Wild Abandon (6 page)

It was half a year ago that Isaac and Marina had been interviewed for full-time membership. They had been staying with the community on a trial basis for the previous six weeks and normally, at that point, there’d be a monthlong cooling-off break before a final evaluation. But just before they were due to leave, Marina started making loud inquiries on the house phone into whether the nearby campsite did a discount for a four-week stay, which rather suggested they had nowhere to
go to cool off. Typically, if an applicant admitted they didn’t have anyone who was willing to take them in, then that was its own kind of bad signal. But on this occasion the community agreed to forgo procedure, largely because of Isaac, who, with his youth, and his kinship with Albert, seemed to represent the beginning of a new generation of young people at the community.

Seated at one side of the round dining table in the center of the kitchen was the core team who led the interview: Freya, Arlo, and Don, in that order. Marina was opposite them. The table had been known to seat twenty, so it looked bare. The other vote-casting members, she and Patrick, watching but not contributing, sat on the blue sofa against the back wall. Janet was away in Bristol, working on a new collection. From where Kate was sitting, she could also see Isaac and Albert underneath the table, crawling in circles, counting everyone’s toes.

“So, I’d be interested to know what your plans are for the future,” Freya had said. “What your aims are, in the long term.”

“Well, I’m really most focused on what’s best for Isaac,” Marina had said, and her son made a
woof-woof
noise on hearing his name. “The great thing about Blaen-y-Llyn”—Don’s eyes tightened as he assessed her pronunciation—“is that it’s a fantastic, open place where he can learn and make friends.”

Marina had a round face, with gray wavy curtains, her cheeks like apples that, to those who fantasized about such things, would have been the best bits, if she were to be cooked. She was big but robust—the term is
jolly
—and was wearing a body warmer.

“And how long would you like to stay with us?” Freya said.

“Well, as long as I can. I mean, I think we’ll all be reassessing things by the end of the year, so it’s probably not good to have anything set in stone …” She smiled and laughed in a way that indicated she hoped her interviewers were on the same astrological page, but found two hard expressions and Arlo, distracted by his nails.

“Why so?” Don said.

“I just think we’ll see some big changes by the end of 2012,” Marina said, changing position in her seat, “in both the physical and spiritual spheres. Around that time.”

Don was nodding now and steepling his fingers.

“Is this about the Mayan calendar?” Freya said.

“I know it can sound loopy. I completely understand. But it’s not really about the Mayans, though people find it fun to think so. There’s a strong scientific backing.”

“I’m interested,” Don said, leaning forward.

Kate was highly attuned to sarcasm in her father’s voice.

“Well, basically, if you imagine this table is the Milky Way, our galaxy,” Marina said, putting her hands out on the wood, “then it’s fairly standard stuff to say that at the center is what they call a supermassive black hole. Ours is known as Sagittarius A. It’s incredibly dense”—Kate noticed her father smile at this—“it’s three million times as heavy as the sun, but invisible to us—its gravitational pull is so powerful that even light can’t escape. Scientists know it’s there because of the way everything around it is drawn in.” There was a hole in the middle of the table from when it had accommodated a sun umbrella, and Marina made a show of peering down into it.
“Because this black hole is, as they say, starving. It has a
hungry
gravitational pull—sucking things in and swallowing them …”

Don decided to start enjoying himself.

Marina stood up off her stool. “Imagine that this pepper mill is the earth and this”—she lifted a
Merry Christmas
mug—“is our sun. We all know it takes a year for the earth to orbit the sun, but the problem is that the earth’s path is not a perfect circle, it’s eccentric”—she showed the pepper mill doing ellipses around the mug—“and it takes twenty-six thousand years of orbits before we come back to our exact start point, right?”

Freya was listening hard.

“Abso
lute
ly,” Don said.

Arlo, it was clear, hadn’t been paying attention and was just now trying to catch up.

“Which of course the Mayans knew all about, along with loads of other cultures, the Sufis for one. Then eventually …”

Marina swung the pepper mill round the mug as she took steps round the curved edge of the table toward Freya. Don’s expression was now one of having happened across something really cute, like a cat standing on a cow.

