Wild Abandon

4. ANIMAL, MINERAL, VEGETABLE

When Kate arrived on Geraint’s doorstep — with a plastic bag and a change of clothes — she had something about her of the convict on day release. Or that’s how she felt, at least, as they brought her in, sat her down at the dining table, made her sweet, milky tea, and asked what she’d like for her first meal, now that she was on the outside.

“We’ve got,” Mervyn, Geraint’s father, said, swinging back the fridge door, “drum roll … streaky bacon!”

Kate explained that, while the community wasn’t vegetarian, actually, she was, although she’d be happy eating anything, and she pointed to the family-size box of Frosties on the counter.

The next day Liz, Geraint’s mother’s, organized a symbolic gas-powered barbecue to clear their fridge of breakfast meats, Iberian chorizo, pork medallions, and handmade lamb burgers. On the patio, topless in April, Mervyn wafted the meat smoke away with a tea tray, carrying himself in the manner of a man who has, at some previous time, worked out.

Liz had a kind of cycle helmet of blond hair, raised from her scalp, sprayed stiff and sturdy-looking. She was fiercely accommodating. Each night she said, “Sleep well, Katherine,” and each morning she paid close attention to which cereal or muesli Kate chose, and then bought lots more of that brand. She never asked what had happened to drive her away from her home, but the implication was that Kate should feel free, at any point, to talk about it. In fact, Kate began to sense she was being treated like someone who had recently been through unspeakable trauma, so she started to wonder if she had.

Kate helped Liz to slice and salt eggplant and build a caponata. In tribute to Patrick, Kate taught Liz how to make red lentil dahl—à la carcinogen—with the bottom of the pan encrusted black. Over those first few days, Mervyn grimly, grinningly, tucked into three-bean stews, stuffed field mushrooms, and huge walnut and beetroot salads.

Kate had texted her father to say whom she was with, but since no one knew where Geraint lived, or even his surname, she was mercifully untraceable. Her only contact with the community was through her father’s text messages, since she never answered his calls and refused to check voice mail.

Sweets, it’s been a week now — you okay? When will you come back? We’re worried about you! Dad xxooxx.

She noticed that the message was sent at 2:13 a.m. and imagined him sitting alone in bed, lit by the light from the phone.

At Mervyn’s request, Kate and Geraint slept in separate rooms. She got the guest room with reading lamps set into the wall and a bed half-covered by a silky turquoise spread. Prior to her arrival on his doorstep, she and Geraint had done all the things they could easily do in the backseat of his tiny Punto, which was a lot, but not everything. Now they were living together, however, and with the twin catalysts of Mervyn’s disapproval and their being put in separate rooms, they quickly moved things forward, beginning with high-risk canoodling in the outdoor pool and ending with full, sacrilegious consummation in Mervyn’s Jeep while it was parked in the garage. Cold and uncomfortable, yes, but fizzing with family scandal. Kate secretly enjoyed spoiling the father’s pride and joy — both vintage vehicle and only son.

Considering that Kate had never spent any time in a suburban home before, she had a highly developed understanding of what to expect; during her upbringing, her father had encouraged her to make the most of his film collection, which had a lot to say on the subject, including The Graduate, Edward Scissorhands, American Beauty, and The Ice Storm. One of the community’s well-told stories was of Kate, age ten, setting an alarm for herself to wake at 3 a.m. so that she could come downstairs and watch Poltergeist, the definitive suburban horror film. When Janet got up to milk the goats, she found Kate awake at dawn, alone, in the corner, staring horrified at the loom, which had more than once been talked of as a machine for chopping up children.

It was difficult for Kate to imagine that behind the contented atmosphere in Geraint’s link-detached home, with garage, especially with swimming pool, there was not some kind of deviant interpersonal rot, rampant and unforgiving. By all surface assessments the Rees family were happy, which — according to Kate’s understanding of suburbia — meant that they weren’t. So it was with some relief that she discovered Mervyn’s insomnia. Although he worked full-time on the Evening Post news desk, he also stayed up half the night watching TV in the lounge; she felt sure this was the key to the family’s metaphorical basement. She remembered something her father had said: “Insomnia is not a condition, it’s a symptom.”

Why couldn’t Mervyn sleep? What monsters emerged in his dreams?

One thing Kate did know was that, most nights, garden slugs came out from under the baseboards and traveled across the lounge carpet. For some reason, Mervyn let them do their thing and, each morning, it was left to Liz to scuff away the glistening tracks. Kate liked that. The unspoken darkness between them.

That first night in the roundhouse, it was just Freya and Albert. They zipped their sleeping bags together, Albert showing her how to make a super-bag, and slept in the center of the room on a sheepskin rug. While they were there, Freya talked to him about his sister and said that he wasn’t to take her leaving too personally. It was by no means the first time Kate had run away. She was known for it. Once, famously, age twelve, weighed down with a backpack full of tins, she had made her escape but was forced to jettison supplies, least favorite first. Her father tracked her via kidney beans, then flageolet, chickpeas, whole plum tomatoes, and so on until he found her, exhausted, drinking the Juice from a tin of pineapple rings.

Albert disappeared deeper into the super-bag and that was where he slept from then on, a warm globe near Freya’s feet. She had brought an armory of herbal teas in anticipation of waking in the quiet hours with something tugging at her, an invisible rope between herself and Don. The reality had been different. She slept deeply and, that first morning, when she woke up, found she was alone in a two-man sleeping bag. Albert had already gone back to the workshop to visit Marina.

On the second night, Isaac joined them and she and the boys slept on the rug, with her in the middle. When they thought she was asleep, their pillow talk was alarming.

“Isaac?”

“Yep.”

“How do you think the world’s going to end?”

“Um. It’s going to start with a big noise like a bus noise and then ten buses’ noise, then twelve, then there will be birds and if they write your name in the sky you can get on the buses and if they don’t you have to die on the floor.”

Even that could not keep her awake. She had almost forgotten what a proper, unbroken, dreamless night’s sleep was like. The feeling of being upgraded. Fresh eyes.

By the time Isaac next stayed over, two nights later, she had come to realize that few things are more exciting to young boys than the idea of the world suddenly and explosively ending, leaving them as lone survivors, walking the toxic earth with massive knives. That was what made Marina’s theories so appealing. It would take more than drab rationality to distract them, which is why she made a concerted effort to get up before them and, when they woke, said: “Today, we’re going to have a lesson in time travel.”

