Wild Abandon (24 page)

When he left hospital, he had assured the doctors that he was going back to the community, where he would be looked after. In reality, he left Morriston, swinging his blue cast out of the parking lot, past the workers’ cottages, and up to the double doors of the unpretentious, redbrick Proclaimer’s Church. A poster pinned to the wall said:
God is a DJ. Got any requests?
If he was soft-brained, Patrick had thought, then he would soon know as much, when tested by Kim’s righteous enthusiasm.

The church had a guest bedroom, which they also used
as storage space. It contained a giant octopus costume, Nativity sets, old arcade machines, and, in one corner, a mattress, sleeping bag, and bedside lamp. They gave him a bowl of the most astounding split pea and ham soup. He hadn’t smoked in weeks; his taste buds were as new.

That first night the church had a party for the local young people. They invited Patrick to join them. On the dance floor, loosened by three times his recommended dose of codeine and with certain frequencies vibrating the pins in his ankle, Patrick bobbed on his crutches and swung the bad leg. He thought again of his desire to pass on something of his life experience to the new generation. He had a semicircle of dressed-up teenagers giving him the thumbs-up every time he tried a fresh move. Behind the DJ, a video screen showed stills from the Chandra observatory. When he went to bed, they gave him a pair of fluorescent foam earplugs. Patrick was nearly sixty. At midnight, on the dot, the music stopped.

The week he spent in the basement of the new-build church, his bowels were still so clogged up from the morphine that he felt like he was sleeping on pebbles. While attractive men and women brought him glasses of prune juice, he spent time mentally cauterizing his feelings for Janet. The metaphor he had developed, while in the hospital, and which showed a trace of the morphine’s imaginative flamboyance, was that Janet conducted relationships like a stunt pilot, flying as close to her spectators as possible, without actually touching them. Patrick thought of himself as a spectator—one of many—grinning and laughing idiotically with his hands in the air, every time imagining that he’d be able to grab hold of her long scarf as she sped by.

He counted himself lucky, in a way, that the damage to his ankle had provided a telling illustration of Janet’s feelings: on first seeing his injury, she was stricken, desperate, willing to do anything, and, judging by the way she passed her body heat to him, most people would have assumed, in love. But when offered the chance to spend two days at his hospital bedside listening to his unappetizing breathing sounds—a commitment that would have shown a deep connection between them—she declined.

In many ways, that time in the dome, long ago, when they had come close to sex but without the sex, was her ultimate loop the loop: getting as close to him as she could possibly be, absorbing maximum attention and love, without giving any of herself away.

Then, one profound morning that for Patrick was the key religious revelation of his life thus far, the prune juice finally had its intended effect. Kim offered to change his sheets. Such saintly hospitality, Patrick thought, would have been enough to lure in a weak-minded individual. But he was relieved to find he still had his rational disgust, and although he liked the engaging young people, the basement had given him new ambitions: to live out his years in secular hopelessness and never see Janet again.

Patrick heard the unmistakable hush of drawers being opened downstairs. He could think of no psychological analogy for this; it sounded like a bona fide robbery in progress, someone searching for jewelry. Pulling back his duvet, he sat on the edge of the bed in his boxer shorts. He leaned forward to the fireplace and grabbed the coal shovel.

Slowly making his way downstairs, Patrick held the shovel like a baseball bat. Adrenaline allowed him to take each step without wincing. His thin blue boxer shorts were the kind that mushroom up around the elastic waistband.

He got to the bottom of the stairs and looked at the plastic front door for signs of forced entry. It was locked and untampered with. The door to the lounge was closed and he pushed it open with his good foot, his bad ankle tweaking under his weight. The room was quiet. Walking slowly back through the house, he tested the lock on the door to the basement as he passed. Stepping into the kitchen, white-knuckled with the shovel high, he quickly checked behind the door, but there was no one.

He was now starting to realize: a psychological burglar was, in truth,
worse
than a real one. A real burglar was for one night only; an internal one was for life.

But then, looking around, he noticed the back door was open a couple of inches. He clicked on the garden’s security light and looked out through the big window above the sink. The only living thing was the pygmy palm at the back of the patio.

