Wild Abandon (16 page)

After his visit to the hospital to see Patrick, Don had driven home with all the windows open, breathing loudly through his mouth. His jumper and trousers were in a plastic bag in a rubbish bin in the hospital parking lot along with, as he would never recall, the sealed letter to Patrick from Janet. His beard had glistened the way pastry glistens after an egg-wash. A note from Kate had been pinned under the Volvo’s windshield wipers. When he got home, Don, in only his T-shirt and boxers, couldn’t face telling anyone the news so he left the note out and went immediately upstairs for a shower that kept going long after the water turned cold.

The note:
Pops, hope things went well with Patrick. I can’t work at home so I’m going away for a bit. Let me know when you and Mum have sorted things out. Am taking the mobile, if you really need me. Tell Albert
—
sorry. K

Albert came running back out the house and was now down on his knees, gathering up what hair hadn’t blown away and balling it together. Don, working his crowd, tested the blade—drew blood, laughed, sucked his thumb. He was getting younger by the minute. He told the two Latvians that they had to stand up with the mirror, and they did what he asked.

Don delicately took the first cut, down the left cheek, the cream piling up against the blade, speckled with dark hairs—branches
in a snowdrift. There was a badge of fresh flesh blinking in the daylight. Arlo clapped, using the palm of his free hand to beat his chest. Through default, he now had the best beard in the community. The little nick on Don’s thumb was surprisingly bloody and there were drops on the blade and in the shaving cream.

Albert, with his head down, not watching, said: “God.”

Wiping the blade on the edge of the log, Don went again, cleaning up the left cheek. The wwoofers held the big oval mirror awkwardly, like a big check from the lottery. Don’s pale cheek shone. Albert’s pockets were full of his father’s beard.

Isaac held both Freya’s and Marina’s hands as he pulled them into the yard. They stood still for a moment, trying to grasp the situation, then Freya went straight to her son, knowing what this would mean to him. She knelt down, hugged him, and kissed the top of his head. Don started in on the right cheek, his mouth still hidden, any compassion disguised by shaving cream.

“Freya, now you’re here, why don’t you help with this last bit,” he said, stretching his neck out.

“Let me,” Albert said, his voice suddenly loud. He looked up at his father and held out his hand.

“Okay. Anyone else?”

“
I said
I’ll do it,” Albert said, and he stood up, tufts of beard showing at the pockets of his jogging bottoms.

“You’ve never shaved before, son.”

“So now I learn.”

“I don’t think you should practice on me.”

“
Who else can I practice on
?”

Don’s cheek twitched, triangles of shaving cream here and there, spots of red.

“Okay,” Don said, “but let your mum supervise.”

Albert wiped his eyes on his sleeves. The rest of the community were still watching, unworried, like they’d come across an impromptu piece of experiential theater.

“It’s
very
sharp, Albert.” Don handed him the razor.

He turned the blade this way and that, letting it blink in the sun.

“Can you lift his chin for me, Mum?” Albert said.

She raised her husband’s jaw to the angle he used for making important statements.

“I’m going to start here,” Albert said, and he pointed with his free hand at his father’s Adam’s apple. “Nice and deep.”

Don didn’t laugh. Freya stood beside her son and lightly cupped the hand that was holding the blade.

Arlo stopped sharpening his knife. The wwoofers shuffled a few steps back, looking awkward and compromised. Freya guided the blade toward Don’s neck. There was a certain childish brinkmanship about who was going to call this a terrible idea first. Don swallowed and the foam rippled.

With Freya’s hand on his, Albert put the blade into the foam. It was clear Don wanted to say something but didn’t want to move. Their son’s lips disappeared inside his mouth and his eyes welled up. Freya could feel him gripping the blade so hard his knuckles stuck out. There was a high-pitched noise coming from his throat.

She drew back Albert’s hand and peeled away his fingers.
Once she’d taken the knife off him, he immediately stepped back and sat down, looking dazed.

“It’s okay, Albert,” Don said.

Freya stood up and moved round the other side of the log to stand behind her husband.

“I can just finish it myself,” Don said.

