Wild Abandon

2. A PARTIAL HISTORY

1989

It was a warm September morning, her second day on campus, and Freya was on a bench outside Norwich University’s flagship Olympic pool, wearing a jumper with two wet patches on the chest. This was when Don first saw her. A week later he had taken up swimming and was half a length behind her in the medium lane. He had goggles and, underwater, saw her body magnified. She was so lithe as to be, Don later claimed, “indistinguishable from the water she passed through.” During his seventh length, he stroked her arm as she went by. In his eighteenth length, she kicked him in the thigh with a painted toenail, almost drawing blood, though she has no recollection of this.

He waited at the shallow end, expecting her to apologize. She did ten lengths, swimming clockwise, tapping the edge of the pool next to where Don stood. She changed to butterfly and did five more. He used his locker key and, underwater, sawed at the cut on his leg a little, to make it look worse. Then he stood in the middle of the lane, his back to the shallow-end wall, so she wouldn’t be able to turn. She was doing the breaststroke toward him, and he watched her head repeatedly pop out of the water, “the dripping oval of her mouth,” as he told it, “dark and inhabitable.”

She slowed as she came near, a look of recognition, or swallowed water, on her face. Without goggles she couldn’t have seen much through the chlorine. Then she slid under the tricolor floats into the fast lane, tuck-turned, and slithered away.

Freya first met Janet when they lived opposite each other in the same dorm. They were a year older than the rest of their corridor, so felt superior and wise, the same way a nine-and-a-half-year-old feels about a nine-year-old. They could think of nothing more pleasurable than sitting at the edge of the Union Square, backs to the Student Advice Centre, judging their peers. The square was shaped a bit like an amphitheater: stepped seating on three sides, and a lower area in the middle that was, in effect, a stage. Janet and Freya observed the way freshers’ postures changed as they approached the limelight as though getting into character; the uncasual casualness of onstage Frisbee and Hacky Sack; the theory that people semiconsciously positioned themselves according to their looks: munters on the moldy paving near the dining hall exhaust vent versus hotties having their literal time in the sun, smoldering away in the suntrap southeast quadrant.

Although Don had always felt that it was his unique powers of underwater seduction that had won Freya over, the truth was that she and Janet had been watching him. Don was in the year above them. He had a very part-time job (Wednesday afternoons, fortnightly) delivering the student newspaper, Off Beat. There were four newspaper dispensers in the corners of the square. On a number of occasions, Freya and Janet sat with cups of tea and a slice of banana bread watching the gloveless machismo with which he tore off the plastic ties on each stack. He was chubbier then, pre-beard, with thick, soft arms and a shallow forelock that dangled three fishing lines into the center of his forehead. The student population was genuinely excited by the prospect of a new issue of Off Beat—it had won awards — so as soon as he filled a dispenser, nearby first-years would scurry across to grab a fresh one, giving Don the air, which he clearly enjoyed, of a zookeeper at feeding time. He used a six-wheeled sack trolley and deliberately, they decided, carried way more at one time than seemed practical, even when going up steps. He used a red Ford van, one of the few vehicles allowed onto pedestrianized areas of campus, which he drove with an arm resting on the rolled-down window, parking, they again observed, in deliberately provocative positions, on crosshatched markings, in front of fire exits, all to signal his maverick approach.

Although he was ridiculous, there was also something likable about him, and Janet knew Freya was keen when she described his bum as looking “like an alarm bell.” Janet encouraged her to make the first move.

On a day that felt, to Don, no different from any other, since he was unaware of the mechanisms at work, Freya waited for him outside the changing rooms. She asked him if he’d like to sit with her and, in the café that overlooked the climbing wall, they shared chips with cheap mayonnaise. He admired her chlorine-burnt eyes.

“I like how hungry I feel after swimming,” she said.

“We have such agency when we’re hungry,” he said.

There was the sound of a free-climber hitting the crash mat.

“Before we eat,” he said, raising one fist into the sky, “we are revolutionaries. Afterward, bureaucrats.”

She picked up a chip and dunked it in the gunk.

