Wild Abandon (20 page)

Then Geraint was kneeling next to Kate and taking her shades off. He hugged her and she couldn’t see much because of the sunlight.

Her mother said: “Kate’s probably furious with me for making a scene.”

“This is not a scene!” Liz said. “Merv, is this a scene?”

“God no,” came the voice from inside. “I know a scene when I see one and this isn’t it.”

Standing on the verge at the side of the North Gower road, Kate kept her thumb right out.

“I can’t fucking be
lieve
you.
Why
did you have to tell them?”

“I didn’t mean to. They seemed nice.”

“They’re not your sort of people. You shouldn’t make friends with them.”

On the moorland, they could see cows bathing in a murky pool, Serengeti-style. A station wagon with bikes on a rack went past, kicking up dust. Freya and Kate both squinted.

“I grew up in a house a bit like theirs, you know,” Freya said.

“Did you have a swimming pool?”

“Well.”

Her mother was a little drunk and it was infuriating. In her hand she was holding a piece of paper with the home phone number of Bishopston School’s headmaster, Howard Ley. Freya had told Liz and Mervyn that she had been thinking of sending Albert there in September, and Mervyn had immediately gone to fetch his little black book. He had all kinds of useful contacts, he said, and he would put in a good word.

A red minivan for M. Hare Period Restoration didn’t slow down.

“Mum, you don’t know them. They look like normal people but they’re not. Mervyn’s an insomniac and, I think, ex-alcoholic. And Liz is pathologically nice. She keeps buying me clothes she thinks make me look attractive.”

Two small cars went by, followed by a delivery motorbike. Kate extended her hand out straight, for more impact.

“Kate, you know that you, of all people, should be tolerant. You grew up with every kind of person,” Freya said, rubbing the small of her daughter’s back with her spare hand. “How many people have we seen touch each corner of the door
frame and then touch the corresponding corners of their mouth with their tongue before they can walk through?”

“One person. Alan Medlicott.”

“Liz
is
being nice. Not everything is the tip of the iceberg,” Freya said. “Sometimes it is just … a bit of ice floating along.”

Kate shook her head. Her mother was drunk; it was dreadful.

“Why are you being like this?”

“Like what? Nonjudgmental?”

“Yes. It’s awful.”

A car driven by boys with surfboards on the roof slowed and pulled up, flashing its hazards.

“Okay, Mum. Go now.”

Albert was now banned from taking minutes. Don looked around the table. Janet had her Biro poised just above the lined pad in, he felt, mock anticipation. For any decision to be agreed, half the full-time members needed to be at the round table. Children counted for half, which meant that Isaac, although technically under the table, made a crucial difference. Freya was no longer expected at community meetings, though she had not been able to stop Albert from attending.
The newlyweds were settling into communal life, ping-ponging a head cold back and forth between them. He coughed, she sniffed.

“A bit of naming and shaming,” Don said, turning to address his son. “It’s come to my attention that the young master has been speaking to a TV production company. He even sent them forged release forms. Anything to say in your defense?”

Albert was playing with his bottom lip, stretching it, turning it inside out to show off the forked blue veins. He let it
flup
back into position.

“Just trying to get the word out. People need to be warned.”

Don turned to Marina. She made a teepee out of her fingers. Janet frowned and wrote something down.

“Right, then,” Don said. “Moving on.”

He passed around copies of a document. It was a compilation of comments about the community dredged from the LiveWild.co.uk forum. One of the more notable contributions was from “Coastnut,” who used an extended metaphor, saying that Patrick had been “like one of these ‘replete ants’—a colony’s living larder, essentially—who they’d been fattening/milking for decades.” Firepoi88 said she had heard “the children are illiterate and some of the other accusations really ought to be taken to social services”—and then a shocked emoticon face. Callum09 said: “I’ve just come back from a week wwoofing there: NOT RECOMMEND.”

Don looked around, watching them go over the document. Some of the comments were a decade old but he didn’t feel the need to mention this. He threaded his fingers together.

