Wild Abandon

1

“First off, the sky goes dark.”

“Of course it does.”

“Then they come out the ground and, if you’re a certain type of person, drag you under, where your body is consumed.”

They got to the gate of the pen and Kate opened it, letting her brother through first.

“And I’m guessing you are that type of person,” he said.

She slid the bolt back across while he ran ahead, his boots squelching in the mud. Walking on, she watched him duck under the low roof, slapping the wooden joist with his free hand as he went inside the shelter. At eleven years old, her brother awoke every day buzzing. Everything he saw in these first few hours — the gravestones of pets, log piles, frost — deserved a high five.

“I’m gonna milk the face off you,” Albert told the goats. “I’m going to milk you to death.”

He did resemble a trainee grim reaper, she thought, in his deep-hooded navy poncho, carrying a bucket to collect fresh souls. Following him into the shelter, she sat on a low stool next to Belona — her favorite goat, a four-year-old Alpine with white legs and a black, comma-shaped beard — who was against the back wall with her neck tied. She stamped her hooves as she ate from her feed pan. Belona was notoriously difficult in the mornings; this was part of her and Kate’s affinity.

Albert was talking as he milked. “… so she has this massive picture of what’s at the center of the universe and it’s basically a pair of eyes — two huge evil eyes …”

Kate tried not to listen. She squeezed, tugged, closed her fingers from index to pinkie, and focused on the noise of milk on metal; the sound slowly deadened as the bucket filled. She put her ear against Belona’s side and listened to the gurgling innards. The swell and slump of the goat’s breathing.

“… and research shows, you’ll have to wave bye-bye to gravity and time and university and …”

“Albert.”

He stopped talking but she knew his speech continued, unbroken, inside his head. She started to get a rhythm going, two-handed, fingers finally warming. Her brother, meanwhile, played his goat like an arcade machine.

“One — nil,” he said, as he picked up his bucket and stool and moved to the other side of the divider. He put a feed pan in front of Babette and she immediately dug in.

Belona started battling a little, her legs jerking, clanging against the bucket. With her knuckles, Kate stroked the tassels that hung from the goat’s jaw and, leaning over, whispered to her.

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you in love with Belona? That’s okay if you are. Mum and Dad won’t mind. They’re totally easy with whatever. They just want you to be in a loving relationship.”

Belona kicked and the bucket tipped — spilling half the milk onto the mud and straw. Kate’s jaw tightened.

Her brother, through years of collecting words from international visitors to the community, had compiled an armory of exotic insults. He tutted and proceeded to call her something bad in Bengali.

It was just getting light. There was the smell of hay and shit. Hooves skittered on the stones. Outside the gloomy hut she could see the rain still coming down in the pen, filling the holes left by their boots.

Back at the yard, Albert poured his milk into a dented churn. Spots of mud and dirt camouflaged themselves among the freckles on his face. His right ear hole, she noticed, held a cache of grit. She often tried to convince him that it was a duty, as someone brought up in a community, to battle stereotypes by maintaining, as she did, exceptional levels of hygiene. Albert wasn’t interested. He longed to summon a bodily stench, regularly checking his armpits and foreskin — waiting for the big day — taking wafts from his fingertips like a sommelier testing a vintage.

She waited, then said “tick,” which was the signal. He looked at her, blinked — said “tock”—then ran, letting the empty bucket clang on the brick.

They sprinted round the front of the house, skidding on gravel, in through the open double doors, up the wide stairs, side by side, a trail of mud across the landing, up more stairs and into the large shared bathroom. She was too old for this, but without her she doubted he would ever get clean. They raced to undress.

Kate sat on the bench and yanked off her muddy boots, then peeled away her socks. Unbuttoning her jeans, she let them pool at her feet. Albert was kneeling, working determinedly at his laces, which he had finally learned to tie, but too well. Kate turned away from him and pulled her jumper and T-shirt off in one, uncovering three well-tended spots in the center of her chest and, despite her posture that tried to hide them and a bra designed to downplay them, her breasts. Albert, seeing that his sister was already down to her underwear, became a frenzy of pushing and tugging, kicking at his boots, getting his hoodie stuck on his head, a line-caught trout, flapping on the tiles. She sat on the bench and pulled down her thermal long johns and knickers in a crouch. Kate’s shoulder-length hair was the red color of late-stage rust, though the box had called it “vampiric.” She dyed her pubic hair too. Unclipping her bra, she stepped over Albert, who was just getting free of his boots, and slipped under the showerhead, spun the tap to starboard. The applause of water rushed over her. Silt and mud and hay ran in clockwise swirls toward the plug.

“Go back to Velcro,” she said.

The creature responded in Malay.

Finally Albert yanked off his jumper and wriggled out of his trousers and pants. Kate blinked at his skinny, china-white body, full complement of visible ribs, hip bones sharp as flints, glowing knees, dick like a popped balloon.

“Cold, cold, cold,” he said and, getting to his feet, launched himself under the water. Kate, with a matador’s grace, took a step back and raised her arms to avoid making contact with him. He hopped from foot to foot in the steam. His goose bumps sank. The water at their feet turned the color of the liquid on top of Patrick’s homemade yogurt.

“Tick tock,” Albert said. “How long have we got left?”

“A minute, maybe less.”

The community used a small, solar-powered, forty-liter water heater that gave up easily and now, in late April, would be overachieving if it got four people clean. When the shower “turned”—channeling deep-chilled hill water — the screams of visiting backpackers could be heard from the bottom of the garden. Kate and Albert knew there was only time for pits and bits. No exfoliant, no conditioner.

“Not long left,” Kate said. “You know what to do.”

Albert bowed his head. Squeezing out a palmful of egg yolk and oatmeal shampoo, she splatted it on his scalp, rubbed it around quickly, then blasted him with the showerhead.

“You’re clear. Now me.” Kate doused her head under the water, then took a dollop of the gray shampoo and spread it on. “We have a problem,” she said. “No lather. Find the contraband.”

Albert located a travel-size bottle of Pantene hidden among the tall lotions and emollients huddled on a corner shelf at the back of the cubicle. One of the wwoofers had smuggled it in.

The shampoo bloomed into froth on her scalp. Her brother watched the foam drift down her back, bum, legs. They started to feel the water temperature drop.

“How long?” he asked.

“Seconds.”

They began the countdown together.

“Five, four …”

Kate quickly dealt with her armpits.

“… three, two …”

They clambered out of the shower, soap-blind, feeling for the clothes rail, arms out like the undead, clamping towels around them just as the column of ice descended. Kate reached in and spun the tap off.

They sat breathing on the cork-topped bench, wrapped up, Kate’s towel tucked above her breasts, their backs making wet patches on the floral wallpaper.

After a while, Albert spread his towel out in the middle of the bathroom floor.

“Albert, please don’t do this.”

He crawled into a ball on the towel, his head between his knees. Goose bumps spread across his arms and legs.

She counted the teeth of his spinal column.

“What am I?”

“Too old for this.”

“What am I?”

“Annoying.”

He shivered a little. “No. What am I?”

“A bomb?”

“Nope. Try again.”

For Kate, it was these moments after showering that were the real problem. He still behaved and looked like a child, but somehow she could sense puberty’s greasy palm on his shoulder. She was damn sure she didn’t want to be sharing a bathroom with her brother when it took hold. This would have to be the last time; she couldn’t do it anymore.

“A tumor?”

“Guess again.”

“A sack of bones?”

“No.”

“An empty shell?”

“No, sir.”

“A failed experiment?”

“Nuh-uh.”

Plus there was the thought of what the boys at her college would say if they knew this happened. You get soaped up with your brother? Is that how they do it in the commune? Dark …

Fuck you, don’t you dare judge me, she thought, making a mental note to carry that resentment into her morning classes. For the last seven months she had been studying at Gorseinon College, finishing her English, politics, history, and sociology A-levels, since there were no adults in the community whom she considered sufficiently “specialist” to teach her. Prior to that, all her schooling had taken place in the community — with her brother — and, not unusually for home-educated children, they were substantially ahead of schedule, academically, compared to their state-educated peers. She had arrived at college with the expectation that it would be entirely populated by sexual predators and intelligence-hating dullards and, as a result of this, she had spoken to almost no one. Her first term had been characterized by walking fast between classes with a fearsome lean, bringing her own intimidatingly Tupperwared vegetarian lunches and working really hard. As a result, no one spoke to her either. By the start of her second term she had conditional offers from Cambridge and Edinburgh and an unconditional from Leeds, all of which confirmed her belief that she had been right not to make friends. The downside was that she had no one to whom she could actually say: Fuck you, don’t you dare judge me.

“Oh no, hang on,” Kate said, pretending to puff on a pipe. “Are you … a boulder?” He was always a boulder. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t like her to guess too quickly.

“Alright. Are you the last remaining human?”

“Not yet.”

“Or are you a boulder?”

“Yes!” he said, and he stood up, putting his hands in the air, his nipples like freckles. “I’m a boulder!”

She picked his towel up and wrapped it round him.

“Great. Now get out.”

Albert pulled open the door and ran into the corridor. She put on her dressing gown and attacked her hair with the towel. There was a thuk thuk thuk sound coming from next door, her parents’ bedroom. She knew what it meant: the community had recently held one of its open days to find new members. On these occasions, the farm was awash with all kinds of lost and cheery wayfarers as well as, quite often, an “undercover” journalist pretending to be a primary school teacher. To become a full-time member you had to volunteer (and do shit jobs: cleaning tools, turning compost, infinite weeding) then have an initial short interview, which, if approved, was followed by a minimum two-week stay (recommended six weeks), then a cooling-down break of at least one month, then another, more involved interview to decide on full-time suitability. It was an undoubted power trip for the panel — particularly Kate’s father, Don Riley, who, still stinging from a failed Oxford interview when he was eighteen, took great pleasure in devising questions.

Q: If there’s a power outage and it’s cold inside and out, how do you dry your clothes?

(A: Washing lines in the polytunnels.)

Q: If you were to cook a communal meal using seasonal ingredients, what would it be?

Arlo Mela was, famously, the only person who, having made elaborate culinary promises in interview, produced, as promised, a game-changing chocolate mille-feuille.

“New members must have realistic expectations of us, and of themselves,” was how her father put it. “Beware strangers promising bouillabaisse.”

The combination of a ruthless selection process and a high likelihood of mental illness among applicants had, over the years, produced some interesting correspondence. The community sent a primly bureaucratic template response to all abusive letters. Thank you for your generous feedback … Their father, however, was thin-skinned when it came to criticism of the community — he took everything as a personal attack — and liked to write replies, even though he never sent them. The typewriter allowed for maximum release of tension. Thuk thuk. In a similar way, everyone knew if Kate and Albert’s mother was upset because a pile of newly chopped wood would appear in the barn.

The community had a guestbook and a detestbook, the latter containing choice quotes from twenty years of occasional hate mail. Highlights included a drawing of the barn in flames and a comprehensive list of unflattering anagrams of residents’ names (only one of which stuck: Patrick Kinwood, a no-work dick-tip). Both books were on public display in the entrance hall to manage the expectations of new visitors.

But when Kate pushed into her parents’ bedroom, she found that it was, in fact, her mother at the desk in the corner, fully dressed, writing at the beige Smith Corona. Her dark hair ran down to her armpits, parting over her shoulders. She was wearing a woolen jumper the color of margarine. Kate watched her forefinger locate a letter on the keyboard, hover above, then drop. Noticing her daughter behind her, Freya stopped typing and rested her hands on the desk.

“What’s going on?” Kate said, and massaged her mother’s tightly upholstered shoulders. She read the letter, if it could be called that. There were just two words, Dear and Don.

Kate turned to look at her dad, who was in bed, sitting up against the headboard. He always kept two pillows under his right foot because he said it needed “to drain.” He had a thick castaway’s beard — badly maintained — a trophy of unemployability. His children had no way of knowing whether he was strong or weak chinned.

“Dad, why aren’t you up?”

“I am up,” he said, which was the same thing that Kate said when she wasn’t up. He was in his pajamas.

It was not unusual for her parents to fight; it was unusual for them to do it quietly. Even if Kate had somehow slept through the original row (not easy, given the thin shared wall between their bedrooms), then she would have expected her mother to come next door and wake her up, just to tell her about it. Ever since Kate had hit puberty, her mother spoke to her with total transparency — this extended both to her parents’ relationship (Mum, can you please not call it a relationship? You’re supposed to be married) and to the community at large. It was from her mother that Kate had learned that Patrick Kinwood, who she had always believed was penniless and possibly ex-homeless, was a former greetings card franchise regional manager and, since the community had a pay-what-you-can system, he made by far the largest monthly contribution. Such disclosures were part of why Kate and Freya were actual friends. Being actual friends with her own mother only started to worry Kate after she saw other South Wales mothers and daughters walking ten paces apart through town.

“What’s wrong with you two?” Kate said.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Don said, speaking to the back of his wife’s head.

Freya didn’t turn round.

“Fine, I’m putting this in the repressed memories box.”

