Wild Abandon (30 page)

“Bertie!” She used to call him that. “My boy, you’re
huge
!”

“I know.”

“
Slask fitte!
”

He repeated it. “What does it mean?”

“I saved it for you. It’s Swedish. It means something unspeakable.”

“Okay, thank you.”

Up at the yard, he tried to ignore his father sitting on the bench by the schoolroom with a Smurf on his lap. Albert examined the flat roof as a possible podium. He walked back toward the dance floor, into the noise, avoiding the flailing elbows, to check that he would still be visible from there. When he heard his name yelled, he turned round in time to see someone who resembled his sister wrap her clammy arms right round him, wetness and heat coming off her neck.

“Bro!” she said. The hug went on and on. Her face paint was smudged to an ashy gray. When she let go, there were black smudges on Albert’s forehead. She looked him up and down.

“What are you?” she said, dancing as she talked. “Are you a sea captain?”

He was wearing wellies and a blue naval utility coat. The coat, which he’d got from the dressing-up box, was to give him authority as a public speaker and to point toward the possible floods ahead.

“Why are you still
here
?” he said.

“I came to see you!”

She bobbed her head from side to side. She was holding a bamboo pole, the panda’s glow stick, twizzling it. He could feel the music in his lungs, the air moving. The smoke machine exhaled, the green laser came on, and his sister reached up to break the beams. He needed to hurt her more.

“The soup,” Albert said. “It was made with the blood of your goat. Belona’s blood.”

“Cool,” she said, and she tried to get him to dance, taking hold of his hands and puppeting them up and down.

“It
was
cool,” he said, in an overly sinister way, then waited for her to scream.

“What did you say about Belona?”

He cupped his hands round her ear and yelled.

“The soup was made with her blood!”

Her dancing slowed a little. Just her feet going.

“I thought it was tomato.”

He didn’t mind repeating himself.

“You drank her blood. We mixed it with tomato to fool you.”

“Oh my God, that’s weird.”

He watched her smudged face crack. Her teeth floating there amid the black paint. It was a smile, he realized. An unfathomable response. Her feet were still going from side to side, shoulders shifting.

“Brother of mine,” she said, kissing him in the middle of the forehead, then leaning right into his ear, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned tonight, it’s that I love you so much. And you’ll never stop loving me either. I know why you do everything. I love everything you are.”

She pulled his head into her chest and kissed him again, really hard on the crown. He could smell her. Maybe she was in shock—that was the problem. He had to make her understand.

“I stuck her, Kate. She was pissing blood like a fountain pissing blood.”

He felt her move in time to the music.

“I know what happened. That you weren’t capable of pulling the trigger. I spoke to Mum. It’s great that you’re sensitive. Don’t fight it—you’re a good person by nature!”

She wouldn’t let him go, squeezing him and trapping his arms at his side and moving his body in time with the music as though dancing with a doll.

“That’s not true,” he said.

“I’m so proud of you!”

Letting go of him, she put her hands in the air as the synths came in. The bass dropped monumentally—a dynamited tower block.

As the smoke cleared, Albert looked to where his dad had been sitting but he was gone.

“Yeeeeeaaah!” she said, her voice going scratchy.

Little bits of spittle got Albert in the face. Her head went back, looking up at the tarpaulin. He gazed inside her nostrils, tiny nodules of dried snot attached to hairs like a miniature and impractical abacus. He did not know who this person was.

“Don’t feel bad. She had a good life. Better than most animals’ lives. Mum said Belona was pretty chilled out, even at the end. Come on, come dance, this is amazing,” and she pulled him closer to the speakers, his heels dragging in the grit. He yanked his hands away and put them over his ears. The bass rattled his insides and he thought of the way the innards had flopped out of Belona onto the grass, and of how there had been a sound like hundreds of people licking their lips all at once. He thought of the way the heart had kept thumping after the brain was mush. He looked around at the brain-dead people, his sister among them. There was an apocalyptic clown, blood around his mouth, with a top hat and cane, the white paint cracking at his jaw where he was gurning.