“Applications for membership are a quarter of what they were three years ago and we only have three visitors booked in for the next open day,” he said. “But, on the upside, I hope you agree that since going off-grid we’ve really turned a corner. We need to let people know how much we’ve changed.”

Around the table, they were frowning and underlining.

At this point, Don turned to Varghese, the almost literal giant, the massive half of the honeymooners who Don had recently discovered had worked for many years in a Chicago-based ad agency. Varghese, who told Don he would be honored to “oversee a rebrand,” was shuffling a sheaf of papers, graphs, and inspiration material, shaping up to speak.

Mervyn began to wonder if Kate was timing her showers so that she always tottered back across the hallway with wet hair, chest flushed, wearing just a tucked towel, at times when he was picking out a shirt from the second wardrobe that stood on the landing. It happened every weekday. He tried to strike a naturalistic balance between completely ignoring her, which was, in its own way, an admission of interest, and gawping. He said “Morning,” made eye contact, but didn’t linger or enjoy the smell that stayed in the air behind her as she made a point of squeezing past him to Geraint’s room, where she now slept. Liz had said that it was time to let her “come out of quarantine.”

He had to provide normalcy, he knew, during her time of upheaval. The last thing she needed was to be sexually harassed by the adults she was trying to trust.

Early on in his marriage, Mervyn had cheated on Liz with an older woman he’d interviewed about the suicide of her
grown-up son. He’d asked questions in the darkened back room of her house. She was a beekeeper and had been drinking Martinique white rum. She answered his questions by taking her tights off. She had red bumps on her ankles. They had sex twice, and Mervyn didn’t speak to her again.

The day after the woman’s son’s funeral, he’d come home from work to find her in his back garden, getting on famously with Liz, who was on the verge of sending off for a mail-order hive. After that the beekeeper blackmailed him into having regular, admittedly thrilling, sex with her. For Mervyn, this marked the beginning of his problems with sleeping. All the while, his wife read up on hive intelligence.
Collectively, they make honey yet no single bee understands how it’s done
.

Then the beekeeper’s house got repossessed. Liz wanted to let her stay in their spare room while she got settled. Mervyn didn’t think it was a good idea. He lied and told a story about her trying and failing to seduce him, using the detail about the tights and the bumps on her ankles. Liz instantly believed him, cut all contact with the beekeeper, and ever since has enjoyed telling the story, among good friends, about the madwoman who tried to “sting her husband”—and each time she told it, Mervyn had to shrug and chuckle.

All the while, the woman continued to threaten him. She was living in public housing in Clase. She warned him that she could describe his penis in a way that his wife would instantly know was authentic. The color of it, she said. To this day, there had never been any genuine resolution—just her demands, first for sex and later for money, growing more and more infrequent. He hadn’t heard from her in years, but that didn’t mean it was over. Mervyn believed that since he had
created the problem, he deserved to take the burden of worry that, any day, if she was feeling drunk, sad, jealous, spiteful, she might call.

Over the years, as the
Evening Post
’s go-to death-knocker, meeting people at times of heightened emotion, Mervyn had been in more than one tempting situation. His method—post-beekeeper—was to take the time to imagine the true details of what it would be like with that person: turn something romantic into something journalistic. Acknowledge the inappropriate feeling, then flesh it out with details until reality leaches the charm out of it.

So it was, that afternoon in the office men’s room, he imagined Kate’s body. In his fantasy, she was double-jointed. After he’d filled a hand towel that he imagined to be her flushed chest, he made himself keep the fantasy going in his mind, her weeping in the back of the Jeep, digging her nails into her palms, and, through strings of saliva in her mouth, saying she loved him. He kept the story going: he and Kate having a nocturnal relationship, silent orgasms in front of muted
News 24
. After a few weeks, Kate convincing him to elope with her in the Jeep—an implication that she might kill herself, if he didn’t go along with it, is how Mervyn imagined it happening. A queen-size foam mattress squeezed in the back, driving through the Irish lowlands, and at first it being exciting but by the fourth day it already becoming clear that, although they got on okay and the hypermobile sex was fun, they were too different for it to work in the long term—and the cold-weather mosquito bites made her calves and ankles swell up in a strange, watery way. Then, one morning, Kate disappearing, lost among the hills and suicide-friendly cliffs
south of Galway, and Mervyn searching for three days before returning home to tell Kate’s family what had happened—only to discover she was back there with them.

