Wild Abandon (4 page)

As he walked passed her this morning, he had heard her lecturing the wwoofers: “A frost this late will murder tomato transplants, aubergines, sweet peas, and put onions, broccoli, and kale on suicide watch …” Cloches, blankets, unclaimed
jackets, rugs, and tarpaulins were piled up in the yard, ready to insulate the vegetables. He watched her hot breath clouding as she sent the young people to work.

It was helpful then to have the distraction of teaching Albert and Isaac an important lesson about advertising—that is, until Don had stepped in to flex his ideology, at which point Patrick had come up to the flat roof to cool off. That was some hours ago. His hands were now so cold that he couldn’t close them properly.

He didn’t hear Don, presently, climbing out of the window. Instead he felt a hand on his shoulder as Don lowered himself down and sat next to him on the edge of the bitumen roof.

“Wondered where you’d gone. I’m
really
sorry if I embarrassed you earlier, Pat—I didn’t mean to, if I did—but I just think sometimes it’s better for the children to be innocent of that stuff.”

Patrick stared out at the farm. He didn’t want Don to see his unbloodshot eyes. It was vital not to give him the satisfaction. So, in mimic of his old self, Patrick got out his pipe, a brass one-hitter, and turned his body away from Don. Patrick still carried all the paraphernalia with him. With his half-numb hands, he managed to open a small plastic bag that was now filled with cherry tobacco. He tore off a bit and tamped it down into the cone.

“I noticed that one of those things was a car advert,” Don said. “An executive Saab. The same car as the one that Janet’s new fella drives.” Don made an elaborate
hmmm
sound, then put his hand on Patrick’s thigh and tried a little warmly mocking laugh but didn’t quite nail the warm part. Everyone
in the community knew when Janet’s boyfriend came up the drive because his car, as Don had observed, sounded like the MGM lion. The geodesic dome was right beside the lane and the engine noise, as it passed, vibrated Patrick’s bookcase.

“Yes,” Patrick said, staring straight ahead. “It’s the same car.”

“It Has Been Noted,” Don said in his
Big Brother
voice, making his eyes go wide. “So many other women here, Pat. I’ll say it again: take a break from the grass. Rediscover that crazy libido. Unleash some famous PK charm.”

“It’s not famous,” Patrick said, then took a deep breath, pushing his shoulders back to open his lungs.

“Some of these
wwoofers
coming through,” Don said, pointing down toward a volunteer in three-quarter-length jeans who was selecting unconventionally shaped cucumbers. “Woof.”

“You’re off the mark.”

“Still hung up on Janet after how long? If you stopped smoking so much green, you’d realize.”

To Patrick, there were few things more galling than Don being right about a thing.

“Not so.”

“Well, you
should
be hung up on her, Pat. She’s tremendous.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Isn’t there a saying about love not knowing what time it is, or some such?”

Patrick patted his chest for the shape of a lighter in his shirt pocket. He hooked it out with his forefinger. Shielding
the pipe with one hand, he lit it and sucked the whole lot through in one, in the style of a hit, his lungs burning.

“I get the feeling it’s not easy for you to see Janet with someone like that,” Don said. “Do you see a little of your old self in him?”

Patrick’s chest pulsed—he held on for a few seconds longer—then let the smoke out in a megaphone shape, blowing it away from Don.

“I guess it’s easier to talk about an advert for her boyfriend’s car than it is to talk about her.”

“I’m going to go now,” Patrick said, and he tapped the pipe on the edge of the roof, pocketed it, then stood up, wavering slightly with the head rush. He was easily high enough above the patio, if he were to fall, to crack open his nearly hairless skull. Behind them, the sound of a car over-revving as it pulled into the yard.

Don reached up and held Pat’s hand.

“Got you.”

After her canteen lunch with Geraint, who once again showed off the charisma of his appetite, they both went to sociology class. Somehow their tutor had discovered that Kate was from an unusual upbringing. This was not good news. They were reading Emile Durkheim, who viewed society as a collective consciousness. Durkheim said that collectively agreed morality was maintained by people performing deviant or unconventional acts, and that without people testing the boundaries of behavior, society would collapse, and how could there be a nuclear family without the opposite, and did Kate have anything she’d like to add?