Kate went next door to her room and started getting dressed for college. She was wary of being labeled a hippie so she avoided the obvious stigma-magnets: long dresses, cardigans, bangles — of which she, shamefully, had many. From the hallway, there was the scrape of something heavy being dragged along the floorboards.

She wore narrow blue jeans that didn’t need cycle clips, black breathable trainers, a thermal vest under a lumberjack shirt that was warm but could easily be opened via poppered buttons when tackling the big hill, and a waxed yellow anorak with a peaked hood that her boyfriend liked because he said it tricked other boys into thinking she wasn’t attractive. She opened her bedroom door and found a wall there, inexpertly built from shoe boxes, luggage, and the wicker dressing-up box.

“Albert, I’m late.”

“This is not an exit,” the wall said.

“You know I don’t like going, but I have to.”

“Apologies for the inconvenience.”

“I’m going to knock this over now, okay?”

As she pushed a load-bearing shoe box, the structure toppled into the hall. Albert was standing back, in his dressing gown, with the solemn look of a squatter watching the developers move in. She clambered over the rubble and made her way downstairs. Her brother climbed over the first-floor banister and hung from the handrail, his feet dangling. She stood beneath him, on the bottom step.

He said: “If you go, I will end myself.”

“You wouldn’t die. You probably wouldn’t even break your legs.”

“I’ll turn in midair so I land on my head.”

She saw that the bottom of his left foot still carried its foliage of verrucas. He’d promised her they’d gone. She reminded herself again: no more shared showers.

She walked across the hall, ignoring a Portuguese wwoofer who was sitting on the tiled floor, crying, with the house phone held to her ear.

“You have to tell me everything!” Albert yelled, as his sister opened the front door. “It’s not fair for you to know things I don’t know!”

As she walked outside, she heard her brother screaming that he was now in fact dead. His most ambitious attempt to stop her going to college had been a typewritten letter, purportedly from her principal, that began:

Dear Kate,

I find you a real downer.

She understood why it was hard for her brother. Now that she wasn’t around, there was only one other young person at the community whom he could have lessons with, and that was Isaac, who was six. It was a long way from when Kate was her brother’s age and the community was awash with bright, multilingual children with dazzling names. (Stand up, Elisalex De Aalwis.) With classes of nearly a dozen young people of all different ages, subject matter had been pitched to the cleverest person, but with simpler alternatives. Their education had peaked with Arlo’s now infamous class on cinquecento Italian architecture, which involved a high-level discussion of the villas of Palladio alongside an ambitious attempt to build “La Rotonda” from Legos. Other popular lessons included Patrick’s introduction to centrifugal force, with its reliance on fearless young volunteers with coins in their pockets. But since then, the numbers of young people at the community had dwindled, and nowadays it was unusual for lessons to consist of anything more than Albert and Isaac, at the dining table, quietly filling out workbooks.

As the first new young person in nearly two years, Isaac had been highly prized for how he tilted the community’s age profile. That was the main reason he and his mother had survived their trial week and got an interview; no one had particularly trusted her; her luggage included a Yeo Valley tote bag that contained the full back catalog of a pamphlet series titled The Paradigm Won’t Shift Itself. Kate felt bad that her brother had no other friends, but she couldn’t hold back her own life to keep him entertained.

Kate got her bike from the barn, the basket preloaded with books.

After breakfast, Albert and Isaac sat in the schoolroom, side by side on the Kerman rug, cross-legged, each with a notepad. Albert was practicing trying to draw a perfect freehand circle. Isaac chewed his pencil like corn on the cob. He had a fringe halfway down his forehead and a few ideally placed freckles. With his white-blond hair, all the better for being badly cut, and a burlesque redness to his lips, adults were prone to falling silent in his presence.

Patrick went to stand in front of the TV to give his lesson. He was wearing a green fleece that, as it happened, for the first time in more than a decade did not smell of bong water. Patrick was fifty-eight but seemed older, had a likable, shapeless nose, watery eyes, and big, glowing ears that looked hot enough to dry socks on. After five clearheaded days, he was glad of the opportunity to share his intellectual energy. It was a rarity, nowadays, for the boys to be getting a formal lesson, so they were excited too.

“Okay, guys,” Patrick said. “Have either of you ever seen an advert before?”

“Of course we have,” Albert said. “We’re not idiots.”

“I saw one about people who work in aeroplanes,” Isaac said.

“I saw one about this excellent soup,” Albert said.

Patrick held his palms out. “So you haven’t seen many?”

Isaac shook his head, the pencil clamped in his mouth.

“Good. And that’s why our community is great. But the important thing to remember is that adverts are not bad, per se. You’ve just got to know how to handle them. We’ll start with something easy.”

Patrick pressed play on the video recorder. There was a low-budget advert for a furniture warehouse in Pontypridd. It showed a couple in the showroom falling backward onto a white leather three-seater, their legs kicking up in the air.

All this week, only this week, fifty percent off everything.

It showed the sofa being lifted out of a van and then it cut to the couple snuggling on the same sofa — but this time in their home.

Come on down, we’ve gone soft in the head for sofas and beds!

Patrick paused the video, pulled across the Ad-Guard, and muted the TV. Albert and Isaac stayed staring up at the bright shapes and colors behind the square of shower curtain.

“I’ll let you think about it,” Patrick said.

They waited in silence.

“Okay, what do you think?”

Isaac looked at Albert, who said: “I think that — if we needed some furniture — then now would be a good time to get it, because of the discount.”

“Very true. What do you think, Isaac?”

“I don’t know. It was loud.”

“Good. Why was it loud?”

“So we can hear it.”

“Good. Why do they want us to hear it?”

Isaac winced and started working the tip of the pencil into the sole of his shoe.

“Okay, fine. Okay. Let’s talk about sales language. ‘We’ve gone soft in the head for sofas and beds.’ ”

Patrick said it in a game-show host voice and Albert laughed.

“Yeah, it’s funny,” Isaac said.

“The advert shows this smiley couple, bleached teeth, glossy hair, picking up the sofa, being all contented”—Patrick mimed carrying one end of a sofa and then grinned, his teeth brown at the edges—“and says that if you buy this soft furnishing you can be like them.”

“They are just an example,” Albert said. “How could we be like them?”

“We can’t,” Isaac said.

“That’s just it,” Patrick said, putting one finger to the tip of his nose and, with the other hand, pointing at Isaac. “Very good. It’s aspirational. People think they will be like them if they buy the sofa, but they can’t be.”

“Who thinks that?” Albert said.

“Stupid people,” Patrick said.

“I don’t believe you. Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Who are they?” Isaac said.

Patrick opened his mouth and then shut it. “Let’s try another one. This is a bit different.”

He pulled back the Ad-Guard, then picked up the remote control with both hands. Coming off the weed had had a strange impact on his relationships to children. He had discovered a desire to pass on knowledge from his own life. Knowledge from his own life. That was a new concept. He had spent two unstoned days preparing the video. He should have been helping to reanchor the fences, but his shoulder, which was known to dislocate at the slightest encouragement — in the bath, reaching for the contraband shampoo, for example — kept him indoors. He recorded hours of adverts and tried to ignore the distant dop-dop-dop of the post rammer. It’d been twenty years since he and Don had sat down with a map of their farm’s fifty acres — dividing it up with a ballpoint pen. They had lifted tons of freestone into the back of their narrow Bedford van and driven it across the fields. Slowly, shirtlessly, they had dug trenches, stacked stones, Tetris-style, and said almost nothing to each other, except in the pure language of manual labor, coming home each day sunburnt and ennobled — and in truth, everyone else found them pretty irritating, with their tiredness-as-honor shtick, as though they could return to the big house after a full day’s real work and just drop like, yes, stones, expecting admiration and exemption from washing up.

He pressed play on the remote. The screen went blank, then the Channel 4 logo appeared. “Here we go.”

It was a long car advert — thirty seconds — with a soundtrack of intricate electro. It showed a man in a silver car disintegrating into atoms, then re-forming as a toboggan team being led by the same man, then disintegrating again and re-forming as a snow leopard climbing an impossibly steep slope, the man a glint in the animal’s eye, then disintegrating and re-forming as two ballet dancers, the man and a beautiful Eastern European — looking woman, spinning on a lake, performing a difficult lift, before turning back into the car in a Nordic landscape, with the man driving but, now, the ballet dancer in the passenger seat, smiling, brushing snow off his shoulders. The car was called the Avail.

Patrick paused the video. He hadn’t noticed but Isaac and Albert were standing up.

“Motherfucker,” Albert said.

“Brilliant,” Isaac said.

They hugged.

“What you have to remember is that every advert wants you to think something; what does this one want you to think?”

“The car is an amazing car,” Albert said.

“What a car,” Isaac said, putting his arm round Albert’s waist.

“You see what it’s done to you?”

Don was watching from the doorway. He was wearing a jumper with the sleeves rolled up. He had stripes of mud on his forehead and cheeks. His beard had an actual twig in it, which seemed, to Patrick, a bit much.

“What’s happening, Pat?” Don said, squinting at the frozen image on the screen.

“Media Studies.”

“It’s amazing, Dad,” Albert said, and he ran to his father and lightly headbutted his stomach.

“Oh-kay,” Don said, squeezing his son’s shoulder, “and what are you learning about?”

In 2002, Don had invented the Ad-Guard after Kate, age seven, had learned a dance to an advert for yogurt. Pat remembered Don’s speech at the meeting that evening, where he said he could whistle the tunes to, he estimated, nearly two hundred adverts, and he sang (“Everyone’s a fruit and nut case, it keeps you going when you toss the caber …”), delivered slogans with perfect intonation (“It looks and tastes as good as fresh meat”), and then he said: “Wouldn’t it be better if our children could remember the words to poems, or songs, or stories? ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough / And stands about the woodland ride / Wearing white for Eastertide.’ ” This was in the days when his speeches really carried weight. He said he wasn’t suggesting they get rid of the TV entirely and — to seal the deal — he revealed his Ad-Guard, already made and ready to be glued on, cut from a square of shower curtain, attached to a rail, translucent enough to tell when adverts had finished, but misty enough to hide their content.

“I thought it’d be good to teach them how to understand adverts,” Patrick said, watching Don’s eyes narrow, “what they’re trying to achieve — and, as a result, remove their power.”

Both men knew that Don, with dirt on his forearms, grit in his T-zones, had the authority. “Whatever experiences we have — no matter how we try to mediate them — affect us,” Don said, putting his hand on top of Albert’s head, “and particularly young minds in ways we can’t comprehend.”

Isaac watched, looking back and forth as they spoke.

“But at some point they’re going to have to face seeing adverts,” Patrick said. “They should know how to deal with them.”

“That’s just it, Pat — that’s an assumption I’m not willing to make. Everything we see is a choice.”

A vein forced its way to the surface of Patrick’s neck. There were still another six adverts on the tape. He had planned the lesson so that, at the end, there would be a couple of funnies to lighten things up: one about a talking sloth and another about an army of dancing bacteria.

Kate’s first class was history. Leanne — they used tutors’ first names — was a large lady who kept her gray hair in a neat plait and wore local artists’ brooches in trapezium and rhomboid shapes. Her teaching style was to speak for the entire hour, with the implicit understanding that students were free to tune in and out, at will. Today she was talking about Von Stauffenberg’s failed assassination attempt on Hitler. When she talked about a briefcase with a bomb in it, she lifted up her own briefcase to help the class understand. When she read Nazi propaganda, she allowed herself an accent.

Kate’s mind kept drifting, trying to puzzle out the memory of her mother at the typewriter, writing a letter to someone who was in the same room.

Later, at lunch, she realized she had left her packed lunch in the fridge. Blaming Albert, she wished him a painful, head-led landing on the bottom step. Knowing that her sandwiches, unclaimed for a whole morning, would now be under communal jurisdiction, she made her way to the canteen. That was where she had first met Geraint. On that occasion also, it had been her brother’s fault: as part of his campaign to make her terminally late for college, he had hidden all Tupperware and plastic wrap. It was a pleasing irony that her brother’s attempts to sabotage her life had led to her meeting her boyfriend.

She remembered that day: it was not only her first time in the canteen, but her first time in any canteen. Her initial impressions of it had been largely as expected: blue trays and yellow food — chips, garlic bread, breaded turkey burger. The only hot vegetarian option had been cauliflower cheese, so she had picked that, with waterlogged carrots. After paying, she looked for somewhere to sit, realizing that she knew this moment too — this awkward searching for a seat, peering around half-casually. There was something comforting about finally taking part in mainstream rituals. No one had invited her to join them. The only other person sitting on their own had been Kit Lintel, well known in college though not well liked; Kit practiced parkour, or as he called it, the art of movement, around the blocky college parking garage stairwells and could often be seen standing neatly on the corner of a high wall with his arms out like Christ the Redeemer. She sat at an empty table.

She had trouble cutting through the cauliflower’s toupee of cheese. It looked bad but, once she got it in her mouth, there was no denying some talent at work. Was she imagining nutmeg? She made semiconscious mmming sounds. The cauliflower cheese’s deliciousness was the point at which the actual canteen had parted ways with the canteen of her imagination. And that’s when she had found her boyfriend-to-be standing over her with a full plate: beef lasagne, chips, lettuce.

