Wild Abandon (2 page)

“Alright. Are you the last remaining human?”

“Not yet.”

“Or are you a boulder?”

“Yes!” he said, and he stood up, putting his hands in the air, his nipples like freckles. “I’m a boulder!”

She picked his towel up and wrapped it round him.

“Great. Now get out.”

Albert pulled open the door and ran into the corridor. She put on her dressing gown and attacked her hair with the towel. There was a
thuk thuk thuk
sound coming from next door, her parents’ bedroom. She knew what it meant: the community had recently held one of its open days to find new members. On these occasions, the farm was awash with
all kinds of lost and cheery wayfarers as well as, quite often, an “undercover” journalist pretending to be a primary school teacher. To become a full-time member you had to volunteer (and do shit jobs: cleaning tools, turning compost, infinite weeding) then have an initial short interview, which, if approved, was followed by a minimum two-week stay (recommended six weeks), then a cooling-down break of at least one month, then another, more involved interview to decide on full-time suitability. It was an undoubted power trip for the panel—particularly Kate’s father, Don Riley, who, still stinging from a failed Oxford interview when he was eighteen, took great pleasure in devising questions.

Q: If there’s a power outage and it’s cold inside and out, how do you dry your clothes?

(A: Washing lines in the polytunnels.)

Q: If you were to cook a communal meal using seasonal ingredients, what would it be?

Arlo Mela was, famously, the only person who, having made elaborate culinary promises in interview, produced, as promised, a game-changing chocolate mille-feuille.

“New members must have realistic expectations of us, and of themselves,” was how her father put it. “Beware strangers promising
bouillabaisse
.”

The combination of a ruthless selection process and a high likelihood of mental illness among applicants had, over the years, produced some interesting correspondence. The community sent a primly bureaucratic template response to all abusive letters.
Thank you for your generous feedback
 … Their father, however, was thin-skinned when it came to criticism of the community—he took everything as a personal
attack—and liked to write replies, even though he never sent them. The typewriter allowed for maximum release of tension.
Thuk thuk
. In a similar way, everyone knew if Kate and Albert’s mother was upset because a pile of newly chopped wood would appear in the barn.

The community had a guestbook and a detestbook, the latter containing choice quotes from twenty years of occasional hate mail. Highlights included a drawing of the barn in flames and a comprehensive list of unflattering anagrams of residents’ names (only one of which stuck: Patrick Kinwood, a no-work dick-tip). Both books were on public display in the entrance hall to manage the expectations of new visitors.

But when Kate pushed into her parents’ bedroom, she found that it was, in fact, her mother at the desk in the corner, fully dressed, writing at the beige Smith Corona. Her dark hair ran down to her armpits, parting over her shoulders. She was wearing a woolen jumper the color of margarine. Kate watched her forefinger locate a letter on the keyboard, hover above, then drop. Noticing her daughter behind her, Freya stopped typing and rested her hands on the desk.

“What’s going on?” Kate said, and massaged her mother’s tightly upholstered shoulders. She read the letter, if it could be called that. There were just two words,
Dear
and
Don
.

Kate turned to look at her dad, who was in bed, sitting up against the headboard. He always kept two pillows under his right foot because he said it needed “to drain.” He had a thick castaway’s beard—badly maintained—a trophy of unemployability. His children had no way of knowing whether he was strong or weak chinned.

“Dad, why aren’t you up?”

“I
am
up,” he said, which was the same thing that Kate said when she wasn’t up. He was in his pajamas.

It was not unusual for her parents to fight; it
was
unusual for them to do it quietly. Even if Kate had somehow slept through the original row (not easy, given the thin shared wall between their bedrooms), then she would have expected her mother to come next door and wake her up, just to tell her about it. Ever since Kate had hit puberty, her mother spoke to her with total transparency—this extended both to her parents’ relationship (
Mum, can you please not call it a relationship? You’re supposed to be married
) and to the community at large. It was from her mother that Kate had learned that Patrick Kinwood, who she had always believed was penniless and possibly ex-homeless, was a former greetings card franchise regional manager and, since the community had a pay-what-you-can system, he made by far the largest monthly contribution. Such disclosures were part of why Kate and Freya were actual friends. Being actual friends with her own mother only started to worry Kate after she saw other South Wales mothers and daughters walking ten paces apart through town.