“I think people like to know that somewhere, someone is testing out a different way of living,” Kate said, “so they don’t have to.”

“Any examples from your own home life?”

She felt Geraint’s gaze on the back of her neck.

When she went to the bike shed after class, it was raining hard. Geraint pulled up in his white Fiat Punto with red four-point seat belts. He’d had it cleaned. The wet poured off the peak of her anorak. He got out of the car and, with rain darkening the shoulders of his powder-blue
MILK IS DELICIOUS
T-shirt, he said: “I’m giving you a lift home.”

He helped her take the front wheel off her bike. Putting the seats down, he did not say a word as a slash of chain grease marked one of the headrests as they wedged the bike in. He was drenched by the time they sat back in the car. He pulled a CD wallet out of the glove box and handed it to her.

They drove off and she looked through his music collection, judging him, but then feeling bad for judging him—blaming her parents for making her judgmental—and then putting Sean Paul on. Geraint did a fairly lame gangster’s click with his fingers and was possibly adorable. A line of inflamed pores ran round his neck like a choker. His face was shiny from the wet. He drove, she felt, in a wealthy way, with his hands sitting softly on the part-leather thick-stemmed steering wheel—hands not gripping but resting flat, except for the tops of his fingers, which were bent, as you might rest your hands on a stranger’s shoulders during an organized cha-cha.

“What was that question about, in sociology?”

There was no point hiding it anymore. If she was going to
tell him, she might as well be bold: “I grew up in a commune. I never went to school.”

She was hoping for a bigger reaction; he somehow kept the car on the road.

No one in the community ever used the word
commune
; they used the word
community
. The word
commune
had a special and dangerous power, and with great power came great responsibility. Geraint straightened up in his seat and tried to be nonchalant. They passed Gower’s tiny airport as a biplane took off. The roadside sheep looked gray.

“I drove to a free party once in a commune in Brecon,” he said. “
Proper
mental. A bloke set himself on fire. Bet you get some right nutters?”

As he drove, she described Blaen-y-Llyn with the broad, lazy strokes she had been raised to avoid—the clichés that were expected from local journalists (or, at least, the ones who did their research online):
yes
, synthetic drugs;
yes
, boundary-testing sex;
yes
, chanting and nudity and nameless individuals waking in their vegetable garden. The latter had once actually happened, but Kate told the story as if most days they found gentlemen visitors asleep in a cloche. It felt good, watching Geraint’s increasing alertness as she told him these things. By the time she was done, he was nailing it, breaking the speed limit through Gowerton.

“So wait … you live in The Rave House?”

“Yes. The Rave House.”

The term had been coined after Kate’s fifteenth birthday when she had asked that her usually wholesome birthday tradition (a day at Three Cliffs Bay, swimming, eating, and
playing an all-community game of rounders) be scrapped in favor of hiring a decent outdoor sound system. It was all pretty low-key—playing tunes from a box of old records they’d found in the attic—until the noise had attracted a group of teenagers from Hill End campsite. The teenagers made some calls to their older brothers and sisters. About two in the morning, a convoy of souped-up cars came up the lane, chained together by their headlights. Kate was excited to have her birthday sanctified by the presence of older boys and girls. She made a deal with her parents that if the party moved into the barn, they could keep it going. There followed nearly twelve hours of unfashionable but undeniably hea
vee
drum and bass while the adults remained besieged in the big house. She went with one of those older boys to the flattened grass in a clearing behind the barn. The boy’s erection, softened by drugs, made for a kind of beginner’s erection. Plus, she suspected that the vibrations from the subs helped. That she enjoyed losing her virginity, she had since discovered, made her rare. By lunchtime the next day, the ravers had fallen asleep: in polytunnels, in Don and Freya’s bed, among the baby leaf salads, and next to the bonfire, their hair too hot to touch. Over the following weeks, tales began to emerge online of relentless debauchery, of parental absenteeism, of meatless barbecues at … 
The Rave House
.

Without Kate noticing, Geraint had taken them on a detour through Three Crosses. He pulled up in front of a link-detached house, set back from the road, with vines climbing the front.

“So guess where I live,” he said somberly.

She examined the house. Again, she was annoyed with
herself—with her upbringing—for her disapproval of the heptagonal plastic conservatory, so she said, “I
really
like your conservatory.” The house had a garage, which was open, and inside there was an old-style Jeep that looked almost military.