She ignored him, placed her thumb on the tip of his chin, and, concentrating, made the first upward stroke, going against the grain of his hair. He did not speak or swallow. Wiping the blade on her sleeve, she continued tidying up. She didn’t recognize him. She didn’t want to.

When she was finished, he rubbed his face with his hands and turned his head from side to side. This got a round of applause.

When Kate arrived on Geraint’s doorstep—with a plastic bag and a change of clothes—she had something about her of the convict on day release. Or that’s how she felt, at least, as they brought her in, sat her down at the dining table, made her sweet, milky tea, and asked what she’d like for her first meal, now that she was on the outside.

“We’ve got,” Mervyn, Geraint’s father, said, swinging back the fridge door, “drum roll … 
streaky bacon
!”

Kate explained that, while the community wasn’t vegetarian, actually, she was, although she’d be happy eating anything, and she pointed to the family-size box of Frosties on the counter.

The next day Liz, Geraint’s mother’s, organized a symbolic gas-powered barbecue to clear their fridge of breakfast meats,
Iberian chorizo, pork medallions, and handmade lamb burgers. On the patio, topless in April, Mervyn wafted the meat smoke away with a tea tray, carrying himself in the manner of a man who has, at some previous time, worked out.

Liz had a kind of cycle helmet of blond hair, raised from her scalp, sprayed stiff and sturdy-looking. She was fiercely accommodating. Each night she said, “Sleep well, Katherine,” and each morning she paid close attention to which cereal or muesli Kate chose, and then bought lots more of that brand. She never asked what had happened to drive her away from her home, but the implication was that Kate should feel free, at any point, to talk about it. In fact, Kate began to sense she was being treated like someone who had recently been through unspeakable trauma, so she started to wonder if she had.

Kate helped Liz to slice and salt eggplant and build a caponata. In tribute to Patrick, Kate taught Liz how to make red lentil dahl—
à la carcinogen
—with the bottom of the pan encrusted black. Over those first few days, Mervyn grimly, grinningly, tucked into three-bean stews, stuffed field mushrooms, and huge walnut and beetroot salads.

Kate had texted her father to say whom she was with, but since no one knew where Geraint lived, or even his surname, she was mercifully untraceable. Her only contact with the community was through her father’s text messages, since she never answered his calls and refused to check voice mail.

She noticed that the message was sent at 2:13 a.m. and imagined him sitting alone in bed, lit by the light from the phone.

At Mervyn’s request, Kate and Geraint slept in separate rooms. She got the guest room with reading lamps set into the wall and a bed half-covered by a silky turquoise spread. Prior to her arrival on his doorstep, she and Geraint had done all the things they could easily do in the backseat of his tiny Punto, which was a lot, but not everything. Now they were living together, however, and with the twin catalysts of Mervyn’s disapproval and their being put in separate rooms, they quickly moved things forward, beginning with high-risk canoodling in the outdoor pool and ending with full, sacrilegious consummation in Mervyn’s Jeep while it was parked in the garage. Cold and uncomfortable, yes, but fizzing with family scandal. Kate secretly enjoyed spoiling the father’s pride and joy—both vintage vehicle and only son.

Considering that Kate had never spent any time in a suburban home before, she had a highly developed understanding of what to expect; during her upbringing, her father had encouraged her to make the most of his film collection, which had a lot to say on the subject, including
The Graduate
,
Edward Scissorhands
,
American Beauty
, and
The Ice Storm
. One of the community’s well-told stories was of Kate, age ten, setting an alarm for herself to wake at 3 a.m. so that she could come downstairs and watch
Poltergeist
, the definitive suburban horror film. When Janet got up to milk the goats, she found Kate awake at dawn, alone, in the corner, staring horrified at the loom, which had more than once been talked of as a machine for chopping up children.