Swinging open the door, he stepped outside, raising the shovel. His ankle ached and tightened. A big moth butted the security light. There were dark footprints, unevenly spaced, marked out across the light condensation on the patio stones. They led to the double doors at the back of the garage, which were wide open but with no light showing through. He took a couple of small steps, barely lifting his feet off the ground. From inside, he could hear a snuffling noise, a nose-breathing,
a crunching, like a hog troughing through human remains. He waited, gripping the coal shovel. He wanted this to be real. He stepped through the doorway.

A square pale light was floating in the blackness. A portal.

There was the smell of garlic and chicken. He flicked on the two strip lights, which batted awake in sequence.

Kate was standing behind the meat safe, hunched over a bowl of Indonesian jellied chicken, a tray of grilled garlicky eggplant and a lentil salad. She was using her mobile phone as a torch and in the other hand was holding a drumstick. There were black marks on her face and arms and streaks of spiced jelly down her dress. She was eating meat.
She was eating meat
. She was wearing a gingham shirtdress.
She was wearing a gingham shirtdress
. This was not the Kate he knew. Her mouth was half-full, and chewing. In the snow-globe moment of the strip lights, she stopped.

He was either Mr. Universe or he was wearing the mother of all Puffa jackets. It was knee-length, collared, black, with a furred hood.

Freya squinted at him while still pissing, making mist.

“Sorry. It’s me, Geraint. Something’s happened to Kate.”

She looked over her shoulder at him for a long time. His eyes were puffy and half-shut. He had a quarter moon of toothpaste at the edge of his mouth.

“I’ll wait back here,” he said, and retreated behind the curve of the roundhouse to wait for her Morse code to stop. It was just getting light. She stood and tightened her dressing gown.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You can come in. Albert’s asleep.”

She waited while he knelt to take off his complex walking boots, then they slid through the draft curtains. She slotted some bits of broken-up pallet onto the coals, and they sat on stools beside the wood-burner. Geraint kept his voluminous coat on, his delicate nose poking out of his hood.

“She’s gone. I rang the community. Nobody’s seen her. I tried her mobile. My dad’s driving round looking. He dropped me here. We thought she might be with you.”

His breathing was shallow. The fire popped and Geraint glanced at Albert, hidden beneath his duvet. As far as he knew, Albert still wanted to kill him.

“Could she be with a friend?” Freya asked.

“Can’t think of any,” Geraint said, and held his stomach.

Then a duvet-muffled voice spoke. “I wouldn’t worry,” it said. “She’s almost certainly dead.”

Kate woke up in a strange bedroom and either her brain had swollen or her skull had shrunk—whichever, the fit was not good. She massaged her forehead. Her most recent memory was of entering a house via a coal chute. From that image, she worked backward. She had been sitting on a doorstep, drinking whisky from an Evian bottle. The doorstep was Patrick’s. She had got there by walking the streets along the seafront with her bag of clothes, looking for a convertible car paid for by advertising. Before that she had been at Blackpill, already drunk, cooling her feet in the lido. Her feet had needed cooling because of a long walk along the old train tracks through Clyne, overcoming the fear of rapists and slashers by taking shots from the sports-lid Evian. The bottle, as she now remembered, had been filled, just before she left their house,
from Mervyn’s expensively packaged Oban whisky (which she never once saw him drink). Then she remembered the reason she had left their house. It went beyond shame, what she was feeling. Darkness and the texture of his jogging shorts. Two kinds of heavy breathing.

The room she was in was filling with the smell of death: this was what she deserved.

When Kate finally stepped into the kitchen, Patrick was in flip-flops, boardies, T-shirt, and a Slanket, holding a metal spatula: an alpha male at a one-man barbecue. She was wearing a silk-hemmed dressing gown, another Liz donation, and her skin was blotchy.

“Oh ho ho, look who it is!”

“Pat,” she said, swallowing.

“Hello, Burglar Bill.”

He put down the spatula and came toward her with his arms raised.

“Sorry,” she said, shivering on the tiles. He wrapped himself round her.