She made them sit cross-legged on the rush matting while she sat on a stool opposite. It was a good exercise for the morning, while they were still in touch with their subconsciouses.

“Who here wants to drive a time machine?”

They both put up their hands. Albert raised his right buttock off the matting to give his hand an inch more commitment.

“Time travel is easier than most people think. Now, close your eyes and listen carefully.”

They looked at each other seriously, held hands, and shut their eyes.

“Imagine you’re in a lift,” she said, “and there’s a whole wall of buttons, numbered one to a hundred. Press the button that’s the same number as your age. So, if you’re six years old, Isaac, then press the button with six on it.”

Isaac’s forehead ruffled. Freya watched him. His face seemed hypermobile, changing the whole time, a kind of human lava lamp, giving the impression that he had a wider emotional range than most children.

“Okay, once you’ve pressed the button, let the lift doors close and feel yourself move upward.”

“Wo ho ho,” Albert said, bouncing on his bum.

“Ping!” Freya said. “You’ve reached your floor. The doors slide back.”

Isaac’s nostrils flared.

“Now, step out into the corridor. Feel the red carpet beneath your feet. Gold lamp fittings run along the walls. On this corridor there are one hundred rooms, doors on both sides.”

Albert’s foot jiggled.

“Start walking slowly up the corridor, counting the numbers as you go. Say them out loud as you go past, and stop at the door with your age on it.”

“Onetwothreefourfive …,” Albert said.

In his mind, he was running.

Isaac didn’t count out loud. He traced a circle with his finger on the floor.

“… eightnineteneleven!”

“You okay, Isaac? Are you standing outside door number six?”

He nodded.

“Okay. That’s your room.”

This was something she’d learned years ago when she and Don had attended a three-day nondenominational meditation course. She remembered Don used to say that every time he achieved “thoughtlessness,” he would be dragged back to the surface by his own sense of achievement.

This exercise was called “Visiting Your Future Self.” Freya remembered her future self told her that she did not need to come on a meditation course to speak to her future or past selves, and that these were the sorts of internal conversations most people saved for long bus journeys. Even if Albert’s “future self” told him something as banal as that, Freya would just be glad to see him indulge in self-reflection. She imagined him meeting a version of himself who was Kate’s age and whose concerns had shifted, as his sister’s had, from the fate of the universe to the fate of a university application.

“Now, walk down the corridor, until you’re another five rooms along. What’s six plus five, Isaac? Is it eleven?”

“Yes, eleven.”

“Good. You go to room eleven.”

“I’m outside mine,” Albert said. “Super-sweet sixteen!”

“These rooms contain the version of you at the same age as the room number. So inside the door you’ll find yourself five years in the future. He knows you are coming because he can remember sitting where you are, five years ago. If there’s anything that’s bothering you right now, then he’ll be able to talk you through it. You can ask him what it’s like to be his age. He’ll know if you are scared or upset. He can offer you perspective.”

She could see by her son’s expression that he was completely going with it.

“Turn the door handle and go in. Sit cross-legged on the floor opposite yourself, just like you are now. Take a moment to notice the room. Then notice your future self. Now, take this opportunity to ask — in your head — any questions you want to, and take note of the reply.”

Isaac’s head dropped. He let go of Albert’s hand, put his fingers in his ears, and pulled them out again. He tasted the ends of his fingers, then wiped his hands, front and back, on his jeans. He opened his eyes and seemed surprised to see Freya watching him. His face passed through a series of emotions in the guilt/shame arena.

She mouthed the words it’s okay and held out her hand to him. He dragged himself over to Freya and wrapped his arms around one of her calves.

They watched Albert. His face was moving: eyebrows tweaking, nostrils occasionally whitening at the edges.

— Albert!

— Yo!

— I’m sixteen!

— I’m eleven! How’s the next dimension?

— Insano!

— I knew it would be.

— Nonstop carnage!

— So what happened?

— Well, it all started with the swarms. Not just one insect, but all of them, over land and sea, to desiccate the earth.

— You know some words.

— I was standing on the flat roof when they blocked out the sun. You could hear them. They were making a documentary about me and they got it on camera when I said: Fetch the goddamn gasoline.

— Wow, yes!

— Then I poured the gasoline through the woods, in a circle around the big house. My henchmen all stood at different points along the circle, each with a box of matches. I went up on the flat roof and everyone waited for my signal. I knew that the forest would only burn for so long, and we had to time it right so the swarm would pass by before the forest burned out.

— Makes sense.

— I could see the MegaSwarm coming over the horizon — locusts, hornets, wasps, horseflies, mantises, midges — and I was like: Hold! … Hold! And I could hear the scrit-scrit-scrit of the super-intelligent ant armies approaching, carrying hundreds of times their own weight in weaponry, and still I was like: Hold! And behind the ants, the legions of ticks, mites, beetles, rolling their ball bearings, even spiders, although not strictly insects, swinging through the trees behind and still I yelled: Hold! Hold! Then I said … Let’s watch this city burn!, which was the signal.

— All of which was on camera?

— Of course.

— Fuckums.

— Yes. And the flames went racing up the trees, shooting into the sky, and my team ran back to the safety of the house, and we waited and watched as the hordes of ants fried themselves to the floor, huge clouds of flaming insects in the air, like fireworks in slow motion. The smoke acted as a force field, directing most of them around us, but still a few broke through, spiders, alight but alive, running through the undergrowth, gnashing their mandibles, so we went out in the yard with cans of Lynx and lighters and we fought hand to hand with those homos.

— Who won?

— Guess.

— Boom town!

— Exactly.

— All in the documentary?

— Oui.

— You’ve learned French?

— Oui.

— Then what?

— Then we were the only people left on the planet. Kate was at her boyfriend’s house and then at university, so she was dead.

— No!

— Sorry, but yes. Everyone else is fine. Mum and Dad are in the big house together again and I can do anything I want, like wander around in old libraries and castles and explore hotels. Living in the roundhouse will be really useful training for surviving in dangerous places.

— That’s pretty cool. But I’m sad about Kate.

— It was her choice. You’ll try to explain to her about how wrong she is, and that the world is really going to end, but she won’t listen. She’s sometimes very insulting. She even tries to kill Mum and Dad by telling them lies about how the world won’t end. You may not want to hear this, but pretty soon you’ll have to think of a way to stop her disrupting your vital preparations.

— Doesn’t she realize that she is wrong and come back to the community just in time?