The next time he saw her in the pool she was wearing goggles. Underwater, she could see the reason he always let her get out of the pool first: his hydrodynamic spoiler, an inverted fin, bulging from his shorts. When she went to the changing rooms, he stayed in the pool to swim it off, which took two and a half lengths. She was waiting for him in the intermediary foot-washing room with indentations on her forehead from where the goggles had been too tight. The smell of chlorine would always remind them of their first kiss.

After a fortnight, they consummated their relationship in the family changing room. In recent renditions of the story, Don toyed with an awkward joke about how the family changing room should be renamed the “changing the family” room because it marked the reinvention of established ideas of family, but he hadn’t worked out quite how to make it funny yet.

By the end of the second term, Freya and Don spent most of their time in her bedroom enjoying the fact that, almost by accident, they had swimmers’ physiques. The remaining time was spent with Janet, who was ruthless on enforcing a ban on canoodling in her company and, if she caught them at it, was known to clap loudly and say hey in the manner of someone shooing a dog away from a picnic.

Nineteen eighty-nine was a good, or at least action-packed year, to be at a left-leaning university. In one corner of the Union Square there was a well-meaning but badly made Tiananmen Square memorial: a life-size sculpture of the “Unknown Rebel,” the man who, with shopping bags in each hand, halted a column of Type 59 tanks. That the memorial was never made to wear a traffic cone showed the seriousness among the student body. In other news, Thatcher was starting to look unhinged; Black Monday revealed the vulnerability of the stock markets; the Happy Mondays revealed the quality of drugs from the continent. It was at a One Berlin — themed squat party in a derelict nursing home that they first discussed the idea of communal living. Along the corridor they could hear the cracking sound of a thin wall giving way as two adjacent bedrooms, east and west, were “unified” with the blunt end of a fire extinguisher. In the hallway there were burnouts jousting in NHS wheelchairs in the name of anticapitalism.

After the party they went back to Janet’s and sat on her mattress drinking West Country cider. Freya said something about how, in their halls of residence, with the tiny shared kitchen, the two unisex shower cubicles, and the papery walls, weren’t they already a kind of commune? And was it just a rumor that the design of the hall was based on a low-security Swedish prison? And the way all students wore the same clothes! They were a cult! Don was not yet known for his charismatic public speaking, but with a skinful of opaque cider he started to build a reputation. Janet and Freya sat on the bed on either side of him, feeling the mattress shift as he gestured and worked up a rhythm.

“All that hippie bullshit,” Don said, starting boldly, though giving the impression that he was not sure how the sentence would proceed, “just about ruined the project, just about sabotaged the whole idea, so they could spend a few years getting idealism out of their systems, then go succeed in their start-up businesses, running fucking plant nurseries and art supplies shops, and referring back to the wild years they spent trying to reinvent society, man [he made the peace sign, then flipped it round to a V] — telling their friends and children ‘imagine our naïveté’ and ‘if me-then could see me-now’—and the truth is, they were never going to get it right the first time, they were never going to just think up a new way of living, a new basis for society, and carry it out successfully, no chance, so you can’t call the hippie movement a failure — you can call them weaklings—but we should never forget it was just the first attempt, and it was decent, they should have kept going but the whole thing got dismissed as a fad, as educated druggies patting themselves on the back, as part of fashion, part of the sixties, because — and this is the real fuck-up — they let it get smeared with the sexual revolution, which has nothing to do with new structures for living.”

“You’re that bloke,” Janet had said, sipping from her plastic cup. “My brother warned me you’d be at university.”

Freya remembered noticing that after Don had said his bit he kept nodding, as though his sentence continued on, unheard, in his head. He strongly agreed with himself.

In their second year, all three of them moved off campus into a mid-terrace place on Maud Street, of which Patrick Kinwood was the private landlord. Janet was only willing to live with the couple on the agreement that they avoid all but the most cursory demonstrations of physical affections within her sight or earshot, saving it for the campus darkroom and swimming-pool changing rooms. This was perhaps one reason why Janet welcomed their landlord dropping by: he punctured the atmosphere of covert groping.

