Wild Abandon (21 page)

“An outdoor event.”

It would change public perception and bring in new, younger members and remind Freya of the reasons they started all this.

“About three hundred.”

He’d suggested to Arlo some special dishes that would utilize Freya’s unique talents as slaughterer in chief, some way of involving his wife in the party preparations, investing her in it. Arlo wanted to help.

“Naturally. How much?”

He lifted the receiver away from full contact with his ear, as though it were hot. There was a long silence, then Don got out his rarely seen personal debit card and, bravely, two digits at a time, read the long number.

Kate had two minutes remaining on her last exam, and was now checking for spelling errors. The light came in from the sports hall’s high windows.

She was almost sad they were over. There was something enjoyable about the tarot of turning over an exam paper: a whole gymnasium full of people reading their fortunes. Kate had hit her specialist subjects on both sections, first the French Revolution, then German Resistance, allowing her to helicopter in an aside about reweighing contemporary German guilt.

She found no spelling mistakes.

Outside the hall, she stood at the top of the stairs that led down to the parking lot, letting other students stream past her. Geraint was standing at the bottom holding six balloons, red, yellow, green, two of each. Since having his final geography exam three days previously, he’d had time to get his first decent burn of the summer and looked good.

She skipped down the steps and the six colored balloons jostled and squeaked above him as they kissed.

“How’d it go?”

“I destroyed it,” she said.

He smiled and admired her and she imagined the balloons, carried by the wind, slowly lifting him out of the lot.

There was someone calling her name. She looked around and saw Patrick standing in one of the empty diagonal bays beside a bright new Mini Cooper. It had an advert for
John Burn’s Gym
on the driver’s door and, on the hood,
Walkabout Bar
. He waved a big, two-armed wave.

They sat on the flood barrier eating North Poles with chocolate sauce that Patrick had bought for them. Kate was in the middle. Patrick wore a white shirt with red pinstripes that was only on its first or second outing, judging by its stiffness.

“So where do you live, Pat?” she said.

“Right on the seafront. I can pretty much swim to my door.” He seemed pleased, and sucked on the little red spoon.

“Is that your way of saying that you’re homeless?” she said.

“You can see my house from here,” he said, and pointed along the cycle path.

“You live in the little shed where they keep the pitch-and-putt clubs? You’ve done well.”

Patrick laughed. “And this,” he said, pointing up and down the coastal path, “is my commute. You’re speaking to Mumbles Pier’s most senior croupier! You two should come and redeem a free game of Bowlingo.”

“Thanks, we’ll definitely do that,” Geraint said, then, leaning forward to make purposeful eye contact with Patrick, “Do you mind if I ask you something?”

• • •

As they drove to Kit Lintel’s house in Llanmadoc, Geraint could not stop talking about the community. Despite the fact that Patrick’s account of life there had included choice phrases such as “the longest winter of my life” and “the deceit of kinship,” this had only succeeded in piquing Geraint’s interest. Kate tried to explain to him that the reason Patrick had seemed so contented now was that he had finally escaped the community. Geraint did not buy it.

Kit’s parents’ cottage overlooked the salt marsh. He had a big garden with a swing. Geraint had suggested that to celebrate the end of their exams they should do something different. As Kit represented the entirety of their college’s alternative scene, he had been chosen.

Kit brought a cassoulet pot out onto the dining table. His black hair had an ambition to become dreadlocks but currently resembled a bird-eating spider clambering out of a nest. The smell was rank, like old flannels, and it stuck in the back of their throats. The mushrooms looked absurdly phallic, twenty severed dicks sliding around in the bottom of the pan. Geraint smiled nervously as he poured the dishwaterish liquid into three mugs. She smelt hers and wrinkled her nose. Kit held his mug out for clinking.

Geraint downed his and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Kit did the same and picked a slimy whole mushroom out of the bottom of the pan, simulated oral, then chewed it. Kate mimed sipping hers but didn’t open her mouth. She had no need for mind-expanding drugs. Her mind was at its perfect width and depth.