— In a fairy tale, maybe. But this is real life, champ.

On the way to the bathroom, Liz passed the room at the top of the stairs where Kate and Geraint were studying together. She stopped outside the door and watched their stillness, the backs of their heads occasionally bobbing, the heavy textbook split on the desktop. She signaled for Mervyn to come see—shh! she mimed, with a finger held up to her lips, as he lumbered over, still in his office shirt. They stood there, arm in arm, trying to concentrate on their son concentrating, but feeling too excited and blessed. Liz rested her head on her husband’s shoulder as Kate’s fearless hand reached to turn the page.

Mervyn and Liz had scoured their drawers for the appropriate office supplies. They would not be the ones to stop her squaring the hypotenuse. If tricolor highlighter tabs might undo the damage of her drab, loose-knit upbringing then she would have tricolor highlighter tabs. High-speed fiber-optic broadband had been installed to keep pace with her untethered mind.

She was, they both agreed, an angel sent to raise their son’s grades by osmosis, a concept that was now well within his grasp. It was enough for him just to share a study with her superhuman concentration span. If their son seemed more subdued than normal, then that was only right because he was going through great changes, the painful retraction into his chrysalis. In the glimpses they got of his bedroom floor, they noted the slow retreat of foil trays, empty Baggies, fried chicken boxes, piles of clothes, shattered jewel cases, and snapped guitar strings until, one unseasonably warm day, they sat up in bed and listened to the burr of the vacuum cleaner coming through the wall. Their son’s bedroom’s famous smell — like damp cork, like the raw side of a carpet — started to sift and soften. Mervyn even claimed he missed it.

Thursday Meeting. 03/05/2012.

Members present: Don, Freya, Marina, Isaac, Arlo, Albert!

Visitors: Erin, The Tallest Man, No-neck Sally, 2 x Unknown.

Members absent: Janet (Bristol) Patrick (ankle) and Kate (death)

Albert loved taking minutes in the community notebook.

“People, our battery is dying,” Don said, standing at the head of the table. The table was round, but still he managed to be at its head. He had a shaving rash, Indonesia-shaped, on his neck.

Although they were “on holiday,” Freya and Albert were still expected at the fortnightly meeting. This was the first time Freya had been back to the big house, though the same could not be said of Albert, who had been returning most days to see Marina.

Albert gripped his pencil and wrote: Battery = dying.

Freya divided her attention among peeling a wafer of mud off the back of her hand, reading Albert’s minutes, and watching her spouse’s newly visible lips move. Don made a pestle and mortar motion. He was speaking slower than normal and the skin beneath his eyes was murky.

Albert wrote: Last legs. Tighten belts. Membership drive.

Freya looked across the table at the empty seat, Patrick’s, a high Windsor chair with a patch of buffed wood where the rear of his head used to gurn against the backboard. Next to that, on the bench where Kate used to sit, there were the American newlyweds, Varghese and Erin, who had arrived last night to wwoof their honeymoon. They were smiling and tugging each other’s jumpers.

Albert wrote down: Patrick’s departure = reduced cash flow.

Freya watched Don chop the palm of his left hand with the blade of his right. His eyes went wide. He pointed at something in another room. Then he pointed at Freya and he gave her two thumbs up.

Albert wrote: Be like Freya and Albert. Minimal living — Roundhouse.

Everyone turned and nodded at her.

Albert wrote: Half-life. 300,000 years. The dinosaurs.

Don, still talking, pointed at each person around the table in turn.

Albert wrote down: Responsibility. Equality. The children of our children. (My children!)

Seeing Don without a beard made her think of him in the very first days of the community. Back then, he seemed to have a perpetual rant running inside him, sometimes silent, sometimes voiced, but always there. Whenever he emphasized a phrase, he used to lean forward, as though his torso became italicized in sympathy. New structures for living. Freya blinked and saw him now — trying to be reasonable. A small mound of dry mud had formed on the table in front of her, where she had been picking at her hands.

Albert wrote: Go digital. Tight ship. Full circle.

She noticed that, in between taking notes, Albert used his pencil to color in his arms, giving himself the gray sheen of someone with serious nutritional deficiencies.

Don looked around the room, catching each pair of eyes. Isaac, tiny in the wicker chair, drummed his fingers on the armrests, trying to synchronize left and right hands. Arlo held his tea in his mouth.

Don didn’t look at Freya for long. He carried on speaking, raising one finger for emphasis. Albert wrote: Reel ourselves in. Forge onward.

She watched Don lean forward, a little awkwardly, his sleeves rolled up, planting his palms flat on the table.

Albert wrote down: Off-grid. Must vote. Now is the time. So little of it left!:-(

All around her, hands went up.

One night, very late, when waking and going downstairs to get a glass of water, Kate saw the TV on through the rows of rippled-pond-effect glass squares in the door to the lounge. Mervyn was watching News 24 on mute with live subtitles. It surprised her that he could bear to spend his sleepless hours watching the news, given that he was a current affairs journalist. She looked through the door and smiled in the small, intimate way people smile to each other as they pass in a narrow corridor, late at night, on a sleeper train.

The phone lead stretched across the hall and into the bathroom beneath the stairs, the door of which was locked.

“Hello. This is Albert Riley of The Rave House. I spoke to you a month ago … Yes, I’ve changed my mind.”

…

“I know. My parents say I must live my life my own way. Make my own mistakes.”

…

“Yes, they are both happy to sign the release forms.”

…

“You’ll have to take my word for it.”

…

“They won’t be around to meet you. Is that a problem?”

…

“You’re making a big mistake.”

…

“Fine. Forget it. My father says your industry is inherently evil.”

…

…

“Hello. This is Albert F. Riley of The Rave House. I spoke to you a couple of months ago.”

A few nights later, in the spare room, Kate was woken by her phone buzzing against the floor. The screen said she had three texts from her father:

NEWS FLASH: BLAEN-Y-LLYN GOING OFF-GRID! Momentous Day Will Be Tinged With Sadness If All-Important Member Of Community Not Around To Enjoy Momentous Day, Sources Close To The Community Reveal.

FYI — Off-grid day is being timed to coincide with F and Alb’s return from holiday, next week. Twice the celebration!

Also, also, Albert’s not washed since you left. Half expect to see centipedes, woodlice etc when he takes off his boots!

She lay awake, being alternately annoyed with, then sorry for, her father, and unable to reconcile the ecstatic tone of his texts with the time on her phone’s clock: 3:12 a.m. Was it possible that he did not know the messages were instant? Did he think they would arrive in the morning, like the mail?