It was difficult for Kate to imagine that behind the
contented atmosphere in Geraint’s link-detached home, with garage,
especially
with swimming pool, there was not some kind of deviant interpersonal rot, rampant and unforgiving. By all surface assessments the Rees family were happy, which—according to Kate’s understanding of suburbia—meant that they weren’t. So it was with some relief that she discovered Mervyn’s insomnia. Although he worked full-time on the
Evening Post
news desk, he also stayed up half the night watching TV in the lounge; she felt sure this was the key to the family’s metaphorical basement. She remembered something her father had said: “Insomnia is not a condition, it’s a symptom.”

Why couldn’t Mervyn sleep? What monsters emerged in his dreams?

One thing Kate did know was that, most nights, garden slugs came out from under the baseboards and traveled across the lounge carpet. For some reason, Mervyn let them do their thing and, each morning, it was left to Liz to scuff away the glistening tracks. Kate liked that. The unspoken darkness between them.

That first night in the roundhouse, it was just Freya and Albert. They zipped their sleeping bags together, Albert showing her how to make a super-bag, and slept in the center of the room on a sheepskin rug. While they were there, Freya talked to him about his sister and said that he wasn’t to take her leaving too personally. It was by no means the first time Kate had run away. She was known for it. Once, famously, age twelve, weighed down with a backpack full of tins, she had made her escape but was forced to jettison supplies, least favorite first.
Her father tracked her via kidney beans, then flageolet, chickpeas, whole plum tomatoes, and so on until he found her, exhausted, drinking the Juice from a tin of pineapple rings.

Albert disappeared deeper into the super-bag and that was where he slept from then on, a warm globe near Freya’s feet. She had brought an armory of herbal teas in anticipation of waking in the quiet hours with something tugging at her, an invisible rope between herself and Don. The reality had been different. She slept deeply and, that first morning, when she woke up, found she was alone in a two-man sleeping bag. Albert had already gone back to the workshop to visit Marina.

On the second night, Isaac joined them and she and the boys slept on the rug, with her in the middle. When they thought she was asleep, their pillow talk was alarming.

“Isaac?”

“Yep.”

“How do you think the world’s going to end?”

“Um. It’s going to start with a big noise like a bus noise and then ten buses’ noise, then twelve, then there will be birds and if they write your name in the sky you can get on the buses and if they don’t you have to die on the floor.”

Even that could not keep her awake. She had almost forgotten what a proper, unbroken, dreamless night’s sleep was like. The feeling of being upgraded. Fresh eyes.

By the time Isaac next stayed over, two nights later, she had come to realize that few things are more exciting to young boys than the idea of the world suddenly and explosively ending, leaving them as lone survivors, walking the toxic earth with massive knives. That was what made Marina’s theories so
appealing. It would take more than drab rationality to distract them, which is why she made a concerted effort to get up before them and, when they woke, said: “Today, we’re going to have a lesson in time travel.”

She made them sit cross-legged on the rush matting while she sat on a stool opposite. It was a good exercise for the morning, while they were still in touch with their subconsciouses.

“Who here wants to drive a time machine?”

They both put up their hands. Albert raised his right buttock off the matting to give his hand an inch more commitment.

“Time travel is easier than most people think. Now, close your eyes and listen carefully.”

They looked at each other seriously, held hands, and shut their eyes.

“Imagine you’re in a lift,” she said, “and there’s a whole wall of buttons, numbered one to a hundred. Press the button that’s the same number as your age. So, if you’re six years old, Isaac, then press the button with six on it.”

Isaac’s forehead ruffled. Freya watched him. His face seemed hypermobile, changing the whole time, a kind of human lava lamp, giving the impression that he had a wider emotional range than most children.

“Okay, once you’ve pressed the button, let the lift doors close and feel yourself move upward.”

“Wo ho ho,” Albert said, bouncing on his bum.

“Ping!” Freya said. “You’ve reached your floor. The doors slide back.”

Isaac’s nostrils flared.

“Now, step out into the corridor. Feel the red carpet beneath your feet. Gold lamp fittings run along the walls. On this corridor there are one hundred rooms, doors on both sides.”

Albert’s foot jiggled.

“Start walking slowly up the corridor, counting the numbers as you go. Say them out loud as you go past, and stop at the door with your age on it.”

“Onetwothreefourfive …,” Albert said.