“You should think about how she bled to death and seemed to be in pain,” Albert said, though he was starting to get upset.

She mimicked using a steak knife and fork, cutting off a chunk, chewing it, but all this in rhythm with the music.

“It’s fine. I love you. And you may not know it but you love me.”

He was blinking a lot. “I don’t.”

She did the one where electricity runs up one arm, across her shoulders, and down the other arm.

She tried to pass it to Albert, but he’d gone.

Don was in the dome, down on one knee, tipping the table up with his shoulder as he took one of its legs off. The Sky was above him on the mezzanine bed, swinging her blue legs in the air.

“What you gonna use that for?” she said. “And will I get splinters?”

He wedged the table leg into the coat hooks and tested the door to make sure it didn’t open.

“You know all the tricks,” she said.

Don was full of different drinks and his ears were ringing and he had even slightly pulled his hamstring when dancing. It made him sad that the thing he was doing might be the thing his wife hoped he would do. He climbed the few stairs, holding on to the rail made from an elm tree branch while trying to disguise a limp.

He crawled onto the bed, took the girl’s drink out of her hand, then leaned in and put his tongue in her mouth. Her skin was soft, even with paint on. He experienced dizziness,
having recently downed a Martini, and he worried about a possible fall from the mezzanine.

She lay back on the mattress and he carried on kissing her, leaning over with an arm on either side of her upper body. She felt the crotch of his trousers. He asked himself a question he had not asked in some time: Did he have clean genitals? Yes, thoroughly so, because he’d hoped that something might happen with Freya.

She pulled off her top and revealed the parts of her body she had not painted. He tried not to think about anything and groped her and kissed her. She slipped her hand down the front of his trousers and tugged inexpertly.

“This is probably pretty normal for you,” she said. She had to stop kissing while she concentrated on his belt. “It’s cool that here sex can just be sex and nobody has to get het up about it.”

Her speaking reminded him of how young she was, so he kissed her to keep her quiet. She shoved off her jean shorts, along with her underwear. He didn’t want to say that this was moving too quickly, but he wondered if it was a generational thing: this
was
moving too quickly. She was of his daughter’s generation. Twenty-four, he had discovered, a graduate. More white clouds now, among the blue. She had shaved all her pubic hair off. He had never seen that in person before. It pretty much appalled him. He tried to buy time by going down between her legs. She was scentless. These weren’t real genitals, as far as he knew. So much had changed since he was young.

“I’m married,” he said, from between her thighs. “I have a wife.”

“I know; I get it. Do you want me to meet her later or something?”

“I mean I’m properly married. Legally.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t think you do. I think I might have to stop what we’re doing here.”

She looked down at him.

“Yes,” he said, “I definitely think I’m going to stop.”

“Weird.”

“I just realized. I’ve also hurt my hamstring.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“Whatever.”