After being awake for a while, she became conscious of a high-pitched whine in the house. It took some time to realize what it was.

She went downstairs in her pajamas. Her T-shirt, a baggy yellow vintage one, a hand-me-down from Janet, said: “Life Begins at Forty.” The silky pajama bottoms were Liz’s.

Mervyn was again watching News 24 with real-time subtitles. She opened the door and waved. He waved back, then made space for her on the sofa. The leather exhaled as she sat down and brought her legs up underneath her. He put down the remote on the coffee table.

“You okay?” he said, turning toward her. “Couldn’t sleep?”

She nodded. He made his face for supportive-but-not-intrusive.

“We’d best keep quiet,” he whispered, then pointed to the ceiling, where his wife was asleep.

“Can’t stop thinking about my exams,” she said, which was half-true. Two images had stayed with her from her open house day at Cambridge: a professor in full subfusc billowing through a Japanese garden and a boy with one overdeveloped bicep punting along the canal.

“I’m sure you’ll do brilliantly,” Mervyn said.

They sat and watched the mute news with the colored subtitles that came up one word at a time. He leaned toward Kate, and spoke quietly: “The subtitles are written live by stenographers — like the people who record what’s said in court. Fantastically skilled. They work in fifteen-minute bursts because it’s so intense. Between 4 and 5 a.m., at the end of their shift, they make more mistakes, I’ve noticed. My favorite: ‘Russia backs away from Gran’s missile deal.’ ”

He laughed with no sound and she smiled.

More interesting to Kate than stenography was the question of what dark dreams kept a grown man with work in the morning awake in a suburban home watching rolling news. He came out like the carpet slugs, silent and lost, trawling the lounge by night. She cultivated thoughts like this — clues about the hollow core of link-detached living — and had more than once watched Mervyn and Liz in the raised pool at the end of the garden and thought that their heads looked severed, bobbing back and forth.

Mervyn was wearing a navy fleece dressing gown on top of his gray cotton pajamas and he sat with his legs wide apart, which she always thought of as a macho way to sit. Pretty much all the men of her childhood sat cross- or closed-legged. Open male legs would probably have been enough to get a black mark from Don, if seen at interview.

Mervyn smiled suddenly when another mistake came up. “… have developed body armour that is even resistant to snark attack …”

The words body armour made her think of her brother. She chose not to explore the thought further. In truth, she tried not to dwell on anything to do with her own family, preferring to analyze the Reeses instead. The last time she had seen Albert, he had been catching her tears and eating them. She listened to the small shifts in Mervyn’s body weight, the leather creaking. The small outward expression of a large inward thing: sleeplessness as a symptom of the discontent that slithers through plush bedrooms at night, leaving a trail behind it. For her part, she angled her legs toward him and enjoyed breathing in a heightened way. It made living in the house more interesting, which was why she did it, she decided.

• • •

Freya woke up late and the roundhouse was empty. Blue and green daylight came through the recycled bottles that were plugged into the wall. This was the day that she and Albert were due to return home to the big house. Moving him down here had done nothing to change his outlook. His visits to Marina had continued apace. If anything, living in the roundhouse had given him a taste of the “challenges ahead” and made his commitment more fervent.

Last night, after she had cooked him a special final-night meal of stewed eggplant followed by rice pudding, he had said: “I’m excited about us going home.” Then, when she woke this morning, he had already packed and gone, leaving her a pan of porridge on the wood-burning stove with a note that said: Morning Mum! Porridge for you, here. See you at home! She sometimes wondered if he felt like he was looking after her, not the other way round.

She got up and tried to eat, but found she had no appetite. She got dressed slowly, then, instead of packing, just picked up her empty suitcase and started off up the hill. Although the bag was empty, it seemed to her to weigh a lot. It was mustard colored, a stiff old 1970s number with brown leather trim. For the first year of the community, she’d lived out of it — when their only private space was their luggage. It was still in good condition, largely because, in the intervening years, she had not traveled anywhere. In those early days, when a relationship wasn’t working, everybody knew about it. In a way, that made it easier because you couldn’t hide anything. Over the years, she’d seen some couples arrive at the community with, it seemed, the express purpose of putting pressure on their relationship. Famously, Tony and Angela Whishaw, too cowardly to end their marriage simply because they were miserable, came to the community and were relieved to find that temptation, jealousy, and, as it turned out, serial adultery could be grown in greenhouse conditions. Freya remembered the couple she’d worked with in London. Five times a day, the kerrrr-chisss sound of his attempts to open Holsten Pils quietly beneath his desk and his wife, as though wearing her own Personal Instrument, selecting not to hear it.

When Freya got to the big house she could see, through the window, Don speaking to Isaac and Albert in the schoolroom. She left her case in the hall and watched them from the doorway. The boys had their back to her, looking up at Don, who was explaining the new charge controller: a machine to help them manage their electricity usage, to help their transition to being off-grid. It was made from off-white plastic and was the size of a shoe box, attached to the wall above the upright piano.

“So, what if there’s a massive storm and the wind is blowing insanely and the sun is shining like a beast,” Albert said. “What then?”

“Well, then we come inside, look at the meter, and if we’re producing more electricity than we can use, then yes, it’s in our interest to use that energy up. Because if there’s nowhere for that excess energy to go, then it can end up burning out the circuits or even causing an explosion.”

“Hell yes!” Albert said.

Don frowned. The meter made a clicking noise, like a camera, every time they used a unit of stored power. Their battery was in a wooden beehive out in back of the schoolroom.

Click.

“Sah-weet!” Albert said, and he looked up at the ceiling. “So, if there’s a storm then we can install lasers in every room.”

“Well, I think the point is that we learn not to desire those things, Bert.”

“Not desire lasers?” Albert said, trying hard to raise one eyebrow.

Isaac watched them earnestly.

Click.

Don sniffed and tugged the end of his nose.

The tip of Isaac’s tongue appeared between his lips when he was concentrating, like now. “I don’t understand,” he said.

Don went down on one knee to speak to him.

“Think of electricity like a river that runs through the house. Sometimes the river’s full and sometimes it’s dry. A river made of fire that you must never go near that flows in a big loop behind the walls.”

Isaac reached out and held on to Don’s nose.

“Okay, boys. I think we’re done. Go and get everyone together so we can make that phone call.”

Don looked up and saw Freya.

