Wild Abandon (22 page)

“
Things
are ter
rif
ic,” he said, opening his eyes wide, starting to dance again. “And full of electrical appliances on standby.”

“Well, you might need to use them in a hurry,” she said.

“Exactly!”

She watched him slow down, stop, lower his hands. The wet had come through his boots and there were dashes of mud up his trousers.

“Why don’t you come up to the big house?” he said.

He waited for an answer, and when one didn’t come he turned and started looking around, first at Freya’s bed, the Celtic knot of dark hairs on her pillow, then at Albert’s quarter-circle of the room. His made-up bed was demarcated by the Japanese dressing screen patterned with clouds and non-Welsh dragons.

“I overheard Albert describe himself as being
of no fixed abode
,” Don said.

Freya watched him. Some thunder revved and white light flashed at the porthole window.

“I’ve been speaking to someone,” she said. “The headmaster at Bishopston Comp. He says there’s room for Albert to start school in September.”

Don turned to look at her. “You never mentioned that.”

“I’m mentioning it.”

“We need to discuss this.” He tugged up the thighs of his
trousers and sat down on a stool opposite her. “I thought we agreed that learning should be child-led. Look at what Kate’s achieved. She’s way ahead of her peers.”

“It was different for her. Albert’s got no one to learn with. Besides, I worry that without contact with people his own age he’ll get too … strange.”

“Right now he’s ballroom dancing on the shoulders of an ex-professional chef. How will that go down in Bishopston Comprehensive?”

“All I’m saying is he might
benefit
from a teeny bit of peer pressure. He’ll make friends. He always does.”

“I’m sure he and the school psychiatrist will get on well.”

Don was a little pleased with that, she noticed. Her socks were drying on the wood-burner. She turned them and they sizzled like rashers of bacon.

“You know,” he said, “since Varghese has been handling our online presence, we’ve had loads of e-mails from teenagers as well as their parents, because the system they’re part of is failing them. By September, the community’ll be overrun by young people looking for a decent education. We’ll be wishing the little sods would leave us alone.” Don stopped speaking as the sky grumbled but no lightning came. He went on: “And what about the things school can’t teach Albert?”

“Like what?”

“Like a million things. Like how to build his own home, live with other people, grow his own food,
kill
his own food—now you’re gone, there’s nobody to pass on that knowledge. Another skill set slips between the generations.”

“Get someone trained up then. Train
yourself
up.”

She watched him. Don stared at the stove.

“You know I’m not cut out for that kind of thing.”

She opened her mouth with an impulse to say something cruel, but decided to let it go.

“Just for example, Arlo’s been looking forward to making this traditional Sardinian meal for the party,” he said. “He’s been going on about it—
sanguinaccio
! Blood soup, basically. But without you, we can’t do it.”

“
Take
the
goat
to an
abattoir
, Don. I don’t live at the community anymore. I’m not killing your animals for you.”

“No, of course,” he said, then stood up off the stool and started looking around again. “But it’s an example of how skills and traditions get lost over time.”

She breathed through her mouth. He examined the fanned, self-supporting pattern of the roof beams. Raising his arms to test one, he grunted as his feet came off the floor.

“But Freya, the thing is, the abattoir’s in Cardiff and the blood needs to be fresh that day. Arlo says it has to be
straight outta de throat and onna de stove
.”

“Tell him to cook a different recipe.”

“Have you ever met Arlo?” Don said, in a funny voice.

“Then
do it yourself
. Christ.”

“You know what I’m like,” he said.

You know what I’m like
. That was it for Freya.

“I won’t let you put this on me.
You
do it.
You
should do it.” Her voice suddenly loud. “Then the
skills and traditions
won’t be lost, if you fucking do it.”

She breathed hard. Don had a dazed look on his face. She turned the socks again. This time they didn’t hiss. She felt the same impulse as before, but now gave in to it.

“I went to see Kate,” she said.

“
What?
”

“I went to see Kate, at her house.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? What’s the address?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What’s the street name?”