Now that they were sharing a room, Kate and Geraint felt a pressure to act like a proper couple. This meant bed sex, which felt somehow much further along the relationship timeline, much closer to marriage and therefore death than Jeep, woods, or pool sex. Quickly they formed a routine, a side of the bed, a sleeping formation (“the turnstile”), and pet names that will not be recorded here.

Geraint had started to change. He’d put his name on the waiting list for an allotment. He’d been reading about Blaen-y-Llyn online and kept signposting his knowledge, in conversation: “I can see the value of a sustainable housing village.” He kept asking her when they were going to go for dinner at her mother’s. He’d Googled Freya Riley and unearthed some of the dreadful articles, hatchet jobs, written about the “Lost Tribe of Gower.” It was when Kate spotted Geraint in the utility room, turning electrical devices off standby, that she felt a portcullis come down between them.

More and more she looked forward to the thrill of her secret visits to the lounge, to sit next to insomniac Mervyn. She liked the extra risk of being careful not to wake Geraint as she got out of bed.

She brought her goose-pimpled legs up on the sofa, didn’t tug down her “Life Begins at Forty” T-shirt, which, having now experienced Liz’s washing temperatures, had shrunk.

She watched the screen. It said: “… school spells fifty truants …”

Mervyn didn’t notice. He kept watching the TV.

She breathed. He turned to look at her and they made eye contact with each other and she smiled. He had a sympathetic expression and she imagined it was the one he used for interviewing the recently bereaved.

Although they were already off-grid, Varghese had said it was important to have something up online so that people could understand, visually, the dramatic change. As such, they shot a short film of the community chopping down the electricity pole at the bottom of the garden, although now no power was running through it. Varghese got various talking heads on video to describe it as sticking out of the ground like “a crucifix,” “a middle finger,” and “the hilt of a knife.” Isaac said electricity was “like a waterfall of fire inside the walls of the house.” He looked unfeasibly cute and muddled. A tracking shot followed Arlo with an ax over his shoulder and Don carrying pruning shears, both men side by side down the stepped path. It was clear by the way they walked that they imagined their own theme music. Having climbed the pole and severed the cables, Don sat on top like an awkward, judicial bird, squinting down at the camera, only sky behind him.

Everyone had a go at chopping, and when they heard the wood creak they ran back and watched. It fell slowly, hitting the ground like a last-round knockout, like a victory for the featherweight outsider. Varghese asked them to hold one another’s hands aloft, then made them do it again, in better light. He made Isaac hold up a piece of slate with a message chalked on it:

The apple tree in the yard had been first planted to mark Don and Freya’s wedding day. In turn, it produced the fruit that made the gum-tingling cider that they got drunk on before conceiving Kate, loudly, on their platform bed. Their daughter’s birth, in turn, had an impact on the community at large: raising morale and, in time, bringing in young families. This allowed for sharing child care with other parents, which gave Freya and Don more time for each other. And so on. It was symbiotic, Don knew, the relationship between his marriage and the community. They fed off one another.

He was standing in the entrance hall, by the phone, turning through the Yellow Pages. He noticed there were several punctures right through it—they looked like bullet holes—which he had not seen before. He turned to P and dialed in the number carefully.

“Hi there. I was wondering about hiring a sound system.”

Just as Kate’s fifteenth birthday party had created its own legacy—The Rave House—Don hoped that this summer event could build a new reputation for the community. By making it an A-level results-day party, he hoped to guarantee his daughter’s attendance.