Wild Abandon (29 page)

Kate was an endangered mega-fauna, with big white eyes and black earmuff ears, smoking Benson & Hedges on the pyramid of hay. Everyone on the flammable pyramid was smoking. It felt huge in her hand, almost like a wand, and she sucked on it and sprayed the smoke, turning her head back and forth while looking for her brother in the crowd. She couldn’t see him. People were watching the band in threes and fours, all drinking perry then slipping away to piss in the nettles. So far, the bands had been sharing their gear with good humor, except for some inevitable queenyness over snare drums.

“Hello? Delivery for Kate.”

She looked round and saw Isaac beside her, holding a tray, a tea towel over his arm.

“From your brother,” he said. “He’s sorry. He sent this tomato
soup and salad that he made himself with a little help from Arlo, which I walked all the way down from the big house without spilling any.”

He handed the tray to Kate.

“Okay. Where is my brother?”

“He drew a letter
K
in coriander, which is the first letter of your name.”

“Great. Tell him he’s forgiven, and to come and see me. Where is he?”

Isaac bowed then turned and climbed down the pyramid and went away. She held the bowl up and took a big sniff and felt better. Geraint, who had been clambering up and down the pyramid like a temple monkey, asking for filters, leaving scuffs of green paint on the hay, returned. He smiled at the sky, which was dark now, then tried to pick something out of the small, impractical pockets at the front of his jean shorts.

“I saved you two greenies,” Geraint said. “They’re a
ma
zing.”

His bin-lid eyes stared at the pills in his hand the way children stare at emergency stop buttons they’re not supposed to press. He put one on the end of his tongue and stuck it out toward her. She’d never taken one before, though everyone assumed she was an old hand. She thought of Kit Lintel, and mushrooms, and the evening she had spent pretending to have a life-changing experience. Growing up in a community she had always found drugs a bit embarrassing, something that old people did, the way most teenagers think about opera.

His eyes narrowed as his tongue started to burn from the chemicals. She looked at her soup and was glad to think her
brother might have mellowed. It was beginning to seem like she might be able to enjoy herself this evening. Geraint put his hands on her knees and wagged his tongue like a dog. She sucked it off in a quick hard slurp that tasted of smoke and ketchup, and washed it down with soup.

Patrick and Don kept walking through the market garden, away from the noise, until the geodesic dome emerged into view, Patrick’s old home, looking like a testicle veined with fairy lights. It had been made available to the revelers—a banner read
THE THUNDER DOME!
—but it was empty, which, for Patrick, said everything about its eternal position in the community. They went inside, shutting the door and the windows, which just left the sound of the kick drum pushing through, a feeling in their chests of perpetual resuscitation.

“Phew,” Don said, and he sat down on the low futon-sofa.

“I think that girl liked you,” Patrick said.

“She liked
everything
.”

It shouldn’t have surprised Patrick that they hadn’t kept the dome as he had left it but, nevertheless, he stood, looking around at the bare, triangulate walls. The only decoration was a photo of whoever was sleeping here of late, a giant brown man and his miniature girlfriend, holding hands in a park. In anticipation of the difficult conversation ahead, Patrick instinctively checked the cupboard where he used to keep his stash. Inside were rows of labeled tapes and a pile of cue cards, each of which had handwriting on it. He read one:

“She thought we were a cult, Pat. She asked me how many wives I have.”

Patrick shut the cupboard and turned round. Don had scuffs of blue on both cheeks where the girl had said goodbye in the French manner. He was filling two wooden cups with Merlot from a box by his feet. He passed one up to Patrick.

“And how many wives did you tell her?”

Don didn’t find that funny.

“Have you seen Freya?” he asked.

“Actually, she did ask me to pass on a message. Said she’s too tired. Gone to bed.”

Don inhaled for a long time.

“I know it’s not what you wanted to hear,” Patrick said. “But you should try and have a good time anyway. You’ve worked really hard to make all this happen, and you deserve to enjoy it.”

Their relationship was not built on kindness and Don squinted in nonrecognition. Patrick took note and tried to even things out with a bit of trademark banter.

