Wild Abandon (25 page)

Albert stared at the camera, eyes wide. “Ladies and gentlemen, fellow humans, I bring grave news. The world could end any time now. We are reaching final days,” Albert said. He gripped the armrests like a pilot in an ejector seat. “Prepare! Choose weapons! The monsters are almost upon us!”

Which is when Don stepped in front of the camera.

Albert unplugged the adapters, one by one, his father standing over him. Isaac, with his head down, dragging one end of the expensive keyboard on the ground behind him, sulked off
through the woods. Albert passed each unplugged adapter to his dad to hold. The mud on his hands was flaking off as he worked.

“Albert, you know I like to see you follow your interests.”

“It’s not an interest.”

“And you know I’d be thrilled to see you take up filmmaking.”

“I’m not taking anything up,” Albert said. “Varghese said I could use his camera. So I did.”

“And that’s one thing about being educated at home, you can learn about filmmaking. We can get Varghese to teach you about lighting and editing. And you and I could study contemporary cinema, if you wanted. I think you’re mature enough to see most films. It wouldn’t be like that at school.”

“Okay, thanks but no.”

“Whatever you’re interested in, you can learn about. That’s the real heart of home education. Have you decided what you’d like to do about next year?”

Albert was concentrating on a particularly sticky plug. Don had seen, in his son’s room, that his bedside reading was a copy of Bishopston Comprehensive’s glossy brochure.

“Well, make up your own mind. Don’t let me and your mum push you around. You’ll probably want to rebel against us, and that’s fair enough. Most teenagers do. I did.”

“I’m not a teenager. I’m eleven, nearly twelve.”

Albert was done with the five-plug adaptors. He started winding up one of the cable-reel extension leads, walking forward as he turned the crank.

“Did I ever tell you about when I ran away from home?”
Don said, watching his son. “For two months, I stayed in a squat in
London
. An amazing old house. We had a tennis court. We used to play tennis.”

Albert shook his head.

“When I first got to the squat, I fell in love with one of the girls,” Don said. “She had a great name. Sheila La Fanu.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“She was the most beautiful girl—a climber, climber’s hands, fingers squished, nails cracked, do you know that move?” Don flattened his right palm and jabbed it in the air. “Wedging? Where there’s a crack in the rock and if they can’t get a grip on it, they just squeeze their fingers in there. Her fingers looked like parsnips, tapered. A Greenpeace climber. Used to be the one who’d scale the power station at night and drop the banner: ‘London Cancer Factory.’ ” Then he leaned down to Albert’s ear and whispered conspiratorially in a tone that he hoped would show his son that, one day, the two of them could be friends. “She had a climber’s body but alpine tits.”

Albert turned the crank as fast as he could. They passed the fire pit.

“Don’t ever say that word, please,” Albert said.

“I fell in love with her. I was your age.”

“You were eleven?”

“You’re almost twelve. I was not much older than you. Seventeen maybe.”

“Kate’s age,” he said. He handed his father one of the cable reels and moved to the next one.

“She took me out to the Mile End climbing wall—she was seven years older than me. I lived for those sessions, me
belaying her, watching her mechanical thighs as she sprang up the wall. Every session, she’d say how much I was improving and I’d tell her that it was her teaching that was the reason.”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do. This is not enjoyable for me.”

They were going up the wood-chipped steps through the kitchen garden, and Albert changed cranking arms as his right got tired. Don wasn’t going to help him.

“After a month, she took me to the Munros in Scotland—just me and her—and said we were going to camp up there. Sleeping on a ledge up a mountain with this girl. We climbed all day and I sunburned my back so badly I couldn’t lie on it. We stopped at this ledge. It was more of a plateau. She put aloe vera on me.”

“Oh my God, Dad.”

They were approaching the kitchen window. Once Albert got there, he’d be able to get away. Don started talking a little faster.

“She had to sleep on her back on account of her breasts. Me, I had to sleep on my side or my front ’cause of the sunburn. It was meant to be. I thought,
If I can’t tell this girl now that I like her, then when?
So I said: “Sheila La Fanu, I’m in love with you.” I used her full name. Sheila La Fanu.”