“What’s wrong with you two?” Kate said.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Don said, speaking to the back of his wife’s head.

Freya didn’t turn round.

“Fine, I’m putting this in the repressed memories box.”

Kate went next door to her room and started getting dressed for college. She was wary of being labeled a hippie so she avoided the obvious stigma-magnets: long dresses,
cardigans, bangles—of which she, shamefully, had many. From the hallway, there was the scrape of something heavy being dragged along the floorboards.

She wore narrow blue jeans that didn’t need cycle clips, black breathable trainers, a thermal vest under a lumberjack shirt that was warm but could easily be opened via poppered buttons when tackling the big hill, and a waxed yellow anorak with a peaked hood that her boyfriend liked because he said it tricked other boys into thinking she wasn’t attractive. She opened her bedroom door and found a wall there, inexpertly built from shoe boxes, luggage, and the wicker dressing-up box.

“Albert, I’m late.”

“This is not an exit,” the wall said.

“You know I don’t like going, but I have to.”

“Apologies for the inconvenience.”

“I’m going to knock this over now, okay?”

As she pushed a load-bearing shoe box, the structure toppled into the hall. Albert was standing back, in his dressing gown, with the solemn look of a squatter watching the developers move in. She clambered over the rubble and made her way downstairs. Her brother climbed over the first-floor banister and hung from the handrail, his feet dangling. She stood beneath him, on the bottom step.

He said: “If you go, I will end myself.”

“You wouldn’t die. You probably wouldn’t even break your legs.”

“I’ll turn in midair so I land on my head.”

She saw that the bottom of his left foot still carried its foliage of verrucas. He’d promised her they’d gone. She reminded herself again: no more shared showers.

She walked across the hall, ignoring a Portuguese wwoofer who was sitting on the tiled floor, crying, with the house phone held to her ear.

“You have to tell me everything!” Albert yelled, as his sister opened the front door. “It’s not fair for you to know things I don’t know!”

As she walked outside, she heard her brother screaming that he was now in fact dead. His most ambitious attempt to stop her going to college had been a typewritten letter, purportedly from her principal, that began:

She understood why it was hard for her brother. Now that she wasn’t around, there was only one other young person at the community whom he could have lessons with, and that was Isaac, who was six. It was a long way from when Kate was her brother’s age and the community was awash with bright, multilingual children with dazzling names. (Stand up, Elisalex De Aalwis.) With classes of nearly a dozen young people of all different ages, subject matter had been pitched to the cleverest person, but with simpler alternatives. Their education had peaked with Arlo’s now infamous class on cinquecento Italian architecture, which involved a high-level discussion of the villas of Palladio alongside an ambitious attempt to build “La Rotonda” from Legos. Other popular lessons included Patrick’s introduction to centrifugal force, with its reliance on fearless young volunteers with coins in their pockets. But since then, the numbers of young people at the community
had dwindled, and nowadays it was unusual for lessons to consist of anything more than Albert and Isaac, at the dining table, quietly filling out workbooks.

As the first new young person in nearly two years, Isaac had been highly prized for how he tilted the community’s age profile. That was the main reason he and his mother had survived their trial week and got an interview; no one had particularly trusted her; her luggage included a Yeo Valley tote bag that contained the full back catalog of a pamphlet series titled
The Paradigm Won’t Shift Itself
. Kate felt bad that her brother had no other friends, but she couldn’t hold back her own life to keep him entertained.

Kate got her bike from the barn, the basket preloaded with books.

After breakfast, Albert and Isaac sat in the schoolroom, side by side on the Kerman rug, cross-legged, each with a notepad. Albert was practicing trying to draw a perfect freehand circle. Isaac chewed his pencil like corn on the cob. He had a fringe halfway down his forehead and a few ideally placed freckles. With his white-blond hair, all the better for being badly cut, and a burlesque redness to his lips, adults were prone to falling silent in his presence.