Isaac stood in the gloom behind the generator, yawning a lot and feeling sick from the fumes but knowing that the human race’s survival depended largely on his standing there, staying awake, feeling sick. He looked up at the flat roof of the big house and could make out a shape moving around. He waited for the signal. Isaac was happy that there were lots of other children at the party, some of whom he knew from before, like the three blond sisters from Tinker’s Bubble whom he used to be friends with when he lived there. They were all wearing bridesmaid dresses and had jumped on him when they first saw him. They called him “Eye Sack,” which he always found funny. Then, later on, he had been riding piggyback on the oldest sister Anya, whose plaited hair swung so high as they ran that it tickled his ears. That was when Albert saw them and made a deadly face so that Isaac had to climb down and take Albert’s hand and come stand here in the dark
behind the generator to finish the plan. Albert had explained that his sister had not been upset at all by the blood soup. She was now entirely without a mind, so there was nothing more they could do. Isaac thought about how his mother had said they would be moving on again soon, to a new community. She said that she was unsettled and that the energy interplay was shifting and she did not want to be here on the fifteenth of October when Mars came a-knocking. She said the party was a good opportunity to meet people from other communities. She had told Isaac to let Albert know it was possible they might leave in the morning, if they met someone who was willing to give them a lift. His mother didn’t like the party being filmed and photographed as she believed that films and photographs took something away from you that they could never return. There was the shape on the roof, silhouetted by the dusky clouds, dragging a rectangle out of the skylight. His mother had very small eyes, eyes that always looked closed in photos even when they were open. He had heard people taking photographs say, “Let’s try again, you blinked,” so many times that in the end she had to say, “That’s just how my eyes look.” He had not got his mother’s eyes. He had someone else’s eyes. For some reason the fumes made Isaac never want to eat bacon again. Isaac had seen a number of photos of himself and was extremely pleased with all of them. No one was noticing the noise the generator was making because of all the other noises. Don sometimes called the generator “Jenny.” His mother said that Don was “messed up on some deep level” and that any community with someone that competitive at the heart of it would have problems. His mother said that they needed to find somewhere more genuine
because it was important to be somewhere genuine, especially now. Isaac had not told Albert that they might be leaving so soon. He was scared about what Albert would say. His mother had been invited to a community in Northumbria and had printed out pictures and Isaac could not deny it looked nice with a big wooden structure for morning meditation and a choir that did not care if you could sing. He stared up at the flat roof above the kitchen. There were a few rectangles up there now and a shape tending to them. His favorite place had been Tinker’s Bubble, where he’d had three girlfriends, all sisters, all blond, and sometimes they’d carried him around like a corpse. There was a waterfall there that trickled down the side of the hill and the posh house at the bottom had a trampoline in the garden that he and the girls used to sneakily bounce on until lights came on in a window and someone yelled. His mother became friends with a nice man named Daniel who smelt of damp wood chips, which was a good smell. Daniel wrote a song about his mother that rhymed
Marina
with
hyena
and
ballerina
and was Isaac’s favorite song for a good while, until his mother said it was not a good song anymore. Then they went to High Copse Court, which his mother tried to become a member of but was not allowed because, as she explained to Isaac, their minds were locked shut like a beehive. Then they came here and Marina told Isaac to be extra nice, which he was. He was happy to meet Albert, and Albert was happy to meet him. The shape on the roof wasn’t moving anymore. He heard a woman’s voice nearby, saying in an American accent: “Varghese, I think you should come up the house quick and catch this. Albert’s on the roof.” This made Isaac pleased that they were doing
something important. Then there were the torch flashes. Dot dot dash. Dash. Dot dot. The signal. Isaac knelt down, gripped the thick textured plastic where the cord went into the generator. It would turn off the music and lights in the rave arena but would not affect Albert, who was plugged into the river behind the walls of the big house. Before he’d even pulled the plug, somewhere someone screamed really loudly and for a long time. Isaac held the cord with both hands and leaned back.

Patrick and Janet took their shoes off at the door to her room. At the end of the corridor, extension cords were running through the window and out onto the flat roof. As they went inside and Janet shut her door behind them, the dance music stopped. She nodded as though the ability to mute the outside world was well within her powers. Through the walls, they heard a muffled, amplified voice and the sounds of cheering. They sat on school chairs opposite each other.

“I’m so glad to see you.”

“Sure.”

Their voices sounded intimate in the sudden quiet, which Patrick didn’t approve of. She examined his face in the light from a double-helix lampshade that hung above them. She smoothed out his forehead with her thumbs, which made him realize he was frowning.

“I never got to say sorry in person for not coming with you in the ambulance. I desperately wanted to but I was worried that I’d make things worse—since you seemed to believe I was plotting to
kill
you.” She opened her eyes wide in mock horror.

Patrick tried not to take in what she was saying. She looked down at his ankle and asked if she could have a look, which was just the sort of thing that he had been training himself to avoid. He wanted to say:
No, that’s not appropriate
. But he didn’t say that. Instead, in the quiet room, he stayed silent. She put her hands on his knee to see if he reacted, then slid off her seat and knelt in front of him, running her hands downward, feeling his left shin through his trousers.