“Don’t be sorry. I’ll take whatever visitors I can get.”

She kept her arms by her sides as he hugged her. She had forgotten how much torso he had. He smelled of moisturizer.

“You’re still not
great
in the
mor
-nings,” he said, and let her go. “Or should I say … afternoons.”

“Please.”

“Just so you know, I rang the community to let them know that you’re safe.”

“Oh God.”

He went back to the cooker, pulled a plate from the oven, and put it on the table. There were beans, toast, two portobello
mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, a hash brown, and a poached egg. She sat down and stared at the plate for a while. He watched her staring and made the sound of cogs turning.

“Something missing?” he said.

“Okay, Pat.”

“What?” he said, and he did a little Charlie Chaplin dance with the spatula, his flip-flops clacking on the tiled floor. He had a mid-price haircut.

“You win,” she said.

“What on
earth
could you mean?”

He did a twirl on the spot, his Slanket pirouetting out. He was really enjoying himself. He swung open the oven door, pulled out the middle rack.

“I’ve waited years for this,” he said, shaking the baking tray a little.

Scraping back her chair, she sighed and took her plate to the oven. She forked in three chipolatas, two pieces of bacon, a load of quartered potatoes that were fried with the meat fat, and then, hesitating for a second, lifted a slice of black pudding aboard.

Click
.

Don stood in front of the charge controller, staring.

Click
. A counter read 459.

He had already checked every room in the big house, the workshop, pottery shed, the barn, and the dome. He had interrogated a number of day visitors and cross-questioned Marina about rumors of an undeclared printer.

Click
. 458. This number showed how charged the battery was, 500 being full and 000, empty. Don had set the controller so that if the reading ever dipped below 450, the whole community’s power would cut out. This had not made him popular. Publicly, he said it was a necessary restriction, to maintain the battery’s life span. Privately, he felt the community had become too easygoing. Since the storm, a month ago
now, when they had tasted limitless electricity, everyone was struggling to embrace a more careful lifestyle. Don wanted the community to be streamlined, in time for the party. He didn’t like the way Varghese, who was working hard at promoting the event, kept calling it a “blowout.”

Click
. 457.

He was becoming emotionally linked to the charge controller. To him, each
click
sounded reproachful: the noise people make in slow-moving post office lines.

Click
.

Between the charge controller and the party preparations, whole days could go past without him having to think deeply about his family. That left only the nights, stretching out limitlessly, with Don finding books that used to guarantee him sleep in under a chapter now seeming, if not exactly riveting, then at least backlit and lightweight.

Click
.

The only community members whose electricity usage Don had not yet accounted for were Isaac and Albert. The community had no official term dates, especially now that there were only two students, so it was generally agreed that whenever the microclimate served up a stretch of genuine warm weather, the student body could make the most of it. Since the start of the “holidays,” he had only seen glimpses of his son, walking across the yard holding something unnerving like a screwdriver or the Yellow Pages.

Click
.

Don shook his head and went outside. He decided to do a lap of the house, which is when he saw a black extension cable snaking from the kitchen’s back window, down through
the garden. Running now, he tracked it past the fire pit and into the musty dark beneath the Douglas firs as it connected with a chain of linked five-plug adaptors. Don slowed as he approached a clearing where there was an old, overstuffed armchair, one that had been in the bottom of the garden for years, rotted down to its bones. It looked like a seat that someone had died in, which was clearly the look that Albert, who was in it, was going for. Don had assumed his son’s uncleanliness had plateaued, but now, perhaps slightly for the camera, he saw this was not true. With dirt-mascara and his hands gloved with mud, he looked like he was presenting an episode of
Tales from the Crypt
. He didn’t see Don.

“Hit it, Eyes,” Albert said.

The chain of plug adaptors led toward a camera—Varghese’s camera—on a tripod, facing Albert, and to the Korg Trinity keyboard belonging to Isaac’s mother lying on the ground, off to one side. Isaac was sitting cross-legged in front of it, lowering his finger onto a single key. A supernatural wind, the creak of a ghost ship.