“You’re in my sociology class,” he said, putting his tray down. “I sometimes see you cycling in. I drive past you in my car. I’m Geraint.” A man of simple statements. His voice had the pitch-shifting quality of the Llanelli Welsh, like a slightly chewed cassette.

“Hi,” she said, holding her hand to cover her mouth, still chewing.

That was it. That was all he had needed. He began to eat. She had never thought of herself as a slow eater until that point. He poured the lasagne in. His teeth patted the food on the way past, as though encouraging a long-distance runner. She watched his throat pulse as he drank his juice. As a general rule, she despised carnivores, even those who only ate “happy meat,” but something about Geraint (did he even know lasagne contained beef?) made him different.

That day, they had got down to some logistically awkward heavy petting across the bucket seats of his Punto. They had known nothing about each other and this was ideal. From then on, once or twice a week, they would consume one another, and afterward, he would ask to drive her home, and she would say no. That was the pattern. She didn’t want him to see where she lived, because she knew it would change his opinion of her. When he finally pushed for a reason, she said, “Because my brother would try to kill you,” which wasn’t a complete lie. Since Albert had spotted a slug-like love bite on her neck, he had been making threats: “Tell whoever is sucking your blood I will not stop till there’s a stake through their heart.”

Patrick sat up on the flat roof, legs hanging over the edge, with his back to the stand-alone bath that — for most of the year — was a velvety green pond, dense with frog spawn. A VHS labeled “Are Ads Bad?” lay next to him. A halo of aphids circled his head. He stayed out there for a long time, his hands growing numb in the cold, as he ran through the stages that had got him to this point.

Eight days ago, Don had taken him aside after dinner, sat him down by the fireplace, and offered constructive feedback on the meal Patrick had just cooked. This in itself he could forgive because, according to Patrick’s pet theory, Don only became condescending when something bad was happening in his personal life. Patrick had noted that, during times of marital strain, Don would aggressively encourage individuals to streamline their recycling process, for example. But since nobody had heard Don and Freya fighting this time, it was unclear what had been the catalyst. There were no other major issues: the community was financially secure (mainly thanks to Patrick, it ought to be said) and Don’s implicit position as “leader” had long ceased to be something worth questioning. So, when Don had put his hand on Patrick’s shoulder and uttered the words “I thought you might be interested in some feedback on your tagine,” Patrick had responded by asking if there was anything that he wanted to talk about and Don had frowned as though not understanding.

After that feedback session, in which Don suggested that perhaps Patrick’s taste buds were being damaged by how much weed he smoked, Patrick, throbbing with a pure kind of humiliation that only Don seemed capable of provoking, had walked across the yard, past the workshop, through the market garden, and back to his geodesic dome, which, with its many panels, had suddenly seemed to Patrick to have the melancholy look of a partly deflated football, kicked to a corner and forgotten. Once inside, Patrick sat on the sofa and worked his one-hitter until it was too hot to hold without gloves, which was his usual way to de-stress.

Next morning, with his eyes not visibly open, he went to the airing cupboard beneath the staircase where he dried his soggy, mellow homegrown and discovered there wasn’t any. That was okay because he was expecting a visit from Karl Orland that lunchtime. Karl was a singer-songwriter and steel-guitar man who funded his lifestyle by selling bags of bush weed. But Karl Orland didn’t turn up. Patrick had hoped one of the wwoofers or day volunteers would have an eighth he could buy. He went round, asking, making sure only to approach people in enclosed, private spaces because he didn’t want Don to see him “talking to new people” and think it was the result of one of his improving suggestions. But the whole farm was dry; there wasn’t even any resin.

That night, Patrick had cleared out the carved wooden smoking box and found enough leftovers for a spliff. The next morning he smoked the dog-ends in his CN Tower — replica stand-up ashtray. That night he scraped out the cone of his ice bong and chewed on the tarry gak. Then there was nothing left. Fine, he thought, I’ll stop smoking for a few days. Either that or Karl will come.

For two days he had done well, enjoying renewed energy, hand-eye coordination, and inklings of short-term memory. He continued to steer clear of Don, who, he feared, would sense his straightness and come and give him a big encouraging hug.

On the morning of the third day, strip lights had batted on in Patrick’s mind’s attic. Junked memories. Cardboard boxes, one labeled my version of events and another, knowledge to pass on. He decided that, for too long, Don had made him feel that he had nothing of value to teach the children. So he made lesson plans. “Introduction to the Political Spectrum.” “Ideas of Class in Modern Britain.” “The Invention of the Teenager.” “Are Ads Bad?”

On the morning of the fourth day, he had woken up angry. He had not been angry in years. He found young people — by which he meant wwoofers, people in their twenties — awful.

On the morning of the fifth day, there emerged — the worst of all his symptoms — the first gnawings of sexual desire. He had walked out of the dome in his green fleece and wellies and, as he passed the seedbeds, saw Janet, wearing a wartime work shirt and fingerless gloves, her hair pinned with chopsticks, surrounded by a group of keen-looking young volunteers. She had on one of her own necklaces.

Janet was one of the community’s founding members and ran a successful mail-order business — Accessories to Murder — making and selling one-off pieces of proto-Gothic recycled jewelry: earrings of diary keys, necklaces made from shattered windshield glass, antique lockets that opened onto photos of keyhole surgery in the small intestine. Her work sold internationally. Fashion magazines loved that she spent half of each year in a commune and — as Patrick saw whenever he periodically looked her up online—Elle magazine wrote: “From horticulture to haute couture, both her lifestyles are controlled by the seasons.” In more than one interview, she had said that the community “kept her sane.” Every now and then a groupie would visit, just to spend a few days cleaning the toolshed under her modish command. For the past decade, she had been spending April through September at the community and October to March in Bristol, where her studio was. Half her earnings, for the half of the year she wasn’t in Bristol, came back to the community. Don had given Patrick a copy of The Waste Land with the first few lines highlighted, since every April she cruelly swept back in, creative and healthy, with her perfect work-life balance, handing out gifts of last season’s stock. This last time she had returned with a boyfriend. After years of failed relationships with handy, politically switched-on men, there was Stephan, who lived in Clifton and represented — and was proud to represent — the victory of market forces. This was Patrick’s pet theory, anyway. He hated himself for needing a pet theory. The six months Janet spent away each year were never quite enough time to forget her. Even with the dampened libido that his bong helped maintain, he still found green shoots of sexual desire each springtime. It didn’t help that she made him presents: this year, a signet ring with a cattle brand instead of a family crest.

As he walked passed her this morning, he had heard her lecturing the wwoofers: “A frost this late will murder tomato transplants, aubergines, sweet peas, and put onions, broccoli, and kale on suicide watch …” Cloches, blankets, unclaimed jackets, rugs, and tarpaulins were piled up in the yard, ready to insulate the vegetables. He watched her hot breath clouding as she sent the young people to work.

It was helpful then to have the distraction of teaching Albert and Isaac an important lesson about advertising — that is, until Don had stepped in to flex his ideology, at which point Patrick had come up to the flat roof to cool off. That was some hours ago. His hands were now so cold that he couldn’t close them properly.

He didn’t hear Don, presently, climbing out of the window. Instead he felt a hand on his shoulder as Don lowered himself down and sat next to him on the edge of the bitumen roof.

“Wondered where you’d gone. I’m really sorry if I embarrassed you earlier, Pat — I didn’t mean to, if I did — but I just think sometimes it’s better for the children to be innocent of that stuff.”

Patrick stared out at the farm. He didn’t want Don to see his unbloodshot eyes. It was vital not to give him the satisfaction. So, in mimic of his old self, Patrick got out his pipe, a brass one-hitter, and turned his body away from Don. Patrick still carried all the paraphernalia with him. With his half-numb hands, he managed to open a small plastic bag that was now filled with cherry tobacco. He tore off a bit and tamped it down into the cone.

“I noticed that one of those things was a car advert,” Don said. “An executive Saab. The same car as the one that Janet’s new fella drives.” Don made an elaborate hmmm sound, then put his hand on Patrick’s thigh and tried a little warmly mocking laugh but didn’t quite nail the warm part. Everyone in the community knew when Janet’s boyfriend came up the drive because his car, as Don had observed, sounded like the MGM lion. The geodesic dome was right beside the lane and the engine noise, as it passed, vibrated Patrick’s bookcase.

“Yes,” Patrick said, staring straight ahead. “It’s the same car.”

“It Has Been Noted,” Don said in his Big Brother voice, making his eyes go wide. “So many other women here, Pat. I’ll say it again: take a break from the grass. Rediscover that crazy libido. Unleash some famous PK charm.”

“It’s not famous,” Patrick said, then took a deep breath, pushing his shoulders back to open his lungs.

“Some of these wwoofers coming through,” Don said, pointing down toward a volunteer in three-quarter-length jeans who was selecting unconventionally shaped cucumbers. “Woof.”

“You’re off the mark.”

“Still hung up on Janet after how long? If you stopped smoking so much green, you’d realize.”

To Patrick, there were few things more galling than Don being right about a thing.

“Not so.”

“Well, you should be hung up on her, Pat. She’s tremendous.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Isn’t there a saying about love not knowing what time it is, or some such?”

Patrick patted his chest for the shape of a lighter in his shirt pocket. He hooked it out with his forefinger. Shielding the pipe with one hand, he lit it and sucked the whole lot through in one, in the style of a hit, his lungs burning.

“I get the feeling it’s not easy for you to see Janet with someone like that,” Don said. “Do you see a little of your old self in him?”

Patrick’s chest pulsed — he held on for a few seconds longer — then let the smoke out in a megaphone shape, blowing it away from Don.

“I guess it’s easier to talk about an advert for her boyfriend’s car than it is to talk about her.”

“I’m going to go now,” Patrick said, and he tapped the pipe on the edge of the roof, pocketed it, then stood up, wavering slightly with the head rush. He was easily high enough above the patio, if he were to fall, to crack open his nearly hairless skull. Behind them, the sound of a car over-revving as it pulled into the yard.

Don reached up and held Pat’s hand.

“Got you.”

After her canteen lunch with Geraint, who once again showed off the charisma of his appetite, they both went to sociology class. Somehow their tutor had discovered that Kate was from an unusual upbringing. This was not good news. They were reading Emile Durkheim, who viewed society as a collective consciousness. Durkheim said that collectively agreed morality was maintained by people performing deviant or unconventional acts, and that without people testing the boundaries of behavior, society would collapse, and how could there be a nuclear family without the opposite, and did Kate have anything she’d like to add?

“I think people like to know that somewhere, someone is testing out a different way of living,” Kate said, “so they don’t have to.”

“Any examples from your own home life?”

She felt Geraint’s gaze on the back of her neck.

When she went to the bike shed after class, it was raining hard. Geraint pulled up in his white Fiat Punto with red four-point seat belts. He’d had it cleaned. The wet poured off the peak of her anorak. He got out of the car and, with rain darkening the shoulders of his powder-blue MILK IS DELICIOUS T-shirt, he said: “I’m giving you a lift home.”

He helped her take the front wheel off her bike. Putting the seats down, he did not say a word as a slash of chain grease marked one of the headrests as they wedged the bike in. He was drenched by the time they sat back in the car. He pulled a CD wallet out of the glove box and handed it to her.

They drove off and she looked through his music collection, judging him, but then feeling bad for judging him — blaming her parents for making her judgmental — and then putting Sean Paul on. Geraint did a fairly lame gangster’s click with his fingers and was possibly adorable. A line of inflamed pores ran round his neck like a choker. His face was shiny from the wet. He drove, she felt, in a wealthy way, with his hands sitting softly on the part-leather thick-stemmed steering wheel — hands not gripping but resting flat, except for the tops of his fingers, which were bent, as you might rest your hands on a stranger’s shoulders during an organized cha-cha.

“What was that question about, in sociology?”

There was no point hiding it anymore. If she was going to tell him, she might as well be bold: “I grew up in a commune. I never went to school.”

She was hoping for a bigger reaction; he somehow kept the car on the road.

No one in the community ever used the word commune; they used the word community. The word commune had a special and dangerous power, and with great power came great responsibility. Geraint straightened up in his seat and tried to be nonchalant. They passed Gower’s tiny airport as a biplane took off. The roadside sheep looked gray.

“I drove to a free party once in a commune in Brecon,” he said. “Proper mental. A bloke set himself on fire. Bet you get some right nutters?”

As he drove, she described Blaen-y-Llyn with the broad, lazy strokes she had been raised to avoid — the clichés that were expected from local journalists (or, at least, the ones who did their research online): yes, synthetic drugs; yes, boundary-testing sex; yes, chanting and nudity and nameless individuals waking in their vegetable garden. The latter had once actually happened, but Kate told the story as if most days they found gentlemen visitors asleep in a cloche. It felt good, watching Geraint’s increasing alertness as she told him these things. By the time she was done, he was nailing it, breaking the speed limit through Gowerton.

“So wait … you live in The Rave House?”

“Yes. The Rave House.”

