Wild Abandon (7 page)

“What is it?” he said.

“Guess.”

He chewed his lip. “A silencer?”

“Here’s a clue: I’m going to paint it with red and white stripes. It’s to help you get your voice heard.”

He started to look scared.

“It’s a megaphone, Albert.”

“Oh sweet!”

“It will be ornamental though, really. A
symbol
of your right to be listened to.”

“I’ve always wanted a megaphone,” he said.

Once he’d made the bhang, Patrick added pistachio and blitzed it in with the plain lassi. Little clumps of weed and nut whizzed past like fence posts in a hurricane. He watched the yogurt take on a green, ill-looking tint.

It was late now, gone midnight, and although he was tired, he didn’t want to sleep until he was stoned. He drank a third of the lassi and went for a walk around the garden. It was a brutally cold, clear night, and after thirty minutes he felt his mind rearrange itself in a familiar formation. Certain memories receded. Lights clicked off in his internal attic. He stretched his back and felt the blood slosh round his brain.

Getting back inside, he wound up the radio to full capacity and set it playing on Radio 3. Music was good again. He sat down in his overstuffed armchair. After a while, the radio died and he found he was incapable of winding it back up. Pinned to his seat, he felt his mind over-revving while he stared at the heptagonal skylight.

He thought about the dome, which had been built as a present for him. When they had first moved to Gower, Patrick used to stay in what was now Kate’s room, sharing a thin wall with Don and Freya. As an infant, Kate had a cot at the end of her parents’ bed, which is where she did her sleeping and, more to the point, her not sleeping. Patrick had little choice
but to synchronize, napping in the one- or two-hour bursts of silence, a tasting menu of sleep.

On Kate’s first birthday, Don had made a speech in which he said: “I don’t think it’s fair Patrick should have to put up with our clatter and Kate’s air-raid siren, and it’s his birthday coming up, so I thought—I know he’s interested—we could get to work on a dome.”

There is no perceptible difference between something made with love and something made with spite, except spite works to a schedule. Six months later, they moved him in with his books and his spices and Don bought him a bag of weed to say thanks for keeping the big house smoke-free for Kate, and that was when he properly started smoking again. With resurgent paranoia, he began to wonder whether the dome had, in actual fact, been built as a way to get him out of the big house.

Patrick made the biggest monthly contribution to the community’s finances and, as such, was prone to believing that they only put up with him because of his money. He was also acutely conscious that if Don ever heard Patrick imply his wealth entitled him to better treatment than anyone else then Don would absolutely pounce, ideologically. Which meant Patrick had never—not once in twenty years—suggested that his position as financial load-bearer entitled him to not feel alienated.

His best attempt at expressing his discontent had been just a few weeks ago. Cider-drunk on spring equinox, during those fearful few days before Janet’s most recent return, while sitting round the fire with most of the community, he had suggested that the geodesic dome, in its isolated position beyond
the tubers at the top of the garden, and given people’s generally withering, lightly nostalgic attitude toward it (“Well, it must have looked like the future when it was built”), was an analogue for how people viewed him personally. He had thought the statement might come out as lighthearted, and that they would make jokes in response—“Yeah, Pat, we put you out there as, like, quarantine”—but his audience’s reaction was the kind of stonewall denial—“How can you say that?”—that people adopt when someone has absolutely nailed a thing.

He began to harbor a strong belief that people talked about him behind his back. You could always hear people talking somewhere, and he often heard double plosives that sounded like his name and, depending on that day’s psychological lean, he would provide the context. In a good frame of mind: “Patrick seriously delivered with the kedgeree this a.m.” In a bad one: “Is it me or was Patrick’s kedgeree pre-chewed?”

When he felt this way, he turned to music and art for comfort, and this presented another problem. It was not possible to hang art in the dome, all the walls being curved and omnitriangulate. When Patrick had moved out of the big house all those years ago, he had donated to baby Kate, in her new bedroom, a smoggy, oil-acrylic seascape and eight wildly imprecise line drawings:
Studies for Any Female Nude I
–
VIII
by Marcel Le Lionnais. On the day before Kate’s third birthday, Don returned them to Patrick, carrying them under both arms to the dome, saying they were “a bit much, for Kate, at this stage in her development.”