“I’ve forgotten.”

“She won’t answer my calls. I’d just like to know, for my own well-being, her postcode.”

She shook her head.

“I’m her father, Frey.”

As she opened the stove door, flames flared in the rush of oxygen. He walked a full loop round the edge of the rug.

“You’re just doing this to be cruel,” he said.

“You’re right,” she said.

“Okay, well, good then.
Good
. Now we’re getting somewhere.” He slapped his hand against the beam above his head. “And tell me—how else would you like me to suffer?”

Patrick watched the storm through the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran the length of Mumbles Pier Arcade. He was in his booth. The weather had kept away the regulars, leaving only Karl Orland, his ex-dealer and now occasional dinner companion, who sometimes dropped in at the end of Patrick’s shifts. Karl was playing Cash Invader, crouching down to peek up the reels.

Patrick’s official title was croupier. The title he gave himself, however, was Human Change Machine. He didn’t just slide stacks often-pence coins across the counter, but also sometimes laminated pamphlets from Proclaimer’s Mental Health Support. This wasn’t his dream job, but despite early
success as a businessman and landlord, twenty years at the community had left him with a pretty wonky CV. Mortgage lenders no longer considered him “a worthwhile gamble,” which was appropriate.

He was renting a little sea-view two-bed with a back patio that opened on to the cycle path. It was paid for by the rent from his student house in Norwich, which was still, according to his agency, “attracting moderate interest.” He had no desire to ever go back there or to discover how badly the agency was ripping him off. All he knew was that each month the cash that arrived in his account, along with the piddling wage he earned as a Human Change Machine, allowed him to live in what felt like extravagance—relative to the geodesic dome.

Karl jabbed the spin button with his knuckles, then stood there frowning for a while, waiting for the music to return to idle and the lights to start swirling. Patrick had discovered the real reason Karl had never turned up that week, back at the community. Jury duty. It really tickled Patrick—to think the hand of democratic bureaucracy was still able to influence the community, and drag him back to the mainstream.

It was Friday. On a normal weekend night, the arcade would be full of gamblers exploring the impact of lager on probability, but tonight, with the weather, Patrick decided to close early. He locked the front and side doors, then put the cashbox in the safe.

He and Karl went outside to the little smokers’ area and sat on the covered bench that overlooked the sea. Behind them, the noise and patterned lights from the machines—cartwheels, snakes, tractor beams, sunrays, building blocks—and, in front of them, the bay and the seafront lights curling round.

Patrick coughed steadily until something came up, which he spat into the water. Karl patted Patrick on the back. He was the sort of drug dealer who genuinely supported a client’s attempts to quit.

A sheet of lightning hit out at sea; gray cloud appearing in a chamber of sky then sucked away into the night’s black lungs. Thunder followed.

“The sky has chest infection too,” Karl said, and was pleased.

They heard the oddly homogenized and comforting noise of drunks walking along the seafront. Girls screaming, either in hysterics or terror. Boys in tight white T-shirts and Italian jeans walked like Ken dolls toward the pier. When he had come to Swansea from London, Patrick had at first assumed that this was a sign of a really vibrant and open gay scene: tanned men in muscle tees, walking with their outsize arms around each other’s shoulders, openly checking one another out.

Lightning hit again, flashing the city’s off-color teeth.

“A beaut,” Karl said, and he brought a spliff from behind his ear. “Do you mind?”

Patrick shook his head. He no longer felt the remotest temptation. Then there was the opposite of a sound as the city suddenly flickered out and the lights went off in the arcade behind them. Every machine, swirling, running rivers of colors with fairground noises, suddenly went blank and quiet. Swansea had disappeared. Either a blackout or the world was ending. There was just the tip of Karl’s spliff, flaring in darkness, and, at the far side of the bay, the tops of the steelworks’ smokestacks burning.