“… eventually, twenty-six thousand years eventually …”

Kate could see Isaac and Albert examining and discussing something they’d found on a table leg; from her own years as a small person, she knew about the carpenter’s hieroglyphics on the table’s underside.

“… there will be an eclipse. But it’s a particular kind of eclipse.” Marina put the pepper mill down and then, with
gravitas, put the Christmas mug—the sun—between the mill and the black hole at the center of the table. “We all know about lunar and solar eclipses, but next year, at the end of this twenty-six-thousand-year cycle, we’ll have a galactic eclipse. And that’s when the sun comes between us and this monster, Sagittarius A, at the center of the galaxy. And when that happens, well, no one’s totally sure—there’s a lot of conjecture—but when the most powerful force in the galaxy is blocked out, and remember, it’s millions of times more powerful than the sun, there’s going to be some major changes, it’s fair to say.”

Don was grinning now, absolutely loving it, not wanting the performance to end. “But you must have a theory on what
you’re
expecting?”

She looked at him. He had his mouth open, waiting.

“I’m genuinely intrigued,” he said, and just about managed to hold it together.

“Well,” she said finally, seeming a little awkward now that she was standing, trying to make her way back to her seat, “nobody knows for sure, but I’m anticipating a shift in gravity—and I mean gravity in the widest possible sense: gravity of the mind, the soul, relationships, moral and spiritual gravity. An untethering. A topsy-turvy world. Some people think the world will stop spinning; others expect South Wales to get the Mediterranean climate it deserves.” Arlo liked that. “All I believe is that something major is going to happen, and those who are ready to adapt will have to make the world new. It’s going to be a test. A
real
test. Because what’s a test if you can’t fail?”

Don clapped enthusiastically. He was known for his loud clap. Freya rubbed her eyelids. Beneath the table, Albert and Isaac were shaking hands.

“Brilliant,” Don said. “Absolutely brilliant.”

His wife wouldn’t look at him. Marina, still standing, shifted back to her stool.

“A really enigmatic iteration,” Don said, looking around. “People can be terribly drab with that sort of stuff, but I think you gave it real oomph. And the scientific data too. Is that your own, Marina, or can I look it up online?”

She looked at him, then down at the table, then she reached under it and said: “Come on, Isaac, we’re going.”

Taking her son by the hand, she marched upstairs to Janet’s room, where they were staying. Through the ceiling, they heard the sounds of first, a door slamming, then Marina noisily packing their stuff. Don held up his hands in apology.

It was then perhaps partly to show his humane side that her father went on to argue that they should be allowed to stay because Marina was “harmless enough” and Isaac “was key to the development of the community.” Patrick said it wasn’t right to invite someone to be a full-time resident just because they matched certain criteria. Arlo, in his usual, instinctive way, said he thought they were nice and should be asked to stay. Freya said it was obvious they were only at the community while they looked for something better. While this discussion went on, Kate could see Albert, with both arms round a table leg, listening earnestly to the sounds from upstairs. He cast his half vote in support of Isaac.

With two and a half for and two against, it came down to Kate to decide. Her brother had not spoken to her since she
started college and, if she voted against him, she knew he would probably never speak to her again. While she deliberated, he knelt and, with ceremony, laid his head on the bench, with his eyes closed, in the manner of someone waiting to be beheaded.

It was dark by the time the Zapatistas reappeared, their breath evaporating against his driver’s side window. Patrick wound down the glass. One of the boys reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic bag, held theatrically between his index and middle fingers.

“High-grade hydro,” he said, his voice muffled by his scarf. “It cost twenny-five, naw twenny.”

Patrick blinked. “I admire your entrepreneurial verve.”

He had always suffered from low-level paranoia, and one of the best things about smoking cannabis was that it gave him something to blame his paranoia on.

“I’m naw lying. You owe us a fiver.”

The other two boys were on lookout, watching the road ahead and behind.

“You think you can do one over on me,” Patrick said as he scooped five quid of someone else’s money from the ashtray and handed it across.