Since Patrick couldn’t hang the art, he had decided to
make use of one of the awkward spaces that existed behind every piece of non-dome-specific furniture. Rectangular sofas, rectangular bookcases, rectangular wardrobes: anything not designed to back onto a spherical wall created dead space. So Patrick, in a fit of innovation, took the pictures out of their frames and put them into cardboard-backed plastic sleeves. He then stood the images on a cradle-style print browser that he’d bought from an art shop in Mumbles. It fitted behind the futon-sofa, thus utilizing, albeit awkwardly, the dead space. If he knelt on the sofa, facing the wall, he could then peruse the images at his leisure. This soon became one thing that made Patrick feel truly wretched and alone: the eight line-drawings now a kind of flick-book, creating the impression of a naked woman exploding, limbs distending, tearing at herself, followed by the undeniably bleak and featureless gray-black-blue seascape. This final image captured Patrick’s feelings whenever he tried to enjoy his modest collection of original art.

The only wall decorations were Patrick’s string instruments. When they had built the dome, Don installed wall-mounted brackets for Patrick’s guitar and banjo. It was a small act of genuine thoughtfulness. Over the years, the community had bought Patrick a number of stringed instruments, each one smaller,
quieter
, than the last. Two Christmases ago it was the samisen, a three-stringed Japanese guitar.

The acoustics in the dome were unsettling. If Patrick sat on a stool in the middle of the room with his Spanish guitar, it added an unwanted 1980s-type reverb to his fingerpicking, making his compositions sound like restaurant music. He could never achieve a lo-fi, stripped-back sound. Also, much
of his record collection became unlistenable and overproduced within these walls, which Patrick blamed Don for as well.

Through Kate’s mid-teens, Patrick had happily transcribed and played her favorite emotional indie rock so she could practice singing. He was one of the only people she would allow to hear her voice, plus she actually preferred how she sounded with the dome’s built-in reverb. The other advantage was that Patrick had no neighbors who could overhear them. He felt privileged to be, as far as he knew, the only person she talked to about her new boyfriend.

Now, as Patrick stared up at the raised, recessed bed at the top of the dome, he found himself thinking about the night that he and Janet had spent there. Not long after Albert’s birth there had been a party; Janet had gifted her own bed to two friends who were visiting, and the schoolroom floor was dominoed with people sleeping, so Patrick—in an honest-to-goodness unsleazy way—said there was spare room in the dome. It was freezing and raining when they ran across the yard, still drunk. They set the wood burner going, and climbed into bed fully clothed and hugging. The way the heavily insulated dome worked was that heat rose and kept the top a lot hotter than the bottom. There was a window above the mezzanine bed for ventilation, but if it was raining, as it was that night, it had to stay shut or the rain came in.

In the morning, with the sun shining through the skylight, they woke up in a tropical weather system. Drenched in sweat, dry-mouthed, brains loose in their skulls, steam particles in the slanted sunlight, condensation on the rolling hills of duvet—reminiscent of North Gower at dawn—they stripped off their jumpers, gasping for air, laughing, coughing,
throwing their clothes down from the mezzanine bed, until it would have just seemed unnecessarily prudish, given their night together and the genuinely sauna-like conditions, not to take all their clothes off and lie on top of the covers, breathing.

Their matted hair, bodies shining with sweat, chests rising and falling. Patrick opened the window and let the light elliptical rain fall through onto them. It felt, in every way but one, postcoital. So, without self-consciousness, they kissed and hugged and fell back to sleep.

Something about this experience, Patrick felt, had sealed off the possibility of them getting together. They had achieved all the awkwardness and shy chatter of good friends who have slept together, but without ever having crossed that threshold. It would have seemed oddly regressive to suggest they start any kind of courting ritual, but equally he didn’t feel able to take the bolder route and talk to her about the thing that had almost happened and whether it could actually happen. As time passed, it seemed impossible to talk to Janet about that morning. He began to suspect she wouldn’t even remember.