The term had been coined after Kate’s fifteenth birthday when she had asked that her usually wholesome birthday tradition (a day at Three Cliffs Bay, swimming, eating, and playing an all-community game of rounders) be scrapped in favor of hiring a decent outdoor sound system. It was all pretty low-key — playing tunes from a box of old records they’d found in the attic — until the noise had attracted a group of teenagers from Hill End campsite. The teenagers made some calls to their older brothers and sisters. About two in the morning, a convoy of souped-up cars came up the lane, chained together by their headlights. Kate was excited to have her birthday sanctified by the presence of older boys and girls. She made a deal with her parents that if the party moved into the barn, they could keep it going. There followed nearly twelve hours of unfashionable but undeniably heavee drum and bass while the adults remained besieged in the big house. She went with one of those older boys to the flattened grass in a clearing behind the barn. The boy’s erection, softened by drugs, made for a kind of beginner’s erection. Plus, she suspected that the vibrations from the subs helped. That she enjoyed losing her virginity, she had since discovered, made her rare. By lunchtime the next day, the ravers had fallen asleep: in polytunnels, in Don and Freya’s bed, among the baby leaf salads, and next to the bonfire, their hair too hot to touch. Over the following weeks, tales began to emerge online of relentless debauchery, of parental absenteeism, of meatless barbecues at … The Rave House.

Without Kate noticing, Geraint had taken them on a detour through Three Crosses. He pulled up in front of a link-detached house, set back from the road, with vines climbing the front.

“So guess where I live,” he said somberly.

She examined the house. Again, she was annoyed with herself — with her upbringing — for her disapproval of the heptagonal plastic conservatory, so she said, “I really like your conservatory.” The house had a garage, which was open, and inside there was an old-style Jeep that looked almost military.

“My dad’s into vintage four-by-fours,” he said.

While she was still wondering how to respond, he drove onward to the community. Fifteen minutes later, as they got near, Geraint slowed at the top of the lane to observe the wonkily wood-cut sign, BLAEN-Y-LLYN, and the American-style mailbox.

“Why did you say your brother wanted to kill me?”

“Ask him yourself.”

Geraint went slowly up the narrow tree-lined lane, showing a total lack of judgment regarding which potholes were worth avoiding and which you had to attack. Between the trees on the left-hand side Kate pointed out the geodesic dome, on its own at the back of the market garden.

“That’s Patrick’s place. He’s kind of like my uncle, I guess. My deputy father.”

Geraint said nothing. They passed the wind turbine, which stood at the top of the tiered permaculture garden. They passed three dead cars, left behind by guests too poor to get them repaired or too lazy to sell them, now rusted beyond saving, warning totems for those men foolish enough to venture this far.

Geraint dropped to first as the driveway took a short, steep incline before opening onto the graveled yard. In the past, when there had been enough young people to make it feasible, this space had been the ideal size and shape for games of rounders or baseball. The batter stood at the big house’s double front doors, which still bore the marks of a few wild back swings and, when the batter ran, they passed the apple tree at first base and went from second to third along the length of the workshop before skidding home in front of the windows of the kitchen, where a victory dance would have its largest audience. It was agreed that if you hit as far as the barn or the pottery shed, set way back behind first and second base, respectively, then that was a boundary. If a ball ever reached Patrick’s geodesic dome, at the farthest end of the garden beyond third — which never happened — then the hitter automatically won everything.

But there weren’t really days like that anymore. In the market garden, two wwoofers, boys, were grimly laying out blue and gray blankets. They did it as though covering the dead. Janet, who could usually be relied on to bring glamour, was sweatily weeding the beds that ran along the front of the house, pompoms of green in each hand. Kate’s father was sitting on the flat roof, partly obscured by the stand-alone bath, holding hands with Patrick, who was standing beside him.

Kate tried to imagine Geraint’s thoughts. It struck her that the big house didn’t even look that big. The lumpy whitewashed walls, patches of psoriatic flakiness here and there, windowsills made from large unpainted slabs, moss on the roof tiles: it was basically a cottage. A cottage that had been known to sleep forty-two. She watched his expression change as his expectations met reality.

“The term Rave House might have been a bit misleading,” she said.

“So you live with these people?”

“Some of them are only visiting. But yes.”

“Which room’s yours?”

She pointed to her first-floor bedroom, through the window of which her Meat Is Murder poster was just visible.

His eyes widened. “And who’s in that window?”

She looked. Albert was standing in his bedroom window, arms by his side, staring at Geraint with the death-eyes, which was something he’d been practicing.

“My brother. He’s seen you. You’d better go.”

“How old is he?”

“Eleven. But surprisingly strong.”

Geraint laughed and looked at Kate, and by the time he turned back to the window, Albert was gone.

“You should probably pop the trunk,” she said.

As she got out and went round the back of the car she heard, through the open front door, Albert’s footsteps clumping down the stairs. Geraint started the engine. She yanked her bike out just as Albert came outside. He was holding a purple water pistol, a Glock, upright in both hands in the manner of the televised FBI.

“Go, go, go! He’ll kill you!” Kate said, and much to her pleasure Geraint did go, slightly for the show of it, but also, she thought, slightly for real — wheel-spinning, gravel pinging against Kate’s ankles as he showed off his Punto’s nippy turning radius with his trunk still wide open. Albert started to run, in his socks, holding the gun out in front of him. He didn’t quite have the commitment to fire — either that or it wasn’t loaded — but in a moment of what looked like confusion, of a need to do something, anything, of running faster than the car was moving, Albert kind of dived, barrel-rolled, into the open trunk of the car. It was not a high-risk stunt, in the broad scheme of things, but Kate was impressed. His feet hung over the bumper as the car disappeared down the incline and out of sight, the sound of its raised trunk cover clattering against branches as it went. She heard the engine idle, then stop. There were no more sounds after that.

Eventually, Albert walked back up the lane without his gun. He came up into the yard and stopped in front of her.

“Sorry, but I had to kill him.”

“I’ll get over it.”

“I didn’t enjoy it, but he’s dead now so …”

“What happened to your gun?”

“I left it with the body.”

She admired her brother, heard the sound of Geraint’s car moving off again, then picked up her bike frame and front wheel, turned, and carried them toward the barn.

“You lied to me,” he said. “You said all your friends were mutants. That one had a face.”

“Did he?”

“He is a proper assho’. Tell him I want my Glock back.”

They heard the phone ringing in the entrance hall. The phone was always ringing. Albert’s mouth twitched. He was the only person in the community who actively wanted to answer. He was much admired for his phone manner. Good afternoon, you are through to Albert Riley, whom can I help you reach? He was always willing to brave wind and rain to track down a volunteer, even if they were waist deep in water trying to clear the filter on the hydroelectric pump.

“It must be someone important,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Only important people call in the mid-afternoon.”

He rubbed the end of his nose with his palm, then said: “Marina says the things you learn in college will be of no use in the next world.”

“It’s for you-hoo,” she said, dropping her bike down in the barn and starting back to the big house.

“Tell me what you learned today,” he said, glancing over toward the front door, the phone now on its eighth ring.

“People with prizes to give away often ring around siesta time.”

“Did you learn about self-defense, survival, or weaponry?”

“Actually, there was a little on bombs.”

“Tell me.”

Albert was hopping from foot to foot now. The phone was his domain, his contact with the outside, and he defended it fiercely. He could often be seen sprinting across the yard in his socks, skidding into the hallway, grabbing the newel post to alter his trajectory — skating the tiles — then plucking the handset from its cradle, hardly out of breath as he delivered one of his lines: Good morning, Blaen-y-Llyn, if you speak to one of us, you speak to us all. Or sometimes just breathing heavily down the line.

“It could be an international call,” she said. “It’s morning in Montreal.”

He swallowed.

“Oh well, looks like nobody’s in,” Kate said, holding her phone-shaped hand to her ear. “Guess I’ll give this free helicopter to somebody else.”

He started to jog backward. “This is not over.”

Albert turned to run, kicking up gravel. He disappeared inside and grabbed the receiver halfway through its sixteenth ring.

“Hello please!”

Kate came in and sat halfway up the stairs to watch him at work. He trapped the handset between his ear and shoulder.

“I’m afraid he’s busy. Maybe I can help. I’m his eleven-year-old son.”

He was known for taking word-perfect phone messages and his intimate knowledge of guests past and present. He knew who was back living with Granny, who had fallen in love and gone to Suriname, who was studying pediatrics. It was his responsibility.

“There’re around twenty of us usually: seven big, three small, and ten wwoofers — which stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms — and they sleep in the attic dorm.”

He was very adept at deflecting TV researchers and journalists. Part of the reason they received so many calls was that Blaen-y-Llyn was first, alphabetically, on a website listing communities of Wales. Pinned to the corkboard above the phone was a printout of answers to Frequently Asked Questions. Albert had learned that most people could be discouraged with a few uninspiring details. He listened, then leaned forward to read off the sheet, speaking with the singsong voice that people get when they have said something many times.

“Blaen-y-Llyn is a community and farm where we grow our own food and run a small-scale veg-box scheme for North Gower. The money from the boxes helps pay for luxury items like”— he looked at his sister —“body armor. We keep hens, goats, and did have plow-horses until they were replaced by machines. We sometimes kill animals and eat them. My mother is a one-woman abattoir.”

Albert looked at his sister and licked his lips. Their mother, Freya, a self-taught but industrious butcher, was in charge of all slaughter on the farm. She could wring a chicken’s neck with the coolness of someone opening a jam jar. She kept up to date on the latest fashions in humane abattage. When Kate became a vegetarian, her mother, perhaps out of guilt, confided in her that she had never chosen her role as executioner in chief. Don had pushed her into it, she said. He had invented the phrase: “one-woman abattoir.”

“Fifty acres in total, divided among fruit, vegetables, crops, livestock, pasture, and our famous orchard.”

The orchard was one apple tree, planted on the day of their parents’ marriage. Kate looked behind her and saw Patrick coming slowly downstairs, looking unsteady. She smiled at him.

“The community was formed during the early nineties recession. More details on our website.”

Patrick went to the bathroom under the stairs. She smelt smoke on him as he passed. She saw, beneath her, in the cracks between boards, the light click on. This toilet had a low ceiling, so boys had to sit down to wee.

“Yes, we have broadband Internet, advert-free television, and some really bad DVDs that my dad likes. The TV is small and in a corner and all the furniture is arranged so that it does not dominate the room.”

Patrick came back out. There was no roar. The community only flushed for solids.

“My favorite film?” Albert said, looking worried.

Patrick took the notepad next to the phone, wrote something down, and held it up.

“Eat Drink Man Woman. Anything else you’d like to ask?”

Kate noticed there were little damp spots down Patrick’s inside trouser leg. Part of her relationship with Patrick involved him telling her about the terrible ways in which his body was changing, and that it was coming for her, and soon.

“You alright, Pat?” Kate said.

“There is a membership application form, available to download. The final decision is made by the entire community based on”—again Albert squinted at the FAQ—“entirely subjective criteria.”

Pat nodded, then grabbed the communal Volvo’s car keys that hung above the phone.

“My tutors graduated from high-ranking universities.”

As the one-man switchboard, Albert was given special allowances, like being allowed to get up from dinner without excusing himself.

“My favorite subject is home economics.”

One of Janet’s old boyfriends, an allergist, once told Albert that in the modern world it was important to have an elegant phone manner, and he clung to this belief and sometimes could be heard repeating it back to the people who phoned: “It’s important to have an elegant phone manner in the modern world.”

“Our policy is no access for video cameras. Photos are not well liked either.”

Albert twirled the cord round his finger in the manner of a girlfriend talking to another girlfriend. Patrick nodded to Kate and slipped out through the front door.

“It sounds like a very interesting project, but my father says your industry is inherently evil.”

There was a long wait.

“Really? He is one of my favorite presenters. In that case, you can have Dad’s mobile telephone number.”

It was useful for Albert, when fending off aggressive producers, to be able to give out one of the two community pay-as-you-go numbers. These mobile phones were for emergency-only use and, as such, were almost never switched on.

“Awesome!” he said. Then he read out the community’s address.

Over the years, he had received a number of autographed photo portraits.

Patrick drove the communal Volvo through light rain. He had the heater on full; a biscuity smell came from the vents. He put on his favorite swing jazz mix tape, 90 percent Benny Goodman, but even that seemed shallow and toneless. He had not been stoned for five and a half days.

In Parkmill, he stopped in the bus bay outside Shepherd’s Ice Cream. It was late afternoon. He looked up and down the road but couldn’t see anyone. His skin tightened as the air recycled. Ejecting the tape, he flicked between radio stations. Classic rock, popular, classical, choral, local unsigned. All music is bullshit, he thought, though he didn’t mean it. Patrick knew only one person who did not like music: Don, who said he found it manipulative. Among the sorts of people who frequented the community, not liking music was up there with not liking foreigners or homosexuals. It had always pleased Patrick to know Don’s secret shame.

As it started to get dark, he saw them riding their BMXs through the parking lot. He flashed his headlights twice and wound down his window.

“Boys!” he shouted, with his famous lungs. “Boys!”