“Mine’s too hot,” she said, and she got up to go to the
sink. She ran the tap and held her finger under it. With the other hand she discreetly poured hers away, then half filled it with water.

She turned back to the boys and made a show of tasting for temperature.

“Better,” she said, then necked it.

When it got dark, the moon was out and bright enough to see by as they walked down to the estuary’s salt marsh, which Kit said was a guarantee of sensual overload, containing every kind of spongy texture, from foam to blow-up mattress to stress-relief toy. They walked across it, wrapped up warm but barefoot, leaving their footprints in the goo. Kate hammed it up, twirling her arms around, looking up at the sky—“I can see, like, all these dudes playing guitar solos”—and pretty quickly they were calling the moon a paracetamol, a glass of milk, a showerhead raining stars, a Nazi prison searchlight (“Don’t dark me out, Kate, please …”), and Geraint announced that paddling through a shallow sandy stream was “just about the fucking greatest thing of all time,” and Kate watched Kit do graceless roly-polies and she quite enjoyed herself—the feeling of a secret separateness—and she and Geraint held hands and laughed and he asked, “Are you laughing at what I’m laughing at?” and Kit had to sit down for a while, and they asked him if he was okay, and he said, “Give me a minute,” and then later decided he had to go inside and listen to Greek myths on cassette, read by Stephen Fry, which left the two survivors sitting on the circular bench that went round the ash tree in Kit’s garden, and he said, “I love you, Kate,” and she didn’t feel the need to respond.

Back in the house, they found Kit Lintel pouring orange juice into Kit Lintel’s father’s laptop.

“I feel fantastic,” he said.

A day later, they were lying under the duvet in the lower bunk bed. Kate was wearing his tartan pajamas. Geraint was naked and only now coming down.

“Do you think we’ll stay together when you’re at university?”

She was on her back; he was on his side.

“Of course,” she said. “When
we
go to university!”

Everyone spends their lives with everyone else, philosophically speaking, if we’re to think of human consciousness as a permeable membrane and time as a concertina’d illusion
.

“I’ll probably go through Clearing. I don’t want to lose you.”

“You won’t lose me.”

“I feel sick, I’ve never felt like this,” he said, and he sucked his lips in.

“Aw, sweetie.”

Geraint, I liked you better when you were a meathead
.

His skin was clearing up now that he ate what she ate. She missed the inflamed pores that ran round his neck.

“I’ve never felt like this either,” she said.

“You know, I really want to see the community. I feel like I’m ready.”

He’d stopped calling it The Rave House or The Commune.

“I just want to see where you come from,” he said. “Who you are.”

“It’s not exciting.”

I want to be able to leave you without feeling bad about it
.

“I don’t care whether it’s exciting. It’s a part of you. That’s why. I want to see your origins. Meet your favorite goat. Bellamy?”

“That’s sweet,” she said.

Then he leaned over and gently—lethally—kissed her on the forehead.

I only came here because I wanted to do well in my exams. I am only with you because you seemed different from what I was used to. I will leave Wales as soon as I can. I will have written the letter breaking up with you before my first day on campus. I will walk straight to the mailbox in the autumnal sunshine in Cambridge/Edinburgh or, at a very outside chance, Leeds, and I will never think of you again
.

The schoolroom windows rattled as the sleet came in slantways. Everyone was standing around the charge controller, watching the hydro and wind needles creep up. The newest wwoofers, four Dutchmen on an alternative stag party, had their arms round one another’s shoulders in the manner of Eurovision contestants awaiting their scores. Early that morning, Arlo had walked through the community beneath paunchy clouds, cranking the windup radio, announcing a storm warning: “Severe weather for Wales and west!”

“Dad, is it dumping yet?” Albert asked.

Don peered at the dials. The wind played a minor chord across the chimney.

“Alright,” Don said. “It’s dumping.”

That was the signal. The community set to work. There was a moral responsibility to use electrical goods. To avoid the excess energy burning out the circuitry, they needed to plug in. It was wasteful for Albert
not
to turn on a hair dryer, play a CD of Harry Belafonte’s “Jump in the Line,” and film Isaac with his swishy blond hair, dancing in a wind tunnel. Clothes that had gone unwashed were washed, then dried in the microwave.

