Wild Abandon (14 page)

“What’s your number?” Albert said. “I’ll remember it. I’ve got a good memory.”

“Really?”

“Yup.”

“Okay. Oh seven eight six oh. Five two three. Six two three.”

“Right. Oh seven eight six oh. Five two three. Six two three. Got it.”

“Good.”

Albert mouthed the number again, but with his eyes closed. Don arrived, huffing.

Don said: “You’re destroying ancient earthworks.” They just looked at him. He grabbed his son by the wrist and walked him back down the slope. Looking behind, Albert saw
the boys squinting after him. They watched Albert go and, after a while, started to walk their quads home.

Albert was too busy repeating the phone number under his breath to be angry with his father.

“Dad, I want you to remember something, okay?”

Don was distracted, toying with the Personal Instrument, wiping little bits of hair gel off the inside of the beanie. Albert tugged on his sleeve.

“You have to listen to me,” Albert said.

“I’m listening.”

“I need you to remember five numbers.”

“Okay, what are they?”

“Remember oh seven eight six oh.”

“Oh seven eight six oh.”

“Got it?”

“Got it.”

Walking back to the big house, Albert chanted “Five two three six two three” to the melody from “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Albert felt that, although the Soviet Hat itself, after the years he had spent jealously watching others use it and anticipating its powers, had been a bit of a letdown, the day’s experiences overall had been unparalleled. He had mud all over his clothes and face, which was excellent. He jumped on molehills as he went along—hopscotch-style—and instead of five gold rings it was “Five! Two! Three!”

Don had taken his coat off and had a heart-shaped sweat spot on the back of his shirt. Checking his mobile, he saw two missed calls from Kate and a message.

Albert sang all the way back to the house. Skipping into the porch, he grabbed the notepad from the wall beneath the phone and ran back to find his father, who was on the bench outside, writing a text message with his index finger.

“Alright, Dad. What is it?”

“What’s what?”

“The number.”

“Oh.”

Albert wrote down a zero. “Then what?”

It was dark when Kate got off the bus at Llanmadoc, so she walked using the phone as a torch. As she came up through the bottom of the garden, she could see the kitchen light on. She was tired and the last thing she wanted was to have people listen attentively to her. She took her shoes off before walking on the gravel and pushed carefully through the front door. The hall was empty but she heard adult voices, restrained and intent, in the kitchen. She stepped on the edges of the stairs where they didn’t creak, then slipped down the corridor and into her room, quietly closing the door. Leaving the lights off, she sat on her bed in silence. She hadn’t slept since the night before last.

That’s when a voice spoke to her.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

It came from under the bed.

She clicked on her bedside lamp, sat back on the mattress, and rubbed her eyes with her palms. The voice spoke again.

“Bad things happen when you go away.”

“Albert, I need to go to sleep. How long have you been under there?”

“It’s hard to tell.”

There was a light feline scratching sound at the bed frame’s wooden slats.

“Dad says that Patrick’s sick, mentally.
Mentally sick, dude!
Marina says his accident was the sort of thing we should come to expect as we get closer. I heard he’ll have metal in his legs, which is way better than bone. By the way, I smell in
sane
.” His index finger appeared from underneath the bed, smudged with gray and black. “Try my belly gunk.”

“Stop, Albert.”

“Try it,” he said, the finger waggling. “Yum.”

“I’m serious.”

“Tummy fudge.”

“Go and have a shower then.”

“Not without you, dear sister.”

“Albert, please, leave me alone. What’s wrong with you?”

“I’ve
missed
you. Tell me you won’t go away again.”

He slid out from under the bed and sat with his back well postured against the fireplace grate. He had spots of mud on his face and a string of cobwebby dust in his hair, like a streak of gray; it scared Kate to think of her brother not young.

“Check this,” he said, and he pulled up the sleeves of his jumper. He rubbed his right hand quickly up and down his
left forearm. Little balls of condensed dirt and mud and dead skin formed like the residue when rubbing out pencil marks. “It’s the same all over my body.”