They skidded to a halt, then cycled over to the window. All three of them had their hoods up and scarves over their mouths and noses, Zapatista-style.

“Alright, Gramps,” one of them said.

“Alright, lads. You want to run your old man an errand?”

“I ain’t giving you a blowie.”

With their scarves, Patrick couldn’t see their mouths move. Their eyes glistened in the cold. He handed over a twenty and watched as they cycled off, bums raised in the air, bike seats ticking back and forth like metronomes.

In the schoolroom, Isaac plucked at the exposed strings through the open base of the stand-up piano. He was half-listening as Kate explained to her brother what she’d learned at college that day. She and Albert sat opposite each other, cross-legged on the rug, and Kate had some of her primary sources out: reproduction pamphlets of the White Rose movement, photos of key members, one who looked like a Morrissey fan.

“The first thing to know is that not everyone in Germany during the war was on the Nazis’ side,” Kate said.

“That’s bullsheeet,” Albert said.

“Bullsheeet,” Isaac said. He had a SuperBall that, when dragged down the piano’s bass strings, created a noise like whale song.

“The White Rose movement were a group who stood up against the established views in German society, even at the risk to their own well-being.”

“They sound like Mum and Dad,” Albert said.

“They’re nothing like that.”

“Mum and Dad reject the norms and values of our society,” Albert said.

“Norms and values?” Kate said.

“Ask Marina,” Albert said.

Isaac climbed through the wooden loom that was standing in the opposite corner to the piano. He liked to get himself tangled in the threads and then, imagining it was a combine harvester about to be switched on, challenge himself to escape.

“Our community changes people all the time,” Albert said. “We have that power, though our time is running out.”

“Shut up, moron. Who told you that?”

“When people come here they realize that it is possible,” Albert said, sounding like he was quoting someone, “that they too can change the way they live.”

“Seriously. You shouldn’t listen to everything people tell you.” She hadn’t noticed that Isaac had escaped the loom and was standing behind her, listening.

“Real education doesn’t happen in classrooms.”

“Listen, Albert, before you switch off all independent thought”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“you should realize that communities like ours maintain the status quo. Ever wonder why Patrick lives on his own in the dome? He’s depressed; they put him in there as quarantine.” She was discovering how she felt by speaking. “And all the volunteers, they’re just tourists. And Marina, my God, do you remember why they let her join?” She started to point and chop for emphasis, unaware that these were her father’s rhetorical tics. It felt good to say all this stuff. “She was touring communities — a perpetual tour — never working or paying rent. Mum and Dad don’t even like her! That’s why they put her in the workshop! It might as well be a council house …”

Kate trailed off. Albert was staring. There was something behind her. Turning, she saw Isaac standing on the piano stool with a look of vertigo on his face. She got up and stood in front of him.

“Hey, little dude,” she said.

Isaac waved at her even though they were only an arm’s length apart.

“We are like the White Rose movement, aren’t we?” Albert said.

Kate kept looking at Isaac: “Yes, brother and sister, rising up against society, and Isaac is the professor, aren’t you, Isaac?”

Isaac looked like he was thinking of something. He peered down at the floor.

“What do you mean about my mum?”

“Nothing. I didn’t say anything about your mum.”

“You said no one likes her.”

“I didn’t say that. Isaac, I think we should play a game, don’t you?”

“Why don’t you like her?” Albert said. “She’s the best.”

“I like your parents,” Isaac said.

Kate took hold of Isaac’s hands and tried to think of a cliché. “Everybody here is your parents.”

“Are you?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, let me try,” Albert said. “Go to your room, Isaac.”

“Ha ha!” Isaac laughed, holding his ribs.

“I’ve had just about enough of you, young man,” Albert said to Isaac, wagging his finger.

“Ha ha!” He creased up at the waist.

“Albert,” Kate said.

He started shaking his fist at Isaac. “I don’t want to hear another peep out of you. I ought to fetch my slipper.”

“Albert, where do you get this?”

“The Beano Annual,” he said, standing up. He pointed at Isaac. “You ungrateful little shit. I wish you’d never been born.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Kate said.

Isaac rubbed the top of his head with his hand.

She turned her back to him and offered him a piggyback. He jumped on.

She said: “Where would you like to go?”

It was half a year ago that Isaac and Marina had been interviewed for full-time membership. They had been staying with the community on a trial basis for the previous six weeks and normally, at that point, there’d be a monthlong cooling-off break before a final evaluation. But just before they were due to leave, Marina started making loud inquiries on the house phone into whether the nearby campsite did a discount for a four-week stay, which rather suggested they had nowhere to go to cool off. Typically, if an applicant admitted they didn’t have anyone who was willing to take them in, then that was its own kind of bad signal. But on this occasion the community agreed to forgo procedure, largely because of Isaac, who, with his youth, and his kinship with Albert, seemed to represent the beginning of a new generation of young people at the community.

Seated at one side of the round dining table in the center of the kitchen was the core team who led the interview: Freya, Arlo, and Don, in that order. Marina was opposite them. The table had been known to seat twenty, so it looked bare. The other vote-casting members, she and Patrick, watching but not contributing, sat on the blue sofa against the back wall. Janet was away in Bristol, working on a new collection. From where Kate was sitting, she could also see Isaac and Albert underneath the table, crawling in circles, counting everyone’s toes.

“So, I’d be interested to know what your plans are for the future,” Freya had said. “What your aims are, in the long term.”

“Well, I’m really most focused on what’s best for Isaac,” Marina had said, and her son made a woof-woof noise on hearing his name. “The great thing about Blaen-y-Llyn”—Don’s eyes tightened as he assessed her pronunciation—“is that it’s a fantastic, open place where he can learn and make friends.”

Marina had a round face, with gray wavy curtains, her cheeks like apples that, to those who fantasized about such things, would have been the best bits, if she were to be cooked. She was big but robust — the term is jolly—and was wearing a body warmer.

“And how long would you like to stay with us?” Freya said.

“Well, as long as I can. I mean, I think we’ll all be reassessing things by the end of the year, so it’s probably not good to have anything set in stone …” She smiled and laughed in a way that indicated she hoped her interviewers were on the same astrological page, but found two hard expressions and Arlo, distracted by his nails.

“Why so?” Don said.

“I just think we’ll see some big changes by the end of 2012,” Marina said, changing position in her seat, “in both the physical and spiritual spheres. Around that time.”

Don was nodding now and steepling his fingers.

“Is this about the Mayan calendar?” Freya said.

“I know it can sound loopy. I completely understand. But it’s not really about the Mayans, though people find it fun to think so. There’s a strong scientific backing.”

“I’m interested,” Don said, leaning forward.

Kate was highly attuned to sarcasm in her father’s voice.

“Well, basically, if you imagine this table is the Milky Way, our galaxy,” Marina said, putting her hands out on the wood, “then it’s fairly standard stuff to say that at the center is what they call a supermassive black hole. Ours is known as Sagittarius A. It’s incredibly dense”—Kate noticed her father smile at this—“it’s three million times as heavy as the sun, but invisible to us — its gravitational pull is so powerful that even light can’t escape. Scientists know it’s there because of the way everything around it is drawn in.” There was a hole in the middle of the table from when it had accommodated a sun umbrella, and Marina made a show of peering down into it. “Because this black hole is, as they say, starving. It has a hungry gravitational pull — sucking things in and swallowing them …”

Don decided to start enjoying himself.

Marina stood up off her stool. “Imagine that this pepper mill is the earth and this”—she lifted a Merry Christmas mug—“is our sun. We all know it takes a year for the earth to orbit the sun, but the problem is that the earth’s path is not a perfect circle, it’s eccentric”—she showed the pepper mill doing ellipses around the mug—“and it takes twenty-six thousand years of orbits before we come back to our exact start point, right?”

Freya was listening hard.

“Absolutely,” Don said.

Arlo, it was clear, hadn’t been paying attention and was just now trying to catch up.

“Which of course the Mayans knew all about, along with loads of other cultures, the Sufis for one. Then eventually …”

Marina swung the pepper mill round the mug as she took steps round the curved edge of the table toward Freya. Don’s expression was now one of having happened across something really cute, like a cat standing on a cow.

“… eventually, twenty-six thousand years eventually …”

Kate could see Isaac and Albert examining and discussing something they’d found on a table leg; from her own years as a small person, she knew about the carpenter’s hieroglyphics on the table’s underside.

“… there will be an eclipse. But it’s a particular kind of eclipse.” Marina put the pepper mill down and then, with gravitas, put the Christmas mug — the sun — between the mill and the black hole at the center of the table. “We all know about lunar and solar eclipses, but next year, at the end of this twenty-six-thousand-year cycle, we’ll have a galactic eclipse. And that’s when the sun comes between us and this monster, Sagittarius A, at the center of the galaxy. And when that happens, well, no one’s totally sure — there’s a lot of conjecture — but when the most powerful force in the galaxy is blocked out, and remember, it’s millions of times more powerful than the sun, there’s going to be some major changes, it’s fair to say.”

Don was grinning now, absolutely loving it, not wanting the performance to end. “But you must have a theory on what you’re expecting?”

She looked at him. He had his mouth open, waiting.

“I’m genuinely intrigued,” he said, and just about managed to hold it together.

“Well,” she said finally, seeming a little awkward now that she was standing, trying to make her way back to her seat, “nobody knows for sure, but I’m anticipating a shift in gravity — and I mean gravity in the widest possible sense: gravity of the mind, the soul, relationships, moral and spiritual gravity. An untethering. A topsy-turvy world. Some people think the world will stop spinning; others expect South Wales to get the Mediterranean climate it deserves.” Arlo liked that. “All I believe is that something major is going to happen, and those who are ready to adapt will have to make the world new. It’s going to be a test. A real test. Because what’s a test if you can’t fail?”

Don clapped enthusiastically. He was known for his loud clap. Freya rubbed her eyelids. Beneath the table, Albert and Isaac were shaking hands.

“Brilliant,” Don said. “Absolutely brilliant.”

His wife wouldn’t look at him. Marina, still standing, shifted back to her stool.

“A really enigmatic iteration,” Don said, looking around. “People can be terribly drab with that sort of stuff, but I think you gave it real oomph. And the scientific data too. Is that your own, Marina, or can I look it up online?”

She looked at him, then down at the table, then she reached under it and said: “Come on, Isaac, we’re going.”

Taking her son by the hand, she marched upstairs to Janet’s room, where they were staying. Through the ceiling, they heard the sounds of first, a door slamming, then Marina noisily packing their stuff. Don held up his hands in apology.

It was then perhaps partly to show his humane side that her father went on to argue that they should be allowed to stay because Marina was “harmless enough” and Isaac “was key to the development of the community.” Patrick said it wasn’t right to invite someone to be a full-time resident just because they matched certain criteria. Arlo, in his usual, instinctive way, said he thought they were nice and should be asked to stay. Freya said it was obvious they were only at the community while they looked for something better. While this discussion went on, Kate could see Albert, with both arms round a table leg, listening earnestly to the sounds from upstairs. He cast his half vote in support of Isaac.

With two and a half for and two against, it came down to Kate to decide. Her brother had not spoken to her since she started college and, if she voted against him, she knew he would probably never speak to her again. While she deliberated, he knelt and, with ceremony, laid his head on the bench, with his eyes closed, in the manner of someone waiting to be beheaded.

It was dark by the time the Zapatistas reappeared, their breath evaporating against his driver’s side window. Patrick wound down the glass. One of the boys reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic bag, held theatrically between his index and middle fingers.

“High-grade hydro,” he said, his voice muffled by his scarf. “It cost twenny-five, naw twenny.”

Patrick blinked. “I admire your entrepreneurial verve.”

He had always suffered from low-level paranoia, and one of the best things about smoking cannabis was that it gave him something to blame his paranoia on.

“I’m naw lying. You owe us a fiver.”

The other two boys were on lookout, watching the road ahead and behind.

“You think you can do one over on me,” Patrick said as he scooped five quid of someone else’s money from the ashtray and handed it across.

They passed him the bag and he took a long sniff — it reeked — then dropped it in his lap. Driving back, he imagined everyone, especially Janet, wondering where he had gone with the car while they were in the cold, insulating the vulnerable vegetables. He thought about her wartime navy work shirt, sleeves rolled up, tangible biceps.

Turning into the community’s driveway, he switched off the headlights, hoping not to alert anyone to his return. He put the car in neutral to let it silently roll along the lane, parking just before the upslope that led to the yard. Maybe they had needed the car to get some vital bag of charity shop blankets and because of him there would be no asparagus this summer. Getting out of the car, he saw, parked parallel to him across the path, the moon reflecting its expensively undulating surfaces, the Avail. He imagined Janet’s boyfriend arriving to a hero’s welcome, the backseat of his car clouded with old duvets.

Walking a back route to the dome, he passed brassicas and endives covered by rugby coats and sheepskin rugs. Once inside, Patrick held the bag up to his bedside lamp. The bud was compact, bristling with tiny orange hairs and covered in crystals like it had been dipped in sugar. He didn’t like the way cannabis culture had become somehow macho: muscle-bound super-skunk. The great thing about Karl Orland, his usual dealer, was that he appreciated the pleasures of pale grass, twiggy and mild. Still, he would have to make do.

