come. It seems to Sallyann as if she has been walking through the crowd for hours. Everyone is wearing the same face. Lights blaze upon the stage, fireworks splinter the sky behind it, cupped by laser streams. Aerial dancers, neon-glowing, haunt the dark spaces between the sparks. Lesser acts cavort and cry out to the music, melding one into another as they pass across the stage. Sallyann feels she must have had one plastic tumbler of foul wine from every booth on the site. Thoughtfully, she vomits where she stands and finds her head feels better afterwards. She thinks she sees some girls from Long Green Meadows a few feet away and tries to push through the crowd to reach them. She finds only strangers. I must go home, she thinks. How? How can I get home? She cannot see the edge of the Common from here, but if she keeps walking in a straight line, keeps pushing through, she must surely reach it. The crowd is getting tighter, a tense euphoria is building up. It is nearly time.
And then the stage goes black. Sallyann is caught in a knot of straining bodies, held upright, held motionless. She finds she can relax utterly, make no effort to stand, and not fall over. That, in itself, is almost comforting. Her head rests upon the shoulder of the girl next to her. She can actually see the stage from here. Gradually footlights flower to reveal a line of white-clad singers. A woman steps forward from the line to exhort the crowd. She appears uncannily like the woman who came to visit Mel from the Health Company, but now she is dressed in a long flowing gown, her red hair loose around her shoulders.
‘Is this the new beginning?’ she asks.
‘Yes!’ howl the crowd. ‘Yes!’
‘Then sing it with me!’ She shakes a jubilant fist, gesturing with her mike.
‘And we have it now
The new day, the new day.
It’s dawn for all of us again.
Sing it sisters, for ours is the power
We are building the temple here
Where the new age begins,
And the temple is...’
‘Built on blood,’ Sallyann says. She doesn’t hear the real words.
As the music swells to a deafening crescendo, Dominic Blair appears on a dais that rises through the floor of the stage. The crowd goes berserk. The night becomes the sound of female baying, nothing more. Sallyann finds her own throat is making a noise, low and desperate. Dominic Blair steps off the dais. He is clad only in a skirt of leaves, or feathers; perhaps both. His image fills the video screen at the back of the stage; his beatific smile, his gentle blue eyes. One of the singers hands him a mic and his voice too is beautiful.
‘I am just for you,’ he says and a despairing wail rises from the crowd. ‘Yours alone,’ he says, and blows kisses out into the night. ‘We are lucky to be alive this day, for we are the future.’
Maybe you are, Sallyann thinks. Maybe. But I’m not. How can I be? What will I ever have? She wishes she could raise her voice to proclaim this undeniable truth, but even if she screamed until her throat bled she would be unable to make herself heard over the din of the crowd. Only Blair can do that, because he has the p.a. behind him.
Blair begins to sing. It is a facile love song that every girl in the crowd will believe is addressed to her alone. The words wash over Sallyann’s mind: love, eyes, kisses, tenderness, baby, darling, angel. She begins to giggle. ‘This is unreal,’ she says. No one hears her.
On the screen, real tears have gathered in Blair’s eyes as he approaches the climax of his song. His baby eyes beseech the crowd: love me, I am yours. As the final bars of music play, the crowd roars and screams. Blair throws back his head, arms outspread. He holds this pose for a moment and then shudders in a strange manner.
Sallyann blinks. She realises, with drunken slowness, that Dominic Blair has just exploded. She wants to laugh. It is quite true. Her eyes are not deceiving her. His chest has exploded outwards in a splendid arc of brilliant red. Is this part of the act? The crowd, strangely, do not react at first. They are still swaying and crooning, arms above their heads.
He’s been shot, Sallyann thinks. He’s been...
Instinctively, she forces her head around, seeking the place where the shot could have come from. Behind her, the skeletal form of the mixing desk gantry rears against the sky. It is utterly dark, but for the canvas-shielded cabin where the engineer is sitting. Too far away to see and yet... It seems to her that a lithe female figure is clinging to the scaffolding, and even as she looks the figure becomes more distinct. Light reflects off the chrome embellishments of an electronic cross bow, which the woman is holding in one hand. Sallyann’s mind clears with realisation.