Her brother seemed wired somehow. She wondered if he’d gained access to some black-market Jelly Sweets.

“Why are you covered in mud?”

He seemed to think for a while.

“I did it deliberately because I wanted to have a reason to spend time with you.”

“Oh good God, I hope that’s not true.”

“The more time you spend away, the worse I get, so they say.”

“Fuck off, Al. Seriously.”

“Tick,” he said, and he stood up.

“Albert, look, I’m not being mean but we can’t have showers together anymore.”

“
Ya wee radge!
” he said, twirling a full circle on his heels. “I’m completely innocent. Tock.”

She wiped her forehead with her sleeve. “It’s not your fault. I’m just changing and I’m older and I don’t think it’s appropriate.”

“
Appropriate
. My God, who are you?”

“It’s my fault.”

“You have a boyfriend and he’s a complete
ass
hole,” he said, clapping.

She put her head in her hands. He came toward her and, while smelling her scalp, said: “I’m getting the fragrance of hospitals and old age. If you don’t have a shower with me then I’m
never
going to wash.”

“Come on, Al. I’m tired.”

Looking up, she pulled the gray out of his hair, taking years off him.

“Will you at least watch me shower?”

She hesitated.

“Will you at least be in the same room?”

Kate sat on the bench-cum-cupboard that ran along the back wall of the bathroom with her legs pulled up underneath her and her left palm raised to shield her vision.

“What’s happened to you?” Albert said.

“Please hurry up.”

“It’s your boyfriend’s fault you’ve turned like this. I would like to destroy him.”

Albert pulled off his clothes and hummed what he thought of as stripper music—“New York, New York”—throwing his T-shirt at Kate, yanking off both trainers, wafting the rich, stewed-cabbage smell toward her. He pushed down his boxers and kicked them at the wall.

“Ta-da,” he said, standing there naked, his hands in the air.

She examined the seam between the sheets of floral wallpaper.

“Darn you, spatchcock. Just talk to me, okay? You don’t have to watch.”

She heard water hit porcelain, then the shower curtain pulled across.

“So, sister. I’ve been learning some new things.”

She turned round and watched the ghost of his shape move behind the curtain, occasionally glimpsing a pink hand above the shower rail.

“Although I told you that the twenty-first of December is
the most likely end date, Marina said it’s not as simple as that. It could come early or late—we have to stay vigilant.”

Kate listened to his voice change pitch and volume as he moved in and out of the water.

“You’re an idiot.”

“It won’t be the end for all of us—just the ones who aren’t on the high-score table, which is most people. Some get selected and some rejected.”

She heard him jump as he said
rejected
and his feet slapped on the porcelain.

“You should probably try to get a grip,” she said. “I’m not saying a whole grip—just a thumb and forefinger.”

“I am guided by my own powers, but doubled,” he said, and she could see that behind the curtain he was lifting up his biceps, making a Mr. Universe pose.

“Where were Mum and Dad while you were being brainwashed?”

“I wash my own brain.”

She watched the gray blob morph and bulge behind the curtain. There was a fizz of particles above the rail, like when you drop soluble aspirin into water. She liked to imagine him dissolving.

“I think it’s gonna be like snow,” he said. “It’ll look just like normal snow, falling on everything, making everything white, but then when it melts, there’ll only be me and you and Mum and Dad and Marina and Isaac and maybe Janet and Arlo left, and everyone else will have gone, washed down the drain, and it doesn’t matter if they try to ride away on quad bikes because they will never escape.”

Kate frowned. She heard him scrubbing at something. The
air around her was starting to white out. The room was warming. The water stopped and she watched Albert’s shape behind the curtain, a freak-show specimen waiting to be revealed.

“You know,” she said, “every few years someone predicts the world’s end. In medieval times they thought it would end, but it didn’t. At college, we studied a cult who killed themselves because they thought that would help them survive the apocalypse, but they just died, thirty of them, all in single beds with their arms across their chests.”

“You promised to teach me everything you learn.” Then he called her something in Catalan.

He was standing still. She could see his fuzzy silhouette.