Normally he saved bhang lassis for the solstice, but since he’d been straight for about two hundred hours, he thought it only right to mix a catch-up dose. Emptying the lot into a mortar, he ground it with some brown sugar. It would save him time to mix a big portion now and ration it out over the next few days. He took his camping gas stove and heated the mixture outside, so it wouldn’t stink out his dome. At one point, someone walked past; he couldn’t make out who in the dark, only knew it was a woman when she said: “Someone’s having a party.”

• • •

Marina was sitting on a bench in the shed, with the pottery wheel between her legs. She sometimes let Albert control the speed of it, but mostly he just watched, as he was now, sitting beside her. Isaac had already been put to bed. The room was lit by a strip light that hung from two chains; it was pitch-black outside. She wet her hands from a bowl beside her and thokked a blob of clay onto the wheel. As she pressed the foot pedal, the wheel spun. She centered the clay; then, delicately shaping her hands into a broken circle, raised it up. Albert sometimes laughed at the rude shapes the clay made but he was never really sure why he was laughing.

One of the most impressive things about Marina was that she could throw a teapot and talk at the same time. It gave her the air of a magician, the hands doing the trick, clay-charming, while she talked to Albert about the future.

“What are you making?”

“A present for you.”

“Yes! Is it a helmet?”

“No.”

“Is it body armor of any kind?”

“Not really.”

Along the middle shelf on the wall opposite were the unclaimed workshop pieces: mugs, butter dishes, scenes from the Nativity, a four-piece band. Albert had seen the pleasure that Marina took in her quarterly cull — the catharsis of visitors’ crappy vases, misshapen animals, and bad likenesses of friends shattering into a masonry-strength bin bag. On the shelf above that were her own elegant milk jugs and bowls.

All full-time members were asked to put in eighteen hours a week of work that contributed to the functioning of the community. Most of the friction around this idea arose not from people working too few hours, but from a shifting definition of what was a worthwhile contribution. Marina included her hours in the pottery shed as part of her quota because on the one hand she was teaching Albert and Isaac a useful skill, and on the other, as the community averaged a minimum of three pieces of broken crockery a week, she was helping replace stock.

Albert stood up off the bench and leaned over the spinning wheel, peering down on top of it, trying to hypnotize himself as the shape dilated.

“By the way, my sister thinks you’re a liar,” he said, still staring down into the revolving portal.

“That’s not very nice,” Marina said, concentrating.

“You should show her the truth. Is it a bowl? It looks like a bowl. I don’t really need a bowl.”

“It’s not a bowl.”

Her hands moved steadily. The tips of her fingers were gray. Some clay splatted on Albert’s trousers.

“Bowls are okay but not great.”

It was more conical than a bowl, and taller. She took her foot off the pedal and the wheel stopped. She looked at Albert’s mouth for a moment, then took a wire and cut the clay at its base. Lifting the cone up, she showed him it had holes at both ends. She rested the shape on a tray by her side.

“What is it?” he said.

“Guess.”

He chewed his lip. “A silencer?”

“Here’s a clue: I’m going to paint it with red and white stripes. It’s to help you get your voice heard.”

He started to look scared.

“It’s a megaphone, Albert.”

“Oh sweet!”

“It will be ornamental though, really. A symbol of your right to be listened to.”

“I’ve always wanted a megaphone,” he said.

Once he’d made the bhang, Patrick added pistachio and blitzed it in with the plain lassi. Little clumps of weed and nut whizzed past like fence posts in a hurricane. He watched the yogurt take on a green, ill-looking tint.

It was late now, gone midnight, and although he was tired, he didn’t want to sleep until he was stoned. He drank a third of the lassi and went for a walk around the garden. It was a brutally cold, clear night, and after thirty minutes he felt his mind rearrange itself in a familiar formation. Certain memories receded. Lights clicked off in his internal attic. He stretched his back and felt the blood slosh round his brain.

Getting back inside, he wound up the radio to full capacity and set it playing on Radio 3. Music was good again. He sat down in his overstuffed armchair. After a while, the radio died and he found he was incapable of winding it back up. Pinned to his seat, he felt his mind over-revving while he stared at the heptagonal skylight.

He thought about the dome, which had been built as a present for him. When they had first moved to Gower, Patrick used to stay in what was now Kate’s room, sharing a thin wall with Don and Freya. As an infant, Kate had a cot at the end of her parents’ bed, which is where she did her sleeping and, more to the point, her not sleeping. Patrick had little choice but to synchronize, napping in the one- or two-hour bursts of silence, a tasting menu of sleep.

On Kate’s first birthday, Don had made a speech in which he said: “I don’t think it’s fair Patrick should have to put up with our clatter and Kate’s air-raid siren, and it’s his birthday coming up, so I thought — I know he’s interested — we could get to work on a dome.”

There is no perceptible difference between something made with love and something made with spite, except spite works to a schedule. Six months later, they moved him in with his books and his spices and Don bought him a bag of weed to say thanks for keeping the big house smoke-free for Kate, and that was when he properly started smoking again. With resurgent paranoia, he began to wonder whether the dome had, in actual fact, been built as a way to get him out of the big house.

Patrick made the biggest monthly contribution to the community’s finances and, as such, was prone to believing that they only put up with him because of his money. He was also acutely conscious that if Don ever heard Patrick imply his wealth entitled him to better treatment than anyone else then Don would absolutely pounce, ideologically. Which meant Patrick had never — not once in twenty years — suggested that his position as financial load-bearer entitled him to not feel alienated.

His best attempt at expressing his discontent had been just a few weeks ago. Cider-drunk on spring equinox, during those fearful few days before Janet’s most recent return, while sitting round the fire with most of the community, he had suggested that the geodesic dome, in its isolated position beyond the tubers at the top of the garden, and given people’s generally withering, lightly nostalgic attitude toward it (“Well, it must have looked like the future when it was built”), was an analogue for how people viewed him personally. He had thought the statement might come out as lighthearted, and that they would make jokes in response—“Yeah, Pat, we put you out there as, like, quarantine”—but his audience’s reaction was the kind of stonewall denial—“How can you say that?”—that people adopt when someone has absolutely nailed a thing.

He began to harbor a strong belief that people talked about him behind his back. You could always hear people talking somewhere, and he often heard double plosives that sounded like his name and, depending on that day’s psychological lean, he would provide the context. In a good frame of mind: “Patrick seriously delivered with the kedgeree this a.m.” In a bad one: “Is it me or was Patrick’s kedgeree pre-chewed?”

When he felt this way, he turned to music and art for comfort, and this presented another problem. It was not possible to hang art in the dome, all the walls being curved and omnitriangulate. When Patrick had moved out of the big house all those years ago, he had donated to baby Kate, in her new bedroom, a smoggy, oil-acrylic seascape and eight wildly imprecise line drawings: Studies for Any Female Nude I–VIII by Marcel Le Lionnais. On the day before Kate’s third birthday, Don returned them to Patrick, carrying them under both arms to the dome, saying they were “a bit much, for Kate, at this stage in her development.”

Since Patrick couldn’t hang the art, he had decided to make use of one of the awkward spaces that existed behind every piece of non-dome-specific furniture. Rectangular sofas, rectangular bookcases, rectangular wardrobes: anything not designed to back onto a spherical wall created dead space. So Patrick, in a fit of innovation, took the pictures out of their frames and put them into cardboard-backed plastic sleeves. He then stood the images on a cradle-style print browser that he’d bought from an art shop in Mumbles. It fitted behind the futon-sofa, thus utilizing, albeit awkwardly, the dead space. If he knelt on the sofa, facing the wall, he could then peruse the images at his leisure. This soon became one thing that made Patrick feel truly wretched and alone: the eight line-drawings now a kind of flick-book, creating the impression of a naked woman exploding, limbs distending, tearing at herself, followed by the undeniably bleak and featureless gray-black-blue seascape. This final image captured Patrick’s feelings whenever he tried to enjoy his modest collection of original art.

The only wall decorations were Patrick’s string instruments. When they had built the dome, Don installed wall-mounted brackets for Patrick’s guitar and banjo. It was a small act of genuine thoughtfulness. Over the years, the community had bought Patrick a number of stringed instruments, each one smaller, quieter, than the last. Two Christmases ago it was the samisen, a three-stringed Japanese guitar.

The acoustics in the dome were unsettling. If Patrick sat on a stool in the middle of the room with his Spanish guitar, it added an unwanted 1980s-type reverb to his fingerpicking, making his compositions sound like restaurant music. He could never achieve a lo-fi, stripped-back sound. Also, much of his record collection became unlistenable and overproduced within these walls, which Patrick blamed Don for as well.

Through Kate’s mid-teens, Patrick had happily transcribed and played her favorite emotional indie rock so she could practice singing. He was one of the only people she would allow to hear her voice, plus she actually preferred how she sounded with the dome’s built-in reverb. The other advantage was that Patrick had no neighbors who could overhear them. He felt privileged to be, as far as he knew, the only person she talked to about her new boyfriend.

Now, as Patrick stared up at the raised, recessed bed at the top of the dome, he found himself thinking about the night that he and Janet had spent there. Not long after Albert’s birth there had been a party; Janet had gifted her own bed to two friends who were visiting, and the schoolroom floor was dominoed with people sleeping, so Patrick — in an honest-to-goodness unsleazy way — said there was spare room in the dome. It was freezing and raining when they ran across the yard, still drunk. They set the wood burner going, and climbed into bed fully clothed and hugging. The way the heavily insulated dome worked was that heat rose and kept the top a lot hotter than the bottom. There was a window above the mezzanine bed for ventilation, but if it was raining, as it was that night, it had to stay shut or the rain came in.

In the morning, with the sun shining through the skylight, they woke up in a tropical weather system. Drenched in sweat, dry-mouthed, brains loose in their skulls, steam particles in the slanted sunlight, condensation on the rolling hills of duvet — reminiscent of North Gower at dawn — they stripped off their jumpers, gasping for air, laughing, coughing, throwing their clothes down from the mezzanine bed, until it would have just seemed unnecessarily prudish, given their night together and the genuinely sauna-like conditions, not to take all their clothes off and lie on top of the covers, breathing.

Their matted hair, bodies shining with sweat, chests rising and falling. Patrick opened the window and let the light elliptical rain fall through onto them. It felt, in every way but one, postcoital. So, without self-consciousness, they kissed and hugged and fell back to sleep.

Something about this experience, Patrick felt, had sealed off the possibility of them getting together. They had achieved all the awkwardness and shy chatter of good friends who have slept together, but without ever having crossed that threshold. It would have seemed oddly regressive to suggest they start any kind of courting ritual, but equally he didn’t feel able to take the bolder route and talk to her about the thing that had almost happened and whether it could actually happen. As time passed, it seemed impossible to talk to Janet about that morning. He began to suspect she wouldn’t even remember.

Patrick managed to heave himself out of his chair and get to the kitchen cupboard. Among the other herbs, he had a jar of dried magic mushrooms that he’d picked last autumn. He needed something to try to turn his evening round and he thought they might open a few internal windows. Sitting back down, he chewed on three tiny caps, washed them down with the rest of the lassi, which he’d forgotten he was planning to keep, and tried to think of something positive.

That was when he heard the roar of a very large animal.

• • •

Upstairs, in the big house, Freya and Don were in bed, each sitting up with a book and their own lamp. She had her hair tied in a side ponytail so that she could rest back against the headboard. He was rereading Ways of Seeing and occasionally laughing with his mouth closed, which Freya felt as a series of vibrations in the mattress. He had two pillows under his right foot for drainage.

Closing the book, he watched his wife, then silently leaned across and kissed her on the cheek. “Silently” because eighteen years into their marriage, two years ago, Don had started to make an involuntary kiss-kiss noise (the noise didn’t sound like kisses; it sounded like a small sealed bag being opened) every time he was seeking, or was about to give her, affection. It just started one day. In the dark of the bedroom, she would hear the two quick vacuum-sealed, slightly wet noises and know that he was shortly to make contact. At the breakfast table, before his lips were on her neck, she would hear the pursed schlupping. The noise was similar to the one people make to attract the attention of a cat. She had never found his kisses repellent before, but something about the self-announcing quality of these noises — a comedian offstage, doing his own intro — really got to her. She had thought it only fair to let him know: “That thing you do, before you kiss me”—she wasn’t able to impersonate, so made a kind of chewing noise—“it’s awful, can you stop?” His small eyes widened. He had not been aware he was doing it.

Of course he would stop, he said. From that point, whenever he made the sound he’d halt and curse. He battled his auto-self. Eventually, after weeks of struggle, Don was able to kiss and receive kisses without making preemptive smoochies.

Except something of it remained: a ghost of the sound, the impulse but without its audible counterpart. She became attuned to Don’s repression of the noise and, lying in bed in the dark, knew with just as much clarity when she was about to feel his lips and the swish of his beard against her. In many ways, this was more distressing than the original kiss-kiss noise. The sound was gone but the idea lived on, made bigger, more upsettingly complex; a process between them.