With his rental properties, tinted glasses, coke problem, and loneliness, Patrick reinforced all they hoped was true about someone made wealthy by the greeting card industry. “He signals the impending collapse of consumerism,” Don said, and nicknamed him “the canary in the coal mine.” Patrick supported Norwich City Football Club, the Canaries, who played in yellow and green, and sometimes, when drunk, he was known to shout “I’m canary till I die,” and this pleased Don. It was obvious when Patrick had enjoyed an excessive weekend because he would turn up on their doorstep on Monday holding a toolbox, ready to work through his self-loathing with DIY. Their house had a lot of work done that summer.

Don, meanwhile, was the tenant who told his landlord, “Property is theft.” It helped that Patrick was, at that time, mostly in love with Janet and would stop mid-sentence if she walked across the lounge in her towel. After a couple of months of getting to know Patrick, Don stopped calling him “the canary.” It had become difficult to see him as merely a representation of a particular worldview. Eventually there came a point when they were not freaked out to find their landlord — without the statutory twenty-four hours’ notice — waiting on their sofa for them to get back from seminars. It helped that the house was falling apart so there were always new reasons for him to turn up in grimy joggers. Being fifteen years their elder, but thinking of himself as broadly part of their generation, he made a point of not commenting on the state of the flat, red wine on the walls, a webbed crack in the skylight, two missing banisters.

When Janet asked if she could redecorate her room — three walls white, one eggplant — Patrick said he would help her. He paid for paint, rollers, brushes, dust sheets, and they spent days together in a poorly ventilated room, giddy from vapor. Patrick’s oft-proclaimed love for women in work clothes stemmed from Janet in a paint-spattered Radio 1 Roadshow T-shirt. Don enjoyed reminding Patrick of this: “You thought it was chemical attraction; she thought it was paint fumes.” Don and Patrick built their relationship on warmly assassinating each other’s characters. “God bless you, Don, safety valve of Middle England’s discontent.” It was only much later, while building the community, that he and Don, keeping their style of direct communication, slowly lost the buffer of goodwill.

After graduating, Freya, Don, and Janet moved to London, where the early 1990s recession had bedded in. Although residential rent was still high in central London, they’d been advised to look into office space. Don bought a secondhand suit and met the real estate agent, Ash, a broad Australian with a sun-ripened face and almost no lips, to look at a dirt-cheap block in North Lambeth. They shook hands and kept shaking as they walked. The entranceway was entirely mirrored, so that in all directions Don saw himself multiplied: an army of smartly dressed versions of himself shaking hands with an army of real estate agents forever. Don sometimes said it was the horror of this image from which the community was born.

The agent opened two locks and pushed through into a lightless space, unfastening and throwing up the industrial metal shutters that covered each window. The shutters made a sound like a train passing. Also, trains passed. The space was a huge, single white room, the floor covered with the thinnest blue office carpet, dusty windows running the length of two sides. They were overlooked all around by other offices, which were empty. The flat tar roof, a four-story climb up a New York — style fire escape, had a view as far as Crystal Palace in the southeast, and to the north they could make out a lack of buildings that, it took them some time to realize, was the river.

Once they’d moved in, they discovered that, each morning, the smell of burnt bacon fat pumped out of a nearby ventilation pipe and that huge rats patrolled the bins in the quadrangles between the surrounding buildings.

They built their own walls using office partitions and shelving, piles of books, shoe boxes, wardrobes, dressers, and cinder blocks from a Dumpster down the road. Janet hung curtains and pashminas as doorways. Sound traveled. She invested in musician’s earplugs rather than listen to her housemates’ idea of silent sex. The corner by the fire exit became the kitchen, with knee-high gas canisters and a two-ring camping stove on a school desk. They found a still-functioning industrial contact grill (one ribbed surface, one flat) out the back of the café opposite. It produced an unsettling plastic smell but was otherwise perfect.

Don managed to get a job that related to his film studies degree, working at the twenty-four-screen Elephant & Castle UCI. He squeezed out bags of nacho cheese, grease-sprayed the hot dogs and, best of all, emptied bladders of salsa that looked like liposuction fat. Popcorn dust clogged his sinuses.