• • •

It was midnight as Don drove through the storm with Radio 3 on. In return for his daughter’s address, which was in Three Crosses, Don had agreed that he would slaughter the goat at the party, under Freya’s supervision. Supervision, as far as he could tell, was her way of saying she wanted to be there to watch him suffer. He tried to explain to her once again that killing was just not part of his nature, and that perhaps she should view that as a good thing, but it didn’t go down well. She had always thought he faked his fear of animal slaughter, and in all honesty he had hammed it up a little, but, he asked her, if a person feels the need to ham something up, then isn’t that evidence of a genuine problem? There had been no response.

On the upside, this did all mean that she was now tied to spending a few hours at the community, on the morning of the party. If he could just get her to start enjoying herself, see some old friends, have a drink, then there was hope.

The windshield wipers briefly conducted Dvořák before falling out of time again. In preparation for the party, Don had started trying to enjoy music. An example of how he was willing to develop himself, to change.

He turned in to Three Crosses. It was only then he noticed that none of the streetlights were on.

It had been Geraint’s idea for them to come together and “enjoy the power cut.” Gathered in the double-glazed conservatory, they were watching the weather with their backs to one another in the style of superheroes surrounded by foes. Kate was wearing a gingham shirtdress that Liz had bought
her. Against her will, she rather liked it. The rain made a satisfying
takataka
noise on the plastic glass. There was lightning and Mervyn laughed and Liz screamed in a theatrical way and Geraint told his mother to grow up. It felt like they were in it, the storm, as a family. They unfussily held one another’s hands behind their backs, and she was holding one of Mervyn’s, she knew, because of its size and the seams of rough skin at his joints. The ground shook, and in the lightning flash Kate thought she saw a figure standing on the hyperfertilized lawn. She didn’t say anything. It could have been her imagination. The killer who comes to torture suburban families when a power outage disables the burglar alarm. Just then, her pocket buzzed. She pulled out her phone and read the message.

She put the phone away immediately and prayed to all gods that the man on the lawn was a serial killer and not her father. Her back stiffened and she gripped Mervyn’s hand behind her.

There was another flash and this time, Geraint saw.

“Oh my fucking God, there’s a man in our back garden.”

Mervyn put his hands against the glass and looked outside.

“Maybe he wants to borrow a torch,” Mervyn said.

“Then why doesn’t he knock on the door?” Liz said. “He’s probably a looter.”

“It’s my dad.”

She let that piece of information sink in, then she read the text message aloud to her family. Ever since she’d arrived, she’d been enjoying painting a picture of her father as a kind of lunatic, and now he was living up to it. Liz said Kate was well within her rights to call the police. Mervyn and Geraint said they’d be happy to have words, on her behalf. Her new family made her feel brave. She rang his number. In the darkness of the back garden, they saw a dim light ping on. As the number started calling, she turned on speakerphone and put her mobile down on the wicker and glass coffee table.

“Kate!” came her father’s distorted voice. “I’m so glad you called.”

They could hear his voice outside, as well as in.

“Dad, what the hell are you doing? I can
see
you.”

“So I found the right house then! I just wanted to check you’re okay, because of the power cut.”

“You’re in our back garden.”

“Couldn’t read the house numbers in the dark, but knew I was looking for a place with a swimming pool. Did I ever tell you that your mother and I did our courting in a swimming pool?”

“You’re on loudspeaker. Say hello to the people on whose property you are trespassing.”

Out in the rain, they could make out the blue-lit outline of the side of his face. Kate thought there was something different about him.

“Hello there?” he said.

Not a peep from her new family, and Kate liked them for that.

“What I wanted to say was that you’d all be very welcome
to stay the night at ours—until you get power back. We’ve got plenty of room. There’s music, lights, and salsa dancing”—he tried to laugh but it sounded robotic through the phone’s crappy speaker. “We’re really enjoying ourselves and you’d all be very welcome to join us.”

They saw the phone light grow larger as Don came toward the conservatory. She realized what was different. No one had told her about his beard. Through the tinny speaker, there was the crackling sound of him breathing.