“I am reminded of something you said to me once. ‘Get stuck in, Pat. Sixty’s not too old.’ ” His impression of Don was camp. “ ‘All these tremendous women, intelligent, freethinking, body-confident.’ ”

“Are you trying to tell me to get laid?”

“I never said that. I’m just saying there’s a little secret that I know. You take this table leg off”—Patrick nudged the one
he was referring to with his foot—“and feed it through the coat hooks on the back of this door.
Et voilà
—privacy.”

“Oh Christ,” Don said, and he put his head in his hands. “Is that what Freya hopes will happen? I’ll get laid and forget about her?”

Patrick didn’t reply; he wasn’t used to seeing Don vulnerable and it unsettled him.

“You know she’s talking about sending Albert to school?” Don said.

“I actually wanted to talk to you about that,” Patrick said.

Finishing off his wine in one, Don leaned forward and squirted himself a top-up from the box.

“I just don’t think it’ll do him any good. School won’t suit him. Maybe when he’s older, Kate’s age, it will. Plus it’s miles away. He’ll lose half his life going back and forth.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk about—the commute,” Patrick said. He knew there was a spot in the middle of the room that, because of its shape, produced a kind of reverb. He had always disliked how it made him sound, but for now he decided it would be better to speak with a certain omnipotence. He knew the spot by instinct; he took a couple of steps and one to the side, then raised his chin: “Freya said it wouldn’t take so long for him to get to school if she and Albert lived nearer the school.”

“You can’t teach that kind of rational thinking, Pat. That’s why I married her.”

Patrick stayed where he was. To get the special effect he had to keep his head in that position.

“And she asked me if she and Albert could live in my house, for a bit.”

The reverb smoothed the harsh edges off his voice, he felt.

“And what did you say, old pal?”

“Well, Don. I mean. To be totally frank, I said ye—”

It was the purest kind of uppercut. Don, seated on the very low futon-sofa, had made a fist and pushed himself up, reaching full height as he caught Patrick under the chin. His fist must have traveled four and a half feet along a vertical axis. At exactly the point in the word
yes
where the tongue darts out before the sibilant, it hit.

Patrick took a couple of steps back and held his throat. It hadn’t been that hard, both men knew, but it counted.

“Okay,” Patrick said, his voice no longer omnipotent.

His tongue was bleeding. Something in the less than wholehearted way Don had hit him—at about 65 percent strength—suggested a kind of resignation. It was almost an
okay, you win
. Don sat back down on the sofa and said: “Damn.”

At this point, Patrick had expected to feel more victorious.

She’d never heard music like this before. This was not normal dance music. Closing her eyes, Kate clearly imagined robotic dogs coming toward her over the horizon. Giant robotic dogs. Their feet were the drums and they were growling the bass line—no, they were chasing the bass line—the bass line was chasing them! Always running toward her but never getting any closer, like in the
Steamboat Willie
cartoon, but not scary at all. A guy without face paint danced against her. His features looked squashed but she didn’t mind so she pushed her bum into his crotch and laughed over her shoulder. He was one of the free-party ‘heads who had arrived at midnight,
easily recognized by the girls’ fluorescent leggings and the boys’ sleeveless tops. Whenever the music dropped away, she heard the hydraulic rush of an entrepreneur, somewhere, doling out nitrous. There was someone who looked like her father, if her father had jaundice, standing near the edge of the dance floor, speaking intensely to a girl who was one of those blue-skinned aliens in hot pants.

She found the Hulk next to the speakers, watching his own hands with interest, dancing by a girl dressed as a peacock. He reached into the condom pocket of his jean shorts and teased something out, another pill, which he pressed into Kate’s palm. Gazing up at the amoeba-shaped tarpaulin, she felt an affinity with everything, right down to the single-cell organisms within her. She took a moment to contemplate the inside of herself, her internal neatness, before becoming aware of her bladder. She could not wait to go to the toilet, Kate suddenly realized. She was excited about it.