“You’re just in time,” he said.

Albert stretched out the cord so that he could take center stage in the middle of the hall. Everyone had gathered to listen to him phoning Swalec, the electricity company. Marina and Isaac were sitting on the herringbone woodblock floor, their backs to the wall beneath the coat hooks. The wwoofers were standing on the lower steps, arranged like a choir. Arlo was watching from the kitchen door, one of his hands cradling macadamias. On the landing halfway up the stairs, her back to the wall and looking down, was Freya. Just in front of her was Don, who kept looking back and forth between Albert’s showboating and his wife, to check she was appreciating this monumental moment in the history of their lives together.

“This is Albert Riley. I’m calling to end our relationship.”

Albert twirled so that the phone cord wrapped around him.

“… No, we’re not switching providers.” He had a piece of paper with a few notes on it. “We’ve been drifting apart for years. It’s not me, it’s you.”

A small ripple of applause from the stairs. Don smiled with his mouth open.

“We don’t need you. We’ve moved on. You should have seen it coming.”

Albert held the receiver away from his face and made a yapping mouth with his left hand. Everyone liked that. Don looked back to share this moment with Freya, but she’d gone.

“Are we sure?” Albert said, and he held the handset out to the crowd.

“We’re sure!” they chorused.

Albert put the phone back to his ear. He read out their account number and address from a bill. But it turned out that a call wasn’t enough. They’d need to do it in writing.

Freya went into Don’s room and put her suitcase down beside the bed. She had the feeling Don had made a special effort so that the community felt vibrant and reinvigorated for her return, which it did. In their room, however, everything was exactly as she’d left it, right down to the glass of half-drunk water on her bedside table, the unwritten letter in the typewriter. The room had a curatorial atmosphere. It was expecting her back. She stood at the window, feeling numb, and watched a shadow move in one of the polytunnels.

After a while, she heard the bedroom door open, but she didn’t turn round. Her empty suitcase was there and she waited for him to see it and realize what was happening. Perhaps there would be no need for her to actually say it, Don would just understand. He would wordlessly acknowledge her leaving. She waited and heard the floorboards ache beneath him. He was behind her. She listened, expecting the sound of his crying. It would be easier, actually, if he cried. Instead, she felt someone’s lips on her neck.

As far as she knew, this was not the mouth of her husband. She had not heard the preemptive kiss-kiss noise or sensed the repression of that sound that would have signaled his swooping in. No small sealed bag opening. These were foreign lips on her neck, soft and a little tacky, possibly moisturized. She knew well the feeling of being kissed by her husband: the wet lips, the loofah of his beard, the enthusiasm. Like being worked on, somehow, buffed up. This was not that. It could not be him. Don did not have his hands on her, was not holding her at the waist then shoulders. She shut her eyes and focused on how it felt to be with someone new.

It was easier this way — so she rolled her head back and let his mouth attend to the curve where her neck became her shoulder. Then the stranger’s hand groped her chest in a way that was unlike her husband. Then the stranger’s other hand bunched her knee-length skirt up, lifting it, and all this in front of a window that made them visible to people for whom the husband was a figure of authority, and this was definitively not like her husband. The person went to work on her neck, breathing heavily. She pushed back against him, being careful not to look over her shoulder. It was still light outside and there was a girl down by the compost, hacking away. Freya heard the fizz of his fly. The stranger didn’t care who saw, and he reached under her skirt and awkwardly pulled down her underwear. The stranger knew her name, it became apparent, because he started saying it, over and over.

She leaned forward with her arms wide and planted her palms flat against the window casement. His mouth sucked her shoulder. The sun was falling behind the downs and she could see the first hint of her own reflection in the glass, and the silhouette of the stranger’s head. He didn’t bother with extensive foreplay, which was unlike her husband. She felt him bend his knees slightly then push inside her and she made the sort of sound she had long ago stopped making.

The light outside kept fading, and in the glass she could make out the outline but not the face of the man who was gripping her hips, his head down, watching himself. The stranger said he missed her. Then he came inside her and told her he loved her and he was glad she was back and he was sorry. Then she heard him sit back on the bed.

She kept her arms out against the window casement. The light outside was dim enough to see the details of her own reflection, and the expression she had was not at all the look of someone rediscovering sex with a new partner.

Pulling up her underwear, she adjusted her skirt, and when she turned round Don looked up at her. Without his beard, the skin on his neck, his jaw, and around his mouth was a pale pink color, a litmus pink, and slightly raised, almost water retentive. He did look younger, but also smaller.

“Thank you for coming back. I wasn’t sure you would.” He buttoned up his trousers. Standing, he went round to the suitcase. It became clear that he thought it was full, the case. He had the tensed shoulders and slightly widened stance of a man about to make light work of something heavy. He gripped the handle with two hands and lifted, but when it gave little resistance it put him off balance and he rocked back on his heels before coming forward again, dropping the bag on the bed. It was a couple more moments before the information was processed. She watched it happening. But he needed to see it, so he put his hand on the zipper and led it along the edge of the old-fashioned case, the four curved corners. He lifted the lid. The inner lining was gold.

Kate couldn’t sleep. She was surprised and disappointed to find herself thinking about the community going off-grid and wondering if it had been a success. She had even stooped to the ignominy of texting her father to ask but had got no reply.

At 2 a.m., she heard the bat-squeak of the TV coming on and decided to go downstairs for a glass of water. She got a drink from the kitchen and went into the front room, where Mervyn was watching his muted news. She waved at him and he waved back. Downing the lot in one go, she breathed hard and put the mug on the glass coffee table with a clink.

“Thirsty,” she said, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“You just missed it,” he whispered. “Humanitarian aid to war-torn Susan.”

She sat down on the sofa and tugged down her T-shirt.

“You okay?” he said, not looking at her.

“I’m fine.”

“Want to talk about anything?”

Her bare legs were tanned from being in the garden. “No.”

She knew it was a cliché but she went for it anyway. She uncrossed and crossed her legs.

He blinked three times but still didn’t look.

She liked passing the time this way.

The TV said: “First U.K. tropes come home.”

Once they were fully off-grid, Don developed a new structure for electricity usage. There were grade-one appliances — washing machine, disc sander, band saw, computer/modem/scanner — which he said could only be used one at a time, and only when the battery was fully charged. He went round the community marking these with a red sticker. On the side of the charge controller, Don attached a small red flag, like the one on their American-style mailbox, which was raised if one of these core appliances was in use. The grade-two appliances (which he dotted yellow), including TV, DVD player, and the hi-fi, could be used freely, and simultaneously, whenever the battery was 95 percent full, or above, but were restricted to “emergency only” below that. He said that he would verify what constituted an emergency.

