Wild Abandon (12 page)

The first animal they bought was a Gloucester Old Spot called Hog. They gave him that name to avoid too strong an emotional attachment, since they planned to fatten and kill him. Hog had different ideas, making himself indispensable by becoming the community’s premier cultivator of previously unworkable scrubland; pretty much the entirety of what was now the market garden was first dug up, and shat on, by him. Only when there was no more uncultivated land left for Herzog (as Don took to calling him) did they decide to eat him. Don picked the short straw to see who would wield the .22 rifle they’d borrowed from a neighboring farm.

The night before the slaughter, while julienning spring onions, he took the lid off his trigger finger. Much bleeding and, some people felt, affected swearing followed. Hamming
it up, appropriately. He said he was gutted but it compromised his marksmanship, though he was still happy to supervise. Another round of straws was pulled.

Werner was eating scraps from a bucket when Freya shot him in the brain. Don, trying to help, fell to his knees and pinned the pig on its side, wrestling-style, while she cut the artery in its neck. Then, as research had said it would, the pig appeared to come back to life, a nerve response causing the body to buck and the legs to kick. Werner was big, bigger than the man pinning him down, and as Don scrabbled to get up, he took a hoof to the ribs.

For six days, Don walked slowly up and down steps and made elongated sighing noises when getting in and out of chairs. He also took any opportunity to mythologize his wife’s role: her calm manner, perfect aim, but underlying humanity. As a result, it was suggested that Freya be the first person in the community to apply for a firearms license, and once she had that, her fate was sealed. She was the executioner. Don was never asked to help again, but still, he ate bacon with an air of moral immunity.

After two years, Arlo came back. So the story goes, the legendary Austrian chef had visited the kitchen to decide who of the trainees to keep on full-time. He had complimented Arlo, who, at the end of a long shift, held back tears of awed happiness, flushed red from head to toe, and felt his skin grow clammy. They shook hands. The next day the message was passed back that Arlo “did not have the palms” for pastry.

Nobody has ever found out where Arlo went for the intervening years. He arrived on New Year’s Day, walking up the frozen lane with a roll of Japanese knives under his arm
instead of a sleeping bag. By then he had the kind of beard that was unacceptable in a professional kitchen. He had no gloves and his hands were blue.

When the big house was finally habitable, they had a grand-opening party. Don chose this day to announce that Freya was twelve weeks pregnant. This boosted morale, and kick-started new projects. Don, Patrick, and Janet set to work on building the workshop. Chris, Arlo, and Freya oversaw the creation of a market garden and finally bought books on permaculture.

Twenty-six weeks later, Freya staggered into the schoolroom, sumo-stance, hair tied back, breathing like a weight lifter, trailed by a midwife and her trainee in squared-off navy pinafores. Kate Bronwyn Riley (or Bronwyn Kate Riley, as she would have been called, had Don got his way) was twelve days early. When Don had left that morning—to collect a trunkload of baby clothes, books, toys, and a cot from a like-minded community in Somerset—he kissed Freya and whispered into her belly button: “Don’t even think about it.”

He was lucky that the news got through to him at all. In Somerset, the phone rang in the Mongolian-style meetinghouse and, by chance, he was nearby. Speeding back through narrow lanes, he beeped his horn at blind bends, biting his tongue, onto the motorway, dominating the fast lane, his aura of necessity, sweeping cars aside with a flash of his headlights. A part of him was relieved that his role in the birth was so clearly defined.
All you have to do is go as fast as you can
. And he secretly hoped to hear the newborn wail of a police siren behind him, to be pulled over, to speak to the officer in candid terms, share a desperate play on words—“I’m sorry I
broke the speed limit, but my wife’s water just broke”—and be back on the road with the officer’s best wishes, having crashed through the fourth wall between government and citizen. In truth, the race was all but over by the time he crossed the Severn bridge, but they had no way of letting him know, so he powered onward, kept the split-screen narrative going, drawing parallels between the engine’s straining, pushing, sweating beneath the hood, and his wife—as he visualized her—screaming: “Where the fuck is Don? I need him here now!”

When his car came skidding into the yard it was dark, and entering the hall he knew by Patrick’s hair, which was swept across unevenly in the manner of someone who has been involved in something major, that he had missed it. Freya and Kate were both asleep and Don had to accept that his biggest role in proceedings would be to feed the placenta to the goats. He listened to them chew.

Patrick had been in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time and had tried his best to help Freya, even—in a moment of uncharacteristic boldness—nodding when she asked him if he wanted to cut the umbilical cord. He can remember its gristly texture, the resistance first, then the give. If he had moments of feeling unsure about his place in the community, of whether he was there for the right reasons, it was then that he felt tied in.

“Dad, time to arise.”

“Mmm.”

“Open your eyes.”

“What time is it?”

“Late. Terribly late.”

“What time exactly?”

“Nearly double figures.”

“Albert, your father’s tired.”

“Your wife has been awake for hours.”

“Okay.”

“You said you’d let me try on the Soviet Hat.”

“Did I?”

“Last night while we were in the woods, you promised.”

“I think we’re going to see Uncle Patrick in hospital today. Why don’t you write him a nice get-well card?”

Kate was in the waiting room. Her father had given her one of the community’s two mobile phones.
Thirty-six unread messages and sixty missed calls
. The calls dated back to the previous summer. The messages were mostly from unknown numbers trying to contact people who had left months ago.

The message that had just come in read:

• • •

They had erected a bear-hugger around Patrick—a kind of paper duvet—into which they blew hot air with a fan. They fed him warm fluids, injected directly through the stomach wall and with two IVs, one in each arm. He was given oxygen while student doctors watched. He could not remember the last time he felt so cared for. The focus of years of study! Monitored by four machines!