Patrick went to stand in front of the TV to give his lesson. He was wearing a green fleece that, as it happened, for the first time in more than a decade did not smell of bong water. Patrick was fifty-eight but seemed older, had a likable, shapeless nose, watery eyes, and big, glowing ears that looked hot enough to dry socks on. After five clearheaded days, he was glad of the opportunity to share his intellectual energy. It was
a rarity, nowadays, for the boys to be getting a formal lesson, so they were excited too.

“Okay, guys,” Patrick said. “Have either of you ever seen an advert before?”

“Of course we have,” Albert said. “We’re not idiots.”

“I saw one about people who work in aeroplanes,” Isaac said.

“I saw one about this excellent soup,” Albert said.

Patrick held his palms out. “So you haven’t seen many?”

Isaac shook his head, the pencil clamped in his mouth.

“Good. And that’s why our community is great. But the important thing to remember is that adverts are not bad, per se. You’ve just got to know how to handle them. We’ll start with something easy.”

Patrick pressed play on the video recorder. There was a low-budget advert for a furniture warehouse in Pontypridd. It showed a couple in the showroom falling backward onto a white leather three-seater, their legs kicking up in the air.

All this week, only this week, fifty percent off everything
.

It showed the sofa being lifted out of a van and then it cut to the couple snuggling on the same sofa—but this time in their home.

Come on down, we’ve gone soft in the head for sofas and beds!

Patrick paused the video, pulled across the Ad-Guard, and muted the TV. Albert and Isaac stayed staring up at the bright shapes and colors behind the square of shower curtain.

“I’ll let you think about it,” Patrick said.

They waited in silence.

“Okay, what do you think?”

Isaac looked at Albert, who said: “I think that—if we
needed some furniture—then now would be a good time to get it, because of the discount.”

“Very true. What do you think, Isaac?”

“I don’t know. It was loud.”

“Good. Why was it loud?”

“So we can hear it.”

“Good. Why do they want us to hear it?”

Isaac winced and started working the tip of the pencil into the sole of his shoe.

“Okay, fine. Okay. Let’s talk about sales language. ‘We’ve gone soft in the head for sofas and beds.’ ”

Patrick said it in a game-show host voice and Albert laughed.

“Yeah, it’s funny,” Isaac said.

“The advert shows this smiley couple, bleached teeth, glossy hair, picking up the sofa, being all contented”—Patrick mimed carrying one end of a sofa and then grinned, his teeth brown at the edges—“and says that if you buy this soft furnishing you can be like them.”

“They are just an example,” Albert said. “How could we be like them?”

“We can’t,” Isaac said.

“
That’s just it,
” Patrick said, putting one finger to the tip of his nose and, with the other hand, pointing at Isaac. “
Very
good. It’s aspirational. People think they will be like them if they buy the sofa, but they can’t be.”

“Who thinks that?” Albert said.

“Stupid people,” Patrick said.

“I don’t believe you. Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Who are they?” Isaac said.

Patrick opened his mouth and then shut it. “Let’s try another one. This is a bit different.”

He pulled back the Ad-Guard, then picked up the remote control with both hands. Coming off the weed had had a strange impact on his relationships to children. He had discovered a desire to pass on knowledge from his own life.
Knowledge from his own life
. That was a new concept. He had spent two unstoned days preparing the video. He should have been helping to reanchor the fences, but his shoulder, which was known to dislocate at the slightest encouragement—in the bath, reaching for the contraband shampoo, for example—kept him indoors. He recorded hours of adverts and tried to ignore the distant
dop-dop-dop
of the post rammer. It’d been twenty years since he and Don had sat down with a map of their farm’s fifty acres—dividing it up with a ballpoint pen. They had lifted tons of freestone into the back of their narrow Bedford van and driven it across the fields. Slowly, shirtlessly, they had dug trenches, stacked stones, Tetris-style, and said almost nothing to each other, except in the pure language of manual labor, coming home each day sunburnt and ennobled—and in truth, everyone else found them pretty irritating, with their tiredness-as-honor shtick, as though they could return to the big house after a full day’s
real work
and just drop like, yes, stones, expecting admiration and exemption from washing up.