Wild Abandon (31 page)

He gripped the sides of the chair and stared at her work table: four ice-cream-cone devil horns were drying on newspaper. Underneath the desk was a mound of bubble wrap, Jiffy bags, and antique presentation boxes printed with “Accessories to Murder” in an italicized font.

She took hold of his left foot and lifted it up, straightening his leg out. He watched her. She pressed the sole of his foot to her hip, then reached up his trouser leg, found the top of his thick walking sock, and rolled it down and off.

Smells are good for bringing back memories.

It was the first week they lived in Blaen-y-Llyn together. They all shared the schoolroom, eight of them. No stench or bulge or habit was disgusting. Janet’s hypersonic bat farts in the night. She and Patrick would sometimes lock together, him waking with her tucked in flush against him.

Outside there was more cheering.

She pushed up his trouser leg, then ran her fingers down the flat of his shin toward his ankle, its yellow skin, the hair worn away by the cast. She watched him breathe in, his chest expanding, those lungs. Then she found it, the scar.

“What was the real reason you left?” she said, while
examining the marks, which looked like a quadratic equation. Locating two metal screws, just below the surface of the skin, she pressed her thumb against them and Patrick inhaled.

“Don says the only reason I stayed here so long was because I was in love with you, but being in love with you was the reason to leave,” he said.

She smiled and slid her hand up to his knee, just beneath his trousers. Her other hand held the underneath of his calf. It felt like she was ready to draw him in, hand over hand.

“Am I really that bad?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Am I doing it now?”

“Oh yes. Absolutely.”

She looked down at her hands.

“Sorry,” she said, and let go.

He stood up from the seat and moved awkwardly to the door, hobbled by a hard-on as well as his ankle. She threw him his sock. He was unable to bend to put it on. They listened to the crowd outside. Some were chanting.

“You never replied to my letter,” she said.

“What letter? You never sent one.”

“The one I sent when you were in hospital. I gave it to Don to give to you.”

Patrick pretended he hadn’t heard that and leaned back against the wall, managing to get the sock on.

“Well, if you didn’t get it, I’ll tell you what it said. It said I was so sorry about your accident and that I had wanted to come in the ambulance but didn’t want to upset you. I wrote about why I was awake that night, and drunk; it was because
things weren’t going well with Stephan. I laid all my feelings on the line. How much I care about you.”

“Was it a love letter?”

He thought of the way she sealed her letters: pink wax stamped to look like a man’s nipple.

She looked at him. “Maybe not in those exact terms, no. More of a kind of get-well letter, but with added content.”

“Did it suggest that we start a full sexual relationship?” His voice was loud.

She showed her teeth. “Not that I recall.”

“Sounds like your typical high-grade bullshit then.”

“So that’s what you want? A full sexual relationship.”

“Yes. Or nothing.”

“Right.”

It had taken him years—actually, decades—to say that. Among some other emotions, there was definite relief. “The answer is nothing, isn’t it?” he said.

“I think so,” she said.

“Fine. Good. That’s cleared up. Anyway, where’s old Stephan? I looked for his Saab,” Patrick said, “but couldn’t see it. I wanted to key him a message in the paintwork.”

“He’s not here,” she said, sitting back on her seat and looking up at the ceiling. “He’s back with his wife.”

Patrick felt giddy. He was close to laughing in fact, but then told himself that this could be one of her stunts, though her expression said that it was not. Something about knowing she had been hurt made certain conversations more possible. Patrick smoothed down his trousers. His hard-on was gone. He felt freed.

“You need inequality. That’s what you get when you’re with someone like me. What could be simpler, more pure, than one person unfalteringly adoring another person, and that person quite liking being adored?”

“Right.”

“You don’t even need to find me attractive. In fact, it’s better if you don’t!”

“The type of relationship you are referring to is called friendship. Happy to renew that with you, Pat.” She looked at him. “You’re pretty much perfect, but I just don’t want to fuck you.”

It was a kind of exhilaration to hear those words.

“I’m hoping for early onset menopause,” he said, his voice suddenly cheerful. “Take sex out of it and I’m looking like a strong contender. Au revoir, libido; hello, Patrick.”