“What makes Patrick a priority?” the doctor asked.

One of the students, a small girl with dedicated eyebrows, stepped forward.

“Here,” she said, pointing. “The skin over his ankle is dying.”

When he woke again, in the ward, hours later, he had metal scaffolding built around his ankle with struts that joined on to plates in his bones. His foot was bandaged and raised above the bed, held in a blue sling. The TV hovered in the air above him, held by a metal arm. He looked around confused, then, recognizing Kate sitting beside him, relaxed a little. She took his hand and squeezed it.

It didn’t take long for a nurse to arrive with a tray: a glass of lemonade, a straw, and a plate covered with a plastic dome. “Luncheon, sire,” she said, and pulled the lid off with a flourish. Patrick watched the cloud of steam rise up and spread out across the low ceiling. Cod in parsley sauce, mash, peas. She bowed and walked out. He stared at the colorful food for a while, then tried the lemonade.

“Patrick, I’m so sorry. Do you remember what happened?”

His voice was muted and coming from his throat. “Some.”

“I came with you in the ambulance. The others will be here soon.”

He sucked the straw until it rasped. “When?” he said, treble returning to his voice, looking more awake now. His leg shifted in its sling.

“They’ll visit this afternoon.”

“
When?
” He tried to sit up but couldn’t. He looked around for a clock.

“It’s one-fifteen now. They’ll be here about three.”

“No,” he said, louder. His hands pushed against the sheets, but he couldn’t prop himself up. He made a low growl as he struggled.

“What’s wrong? Don’t get agitated.”

“
Tell
them
not
to come,” he said, gripping the bed’s metal safety bars, his head turning this way and that, his voice spiking, mucus rattling in his chest.

“They’re your friends, Patrick. They’re worried about you.”

He clawed at the tubes on his wrist, trying to peel off the surgical tape.

“I’ll get someone.” Kate stood up.

“Hoh,” he yelled, sounding like a tennis umpire, his slung leg swinging as he knocked the tray of food off his bed, the plastic plate clattering, the bladeless knife and a snot of mushy peas on the linoleum, the cod fillet sliding into the gangway.

“You have reached the forefront of human development.”

This was one of the new ways that her brother answered the phone.

“Hi, can you get Dad please.”

“Where are you? With your boyfriend, I bet.”

“You know where I am. I’m at the hospital.”

“Tell your boyfriend I am a terrific marksman.”

“Fine, Al, I’m calling you from the boudoir. Get Dad please.”

“As I suspected.”

“You need to get that grip I was suggesting you get.
Get
Dad.”

She listened to him put the phone down and disappear.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Dad.”

“Kate! I’ve been trying to call. So good to hear you. How is he?”

“He’s okay. Been to theater. The operation went well.”

“Good—we’re getting a convoy ready. The hamper to end all hampers. Sherry onions.”

“He’s awake now and he’s asked that nobody visits him.”

“Arlo’s made fresh wild garlic pesto. Albert made a card.”

“He went schiz. He doesn’t want you to visit. The nurse asked if you could wait a day or so.”

She could hear her father breathing elaborately into the handset. The same noise that had come from the hall after the letter had arrived letting them know they’d not got planning permission for the yurt village.

“Righty,” he said.

“Sorry, Dad.”

“Not your fault.”

In the background, she heard her brother saying something
about the Soviet Hat and then the sound of him running upstairs.

There was a syringe full of morphine hanging up next to his bed and a rubbery gray button, shaped like a tiny mushroom, that he could press with his thumb when he wanted a dose. The button was on a plastic box, designed to sit comfortably in the hand. It allowed him one shot every half an hour.

They let Kate stay at his bedside, beyond normal visiting hours, because of his erratic behavior. They were on an eight-bed ward with blue curtains that kept everyone segregated. The man in the bed opposite was having his dressing changed. Half his head had been shaved and there was a long, scimitar-shaped scar on his scalp, ridged with dense scabs. Kate could hear the sound of someone’s iron lung wheezing in and out, which reminded her of her father’s breathing at the end of the line.

Patrick woke for a rerun of
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
He used his gray morphine dispenser button to buzz in every time he knew the answer. Eventually the syringe hissed. He passed out again as the credits rolled.

“Everything that goes in, stays in.”

Don and Albert were standing in the yard in thin sunlight. They had coats and scarves on and could see their own breath. Don was wearing his Personal Instrument and explaining that he had built the device based on a 1985 design by the Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko. When Don was eighteen years old, before he met Freya and Janet, he was traveling through
Eastern Europe and reading Kafka’s
The Castle
when he came across Wodiczko’s Cold War art-technology and decided to make his own replica. Now, many years later, it was an infamous part of the community’s curriculum. Kate had been through it, and so had two dozen or so young people over the years; he typically approached someone after their thirteenth birthday, but for Albert, he made an exception.

“Life is about avoiding bad information and amplifying the good.”

If his son could only develop the critical faculty to help him
choose
not to be influenced by Marina, there would be no need to take him away to the roundhouse. Don called this lesson “the Human Filter,” but it was more was commonly known as “the Soviet Hat.”

Freya was round the side of the house, chopping wood with a regular
thok
. Marina and Isaac were out in the pottery shed. Janet was on a bench in front of the schoolroom, wearing fingerless gloves, writing Patrick a letter on a spiral-bound notepad.

“The idea is to help develop your innately discerning intellect,” he said, speaking loudly enough for his wife to hear. “What should we listen to and what should we ignore?”

It was an especially pertinent question, since Patrick’s accident had stemmed, in Don’s opinion, from an inability to weed out, pun intended, certain untrustworthy internal voices. Don wore a pair of large, on-ear headphones, a red beanie, and black gloves, all of which were connected by wires. There was a small directional microphone on the front of the hat.