“You’ll be a teenager soon, Alb, and you shouldn’t have to waste time listening to idiots like Marina when you should be having fun. Patrick escaped for a reason.” She hadn’t thought about what she was going to say. “And things are changing with Mum and Dad. Something is happening, has happened. Albert? You should be out there having fun. You need to make some new friends. Meet people your own age.”

She saw the shape halve, folding in on itself. A gray round shape at the bottom of the shower.

“I don’t have anything in common with people my own age,” he said.

She tried laughing. It sounded stagy in the bathroom’s acoustics. She stepped up to the curtain and, listening, could only hear the showerhead dribbling, the gap between each drip getting bigger and bigger until it stopped.

“But you get along with everyone,” she said.

She pulled back the curtain.

He was folded up on the floor of the shower, his skin shiny,
shampoo still in his hair, his forehead touching the plughole, a boulder, the teeth of his spine sticking out through his back. The soles of his feet, she saw, still dirty, a bouquet of verrucas on his right heel. He stayed there, unmoving, starting to shiver.

“Albert, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m not upset. Why do you spoil everything?”

“Albert, don’t say that. I haven’t slept.”

She felt tightness at the back of her throat.

“Are you crying?” he said, still balled up, his voice muffled. “You’d better not be crying.”

She folded her arms across her chest.

“No way,” he said, and he unfolded from the boulder position and stood up. “That’s not right.”

With her on the bathroom floor and him raised in the shower cubicle, they were the same height. Water ran off the tips of his fingers. He was completely hairless. A tear hung off the end of her chin. Albert put his hand underneath to catch it.

“It’s me that should be crying. I’m younger than you.”

He caught the tear and rubbed it under his armpit.

“Why wouldn’t you have a shower with me? Why are you so stupid?”

He caught another tear and wiped it on his hair.

He caught another and ate it.

In the car on the way to dropping her at the hospital, her father seemed small-eyed and drawn, his cheeks loose.

“I want you to tell Patrick that we miss him,” Don said.

“Okay.”

He was wearing navy jogging bottoms and his “driving socks,” which had rubber grips on the soles.

“Tell him it’s not the same now he’s gone.”

Kate flicked the direction tabs on the dashboard heater. Don changed lanes twice along Mumbles Road, though there were no other cars.

“His energy, his ideas, the discussions we used to have, even the fights, I miss having someone to fight with.”

“Are you okay, Dad?”

“I’m tired.” Don checked all three mirrors but didn’t change lanes.

“What’s going on with you and Mum?”

“She and Albert are going to spend a couple of weeks down at the roundhouse, we’ve decided. Give Albert some space from Marina.”

“Why don’t you just do something about her?”

Kate examined her father’s profile while he kept his eyes on the road. He had a small nodule of gray—she hoped it was porridge—trapped behind the bars of his mustache.

“It’s more important that Albert learn to understand his own mind, rather than have us force our beliefs on him.”

“But he’s eleven.”

“We think a fortnight’s holiday at the roundhouse will help.”

“You think or Mum thinks?”

“We do. It’s an experiment.”

The workshop contained a disc sander, band saw, two wooden counters, and a shadow-board with half the tools missing. A
storage room at the far end had become Marina and Isaac’s bedroom, and when Freya knocked and went in, she found them, with Albert, playing cards on a single bed.

“This is a nice surprise!” Marina said.

They were playing cheat. Freya said hello and sat at the end of the mattress to watch.

“We’re discovering that your son is an exquisite liar,” Marina said.

“Here’s the face I use,” Albert said, and he showed his mother his honest face.

The concrete floor had, at its center, a rug the color of bandages. Light came through a single high window. They played a hand and Isaac yelled “You’re lying!” at his mother, but she was telling the truth.

Above Marina’s bed there was an image in a clip-frame, a panoramic photo of deep space that had what looked like two phosphorescent eyes at its center. A thin handwritten label ran the length of the frame:
Chandra Telescope 2001, The Centre of the Milky Way: Sagittarius A*. What do you see?
The two eyes glared at the opposite wall, which was decorated with Polaroids of Isaac.