Wild Abandon

6. PREPARATIONS

Click.

Don stood in front of the charge controller, staring.

Click. A counter read 459.

He had already checked every room in the big house, the workshop, pottery shed, the barn, and the dome. He had interrogated a number of day visitors and cross-questioned Marina about rumors of an undeclared printer.

Click. 458. This number showed how charged the battery was, 500 being full and 000, empty. Don had set the controller so that if the reading ever dipped below 450, the whole community’s power would cut out. This had not made him popular. Publicly, he said it was a necessary restriction, to maintain the battery’s life span. Privately, he felt the community had become too easygoing. Since the storm, a month ago now, when they had tasted limitless electricity, everyone was struggling to embrace a more careful lifestyle. Don wanted the community to be streamlined, in time for the party. He didn’t like the way Varghese, who was working hard at promoting the event, kept calling it a “blowout.”

Click. 457.

He was becoming emotionally linked to the charge controller. To him, each click sounded reproachful: the noise people make in slow-moving post office lines.

Click.

Between the charge controller and the party preparations, whole days could go past without him having to think deeply about his family. That left only the nights, stretching out limitlessly, with Don finding books that used to guarantee him sleep in under a chapter now seeming, if not exactly riveting, then at least backlit and lightweight.

Click.

The only community members whose electricity usage Don had not yet accounted for were Isaac and Albert. The community had no official term dates, especially now that there were only two students, so it was generally agreed that whenever the microclimate served up a stretch of genuine warm weather, the student body could make the most of it. Since the start of the “holidays,” he had only seen glimpses of his son, walking across the yard holding something unnerving like a screwdriver or the Yellow Pages.

Click.

Don shook his head and went outside. He decided to do a lap of the house, which is when he saw a black extension cable snaking from the kitchen’s back window, down through the garden. Running now, he tracked it past the fire pit and into the musty dark beneath the Douglas firs as it connected with a chain of linked five-plug adaptors. Don slowed as he approached a clearing where there was an old, overstuffed armchair, one that had been in the bottom of the garden for years, rotted down to its bones. It looked like a seat that someone had died in, which was clearly the look that Albert, who was in it, was going for. Don had assumed his son’s uncleanliness had plateaued, but now, perhaps slightly for the camera, he saw this was not true. With dirt-mascara and his hands gloved with mud, he looked like he was presenting an episode of Tales from the Crypt. He didn’t see Don.

“Hit it, Eyes,” Albert said.

The chain of plug adaptors led toward a camera — Varghese’s camera — on a tripod, facing Albert, and to the Korg Trinity keyboard belonging to Isaac’s mother lying on the ground, off to one side. Isaac was sitting cross-legged in front of it, lowering his finger onto a single key. A supernatural wind, the creak of a ghost ship.

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

Which is when Don stepped in front of the camera.

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

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

“It’s not an interest.”

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

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

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

“Okay, thanks but no.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Albert shook his head.

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

“Why are you telling me this?”

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

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

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

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

“You were eleven?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh my God, Dad.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is that it? Can I go?”

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

“I’m not.”

“You may not know it, but you are.”

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

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

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

“You’re still eleven.”

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

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

Albert brightened up. “Really?”

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

“Okay good, I will.”

He hugged his father, the power cables between them.

“Now tell me. How’s your mother?”

“I don’t know. She’s okay, I think.”

“I miss her. Does she know that?”

His father was getting upset.

“She knows.”

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

Albert looked around to see if they were being watched.