Each screening had to be checked every half an hour to make sure nobody was smoking or having full intercourse in the deluxe seats. He never saw whole films, just glimpses as he moved from screen to screen: a man being tortured with a vise, a boy hugging a dog, animated clocks dancing, a male nurse talking about love, a series of massive explosions, snow on a lake, blood on bedsheets, a gondola trip … and so on, for twenty-four screens. His dissertation had been called “Collage and Sleep in Late European Cinema” and it was in this essay that Don had first put forward the idea that it was valuable to think of life as a film. Not that the individual was the star and there were cameras watching, but that our eyes and ears were a camera that was always recording. We had to make decisions about what our lives — a live broadcast, one-shot, uneditable film — were going to be about. In Don’s life-film, there was no sound track. He preferred the ambiguity of silence, he said. This was just one justification, of many, for why Don could not enjoy music.

He became irritatingly discerning, saying he would not consume toxic food or toxic culture, saying that nacho sauce, Lethal Weapon 3, and Margaret Thatcher all spawned from the same toothless maw. The UCI radicalized him. He knew by heart the trailers for A Few Good Men, Batman Returns, Basic Instinct, and Aladdin. He knew the taglines from numerous high-end adverts: Tanqueray, Omega, Bosch. When he was made redundant, he said this to his boss:

“Your mind — it is the center of your life. Everything you see and hear and feel. How would you know if someone stole your mind?”

It was from the trailer to Total Recall.

Freya worked in the admissions department of the School of Oriental and African Studies. Her two colleagues were married to each other and the office sometimes felt like an extension of their bedroom, with pet names and passive-aggressive whispering. The man was an alcoholic; five or six times a day they’d hear the conspicuous hiss of a can of Holsten Pils spitting froth onto the underside of his desk. It was never mentioned, though at the end of each workday he had the cans lined up by his feet. As far as Freya could tell, it had got to the point in their marriage when it was easier for his wife to pretend that the regular kerrrr-chisss sound was a normal part of the administrative bustle: keystrokes, photocopying, continental lager. As a way to feel better about her job, Freya stole and cycled home so much good-quality stationery that she started to get a backache. The notepads and rollerball pens would become key tools in planning the community.

Meanwhile, Janet worked in a vintage clothes warehouse. Campaigners used to come in and slash the furs. Addicts used to steal novelty ties from the one-pound bin. The clothes arrived in huge, tightly wrapped bales, which, once cut, flopped out, trebling in size: marshes of dead people’s dirty glad rags. There was no heating because heating was pointless in a space that size, so Janet had a permanent dust cough and sniffles and was eventually diagnosed with bronchitis.

This said, the three of them were reasonably happy: Freya and Janet bonded by jobs they despised while Don, newly jobless, was the stay-at-home housewife, cleaning and cooking. Then Patrick arrived. The recession had hit the rental market and he’d had to sell off a property. They didn’t find out until later that the one he sold was the one he had been living in. He was homeless. They thought he would only stay for the weekend, but on Monday evening Janet and Freya came home from work to find he had laid out a bribe: two dozen oysters and a bottle of champagne. Since he’d quit cocaine, he had taken up eating. As Janet frowned and prodded at one of the frilled, quasi-testicular sacs, Patrick realized that oysters were no guarantee of seduction. Don, on the other hand, dove right in.

During those first two weeks, Patrick made himself indispensable, doing practical things like building plasterboard walls, which, Don claimed, were mainly motivated by his desire to achieve privacy with Janet. Then Freya got made redundant too and Patrick offered to cover the shortfall in rent, at which point he became permanent. While Janet went to work, the three of them explored free London: morning swims in Hampstead mixed-sex pond, lunch from the Hare Krishnas, museums in the afternoon. Each night, when Janet was at her most tired and susceptible, Patrick would show her his leather-bound notebook full of primitive sums proving that, with a mixture of mild benefit fraud and some extra roommates to lower costs, Janet could quit her job and join them in enjoying the summer of the slump. One glorious evening, when she could feel a new chest infection brewing, Janet caved.