Don prowled. It disappointed him to know that so many of the people he trusted had secret pluggable devices in their rooms. In the kitchen, Arlo, with an electric whisk, made raspberry meringues and pushed carrots and ginger into the blender. On the table, an electric carver. In the pottery shed, Marina was filling the electric kiln with new work. On the bench next to her, a laptop he’d never seen before.

By dusk, everyone was gathered in the schoolroom, ballroom dancing. The music was loud enough to distort and it skipped each time Isaac ran past, arms out, pretending to be an airplane with one engine down due to bad weather. Marina was dancing with Arlo, with Albert on his shoulders, the stag partyers paired off in two couples, and the newlyweds spun in circles. Janet was away again with her boyfriend. Flashing fairy lights were wrapped around the two horizontal roof beams and Schubert’s “Kupelwieser Waltz” was on the record player. They danced and listened to the gap close between the lightning and its sound effect. Every now and then the windows blinked white and the room bleached. Don, watching from the doorway, felt that everyone was too pleased, too relieved—that this betrayed their true longings. He leaned against the
door frame, watching them slowly turn, standing on one another’s toes, laughing it off, whispering little jokes, clinging to a world they claimed not to miss.

Don thought about the forthcoming party. Varghese was building online buzz by harnessing the already existing reputation of “The Rave House.” In the DogsOnAcid.com forum, he had posted “the tech spec” of the Funktion One sound system alongside a row of gurning animated emoticons. Don had told Varghese he was worried that the party was going to be too wasteful, and that it might not reflect the values of the community. Varghese had explained that with some of today’s young people there was a conflict between a party being overtly low impact and being authentically cool. It was either/or. Responsibility versus Freedom. But, Varghese said, by encouraging the young people to have the best night of their lives, Don could create a bond with the community that would, in time, develop into an interest in sustainable living. That was why it was vital to get them on results day. They would be at an apex of open-mindedness and ready to make lifelong emotional attachments. They would do most of the work themselves. All the community had to do was not get all heavy on the first date.

Varghese suggested Don think of sustainability as an embarrassing uncle who, although invited to the party, should be kept out of sight. Young people were attuned to being manipulated into thoughtful behavior, he said.
Slam-dunk your green glass bottles here, dude!
That wouldn’t do. A generator running on used vegetable oil and biodegradable cups and plates was about the limit of it.

Don sniffed. He watched the ballroom dancing and missed
his daughter and wife. It was usually only at night, in his room, that he let himself feel what he was feeling now. He went into the hall. While putting on his coat, he could hear boots in the washing machine thumping like a heartbeat. In the scullery he grabbed a torch, then went out the back way into the weather. He heard the three-blade wind turbine going
whup-whup-whup
, its metal struts creaking.

Looking back from the bottom of the garden, he saw the house lit up, shapes passing the schoolroom windows, and the distant crescendos of swing jazz behind the big band of rain and wind. Ambient light poured out through all the piecemeal windows: bay, skylights, portholes, the stained glass at the top of the stairs—a testament to twenty years of cooperation, not a single vision but many visions patched together. It looked like the big house might explode, like it was molten in the center and getting hotter.

Varghese had told Don about a nightclub in Rotterdam that had a piezoelectric dance floor that harvested the energy given off by the stomping feet to power the lasers, which, in turn, promoted more ambitious dancing, and so on, until the whole club, Don presumed, got vaporized.

The first thing that came through the draft curtains of the roundhouse was a raised hand, followed by its owner, waltzing, partnerless, spinning through the room, dark spots specking the matting as drips fell off the hem of his coat. Don did a couple of turns and then stopped.

“Everyone’s pleased about the weather,” he said. “They’re dancing in the schoolroom. I thought you might like to join us.”

Freya was smiling, watching him from a stool next to the ex-milk-churn wood-burning stove, which was glowing orange at its edges. She was drying off—steam rising from her arms, her thighs, as though she were evaporating.

“You bring glamour wherever you go,” she said. “How are things?”