She read the same line in her poem again and again. The line was “That is the way with amputations.” Recently, she’d been finding that if Don got to sleep before her, then she stayed awake, preoccupied by the light pan-pipe moods that whistled from his nostrils. She used to say how much she liked the chords his sinuses played, but not now that they kept her awake. When she was not sleeping she worried about her son.

More and more, she was seeing Albert skulk off to the workshop or pottery shed, both of which were far enough away to make it difficult for Freya to casually pop by to check on him without having some genuine reason for doing so. It had been Don’s idea to take Marina and Isaac out of the big house (since Janet was shortly to reclaim her room) and put them into the workshop’s spare room. Publicly, he said it would give them independence—“You can be your own family unit”—while remaining within the communal fold. In truth, he wanted to keep Marina at a distance. Don complained she was “too intense,” but what felt like overintensity to an adult felt to a child like that person was actually listening.

Although it was tempting to casually dismiss, as Don had, all her talk of a galactic eclipse, Freya preferred to understand the idea first and then be able to reject it definitively. A know your enemy sort of thing. Her online research showed that supermassive black holes did exist and that our spiral galaxy did indeed have one at its center: Sagittarius A*. It was invisible; dramatic photos from the Chandra satellite observatory showed where it wasn’t. An article on the NASA blog, written with, she assumed, preteen astronomers in mind, said the “SMBH” was “hungry” and “gobbling up all-comers” and that “beasts of its kind” had the power to “bend the space-time continuum.” NASA didn’t go as far as mentioning the end of days, but Freya wouldn’t have been totally surprised if they had. This was science trying to compete for the attention of the young imagination. But when she searched for “galactic eclipse,” that’s when the real nutters emerged: GaiaMind.org and ProphetsManual.com.

The communal desktop computer was in the attic and had a button next to it that allowed thirty minutes of access to the Internet at a time. For Albert, this meant that he took his access seriously, going up there with a list: solar flares (12 mins), galactic equator (10 mins), knife-vest (8 mins). Freya’s concern was not just that he believed in the same things as Marina but that her beliefs were gateway beliefs into the vast, unquenchable fruitiness of cyberspace.

All this had come together to convince Freya that she ought to remove Albert from the community for a time. That she also needed a break from Don was just a lucky symmetry. The simplest and cheapest solution was to go to the roundhouse, a twenty-minute walk away through the woods; not much of a holiday destination, but it would give him (them) a little breathing space. The roundhouse was made of cob, which was, put simply, mud. It had originally been built as an educational tool: a group of visiting undergraduates on a Sustainable Built Environment degree had assembled it over four days, spent two nights in it, then tried to take it apart again. It was a testament to the hardiness of cob housing that destroying it was more hassle than building it; the students gave up, and left the structure mostly intact. After that it became the community’s overflow sleeping area, though it had not been used in a long time.

It didn’t seem like a big thing to be asking Don: a fortnight’s time-out, for her and for Albert. A month maybe. After all, they both agreed that something needed to be done. Yet she found herself unable to broach the subject. All of which went some way to explain why, this morning, after a night of maddening sleeplessness, she had decided it would be a good idea to type him a letter about it. She got as far as Dear Don, then her daughter came in, and that was the point that Freya realized she was behaving like an unstable, sleepless person, not a wife communicating to her husband about a shared concern.

Freya let her poetry book drop to the duvet. Her reading glasses fell off her nose and hung round her neck. She turned to her husband, but he started speaking before she could.

“I told Patrick he needs to finally forget Janet,” Don said. “Don’t be the victim. Stop moping. Quit the demon weed. He was still puffing on that pipe — some potent concoction.” There was a tone in his voice, and an angle of his chin in delivery, that let her know he was saying something he’d already practiced in the well-attended auditorium of his mind. He spoke up toward the curtain rail. Sometimes he would premiere a statement with Freya, then over the next few days she would hear him say the same thing to other communards, perhaps editing a word or two, depending on the audience. A good strong utterance might see nine or ten outings before being archived. “You live in a community with a constant flow of young, attractive left-leaning men and women. Get stuck in, Pat, I said. Sixty’s not too old. All these tremendous women spending time here, intelligent, freethinking, body-confident. Get out there. It feels good to make other people feel good. Be active. Sweat out your problems. Let’s reanchor the fences. But I think he’s worried about dislocating his shoulder. It’s his mind dislocating that I’m worried about.”

“Don.”

He turned to look at her. He had the sheen of an uncollected sneeze in his mustache hair. He saw something in her expression and closed his book, let it drop to the duvet, and patted the back cover. “Yes,” he said.

“I’m worried about Albert. I don’t think it’s good for him to be spending so much time with Marina.”

“I’m with you, Frey. You know that.”

“I was thinking he and I could go to the roundhouse for a while. A fortnight, maybe. A kind of holiday.”

Don blinked twice. She felt the mattress shift as he sat more upright. “But the roundhouse is half-built.”

“I thought that could be part of it. I’ll show him how to finish the cobbing. It’ll be educational.”

He looked around the room. “When did you think of this?”

“I’ve been thinking about it for a while.”

“You’re saying you want to move out of the house, you and Albert?” The volume of his voice spiked.

“I thought we could talk about it.”

“All this because of Marina? Let’s not go crazy. Why doesn’t one of us just speak to Albert? Education, not prohibition, we could”—she saw the hairs on his neck ripple as his Adam’s apple bounced—“dig out the Personal Instrument?”

“You’re kidding.”

“I honestly think it might help.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“Why are you being like this?”

They stayed in silence for a while. The Personal Instrument was a learning tool that, according to her husband, helped “encourage young people to make active choices between right and wrong.” He had built it himself. Every young person, shortly after their thirteenth birthday, got to wander the farm wearing the device. Don liked to say the experience was equivalent to the vision quest in Native American cultures. It was frightening to glimpse the gap between Don as he viewed himself, and the reality. She pulled back her side of the duvet and swung her legs out. He watched her get dressed and take a blanket out of the bottom drawer of the dresser. He listened to her go down the corridor and knock on their daughter’s door.

• • •

Patrick was standing in the middle of the geodesic dome in shapeless boxer shorts, holding a table leg with both hands, in a baseball stance.

It had been little comfort for him to realize that the growling animal noise, which had got so loud that he felt vibrations in the soft flesh along his jawline, was not the sound of a beast, awoken after thousands of years, come to wreak vengeance on this earth, but a Saab Avail, announcing Janet’s boyfriend’s exit, presumably with her purring in the passenger seat. After that, when he felt the second half of the lassi start working, he climbed up the wooden staircase into bed and, lying beneath two duvets and a blanket, started to feel nervous. Soon nervousness became twitching paranoia and, not long after that, twitching paranoia blossomed into a higher state of pure understanding: his fellow communards were not his friends; they were planning his removal.

It would be so easy. There were no locks on the doors. So Patrick got out of bed, took the loose leg off the table, and barred the double doors by feeding it through the two coat hooks. He tried to go to sleep again. It didn’t work. He listened to the ash tree outside groaning like a man slowly dying. He heard the distant sound of laughter that might well have come after a vicious but finely judged joke regarding his personal odor. He heard an unknown dog barking with a hoarse mindlessness, starved and bloodthirsty. He got out of bed again, took the table leg off the door, and stood with it in his hands like a bat, which is where he was now, waiting for them to burst in.

Listening to the noises outside his room, Patrick constructed a narrative: for years, Don had been looking for a way to get rid of him, had been telling everyone about his creepy, masturbatory, weirdo-in-the-dome obsession with Janet. Don had been saying that Patrick was a hermit, a recluse. He’d told them he was no longer useful, he was spent, a drain on resources, but by dint of Patrick’s financial liquidity, he was difficult to expel.

First, they had paid off his dealer, Karl Orland, then they had waited for Patrick’s stash to run dry. Second, they had made bets on how long it would be before his mental collapse. Third, at a secret brunch-time meeting, they had planned in exquisite detail his final hours, discussing every contingency: disposal, legal matters, a bonfire of his guitars, and through their commitment to putting Patrick in the ground there would bloom a new communal solidarity, as though he were the finest possible compost.

Fourth, this very afternoon, when Patrick had taken the car without asking, and hadn’t helped with the cloches, and hadn’t returned the car key, they all knew he was going to the bus bay outside Shepherd’s, so they made the decision to act. Later, when one of their spies came past and said, “Someone’s having a party,” she reported back that he was brewing a strong dose and would shortly enter a state of reduced motor function.

Albert — who was good at climbing — was in the ash tree above the geodesic dome, with his hands on a high branch and his feet on a lower one, stretching and bending his legs, making the tree creak loudly, knowing the fearful sleeplessness this would bestow.

Marina had brought out her four-octave Korg keyboard with the surround-sound speakers and set them up in a circle around the dome. With total disregard for electricity consumption, she was using “Set 665: Unnerving Sound Effects,” working “Fearful Wind” with one hand and with the other, “Laughter at Your Expense,” and occasionally “Growling Dog in Blood Lust.”

This was all in aid of getting Patrick into a state of terrified paralysis so that when Arlo, Marina, Freya, Don, and a number of masked, ambitious wwoofers who wanted to show their commitment to the community came into his room, chanting his name and wearing robes with deep hoods, to take him at last, Patrick would stay still, shaking in his bed and, given his family history, in addition to previous addictions, perhaps suffer a fatal embolism. If his heart held they would simply lower the rainbow-colored pillow onto his face, pin his arms and legs down, and continue chanting until his body stopped moving. Then they’d lay his arms across his chest in an X and in the morning, they would say: “So peaceful, he must have known it was his time.”

They would dispose of his body in the compost, and he would be replaced, for there were tens and tens of people who’d take his position, and they were younger and supple and spoke more than one language.

His only option was action. He could not stand still waiting for them. He would have to duck through the low double doors, step out of the porch and into the moonlight, swinging his blunt implement, smashing the keyboard first, which was something he’d been wanting to do anyway, then targeting Freya, who was more dangerous than her husband, then cracking Arlo’s skull like the top of an egg, on and on, one after the other, notches on the table leg, though even in Patrick’s wildest delusions, Kate was not involved.

Last of all would be Don. Patrick would drag his unconscious body to the deep part of the river, where he would wait for him to wake up, then, as though absolving himself of every wrong, washing away every bitterness, skimming off his misery, Patrick would baptize Don, again and again, under many different names.

Breathing hard through his mouth, Patrick kicked out the double doors. As he stepped outside into moonlight, the cold landed the first punch, smacking him in the nose. He couldn’t see the keyboard. He couldn’t see the hooded figures. There was a bonfire smell. The market garden was still covered with a patchwork of tarps, rugs.

As he stepped along the slate path that led toward the yard, the cold ran up through his feet, his ankles, rattled past his knees, and settled in his stomach. He tried to be positive: in just his underwear, he would be that much more nimble while they, in their ungainly robes, would be like sacks of steak to tenderize. He thought of punching Don again, this time with the ring that was a present from Janet, and leaving a cattle brand on his temple. He looked back at the dome, checked the roof. Nothing. He looked up into the bare ash tree; it creaked of its own accord. But then, at last, there was laughter. A knowing, hollow laugh.

As he made his way across the yard, the sharp gravel made him wince. Keeping close to the south wall of the big house, he stayed out of the patches of moonlight. He was shivering. Mud clotted the thick hairs on his calves. As he walked down the stepped wood-chip path, he saw there were some people around a small fire at the bottom of the garden, which was not unusual for a Friday night.

His mind swiftly reordered the previously stated narrative to make sense of the new information. They would tell him he was paranoid. They would put a flammable blanket round him. They would ask him whether he should consider laying off the green lassis. Then they would tip him on the fire and beat him, burn him, dance, and raise a glass to his great sacrifice and, by morning, his bones would be nothing more than ash, sprinkled over the beetroot patch and returned to the earth.

Who will come looking for me?

Nobody. They’ll keep signing for your pension, so that even after your death, you will still fund the community.

It was Janet, Freya, and Kate seated on three kitchen chairs, with Freya in the middle and one big blanket around all their shoulders, each with a mug. They were leaning into one another. There was a bladder of wine at their feet. The reason Janet had sent her boyfriend away, Patrick now decided, was that she didn’t want him to witness this ruthless act of housekeeping.

He could hear them as he got close.

“… you haven’t met him because he’s a doofus,” Kate said.

“You call your boyfriend a doofus?” Janet said. She held her mug in both hands, keeping it close to her mouth as though it were tea. She had her hair tied back but a sweep of fringe across her forehead.

“You wouldn’t like him,” Kate said.

“I would,” Freya said. “I’m into doofuses. Is he ugly? I like ugly men.”

Janet picked up the foil bag and, squeezing one end, topped off their mugs. Her face was puffy. She had two red wine stains, shaped like devil horns, at the corners of her mouth.

“He’s not ugly,” Kate said.

“I knew it. He’s beautiful,” Janet said. “You have to let us meet him.”

“Never going to happen.”

Freya said: “I’ll put on some makeup and pretend not to be your mother.”