They brought in an old university friend, Li, who was clever, lonely, and had a nose bridge so slight she had to tie on her glasses. Don suggested they invite Ash — the real estate agent — by handwritten letter because, as Don wrote, “I thought I saw something in you that was longing for the other,” but they got no reply. They brought in Perry, a skinny would-be scriptwriter who built himself an actual garden shed in one corner of the room for live/work. There was Chris, who was repetitive but useful, an eco-carpenter in the days when eco-something didn’t just mean he had once climbed a tree. There was Alana, who “disliked bread” and brought with her a hypoallergenic kitten. There was Arlo Mela, a young Welsh-Sardinian sous-chef who worked so many hours at Le Gavroche that they were never sure if he slept in his bed or just muddled the duvet for effect. With each new recruit, they rearranged the walls to make new bedrooms. The rent dropped. They shared food. Sunday lunches were gourmet — oysters not unusual — with above-the-rooftop views.

By the end of the summer, the recession began to subside. On the roof of a neighboring office, a crane appeared. Drunk, one Sunday, watched by all his housemates, Don decided to leap across the small gap between the roofs and climb it. At the top, by the driver’s seat, he found bottles of Celtic Spring mineral water, filled with piss in different shades of dehydration. He wanted to yell, “The heart of the capitalist dream,” but didn’t. Instead he “noticed his desire” to. At that time, he was into noticing his emotions.

By autumn, the surrounding office blocks were nearly full: ergonomic shoemakers, licensed taxis, and a life-science industry magazine called Research? Research! They had grown too used to feeling that the building was their own, and their neighbors, people with real jobs, didn’t like walking past on a lunch break and seeing shutters rattle up on a tableau of dropouts in bathrobes. One morning, Ash turned up with two big blokes from the council.

After they got served their month’s notice, Don made one of his speeches. Except at that point he didn’t make speeches, so it just seemed impromptu and genuine. He said they had two choices: either return to the familiar, piss-drinking drudge of city life or run with the summer’s energy, the shared skills, the collective joblessness, their youngness, and try a different life, in the countryside. That’s all he called it. The countryside. “The city will still be here, waiting to eat us up, the moment we want to come back.”

This speech was not a surprise to Freya. She and Don had already talked at length about it — had even discussed how best to pitch it to their housemates and how best to hide it from Alana, whom no one liked. But Freya played along, pretending to be struck, right then, by the idea’s ripeness.

“I’m ready,” she said, standing up. “Who else is with us?”

Out of seven of them, only Arlo stayed seated. A few weeks later, they heard he’d won a scholarship to work as a pâtissier in New York. Not only that but it was with his culinary hero, a legendary Austrian chef with an empire of restaurants and his own range of implements, including a signature veal mallet.

They spent the next couple of weeks doing road trips in two cars — one Chris’s, the other Li’s — searching for an appropriate property. They went to Yorkshire, Northumberland, Dumfriesshire, Mid Wales, North Wales, South Wales — anywhere that was cheap. In North Gower they found a building that was previously a parish school, a single classroom its best feature, and a run-down cottage attached. It sat on unpromising-looking farmland on the gloomy west side of The Bulwark with an almost-fantastic view of Rhossili beach if it weren’t for the downs in the way. But it was undeniably cheap, and the farmer who was selling it, in a charming reverse of their other experiences, did not hide his desperation to get rid of it. He said: “I’m desperate to get rid.” He had tremendous visible capillaries in his nose. His only attempt at spin was when he referred to the Gower peninsula’s “microclimate.”

After showing them the house, he walked with them to the top of The Bulwark, which rose up behind the farm. From there they could see north, the Loughor Estuary; west, Worm’s Head pointing out to the Irish Sea; south, the Bristol Channel and the cliffs of Devon beyond. To the east was Swansea and industry and that which they were trying to escape. For Don, to whom such things were important, a peninsula had the right implications: something that pushed out from the mainland, making an insular path into the unknown.

Patrick — now at the peak of his love for Janet — paid the deposit. They got a joint mortgage that named Patrick, Freya, Janet, Li, Perry, Chris, and Don as tenants-in-common, dividing up proportions of ownership, and therefore of repayment, according to what each person could afford. At the same time, Patrick had a solicitor draw up a declaration of trust that, in an act of clear distrust, committed each person to pay a little each month, beyond their share of the mortgage, to reimburse his deposit. He was happy to see his experience as a landowner coming in useful and he set up a sinking fund and bought comprehensive insurance. In October they moved in, when the only space with a fully functioning roof was the schoolroom, so that’s where they slept. It was lucky that London had got them used to living in close quarters. They brought their gas stoves and favored slow-cooked stews and curries because they radiated more heat into the room. They had not expected snow on the beach by Christmas.