She nodded slowly twice. “You’re playing the long game?”

“Twenty years in, no turning back now. Let me know when you feel the hormones dwindle,” he said, and looked at his watch. “How old are you?”

“Forty-two.”

“And counting,” he said. “You’re just entering the zone. Keep me on speed dial. You may find your priorities change. Oh ho, I wish you’d told me this a long time ago.”

She stood up and came toward where he was standing by the door.

“I did tell you. I told you by never having sex with you.”

When the outdoor lights and music shut off, everyone beneath the rave canopy made a big synchronized
boo
, which, Albert knew, was just a small slither of how bad they would
feel when the world as they knew it really did go through the industrial cheese grater.

Albert had hooked himself up to the big house mains. He had the karaoke machine from the attic and a microphone on a stand. He was on a low stool that was so close to the edge of the flat roof that if it were to tip forward he would be hospitalized, he estimated. He was ghoulishly lit; in a circle beneath him were five upturned reading lamps, each installed with contraband hundred-watt bulbs. He lifted the clay megaphone that Marina had made for him to his lips and yelled at the microphone.

“I have something important to tell you!”

In the yard, the only remaining light was from the mosquito repellent lanterns. He couldn’t make out the faces of the people who were turning to notice him, spinning and pointing up in the way that people point at superheroes. There were some people still talking loudly, and some laughter.

“Listen to me! This is important!”

Having never been to school, he had never seen the silence-produces-silence technique.

“Listen!” he said.

Someone shouted: “We love you, Albert. Don’t jump!”

There was a round of applause and a hydraulic gushing sound, then everyone went quiet apart from one or two drunks somewhere singing “Heeeey-ay-baby,” but Albert decided that it was fine for those people to die in the paradigm shift so he ignored them.

“I have invited you all here today to tell you some very bad news.”

Huge, pantomime-style, sympathetic
aww
sounds from the gathered throng.

“We have a limited number of days remaining on this planet.”

The quiet held for a moment. The clay megaphone hurt his lips.

“We must learn to discard the material world.” There was a shout-out for Madonna that Albert didn’t understand. “Pass this message on. If everyone here told just two people a day, and those two people told two people, and so on, for all of the remaining days, then we would reach the whole world.”

He started to hit his rhythm and was getting some strong calls of support.

“When it happens we are going to have to be ready. Before we enter the next paradigm, we must learn to perceive it. Some people will try to tell you lies.”

A scattering of applause and, it was hard to be sure, some kind of bowing hero worship happening in one section of the crowd, which was the sort of thing he had been hoping for. Possible Mexican wave. There was a red light too, pointed at him, like a robot eye.

“Who’s with me?”

He’d hoped a few natural leaders might emerge in the crowd and start organizing people but, as yet, that hadn’t happened. Down by the generator he could see someone had a flashlight, and just then there was the tinnitus of the sound system coming back online, his audience suddenly visible to him, expressions lit by fairy lights on the trees and security lamps in the grass. Perhaps they were turning on the sound
system so that they could plug Albert’s microphone in and he could project his news even farther. The red light was Varghese’s camera. That made sense, because it was important to record a moment like this.

“Thank you for listening!” Albert said. “Go—now—it’s time!”

He dropped the megaphone and it fell off the roof and landed in a plush flower bed below, although it didn’t smash dramatically; it just cracked in two.

Someone in the crowd pointed and yelled “It’s behind you!” at Albert, and there was a huge cheer, bigger than anything he’d got for his speech. He turned round and saw something terrifying: sea mist. It was coming in quick, thickening tangibly, smudging everything out. The revelers were captivated. It was quite possible this was the beginning of the end, in which case his speech had come too late. This would be permanent darkness. The world was shrinking. As Albert walked offstage, someone had lined up Prince’s “1999” as the first record and everyone went absolutely nuts.