Patrick managed to heave himself out of his chair and get to the kitchen cupboard. Among the other herbs, he had a jar of dried magic mushrooms that he’d picked last autumn. He needed something to try to turn his evening round and he thought they might open a few internal windows. Sitting back down, he chewed on three tiny caps, washed them down with the rest of the lassi, which he’d forgotten he was planning to keep, and tried to think of something positive.

That was when he heard the roar of a very large animal.

• • •

Upstairs, in the big house, Freya and Don were in bed, each sitting up with a book and their own lamp. She had her hair tied in a side ponytail so that she could rest back against the headboard. He was rereading
Ways of Seeing
and occasionally laughing with his mouth closed, which Freya felt as a series of vibrations in the mattress. He had two pillows under his right foot for drainage.

Closing the book, he watched his wife, then silently leaned across and kissed her on the cheek. “Silently” because eighteen years into their marriage, two years ago, Don had started to make an involuntary kiss-kiss noise (the noise didn’t sound like kisses; it sounded like a small sealed bag being opened) every time he was seeking, or was about to give her, affection. It just started one day. In the dark of the bedroom, she would hear the two quick vacuum-sealed, slightly wet noises and know that he was shortly to make contact. At the breakfast table, before his lips were on her neck, she would hear the pursed schlupping. The noise was similar to the one people make to attract the attention of a cat. She had never found his kisses repellent before, but something about the self-announcing quality of these noises—a comedian offstage, doing his own intro—really got to her. She had thought it only fair to let him know: “That thing you do, before you kiss me”—she wasn’t able to impersonate, so made a kind of chewing noise—“it’s awful, can you stop?” His small eyes widened. He had not been aware he was doing it.

Of course he would stop, he said. From that point, whenever he made the sound he’d halt and curse. He battled his auto-self. Eventually, after weeks of struggle, Don was able
to kiss and receive kisses without making preemptive smoochies.

Except something of it remained: a ghost of the sound, the impulse but without its audible counterpart. She became attuned to Don’s repression of the noise and, lying in bed in the dark, knew with just as much clarity when she was about to feel his lips and the swish of his beard against her. In many ways, this was more distressing than the original kiss-kiss noise. The sound was gone but the idea lived on, made bigger, more upsettingly complex; a process between them.

She read the same line in her poem again and again. The line was “That is the way with amputations.” Recently, she’d been finding that if Don got to sleep before her, then she stayed awake, preoccupied by the light pan-pipe moods that whistled from his nostrils. She used to say how much she liked the chords his sinuses played, but not now that they kept her awake. When she was not sleeping she worried about her son.

More and more, she was seeing Albert skulk off to the workshop or pottery shed, both of which were far enough away to make it difficult for Freya to casually pop by to check on him without having some genuine reason for doing so. It had been Don’s idea to take Marina and Isaac out of the big house (since Janet was shortly to reclaim her room) and put them into the workshop’s spare room. Publicly, he said it would give them independence—“You can be your own family unit”—while remaining within the communal fold. In truth, he wanted to keep Marina at a distance. Don complained she was “too intense,” but what felt like
overintensity to an adult felt to a child like that person was actually listening.

Although it was tempting to casually dismiss, as Don had, all her talk of a galactic eclipse, Freya preferred to understand the idea first and then be able to reject it definitively. A
know your enemy
sort of thing. Her online research showed that supermassive black holes did exist and that our spiral galaxy did indeed have one at its center: Sagittarius A*. It was invisible; dramatic photos from the Chandra satellite observatory showed where it wasn’t. An article on the NASA blog, written with, she assumed, preteen astronomers in mind, said the “SMBH” was “hungry” and “gobbling up all-comers” and that “beasts of its kind” had the power to “bend the space-time continuum.” NASA didn’t go as far as mentioning the end of days, but Freya wouldn’t have been totally surprised if they had. This was science trying to compete for the attention of the young imagination. But when she searched for “galactic eclipse,” that’s when the real nutters emerged: GaiaMind.org and ProphetsManual.com.