Avoiding the portable johns, she went to the bathroom under the stairs. She felt her breath go in and out and she looked at the ceiling and the walls and the toilet scrubber and the curlicued
H
and
C
on the faucets. She sat down, giggling, then read and reread the note that said: “Hello. If you’re reading this, you must be sitting on me. I like organic waste (that means piss, shit, and toilet paper—yum!). Everything else, feed to my friend, Senor Bin. Love, Joe Bog.” It was brilliant and clever. Then she wiped herself and saw red on the tissue paper. She stared at it. A watery red. She looked into the bowl and saw all her piss was red. Internal bleeding. The pills.

Fucking cheapskate pills, just typical, for me to die on the day of my unconditional acceptance. So this is how Geraint gets his revenge
.

She pressed her hands on her stomach. Suddenly there were no unthreatening robotic armies, just a slow, painful death in a brightly lit hospital, and she remembered Patrick in an eight-bed ward, the forked capillaries at the side of his nose. Kate realized she would never stride purposefully through the university library’s impossibly complicated annals. Annals. Never annals for her. She would never have one-on-ones with outlandish lecturers. So many stains on their jumpers, shoelaces untied, that she would never see. She would never punch well above her weight, academically and romantically, would never fall in love with a boy of an opposite social background—even more opposite than Geraint’s, the son of a wealthy foreign diplomat, perhaps—and they would never toss off the shackles of each other’s ideas of what a relationship could be, and discover that, when it came down to it, they were similar—both fleeing their childhoods, both social explorers—and they would never hold each other in a postgraduate carrel amid the smell of rare and expensive books and wake full of knowledge, not the kind of knowledge found in books but something deeper, about themselves, about each other.

She stared into the bowl. What was she worried about again?

Oh yeah, the watery blood that suggested a slow, agonizing death—with hours to decide her final words, hours to edit and redraft. She couldn’t think what her final words would be.
I love you
. Was that an awful cliché? It felt true, though. I love
you
. I
love
you.
I
love you.

“He-llo? I’m dying out here,” a female voice said.

Kate pulled up her knickers and flushed. She straightened
her black skirt and unlocked the door. As she came out, a Pierrot clown shoved past and slammed the door behind her. Kate went back to the kitchen, where there had been a fight with raw onion. It was everywhere. She felt her eyes start to sting. She sniffed and remembered that she was going to die. She’d forgotten. She started crying. There was a big red bloody patch on the chopping board on the table. She stared at it. Next to the board were a pile of beetroot scalps.

She stared back and forth between the board, the bloodstain, the beetroot.

The board. The bloodstain.

The beetroot.

She was like some completely useless detective.

It took maybe eleven seconds.

“Beetroot salad,” she said. “I ate beetroot salad.”

There was a boy she didn’t recognize at the fridge—not in fancy dress—digging at a carrot cake with his hand.

“I thought I was dying, but I’m not!”

She pulled the other pill Geraint had given her out of her pocket and took it with a glass of Five Alive.

The last image that Patrick had of Don was of him, with frightening intensity, twisting out the last dregs from the foil bag of box wine, as though breaking the neck of a rabbit. Don had asked to be left alone, and so now Patrick was standing at the edge of the live music yurt. He kept deliberately clipping the cut on his tongue against his front teeth, wincing, then doing it again. The band were called “Palindromeda.” As they finished one particularly awful song, Patrick heard a voice at his shoulder.

“You’ve been avoiding me.”

He knew who it was. Only now, somehow, with his car full of another man’s wife’s belongings, and with his tongue swollen in his mouth, did he feel able to see her. He turned to look—her face was flushed at the forehead from dancing and wearing a neckerchief—then he went back to watching the band. The front man said: “This song’s called ‘Called songs, this.’ ”

She said: “I’ve missed you.”

Patrick felt the back of her hand against his cheek.

“What happened to your face?” she said.

Albert wandered the party, trying to decide on the best position from which to make his announcement. He needed to take into account where the biggest crowd could gather, the audience’s sight lines, and which position would give him the best silhouette. They would not be getting any more trouble from his sister, who, Albert could only assume, had tasted the soup, realized that she was drinking one of her oldest friends, and was right now releasing tears into the wild, somewhere very far away. He walked past the fire pit and saw Zinia, a woman who he had once loved like a grandmother until she left the community to live in Christiania years ago. She had curly hair and an alpine chest.