Under Don’s new regime, new behaviors developed. The smoothie maker ran just once a morning. To burn toast was no longer charmingly ditsy. Electric blankets were a distant dream. There was an art to a responsibly filled kettle. If Janet blow-dried her hair she concealed it beneath a low-key hat. Despite Arlo’s protests, the fridge and chest freezer thermostats were raised by three degrees. They took turns spending time with the windup radio.

The newlyweds, Erin and Varghese, acutely aware of not wanting to be a burden, had moved into Patrick’s old dome, where they made cups of tea on a gas stove. Lit by candlelight, frail and sniffly, they were more in love than ever. Varghese, the giant, was making a video of their honeymoon. Filming at night with a time-lapse, he’d set up his camera in the yard, looking at the house. He was very pleased with a shot he’d got that tracked the passage of individuals, turning on a light as they entered a space and off as they left. A flurry between 3:30 and 4 a.m. showed that some of the residents’ bladders had synchronized. One bedroom light stayed on all night and Varghese was thinking of reporting this to Don until he realized whose bedroom it was.

Kate and Geraint sat out on the shady grass and Mervyn sat on the deck on a beach chair in his Speedo with The Times on one side and The Sun on the other like main course and pudding. On weekends, he dozed on and off through the afternoons. Liz, with the patio doors open, could be heard whizzing and blending, having graduated to vegetarian recipes that were not imitations of meat. Kate and Geraint both wore their swimming costumes and, in breaks from studying, cooled off in the raised pool. Her white two-piece with bows at the shoulders and hips had been bought for her, on a day trip to McArthur Glen Retail Park, along with some tights that Liz said her legs “deserved.”

Uneven stacks of books made a skyline along the walls of the roundhouse. Most of the rest of Freya’s stuff was still in cardboard boxes, patterned with crossed-out labels in unfamiliar handwritings: Fragiles, Sport Gear, VHS. In acknowledgment that this was now her permanent situation, she had dragged a mattress down from the big house. Being ancient and much communally used, it was in bloom with yellow daffodil-shaped stains.

It was hard to argue with Don that her experiment had failed; Albert was more fanatical now than ever. It was agreed, then, that their son spend weekdays at the community, where he could at least do his schoolwork, and weekends with his mother. The other news was that Isaac was no longer allowed to spend any time at the roundhouse. Marina denied him access, flat out. According to Albert, the reason she gave was that she wanted Freya and Albert to have more time together. But Freya had plenty of time to speculate on what this actually meant.

So when Albert came to stay, it was just the two of them, which Freya liked, though they no longer joined their sleeping bags together. One Sunday they went for a low-tide walk on Whitford Burrows, out to the cast-iron lighthouse, rusted and peeling, which would make, as Albert observed, a good bunker. She tried to make the time he did spend in the roundhouse pleasant: they baked bread together, harvested horseradish, and made onion marmalade. She got him the windup radio, some books and worksheets, an electric lantern, a proper pillow, and a Japanese dressing screen which allowed him a quarter circle of personal space.

Of the weekdays Albert was at the community, every other night he slept on a camp bed in the workshop with Marina and Isaac. That made a three-way split in his sleeping arrangements.

Freya knew he needed a wholesale change of circumstances. But one of the reasons her options were so limited was that she had few contacts outside the community. There was really only one person she could think of who might help.

Don stood on a stool in the entrance hall, reaching up, his right forearm hidden in the wooden, crisscross-slatted lampshade. He was replacing the energy-saving bulbs with other, more severely energy-saving bulbs.

“I appreciated your support on this,” Don said.

Arlo was watching from the door to the kitchen and chewing imported biltong. Over the years, Don had come to rely on Arlo to get behind most projects (the yurt village and the Ad-Guard, for example) so long as they did not affect the kitchen.

“About that,” Arlo said, flicking the switch to test the new bulb. A barely perceptible glow showed at the edges of the lampshade. “It’s great to see you so full of energy, Don, but I slightly wonder if this is necessary?”

“I’m just finishing what Freya and I set out to do,” Don said as he unboxed another golf-ball — like bulb and went into the bathroom under the stairs, where his voice grew muffled. “If anyone’s not up to the challenge then they shouldn’t be here.”

“You sound like Albert.”

Don went into the kitchen, followed by Arlo, and they stood looking up at the lights above the counter.

“Don’t even think about it,” Arlo said.

“We all have to make sacrifices.”

“Yes but I actually need to see what I’m chopping. Unless you want me to sacrifice my fingers.”

“This reminds me,” Don said. “I wanted to talk to you about catering for the party.”

“Right.”

Don was still staring up at the lights. “I’ve been having thoughts about some unusual specialities.”

“Oh-kay,” Arlo said, frowning. “Whatever you like. As long as my workspace remains well lit.”

“Deal,” Don said, and he went through to the scullery. He pulled out a milk crate, stood on it, reached up, and twisted the bulb free. Arlo followed and shut the door behind them.

“I can see why you are doing this,” Arlo said, his voice lowered, “but I just wonder if you and Freya should talk first?”

“This is about what’s right for the community,” he said, and he screwed in the new bulb.

Arlo clicked the switch to test it. It was sunny outside and the light in the room didn’t change.

Kate was sitting in the lounge on the black leather sofa, a dress over her swimming costume, wearing Liz’s Dallas shades on top of her head, which she’d tried on as a joke but had grown to quite like, and was studying the Heaven’s Gate cult when she noticed the dark silhouette at the bay window. Her mother was in the front garden, waving, not knocking.

It had been nearly six weeks since she’d seen either of her parents. She often thought of what they would think of her new lifestyle, lounging around with luxurious hair. Kate did not acknowledge her mother at the glass but enjoyed the feeling of being silently judged.

Then, after a while, getting up off the sofa, Kate went into the hall, opened the plastic front door, ignored the shape standing there, shut the door quietly, and walked up the drive, along the street and out of sight. She stopped at a grass border between the pavement and the wide road. Watching her mother coming toward her, Kate was struck by how, in this postcode, her clothes looked sad — frowning, drooping, washed at low temperatures. She appeared to be carrying the woodland shade with her.

“How did you find me?”

“I rang your college.” Kate allowed herself to be hugged. “So glad to see you.”