“My dad’s into vintage four-by-fours,” he said.

While she was still wondering how to respond, he drove onward to the community. Fifteen minutes later, as they got near, Geraint slowed at the top of the lane to observe the wonkily wood-cut sign,
BLAEN-Y-LLYN
, and the American-style mailbox.

“Why did you say your brother wanted to kill me?”

“Ask him yourself.”

Geraint went slowly up the narrow tree-lined lane, showing a total lack of judgment regarding which potholes were worth avoiding and which you had to attack. Between the trees on the left-hand side Kate pointed out the geodesic dome, on its own at the back of the market garden.

“That’s Patrick’s place. He’s kind of like my uncle, I guess. My deputy father.”

Geraint said nothing. They passed the wind turbine, which stood at the top of the tiered permaculture garden. They passed three dead cars, left behind by guests too poor to get them repaired or too lazy to sell them, now rusted beyond saving, warning totems for those men foolish enough to venture this far.

Geraint dropped to first as the driveway took a short, steep incline before opening onto the graveled yard. In the past, when there had been enough young people to make it feasible, this space had been the ideal size and shape for games of rounders or baseball. The batter stood at the big house’s
double front doors, which still bore the marks of a few wild back swings and, when the batter ran, they passed the apple tree at first base and went from second to third along the length of the workshop before skidding home in front of the windows of the kitchen, where a victory dance would have its largest audience. It was agreed that if you hit as far as the barn or the pottery shed, set way back behind first and second base, respectively, then that was a boundary. If a ball ever reached Patrick’s geodesic dome, at the farthest end of the garden beyond third—which never happened—then the hitter automatically won everything.

But there weren’t really days like that anymore. In the market garden, two wwoofers, boys, were grimly laying out blue and gray blankets. They did it as though covering the dead. Janet, who could usually be relied on to bring glamour, was sweatily weeding the beds that ran along the front of the house, pompoms of green in each hand. Kate’s father was sitting on the flat roof, partly obscured by the stand-alone bath, holding hands with Patrick, who was standing beside him.

Kate tried to imagine Geraint’s thoughts. It struck her that the big house didn’t even look that big. The lumpy whitewashed walls, patches of psoriatic flakiness here and there, windowsills made from large unpainted slabs, moss on the roof tiles: it was basically a cottage. A cottage that had been known to sleep forty-two. She watched his expression change as his expectations met reality.

“The term
Rave House
might have been a bit misleading,” she said.

“So you live with these people?”

“Some of them are only visiting. But yes.”

“Which room’s yours?”

She pointed to her first-floor bedroom, through the window of which her
Meat Is Murder
poster was just visible.

His eyes widened. “And who’s in that window?”

She looked. Albert was standing in his bedroom window, arms by his side, staring at Geraint with the death-eyes, which was something he’d been practicing.

“My brother. He’s seen you. You’d better go.”

“How old is he?”

“Eleven. But surprisingly strong.”

Geraint laughed and looked at Kate, and by the time he turned back to the window, Albert was gone.

“You should probably pop the trunk,” she said.

As she got out and went round the back of the car she heard, through the open front door, Albert’s footsteps clumping down the stairs. Geraint started the engine. She yanked her bike out just as Albert came outside. He was holding a purple water pistol, a Glock, upright in both hands in the manner of the televised FBI.

“Go, go, go! He’ll kill you!” Kate said, and much to her pleasure Geraint did go, slightly for the show of it, but also, she thought, slightly for real—wheel-spinning, gravel pinging against Kate’s ankles as he showed off his Punto’s nippy turning radius with his trunk still wide open. Albert started to run, in his socks, holding the gun out in front of him. He didn’t quite have the commitment to fire—either that or it wasn’t loaded—but in a moment of what looked like confusion, of a need to do something, anything, of running faster than the car was moving, Albert kind of dived, barrel-rolled, into the open trunk of the car. It was not a high-risk stunt, in
the broad scheme of things, but Kate was impressed. His feet hung over the bumper as the car disappeared down the incline and out of sight, the sound of its raised trunk cover clattering against branches as it went. She heard the engine idle, then stop. There were no more sounds after that.