During that first winter, they worked on pinning down the project’s details, from breeds of unusual vegetable the microclimate would support — breadnut, gumbo, black salsify — to the stepped permaculture garden; the badminton green; an Aylesbury drake and six ducks; the yurt village; a Gloucester Old Spot pig; radicchio, garbanzo, cowpea; their right to a lobster pot at Broughton; and fully off-grid power: hydro, solar, wind, and car batteries concealed in beehives.

By spring, they’d lost two members: Li, who said the damp was making her ill, and Perry the scriptwriter, who’d gone to live with his parents and write a feature-length script about life in a commune. With seven people living in one room, privacy was hard to find. Everyone knew how Patrick felt about Janet and they watched to see if she would capitulate. With no TV, they became the soap opera.

Their numbers swelled as the weather got better, and under Chris’s supervision they got to work on repairing the house and outbuildings. The stairs were rotted in a slapstick way and they used a wood-fired, steam-powered log saw, Chris’s pride and joy, to cut planks. The gas-fed Rayburn oven, which they had assumed was ruined, awoke from hibernation, a roar of flames in its stomach. The house and gardens were in such a state that hour by hour the impact was dramatic. After a day with scythes and machetes, clearing brush, nettles, brambles, and weeds, they could celebrate around a victory bonfire. The whole first year, in fact, was characterized by this sensation of making big steps.

Official meetings were, and remained, on Thursday mornings, at first weekly and later fortnightly. They were chaired by a different member each time until they realized it was easier to allow Don to be permanent chair than it was to try to control his contributions. One of his earliest suggestions was to change the name of the farm to Welsh. Don expressed his support of the Meibion Glyndwr movement — a then still-active group who had been firebombing English-owned vacation homes on Anglesey and the Llyn peninsula. He said the Anglophone destruction of Welsh culture was unforgivable. To watch Don pronounce Meibion Glyndwr was to see a man battle his own genetics.

“Good on ’em, I say,” said Don, whose family was English, but who had a dram of Scots blood somewhere way back in his ancestry.

“I’m sure they’re relieved to have your support,” said Patrick, who was, with his Welsh mother, the only one among them who could claim to be returning to the motherland.

They bought an English — Welsh dictionary and set about trying to mash together the two words that best captured their geographical location, since Welsh house names tended to be purely descriptive: “house on triangular piece of land,” for instance. There followed a fortnight of grueling discussion, long lists, short lists, blind voting, and, each day, the sound of people absently repeating different combinations of words—Ty Nant, Cwm Mawr, Trem Coed, Treffoel, Dolclogwyn—to gauge how they felt in the mouth.

Blaen meant “extremity” and “beginning,” both of which, Don felt, said something about their reasons for being there. It also referred to a place at the head of a valley. They were at the side of an almost-valley. And Llyn, meaning “lake” or “pool,” referenced the swimmable section of river in the woods. All that first winter they had talked about how they would bathe and picnic there, in much the same way that people buying more suburban homes visualize barbecues they will never have. Don liked the name for its challenging consonant and forbidding stand-alone extra vowel. Blaen-y-Llyn was a mark of their early commitment to the language and would subsequently be a reminder that some of the grown-ups never moved beyond a toddler’s conversational Welsh.

The first animal they bought was a Gloucester Old Spot called Hog. They gave him that name to avoid too strong an emotional attachment, since they planned to fatten and kill him. Hog had different ideas, making himself indispensable by becoming the community’s premier cultivator of previously unworkable scrubland; pretty much the entirety of what was now the market garden was first dug up, and shat on, by him. Only when there was no more uncultivated land left for Herzog (as Don took to calling him) did they decide to eat him. Don picked the short straw to see who would wield the.22 rifle they’d borrowed from a neighboring farm.