Freya had her back to the sun; the light picked out the wilder edges of her dark hair, which ran down to her armpits, parting over her shoulders. She had a quality of being impervious to light; Kate struggled to see her expression.

“You look well,” Freya said.

“I’m fine.”

“What are Geraint’s parents like?”

“They’re normal.”

“You wear shades now,” her mother said, and seemed really pleased. “How are you? I’ve missed you.”

“I’m good. Fine. Studying.”

“In very glamorous surrounds.”

“Not ‘surrounds.’ This is what a normal street looks like. Why are you here?”

“Oh, this is a normal street. Of course. It’s been too long.”

Her mother was trying to be jokey and warm in the way of best friends, but Kate was not willing. Freya grinned with all her teeth, which, Kate could see, were clean but not white. Her mother, looking around, seemed excited to be on the municipally maintained grass. Next to them, on a lamppost, there was a photocopied poster with a child’s scrawled handwriting: Your dog does the crime, you pay the fine. Freya had the curiosity of someone visiting the set of a long-running soap opera. Kate could tell she wanted to be invited inside.

“How did you get here?” Kate said.

“I hitched.”

“You’re too old to hitch.”

Her mother squinted at her. “Are you eating meat?”

“What?”

“You just seem carnivorous, somehow.”

Freya rubbed her daughter’s bare upper arms, then opened her mouth but didn’t speak.

“Mum, has something happened?”

“Sweetheart. I’m sorry. I wanted to talk to you.”

Kate took off her shades and squinted. “I don’t have time for this. I’ve got studying to do.”

“I wanted to speak. You’re my best friend.”

“I don’t think it’s healthy for us to be best friends.”

She watched her mother move from foot to foot.

“Is the grass hot?”

“No. It’s fine. I’m just pleased to see you.”

“Mum, what’s wrong? Do you need a wee?”

Kate looked around, her hand shading her eyes, checking to see if they were being watched.

“So,” Freya said. “Can I meet them?”

“No.”

“I’ll play it cool.”

“Do not play it cool.”

Kate looked her mother up and down. “Why are you wearing so many clothes? Are you sweaty?” She leaned in and smelt her mother’s neck, then sniffed her armpit.

Freya said: “If I didn’t love you so much this would be humiliating.”

The frosted-glass front door was unlocked. They went into the quiet, carpeted hallway and into the lounge.

“Okay, Mum. No specifics.”

Out the back of the garden they could see both Mervyn and Liz’s bodiless heads moving in the raised pool. It was more expensive to get a sunken pool, Kate now knew. Two severed, free-roaming heads. Liz was doing breaststroke and had her hair held up with a crab-colored clamp. Kate tried to read her mother’s expression.

Stepping out of the sliding doors and onto the deck, Freya was hit by direct sunlight and she did not melt.

Geraint was on the shady grass, bouncing the football on his knees. Each time the ball went up above his head it moved into sunlight and reflected brightly, then fell into shade again. He made small, unconscious grunting noises. The ball hit his shin and rolled into the flower bed. He looked up at the woodland troll on the deck next to his girlfriend.

He said: “Mum. Dad.”

Kate waited until the severed heads had noticed that she had brought a homeless person onto their property. The two heads smiled.

“Guys, I’d like you to meet Freya, my mum.”

The woodland troll waved.

On foldout garden chairs in a rough semicircle on the sunny deck, the mothers drank Pimm’s and lemonade, no trimmings; Geraint and Kate drank tiny Bière D’Alsace; and Mervyn, who was topless, smooth-skinned, drank cherry Coca-Cola from the can. Liz had put on a turquoise bathrobe with a big collar. Kate kept her shades on, tried not to look at her mother, and heard everything with live subtitles.

“You’ve a beautiful home, Liz.”

You’re a bourgeois sham, Liz.

“Thank you, Freya.”

“I hope my daughter’s been behaving herself,” Freya said.

“She’s been an absolute dream!” Liz said. “Wish we could keep her!”

Geraint leaned in. “She’s even got Dad eating polenta.”

“It’s true!” Mervyn said, lifting his glass. “I thought it was veal.”

Freya and Liz both laughed. Kate wondered how long she could endure this.

“Well, we’re really glad to finally meet you,” Liz said. “And how’s—Don, is it? He didn’t come with you?”

“He’s okay, thanks. I was trying to tell Kate, we’ve been going through …”

“Oh …,” Liz said, leaning forward.

“Well, I’m just glad that Katie is staying with you at the moment.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Liz said, and she put her hand on Freya’s knee and kept it there. “Is everything okay?”

Kate, behind her shades, was trying to feel nothing.

“Well, no, Kate’s father and I are not living together anymore.”

“Oh God!” Liz said, and she crossed the circle and threw her arms around Freya, spilling Freya’s drink in the process, the Pimm’s and lemonade draining away between slats of deck board.

“My God, you need something stronger,” Liz said and looked to Mervyn, who disappeared off into the house.

“If there’s anything we can do to help.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I didn’t mean to. They seemed nice.”

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

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

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

“Did you have a swimming pool?”

“Well.”

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

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

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

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

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

“One person. Alan Medlicott.”

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

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

“Why are you being like this?”

“Like what? Nonjudgmental?”

“Yes. It’s awful.”

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

“Okay, Mum. Go now.”

07/06/12.

Members present: Don (chair), Arlo, Marina, Janet, Albert, Isaac.

Visitors: Varghese, Erin.

Members absent: Kate, Patrick, Freya.

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

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

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

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

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

“Right, then,” Don said. “Moving on.”

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

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

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

Around the table, they were frowning and underlining.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A-Level Results Day Party, 2012

All Welcome.

At Blaen-y-Llyn (aka The Rave House), North Gower

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

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

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

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

“An outdoor event.”

It would change public perception and bring in new, younger members and remind Freya of the reasons they started all this.

“About three hundred.”

He’d suggested to Arlo some special dishes that would utilize Freya’s unique talents as slaughterer in chief, some way of involving his wife in the party preparations, investing her in it. Arlo wanted to help.

“Naturally. How much?”

He lifted the receiver away from full contact with his ear, as though it were hot. There was a long silence, then Don got out his rarely seen personal debit card and, bravely, two digits at a time, read the long number.

Kate had two minutes remaining on her last exam, and was now checking for spelling errors. The light came in from the sports hall’s high windows.