Smoke machines were obsolete. Albert walked out of the big house and across the yard, which was now a gray room. He found Isaac and took his hand. The DJ couldn’t resist putting the strobe on. People kept coming out of the mist and patting Albert on the back and saying things like “Nice one, dude” and “Thanks for the tip-off” and “The prophet walks among us” and Albert tried to give them all the death-eyes but it wasn’t having any impact.
They
gave him the death-eyes, though none of them seemed to realize.

Isaac was fidgety and had stopped speaking. He had a look on his face that Albert didn’t like. The mist made them feel that, wherever they went, they were still inside.

They looked in Isaac and Marina’s bedroom at the far end of the workshop. It was bare, apart from a load of cardboard boxes and suitcases stacked at the far end. Isaac was upset and Albert told him to grow up.

“Where’s your mum?” Albert asked.

Isaac squirmed and Albert gripped him by the wrist as they walked back along the candlelit path through the market garden to check for her in the pottery shed. As they got close they saw that the shed’s strip lights were on. Albert wanted to ask Marina what the best plan was, now that the world was officially full of idiots who would soon be dead. He found her, kneeling, wrapping a fruit bowl in newspaper and putting it into a cardboard box full of other parceled-up shapes. There was a can of Red Stripe by her knee on the concrete floor and behind her a huge stack of detritus: a noseless surfboard, a wooden toolbox, tent poles. He realized what was happening.

“We’re leaving, aren’t we?” he said, standing in front of her. “It makes sense if we are. It’s probably a good idea for us to leave. I’ll get my mum.”

She reached forward and put her hands on each side of his cheeks and admired him.

“And we’d
love
to take you with us.”

Her lips were wet. He’d never seen her drinking before.

“Well, I’ll go get my stuff then,” Albert said.

She laughed and smiled at him in a way that said she found
him endearing. Being thought of as endearing was one of Albert’s least favorite things.

“We can’t very well take you away from your family,” she said then, with a sideways glance, “much as you might like us to.”

It was supposed to be a joke of some kind, that last bit, because of the way she’d said it, but Albert had no idea what she was getting at. Isaac had appeared in the doorway behind him, Albert knew, because of the weedy sniveling noise.

Marina’s eyes flicked to the doorway and back to Albert. She still had his cheeks between her hands. “Did Isaac tell you where we’re going?”

Albert felt his face go hard. When things were annoying he found his face went hard and sometimes he breathed through his mouth.

“Where are you going?” Albert said.

“Didn’t Isaac say? Northumbria. Not so far away.”

Albert heard the sound of Isaac sniffling behind him. Marina had her hands on his shoulders now. The jacket he was wearing had epaulettes and she dusted them off. If she dared call him a little trooper or soldier then he would lose it.

“We’ll visit you. You and Eyes can be pen pals.”

“Pen pals,” Albert said.

Somehow those two words felt incompatible with everything he knew about the future of the planet. Either she was treating him like an idiot or she was an idiot herself. Albert’s experience of the evening so far had been, broadly, that nobody was his intellectual equal.

“Why can’t I come with you?” he said.

“Because you have to stay with your family. They love you and they’re the most important thing.”

It was becoming increasingly clear with each answer she gave that she no longer knew what the right priorities were.

“You and Isaac have got a little while to say goodbye to each other. We won’t leave until this mist clears.”

“Did you hear our announcement?”

“What’s that?”

“We made an announcement about the bad news.”

She looked surprised and then made a face of recognition, but not a convincing one.

“Oh yes, I heard something. I was in here, packing up, but I heard it. I thought it was … yes. It was great. It was
excellent
.”

“It wasn’t excellent. Nobody listened.”

“But it sounded like everyone really enjoyed it.”

He had a bad feeling that there was literally no one he could think of who wasn’t in some very significant way a letdown. At least his own mother had been asleep all this time. There was only limited damage she could do to her reputation while sleeping. He had known people to leave him all through his childhood; his best friends were always leaving. He had a way of dealing with it, which was to stop being friends with them. In the time between hearing the news they were leaving and the time they left, you stopped being friends so that, on the day of their departure, it was a total breeze. For want of anything better he put his arms round Marina. Up close he noticed that her gray hairs had a different texture from the other ones. They looked like the hairs on a horse or a pig. He tried crying but found nothing there.