“I’m asking you to stop,” Albert said, his nostrils flaring. “Whatever you’re trying to do, please don’t.”

Albert was on the final cable reel, whizzing his hand as quickly as he could. Don was now weighed down with extension cords.

“She said, ‘You’re too young, but I like you, and we can have a kiss and you can touch my breasts,’ so we kissed. The
wind and her tongue and she put my hand under there. It was momentous.”

Don gave his biggest smile. His arms were full of adapters and cable reels. They were at the kitchen window.

“Is that it? Can I go?”

“I’m telling you—one of the greatest experiences. This is all to come, for you, in the future, if you’d just choose to believe in it. If the world doesn’t end, you’ve got lots to look forward to. Then she paid for my train home. You can’t know the value of it until you experience it. You’re becoming an adult.”

“I’m not.”

“You may not know it, but you are.”

“If I was an adult then you’d let me have responsibility for things, and you don’t.”

“I am giving you responsibility. Remember what we talked about?”

“You said I’m allowed to watch. That’s not the same. You need to let me be in charge.”

“You’re still eleven.”

“You just said I was basically seventeen. Am I an adult or am I not?”

“Look, okay. A compromise.” Don knelt down in front of his son. “How about I let you take charge of the selection process?”

Albert brightened up. “Really?”

“Yes, I’ll rely on you to do the research.”

“Okay good, I will.”

He hugged his father, the power cables between them.

“Now tell me. How’s your mother?”

“I don’t know. She’s okay, I think.”

“I miss her. Does she know that?”

His father was getting upset.

“She knows.”

Don’s Adam’s apple bobbed in a way that signaled what was coming.

Albert looked around to see if they were being watched.

“They don’t smell like failure,” Patrick said, sniffing each envelope in turn.

He and Kate were on a bench next to the cycle path, looking out over the bay. It was raining at sea but Mumbles was bright.

“Open them,” she said.

Two Rollerbladers went past, sweeping their feet behind them.

“What does it mean if you get into Cambridge?”

“I won’t have got in,” she said.

She’d spent the last two months working through her reading lists, and when not studying, imagining Mervyn and Geraint bonding over her disappearance with fishing trips, remote control helicopters, and a compensatory meat marathon.
She visualized their house suddenly brimming with chorizo, Coke-boiled hams, shanks, and T-bones. Or even worse, she thought, the continued path toward vegetarian enlightenment: walnut oil, a veggie box, sunflower seeds in clamp jars. The disappointing news from her time in Three Crosses was that, where she had hoped to find suburbia’s dark and seething underbelly, she had found the potbelly of contentment.

“Put me out of my misery,” she said. The electric tourist train went past incredibly slowly. Patrick’s wide fingers struggled to tear the paper.

“Oh ho ho,” he said.

Kate stared off at the pier, imagining herself high up in the sky and falling with rag-doll limbs into the green-blue sea.

It had been agreed that Varghese could make a filmed record of the party because new content would need to be online, in the days afterward, if they wanted to see long-term impact. “Stickiness,” Varghese called it.

Don said he could film whatever he wanted, on the condition that he steer clear of the goat pen between 10:30 a.m. and noon, though he didn’t tell Varghese why.

Just after breakfast, Varghese captured the party’s first genuine
moment
. Don and a team of wwoofers were building the live music yurt in the long field when three young lads turned up, carrying buckets. Although the party had been advertised as “an all-dayer,” Don had assumed that guests wouldn’t arrive until lunch. These lads had been up since dawn, low-tide fishing. They showed the camera the buckets of whitebait, razor clams, and wild oysters. They didn’t like oysters so Don took as many as would fit in the pockets of his tweedy suit jacket.
“If all the young people who come today are anything like you,” Don said, “then our future is in good hands.” Varghese had to explain to him not to make direct eye contact with the lens.

At the last count, Varghese’s YouTube video of the community felling their electricity pole had almost ten thousand views and the requisite mixture of abusive and incomprehensible comments that, he reassured Don, were a mark of growth, “like zits during puberty,” and not to be taken personally. On the BassMusicWales.co.uk forum, genuine ravers now outnumbered Varghese’s various avatars on a thread titled “Rebirth of the Free Party!” Likewise, the environmentally conscious GowerPower.org had included them on its list of local days out.