The night before the slaughter, while julienning spring onions, he took the lid off his trigger finger. Much bleeding and, some people felt, affected swearing followed. Hamming it up, appropriately. He said he was gutted but it compromised his marksmanship, though he was still happy to supervise. Another round of straws was pulled.

Werner was eating scraps from a bucket when Freya shot him in the brain. Don, trying to help, fell to his knees and pinned the pig on its side, wrestling-style, while she cut the artery in its neck. Then, as research had said it would, the pig appeared to come back to life, a nerve response causing the body to buck and the legs to kick. Werner was big, bigger than the man pinning him down, and as Don scrabbled to get up, he took a hoof to the ribs.

For six days, Don walked slowly up and down steps and made elongated sighing noises when getting in and out of chairs. He also took any opportunity to mythologize his wife’s role: her calm manner, perfect aim, but underlying humanity. As a result, it was suggested that Freya be the first person in the community to apply for a firearms license, and once she had that, her fate was sealed. She was the executioner. Don was never asked to help again, but still, he ate bacon with an air of moral immunity.

After two years, Arlo came back. So the story goes, the legendary Austrian chef had visited the kitchen to decide who of the trainees to keep on full-time. He had complimented Arlo, who, at the end of a long shift, held back tears of awed happiness, flushed red from head to toe, and felt his skin grow clammy. They shook hands. The next day the message was passed back that Arlo “did not have the palms” for pastry.

Nobody has ever found out where Arlo went for the intervening years. He arrived on New Year’s Day, walking up the frozen lane with a roll of Japanese knives under his arm instead of a sleeping bag. By then he had the kind of beard that was unacceptable in a professional kitchen. He had no gloves and his hands were blue.

When the big house was finally habitable, they had a grand-opening party. Don chose this day to announce that Freya was twelve weeks pregnant. This boosted morale, and kick-started new projects. Don, Patrick, and Janet set to work on building the workshop. Chris, Arlo, and Freya oversaw the creation of a market garden and finally bought books on permaculture.

Twenty-six weeks later, Freya staggered into the schoolroom, sumo-stance, hair tied back, breathing like a weight lifter, trailed by a midwife and her trainee in squared-off navy pinafores. Kate Bronwyn Riley (or Bronwyn Kate Riley, as she would have been called, had Don got his way) was twelve days early. When Don had left that morning — to collect a trunkload of baby clothes, books, toys, and a cot from a like-minded community in Somerset — he kissed Freya and whispered into her belly button: “Don’t even think about it.”

He was lucky that the news got through to him at all. In Somerset, the phone rang in the Mongolian-style meetinghouse and, by chance, he was nearby. Speeding back through narrow lanes, he beeped his horn at blind bends, biting his tongue, onto the motorway, dominating the fast lane, his aura of necessity, sweeping cars aside with a flash of his headlights. A part of him was relieved that his role in the birth was so clearly defined. All you have to do is go as fast as you can. And he secretly hoped to hear the newborn wail of a police siren behind him, to be pulled over, to speak to the officer in candid terms, share a desperate play on words—“I’m sorry I broke the speed limit, but my wife’s water just broke”—and be back on the road with the officer’s best wishes, having crashed through the fourth wall between government and citizen. In truth, the race was all but over by the time he crossed the Severn bridge, but they had no way of letting him know, so he powered onward, kept the split-screen narrative going, drawing parallels between the engine’s straining, pushing, sweating beneath the hood, and his wife — as he visualized her — screaming: “Where the fuck is Don? I need him here now!”

When his car came skidding into the yard it was dark, and entering the hall he knew by Patrick’s hair, which was swept across unevenly in the manner of someone who has been involved in something major, that he had missed it. Freya and Kate were both asleep and Don had to accept that his biggest role in proceedings would be to feed the placenta to the goats. He listened to them chew.

Patrick had been in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time and had tried his best to help Freya, even — in a moment of uncharacteristic boldness — nodding when she asked him if he wanted to cut the umbilical cord. He can remember its gristly texture, the resistance first, then the give. If he had moments of feeling unsure about his place in the community, of whether he was there for the right reasons, it was then that he felt tied in.