“I don’t want to see that.”

“Patrick?” Janet said.

He was standing on the other side of the fire, the table leg down at his side, and he was shivering so fast he could have turned to gas. In the firelight they saw the skin on his shoulders, sun-aged and slack. His chest hair was not at all dense, but it was evenly spread.

“Come on then,” he said. “I’m ready.”

“Pat, what’s happened?” Freya said. “You must be freezing.”

They stood up together, the blanket falling from their shoulders.

“I suppose you’re the lure. The sirens. Kate, I’ve got to say I’m disappointed in you.”

“Tell us what’s wrong,” Janet said. “You’re shivering.”

“Yeah, that’s it, offer to warm me up. You won’t get fucking near me.”

Kate spoke slowly: “What are you talking about?”

He shouted into the woods. “Come out!” His giant lungs flapping. “Come out! I’m ready for you!”

There was the noise of disgruntled birds. Leaves shuffling. Albert, in his room, in a hammock, opened his eyes. Don was already at the window. He had been watching his wife.

“Sweetheart, let me put this round you,” Janet said, coming toward him with the blanket held up, matador-style. Patrick raised the table leg.

“I’m not gonna hurt you, Patrick. I’m Janet — you know me. We’re friends.”

“I know perfectly well who you are, you patronizing cow. I should’ve known all along.”

Kate came round the other side of the fire, followed by Freya.

“Put down the table leg,” Kate said. “Pat, what happened?” Janet said. “Should I call an ambulance?”

“That’s it. Pack me off!”

Janet took a step closer and raised the blanket up. Her eyes were red. They were closing in on both sides.

“You’re cold,” Janet said.

“You’re cold,” he said, raising the weapon.

Kate and Freya were treading slowly toward him.

“Back off!”

And then, dropping the table leg, he turned for the fire, ran toward it, his shivering body, his loose skin purple in patches, and leaped over the heat, the knee-high flames, his feet passing through them. He landed on the other side with a grunt, and was away, running. They watched him disappear, brief seams of flame in the pale hairs on the backs of his calves, like lit brandy on a Christmas cake, the skinny legs clattering off into the woods.

Everyone was awake, standing round the last of the fire at the bottom of the garden. They were pale-faced, interrupted dreams just beginning to fade. Arlo was in his professional rugby coat, thigh-length, black, some shine from the polyester. There were four wwoofers (unprepared for the cold, wearing fashionable jackets) holding out their hands to the last of the fire. Isaac and Albert wore waterproof ponchos over jumpers over pajamas. In their hoods they did not look unlike the death-bringers that Patrick envisioned.

Don, in an act of deliberate melodrama, was out there in his blue casual kimono (which he wore around the house instead of a dressing gown) over pajamas, as well as a woolen hat and walking boots. He thought of himself as useful in an emergency.

They passed the table leg from person to person, each trying to gauge Patrick’s mind-set by moving their hand along its corniced midsection. The moon was bright, and if there was a night for finding a pale potbellied man running through undergrowth, this was it.

Janet was pacing. “Let’s just go,” she said.

Don pulled his kimono tight and tried not to be distracted by his wife, red-eyed and swaying slightly, holding her mug of wine.

“Janet’s right. We have to act fast. Freya, Arlo, Gabriella, and her friend, follow the river. Janet, Kate, you saw which direction he went, try to find his trail. You two,” he said, pointing to the Belarusian lads, “check the barn, workshop, shed, polytunnels. Marina and Isaac, you man the headquarters. Stay inside. Albert and I will take the lane.”

This was a rare chance for a display of leaderly navigation. With the air of a sergeant letting his squadron know that they would not all come back alive, he said: “And I’m turning the mobile phones on.”

A torch for each group. They moved away from the fire, clutching their faces as the cold hit. Making their way into the dark, they were able to mark Don and Freya’s progress by the distant sound of months of text messages and voice mail finally coming home. This was the phones’ first genuine emergency. The needlessly loud message-received tone that nobody had ever learned how to change, like some strange birdcall, echoed back and forth through the woods.

The frozen puddles on the lane blinked in Don and Albert’s torchlight. Albert was worried and excited and full of the pleasures of a well-defined objective. His father seemed youthful, tying a knot in his obi.

“Dad, is this the beginning of end times?”

“No, Albert. Sometimes bad things just happen.”

They were now on the road and walking at pace. Albert had to jog every few steps to keep up.

“Marina says we’ll start to notice more and more bad things as we get closer.”

“Look for yellow cars and you see yellow cars. We call that ‘confirmation bias.’ I’ll teach you about it someday.”

“Okay, I’ll start looking for good things.”

“That’s better.”

“Do you think Patrick’s dead?”

“He’s not dead.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s an educated guess.”

“I want to make an educated guess. Is that something I’ll learn from the Soviet Hat?”

“Funnily enough, me and your mother were talking about that.”

Albert watched his father with wide eyes. “Oh my God, really?”

Don lifted his eyebrows and picked up the pace again.

“If you’re really good, then we might let you have a certain lesson before your thirteenth birthday.”

“Yes!” Albert said, and started conscientiously swinging his torchlight into the bushes at the side of the road.

From the woods they heard yelled reassurances: “We’re not out to get you!”

“We love you, Patrick!”

“We’re your friends!” This was just like the sort of hippie trust game that Don had always retreated from — that Blaen-y-Lllyn was definitively against — but now, occurring naturally in a dramatic situation, it filled Don with pride and adrenaline. Under torchlight, standing water showed the sudden April frost: shattered geometric sheets of ice. Along the bank, the saplings glittered.

Following the river were Freya, Arlo, and Gabby Casals — a Catalonian and regular visitor to Blaen-y-Llyn, this time returning with her new partner, Patricia, who looked beautiful when suddenly woken, and they held hands as they shushed through the semifrozen undergrowth.

“Patrick! Listen to your heart!” Arlo shouted.

Kate and Janet tried to locate and follow Patrick’s track, which began as a dark path scratched through the wet ground but soon faded to nothing. Janet was way out in front, climbing over fallen trees and pushing, without complaint, through waist-high nettles.

As light started to seep in above the horizon, so the edges softened on Patrick’s paranoia. He was clinging to the branch of a low oak tree, his feet wedged in a Y-shaped split in the trunk. The one thing he was absolutely certain of — that his friends were out to kill him — was becoming unconvincing.

The difficulty was he didn’t want to be wrong. What if there was no fundamental problem and he should just be a bit more outward-looking and cut down on the weed a bit and try to help other people and practice a few new recipes, and that would be enough? He prayed to any God that this was not the solution. That moderation was not what he needed. That these people really were coming to shake him down, to tell him some home truths. That they came with a bolt gun and a panel saw.

In the cold, his body was shrinking. He had no toes; they had disappeared an hour ago. He had no feet. He had no hands, no nose. His ears were missing. His eyes made insectile clicks each time he blinked; they would freeze over if he gave them a chance. He was losing all the senses except for his tongue.

“Ahhhh!”

Even if he had wanted to call the names of the people he cared about, the cold would not let him pronounce them. Only vowel sounds remained. He heard voices coming from different sides.

“Ahh!”

He had no wrists, no elbows. And although he now knew, deep down, that they were not out to kill him, he would do anything to delay their sympathy, their thoughtfulness, their forgiving.

He let himself fall from the tree he had climbed. There was a dry cracking sound. Everyone heard it.

He had no ankle to shatter.

Dragging himself onward, he stumbled, making small animal noises, with splinters of bone beneath his skin, while three parties closed in and Janet yelled: “Patrick! We’re coming!”

At the edge of the forest, where the National Trust boundary ended, there was a Taylor Wimpey homes development: a single cul-de-sac built on the edge of Llanmadoc, with views of the woods beyond. It had just been completed and no one had moved in yet.

Patrick crawled into the street. The windows were blank, no curtains, no trinkets, no cars in the drives, just ten subtly nonidentical detached homes, pine doors, tapered drives leading to one-car garages. In a curious and isolated nod toward a made-up past, there were replica Victorian streetlamps. A road shaped like a thermometer — a turning circle at one end.

In the lamplight, Patrick noticed that his ankle was grossly swollen, nearly the same size as his skull. He lugged himself to the center of the cul-de-sac’s bulb and flopped on the even concrete. His body shook. The streetlight was steady. He was the same color as the moon.

It was Janet who first spotted him and started running down the street, followed by Kate and, not far behind, Don, Albert, and the rest. A cloud of them, steam coming off their scalps. Patrick was curled up, but with his left leg stuck out in an attempt to keep it numb. The ankle had ballooned, the shape of his foot lost to the swelling. He made the low gurgling noise of a radiator filling. Janet unbuttoned her coat as she ran, and behind her, the others followed suit. His thin boxer shorts were torn and stained, a purple testicle like a limpet against his thigh. They took off their clothes as they descended on him — just as he had feared — and smothered him in coats and jumpers, laying out everything they could and swaddling him until it was just his head at one end and, at the other, his broken ankle, a half-deflated football, a geodesic dome, the skin dying, turning gray and dusty at the edges, and the impossible angle of his foot.

While Janet efficiently tucked the clothes in around him, Don — who couldn’t look at the injury — made a display of knowledge, standing, speaking toward the mock-Victorian lamps.

“The predator here is the cold. Patrick is at risk of going hypothermic. He’s stopped shivering — that’s not good. It won’t be enough to simply cover him in coats. He needs body contact. Patrick, I am going to give you a hug.”

And with that, he retightened his robe, dropped to his knees, fell to his side on the blacktop, and spooned in behind. Patrick’s slack expression didn’t change. Don had a man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do tough-guy look, resting his jaw on Patrick’s shoulder. Freya rearranged the coats over both of them. Two heads peeking out, old friends, bonded by labor and a shared vision. Patrick’s eyes bulged a little as though trying to leap free.

Waiting for the ambulance, they took it in turns, snuggling in under the pile of jackets, passing on their body heat through his pale, bluish back, the milk-white notches of his spinal column. Everyone was part of it. Patrick had decided to be silent, to not give them anything more. Even when feeling Janet’s small breasts and tangible nipples against his back, he kept quiet. She gripped him and put her warm lips against his neck. Now that it was her turn, she wouldn’t let anyone else take over. Patrick wondered how, when his body was under such extreme pressure, it still found time to siphon blood to appease his groin. Strangers put their hands on Patrick’s shoulder and squeezed mechanically, as though testing his pressure. After a while, Marina, Isaac, and the Belarusians turned up with thermoses. Isaac ran in loops round the cul-de-sac, blowing his breath, pretending to be a train.

No one but the newest of the wwoofers took notice of Don sitting on the pavement, wiping his eyes. He cried, on average, once per quarter. He liked the release. He was good at it. This sometimes involved a kind of play-blubbing, his mouth opening and closing before the real crying could begin.

They shivered by the roadside as the ambulance drove into the cul-de-sac. They felt like a cult then — in a good way — standing in a neat line with bed-heads as the flashing lights reflected off the white lilac bushes. The empty lounges and unfurnished bedrooms filled with blue light. Pulling into an empty drive, the ambulance backed up to where Patrick was lying. Freya knelt next to him, trying to keep him awake by asking why Miles Davis was overrated. They stood aside as two paramedics appeared from the back doors carrying plastic green briefcases.

“What’s his name?” the woman asked.

They replied in chorus.

Some of the group hoped the paramedics’ first reaction would be “Whoa, weird, what are you people even doing here? It’s five in the morning,” but it was as if the paramedics couldn’t see them. Don was in a casual kimono. There were Spanish lesbians here, for God’s sake. But there was no comment, no look. The paramedics just peeled away the layers of clothing until they found Patrick and Janet’s embalmed bodies at the center.

“Hello, Patrick? I’m Helen. How long have you been outside?”

He couldn’t speak though he was still conscious.

“About two and a half hours, we think,” Janet said, and she unclamped herself from behind him.

“Okay. Patrick, I’m going to give you some oxygen now.”

The other paramedic, a guy, brought a gas tank out of the ambulance, set it down with a clank, and put the respirator over Patrick’s face. There was a noise like automatic doors.

“Patrick, nod if you’ve taken any drugs or alcohol.”

He just stared. Freya said: “Only cannabis, as far as we know.”

“We’re going to give you something for the pain, okay?”

She looked for veins in his arms but couldn’t find any, so she injected the morphine into his bicep. Don stood next to his wife and put his arm around her. He still couldn’t look at the injury. They wrapped Patrick in silver and lifted him onto a cloth stretcher.

“Okay,” the paramedic said, “I need an adult to come with us.”

They all stood there listening to the engine, and in that moment they realized, having ridden a wave of collective love for this hard-to-love older man, having all felt unified by their support for him — in spite of his laziness, his depression — that they were each expecting someone else to jump at the chance to ride in the ambulance, that there was surely someone — they each thought — who was the right person to go, one among them for whom it was clearly best, and no one wished to push in and say me because that one right person should be allowed to accompany Patrick at this important and high-octane time.

Nobody spoke.

And the blue light scrolled across their faces, which were sad and solemn and some defiantly smiling, until at last the right person gave in, and she said: “Okay.”