They passed him the bag and he took a long sniff—it reeked—then dropped it in his lap. Driving back, he imagined everyone, especially Janet, wondering where he had gone with the car while they were in the cold, insulating the vulnerable vegetables. He thought about her wartime navy work shirt, sleeves rolled up, tangible biceps.

Turning into the community’s driveway, he switched off
the headlights, hoping not to alert anyone to his return. He put the car in neutral to let it silently roll along the lane, parking just before the upslope that led to the yard. Maybe they had needed the car to get some vital bag of charity shop blankets and because of him there would be no asparagus this summer. Getting out of the car, he saw, parked parallel to him across the path, the moon reflecting its expensively undulating surfaces, the Avail. He imagined Janet’s boyfriend arriving to a hero’s welcome, the backseat of his car clouded with old duvets.

Walking a back route to the dome, he passed brassicas and endives covered by rugby coats and sheepskin rugs. Once inside, Patrick held the bag up to his bedside lamp. The bud was compact, bristling with tiny orange hairs and covered in crystals like it had been dipped in sugar. He didn’t like the way cannabis culture had become somehow macho: muscle-bound super-skunk. The great thing about Karl Orland, his usual dealer, was that he appreciated the pleasures of pale grass, twiggy and mild. Still, he would have to make do.

Normally he saved bhang lassis for the solstice, but since he’d been straight for about two hundred hours, he thought it only right to mix a catch-up dose. Emptying the lot into a mortar, he ground it with some brown sugar. It would save him time to mix a big portion now and ration it out over the next few days. He took his camping gas stove and heated the mixture outside, so it wouldn’t stink out his dome. At one point, someone walked past; he couldn’t make out who in the dark, only knew it was a woman when she said: “
Some
one’s having a party.”

• • •

Marina was sitting on a bench in the shed, with the pottery wheel between her legs. She sometimes let Albert control the speed of it, but mostly he just watched, as he was now, sitting beside her. Isaac had already been put to bed. The room was lit by a strip light that hung from two chains; it was pitch-black outside. She wet her hands from a bowl beside her and thokked a blob of clay onto the wheel. As she pressed the foot pedal, the wheel spun. She centered the clay; then, delicately shaping her hands into a broken circle, raised it up. Albert sometimes laughed at the rude shapes the clay made but he was never really sure why he was laughing.

One of the most impressive things about Marina was that she could throw a teapot and talk at the same time. It gave her the air of a magician, the hands doing the trick, clay-charming, while she talked to Albert about the future.

“What are you making?”

“A present for you.”

“Yes! Is it a helmet?”

“No.”

“Is it body armor of any kind?”

“Not really.”

Along the middle shelf on the wall opposite were the unclaimed workshop pieces: mugs, butter dishes, scenes from the Nativity, a four-piece band. Albert had seen the pleasure that Marina took in her quarterly cull—the catharsis of visitors’ crappy vases, misshapen animals, and bad likenesses of friends shattering into a masonry-strength bin bag. On the shelf above that were her own elegant milk jugs and bowls.

All full-time members were asked to put in eighteen hours a week of work that contributed to the functioning of the
community. Most of the friction around this idea arose not from people working too few hours, but from a shifting definition of what was a worthwhile contribution. Marina included her hours in the pottery shed as part of her quota because on the one hand she was teaching Albert and Isaac a useful skill, and on the other, as the community averaged a minimum of three pieces of broken crockery a week, she was helping replace stock.

Albert stood up off the bench and leaned over the spinning wheel, peering down on top of it, trying to hypnotize himself as the shape dilated.

“By the way, my sister thinks you’re a liar,” he said, still staring down into the revolving portal.

“That’s not very nice,” Marina said, concentrating.

“You should show her the truth. Is it a bowl? It looks like a bowl. I don’t really need a bowl.”

“It’s not a bowl.”

Her hands moved steadily. The tips of her fingers were gray. Some clay splatted on Albert’s trousers.

“Bowls are okay but not great.”

It was more conical than a bowl, and taller. She took her foot off the pedal and the wheel stopped. She looked at Albert’s mouth for a moment, then took a wire and cut the clay at its base. Lifting the cone up, she showed him it had holes at both ends. She rested the shape on a tray by her side.