She used an explosive bolt! Yes, of course! But why?
The woman’s face is wrapped in a dark-coloured scarf, but her hair is whipping free. There is something so familiar about her. Slowly, she turns her head towards Sallyann, unwraps the scarf from around her face. It is as if she is only a few feet away, her face large and pale. ‘The Temple is Built on Blood,’ she says to Sallyann. It is the voice of her mother.
Around Sallyann, the crowd is beginning to stir. Dominic Blair has fallen to the floor of the stage, nearly cut in two. His singers stand motionless behind him, their white robes splashed with red, as if they are only robots and someone has turned off their power. Then, a helicopter shudders its way through the night, and from its side a rope uncoils downwards towards the woman on the gantry. Hooking the crossbow over her shoulder, she reaches for the rope, wraps herself around it, and the helicopter purrs upwards. Clinging to the rope with one arm and both legs, the woman is borne slowly across the heads of the crowd.
My mother? Is that my mother? No! Someone will have a gun. They’ll kill her for this!
But there are no guns. Arms are raised, a crooning sound issues from every female throat. The woman on the rope waves to them. They scream. Then, they storm the stage.
On the video screen, spattered with blood, is a freeze frame of a commercial. ‘The Temple is Built on Blood!’ The figures on the steps of the ruin are Maenads. They are killing a man. They are devouring him. Of course. The King is dead. Long live the King.
Sallyann does not remember too much of how she got home that night. She thinks Terror found her again and carried her onto the tram. In the morning, Mel brings her a cup of de-caf to drink in bed and Sallyann decides it is safer to believe she suffered a terrible hallucination the previous night. She says nothing to her mother about what she saw, although Mel does say, ‘I did warn you about going, Sal.’
On TV, psychologists talk about catharsis and release. Sallyann just wants to forget. She is afraid to watch the programmes about the Breakthrough.
Now, she is sitting on the roof of the biker house, sharing a couple of cans of beer with Danny. He is polishing a gun, lovingly inspecting all the parts, dismantling and reconstructing. There hasn’t been a riot for over a week, which Danny suggests, in an oblique way, might be something to do with what happened at the Carnival.
‘Coincidence,’ Sallyann says.
‘Could be,’ Danny replies. ‘But don’t you feel
something different?’
‘Something different where?’
He shrugs. ‘Dunno. In the air maybe.’
Sallyann pauses with her can halfway to her mouth, sniffs. ‘Nah.’
‘How’s your ma?’ Danny asks.
Sallyann looks at him sharply. She hasn’t told him everything. ‘Fine. Why?’
He grins. ‘Just wondered. She did business with Ziggy a few weeks back.’
Ziggy is the most terrifying of Danny’s tribe. He usually deals in weapons. ‘What kind of business?’ Sallyann asks, needlessly.
Danny gives her a look, but doesn’t answer. ‘Reckon you’ll stay here now?’ he says.
‘Of course! Nothing’s changed. Where else can we go? We’ll always be here. Mel likes it here.’
Danny shakes his head. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but I reckon she’ll send you out, Sal. She’s always planned that. She’ll send you out.’
‘Fuck! I won’t go!’ Sallyann yells. ‘Why would she do that? How can you know? I won’t go.’
‘Don’t be an asshole, Sal. Take it when it comes,’ He leans over to kiss her cheek. ‘There are always sacrifices. It doesn’t matter whether the gods are tripping out in skirts and thunderbolts somewhere in someone’s heaven, or getting you to buy a can of beer on TV. There are gods, and they need blood to keep them sweet. We lost the way for a while, maybe. Don’t you see? It’s been a long time coming, but the show was well organised, down to the last detail.’
‘This is just another of your stupid theories!’ Sallyann says, but suddenly she feels cold and exposed sitting there on the roof. ‘You’re making it up!’
Danny shrugs, lovingly wipes a piece of gun with a piece of lint. ‘The King of Carnival is dead,’ he says, ‘but there’ll be another one soon, you see. There’ll always be a king now. The people need it. We’ve got our New Age whether we like it or not, but, you know, it’s not that new, not that new at all.’