She was almost sad they were over. There was something enjoyable about the tarot of turning over an exam paper: a whole gymnasium full of people reading their fortunes. Kate had hit her specialist subjects on both sections, first the French Revolution, then German Resistance, allowing her to helicopter in an aside about reweighing contemporary German guilt.

She found no spelling mistakes.

Outside the hall, she stood at the top of the stairs that led down to the parking lot, letting other students stream past her. Geraint was standing at the bottom holding six balloons, red, yellow, green, two of each. Since having his final geography exam three days previously, he’d had time to get his first decent burn of the summer and looked good.

She skipped down the steps and the six colored balloons jostled and squeaked above him as they kissed.

“How’d it go?”

“I destroyed it,” she said.

He smiled and admired her and she imagined the balloons, carried by the wind, slowly lifting him out of the lot.

There was someone calling her name. She looked around and saw Patrick standing in one of the empty diagonal bays beside a bright new Mini Cooper. It had an advert for John Burn’s Gym on the driver’s door and, on the hood, Walkabout Bar. He waved a big, two-armed wave.

They sat on the flood barrier eating North Poles with chocolate sauce that Patrick had bought for them. Kate was in the middle. Patrick wore a white shirt with red pinstripes that was only on its first or second outing, judging by its stiffness.

“So where do you live, Pat?” she said.

“Right on the seafront. I can pretty much swim to my door.” He seemed pleased, and sucked on the little red spoon.

“Is that your way of saying that you’re homeless?” she said.

“You can see my house from here,” he said, and pointed along the cycle path.

“You live in the little shed where they keep the pitch-and-putt clubs? You’ve done well.”

Patrick laughed. “And this,” he said, pointing up and down the coastal path, “is my commute. You’re speaking to Mumbles Pier’s most senior croupier! You two should come and redeem a free game of Bowlingo.”

“Thanks, we’ll definitely do that,” Geraint said, then, leaning forward to make purposeful eye contact with Patrick, “Do you mind if I ask you something?”

• • •

As they drove to Kit Lintel’s house in Llanmadoc, Geraint could not stop talking about the community. Despite the fact that Patrick’s account of life there had included choice phrases such as “the longest winter of my life” and “the deceit of kinship,” this had only succeeded in piquing Geraint’s interest. Kate tried to explain to him that the reason Patrick had seemed so contented now was that he had finally escaped the community. Geraint did not buy it.

Kit’s parents’ cottage overlooked the salt marsh. He had a big garden with a swing. Geraint had suggested that to celebrate the end of their exams they should do something different. As Kit represented the entirety of their college’s alternative scene, he had been chosen.

Kit brought a cassoulet pot out onto the dining table. His black hair had an ambition to become dreadlocks but currently resembled a bird-eating spider clambering out of a nest. The smell was rank, like old flannels, and it stuck in the back of their throats. The mushrooms looked absurdly phallic, twenty severed dicks sliding around in the bottom of the pan. Geraint smiled nervously as he poured the dishwaterish liquid into three mugs. She smelt hers and wrinkled her nose. Kit held his mug out for clinking.

Geraint downed his and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Kit did the same and picked a slimy whole mushroom out of the bottom of the pan, simulated oral, then chewed it. Kate mimed sipping hers but didn’t open her mouth. She had no need for mind-expanding drugs. Her mind was at its perfect width and depth.

“Mine’s too hot,” she said, and she got up to go to the sink. She ran the tap and held her finger under it. With the other hand she discreetly poured hers away, then half filled it with water.

She turned back to the boys and made a show of tasting for temperature.

“Better,” she said, then necked it.

When it got dark, the moon was out and bright enough to see by as they walked down to the estuary’s salt marsh, which Kit said was a guarantee of sensual overload, containing every kind of spongy texture, from foam to blow-up mattress to stress-relief toy. They walked across it, wrapped up warm but barefoot, leaving their footprints in the goo. Kate hammed it up, twirling her arms around, looking up at the sky—“I can see, like, all these dudes playing guitar solos”—and pretty quickly they were calling the moon a paracetamol, a glass of milk, a showerhead raining stars, a Nazi prison searchlight (“Don’t dark me out, Kate, please …”), and Geraint announced that paddling through a shallow sandy stream was “just about the fucking greatest thing of all time,” and Kate watched Kit do graceless roly-polies and she quite enjoyed herself — the feeling of a secret separateness — and she and Geraint held hands and laughed and he asked, “Are you laughing at what I’m laughing at?” and Kit had to sit down for a while, and they asked him if he was okay, and he said, “Give me a minute,” and then later decided he had to go inside and listen to Greek myths on cassette, read by Stephen Fry, which left the two survivors sitting on the circular bench that went round the ash tree in Kit’s garden, and he said, “I love you, Kate,” and she didn’t feel the need to respond.

Back in the house, they found Kit Lintel pouring orange juice into Kit Lintel’s father’s laptop.

“I feel fantastic,” he said.

A day later, they were lying under the duvet in the lower bunk bed. Kate was wearing his tartan pajamas. Geraint was naked and only now coming down.

“Do you think we’ll stay together when you’re at university?”

She was on her back; he was on his side.

“Of course,” she said. “When we go to university!”

Everyone spends their lives with everyone else, philosophically speaking, if we’re to think of human consciousness as a permeable membrane and time as a concertina’d illusion.

“I’ll probably go through Clearing. I don’t want to lose you.”

“You won’t lose me.”

“I feel sick, I’ve never felt like this,” he said, and he sucked his lips in.

“Aw, sweetie.”

Geraint, I liked you better when you were a meathead.

His skin was clearing up now that he ate what she ate. She missed the inflamed pores that ran round his neck.

“I’ve never felt like this either,” she said.

“You know, I really want to see the community. I feel like I’m ready.”

He’d stopped calling it The Rave House or The Commune.

“I just want to see where you come from,” he said. “Who you are.”

“It’s not exciting.”

I want to be able to leave you without feeling bad about it.

“I don’t care whether it’s exciting. It’s a part of you. That’s why. I want to see your origins. Meet your favorite goat. Bellamy?”

“That’s sweet,” she said.

Then he leaned over and gently — lethally — kissed her on the forehead.

I only came here because I wanted to do well in my exams. I am only with you because you seemed different from what I was used to. I will leave Wales as soon as I can. I will have written the letter breaking up with you before my first day on campus. I will walk straight to the mailbox in the autumnal sunshine in Cambridge/Edinburgh or, at a very outside chance, Leeds, and I will never think of you again.