Patrick drove Kate in his sponsored Mini Cooper with the top down and she sang, “If you’ll be my bodyguard” and he sang, “I will be your long lost pal.” Her hair made a comet’s trail behind her as she yelled, “Aaaa!” which was a representation of the four key letters she’d seen when she’d looked at her exam results. Patrick slalomed slightly once they were out on South Gower Road and honked at everyone. They were going for overpriced lunch.

Kate was too busy miming the bass solo to notice when he didn’t take the turning for Llanmadoc. In fact, it took Patrick coming to a full stop before she looked up and saw a poster attached to a tree that read:
This Must Be the Place
.

“Strange,” she said.

He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” she said. “It’s a nice
idea, but I don’t want to come home. It’s not like I secretly want to but I can’t come to terms with it. Let’s go order food we can’t pronounce.”

He turned off the stereo.

“You should at least go and see your parents. Tell them the news.”

“Don’t do this. Stop being grown up. Let’s hit the road.” She thumb-pointed over her shoulder. “I’ll text them.”

She turned the stereo back on. “If you’ll be my bodyguard …”

Patrick killed the engine and pulled up the handbrake.

Kate let her head loll forward. “
Really?
”

He power-unlocked her door.

“Okay, listen. I will tell Dad the news and have some kind of epiphany, since that’s probably what you’re imagining, but there is no way in the world I’m staying, so I’m going to come back and you’ll still be here—
won’t you
—and we’ll go and eat hand-dived scallops, am I right?”

He nodded.

“You’re lying,” she said, then, holding out her hand, “give me the keys.”

It was both pleasing and disappointing that, walking into the community for the first time in months, nobody recognized her. After looking around, unnoticed, she finally spotted Don inside a chill-out teepee that was set up beside the fire pit. Through the arched entrance to the tent, she could see him, kneeling, arranging cushions in a diamond formation.

“Hello, Father.”

He stopped for a moment, spooked-seeming, and shook his head.

“It couldn’t be,” he said, not turning to look. “It must be her ghost.” He plumped a beanbag in a way that tried to be wistful, then turned and crawled out of the teepee, pretending not to see her.

“Dad.”

“
So
sad,” he said, standing up, his eyes wide, “to be haunted by my own daughter. Such a sweet girl.”

“Da-ad. I’ve got news.”

He started walking up the shallow steps to the big house, shaking his head.

“Oh we’ll miss her, I suppose. She wouldn’t even come home for the party in her honor.”

She bounded toward him and took a running jump onto his back, swinging her arms round his neck and her legs round his waist, yelling “Aaaa!” as he huffed and gripped hold of her and turned back down the steps at a canter, already heaving under the strain but
absolutely not
willing to put down his seventeen-year-old daughter until she explicitly said so. He started doing loops of the fire pit, neighing, and Kate’s laughter went up and down as the air got knocked out of her. She raised one arm in the air rodeo-style and didn’t say stop until she could hear some unsettling congestion in her father’s lungs. When she did say “Okay! Okay!” he halted instantly, gracelessly, falling to his knees on the soft ground, his face now a purplish, almost glans-like color and sweat beading between his eyebrows. His tongue was slightly out. He was old, she noticed.

Kneeling down in front of him with her high-beam grin on, the wonks in her front teeth, she said: “I got into Cambridge.”

Just saying those words made her capable of compassion. She watched his chest go up and down. He coughed a little and it became clear he had something in his mouth. Even this could not dim her torch of empathy. She handed him a tissue. He made the transfer, subtly, turning his head to the side. It was a big one. She glimpsed it, just for a second. The phlegm in the tissue like a sunrise through mist. Everything was beautiful.

“I’m so glad you came back,” he said.

There were two wet patches forming in the pockets of her father’s jacket.

“I’m not actually
back
. I just came to let you know.”

From the patio at the back of the big house, Kate noticed a tall South Asian man pointing a handheld camera down at them.