Wild Abandon

5. OUTAGE

The schoolroom windows rattled as the sleet came in slantways. Everyone was standing around the charge controller, watching the hydro and wind needles creep up. The newest wwoofers, four Dutchmen on an alternative stag party, had their arms round one another’s shoulders in the manner of Eurovision contestants awaiting their scores. Early that morning, Arlo had walked through the community beneath paunchy clouds, cranking the windup radio, announcing a storm warning: “Severe weather for Wales and west!”

“Dad, is it dumping yet?” Albert asked.

Don peered at the dials. The wind played a minor chord across the chimney.

“Alright,” Don said. “It’s dumping.”

That was the signal. The community set to work. There was a moral responsibility to use electrical goods. To avoid the excess energy burning out the circuitry, they needed to plug in. It was wasteful for Albert not to turn on a hair dryer, play a CD of Harry Belafonte’s “Jump in the Line,” and film Isaac with his swishy blond hair, dancing in a wind tunnel. Clothes that had gone unwashed were washed, then dried in the microwave.

Don prowled. It disappointed him to know that so many of the people he trusted had secret pluggable devices in their rooms. In the kitchen, Arlo, with an electric whisk, made raspberry meringues and pushed carrots and ginger into the blender. On the table, an electric carver. In the pottery shed, Marina was filling the electric kiln with new work. On the bench next to her, a laptop he’d never seen before.

By dusk, everyone was gathered in the schoolroom, ballroom dancing. The music was loud enough to distort and it skipped each time Isaac ran past, arms out, pretending to be an airplane with one engine down due to bad weather. Marina was dancing with Arlo, with Albert on his shoulders, the stag partyers paired off in two couples, and the newlyweds spun in circles. Janet was away again with her boyfriend. Flashing fairy lights were wrapped around the two horizontal roof beams and Schubert’s “Kupelwieser Waltz” was on the record player. They danced and listened to the gap close between the lightning and its sound effect. Every now and then the windows blinked white and the room bleached. Don, watching from the doorway, felt that everyone was too pleased, too relieved — that this betrayed their true longings. He leaned against the door frame, watching them slowly turn, standing on one another’s toes, laughing it off, whispering little jokes, clinging to a world they claimed not to miss.

Don thought about the forthcoming party. Varghese was building online buzz by harnessing the already existing reputation of “The Rave House.” In the DogsOnAcid.com forum, he had posted “the tech spec” of the Funktion One sound system alongside a row of gurning animated emoticons. Don had told Varghese he was worried that the party was going to be too wasteful, and that it might not reflect the values of the community. Varghese had explained that with some of today’s young people there was a conflict between a party being overtly low impact and being authentically cool. It was either/or. Responsibility versus Freedom. But, Varghese said, by encouraging the young people to have the best night of their lives, Don could create a bond with the community that would, in time, develop into an interest in sustainable living. That was why it was vital to get them on results day. They would be at an apex of open-mindedness and ready to make lifelong emotional attachments. They would do most of the work themselves. All the community had to do was not get all heavy on the first date.

Varghese suggested Don think of sustainability as an embarrassing uncle who, although invited to the party, should be kept out of sight. Young people were attuned to being manipulated into thoughtful behavior, he said. Slam-dunk your green glass bottles here, dude! That wouldn’t do. A generator running on used vegetable oil and biodegradable cups and plates was about the limit of it.

Don sniffed. He watched the ballroom dancing and missed his daughter and wife. It was usually only at night, in his room, that he let himself feel what he was feeling now. He went into the hall. While putting on his coat, he could hear boots in the washing machine thumping like a heartbeat. In the scullery he grabbed a torch, then went out the back way into the weather. He heard the three-blade wind turbine going whup-whup-whup, its metal struts creaking.

Looking back from the bottom of the garden, he saw the house lit up, shapes passing the schoolroom windows, and the distant crescendos of swing jazz behind the big band of rain and wind. Ambient light poured out through all the piecemeal windows: bay, skylights, portholes, the stained glass at the top of the stairs — a testament to twenty years of cooperation, not a single vision but many visions patched together. It looked like the big house might explode, like it was molten in the center and getting hotter.

Varghese had told Don about a nightclub in Rotterdam that had a piezoelectric dance floor that harvested the energy given off by the stomping feet to power the lasers, which, in turn, promoted more ambitious dancing, and so on, until the whole club, Don presumed, got vaporized.

The first thing that came through the draft curtains of the roundhouse was a raised hand, followed by its owner, waltzing, partnerless, spinning through the room, dark spots specking the matting as drips fell off the hem of his coat. Don did a couple of turns and then stopped.

“Everyone’s pleased about the weather,” he said. “They’re dancing in the schoolroom. I thought you might like to join us.”

Freya was smiling, watching him from a stool next to the ex-milk-churn wood-burning stove, which was glowing orange at its edges. She was drying off — steam rising from her arms, her thighs, as though she were evaporating.

“You bring glamour wherever you go,” she said. “How are things?”

“Things are terrific,” he said, opening his eyes wide, starting to dance again. “And full of electrical appliances on standby.”

“Well, you might need to use them in a hurry,” she said.

“Exactly!”

She watched him slow down, stop, lower his hands. The wet had come through his boots and there were dashes of mud up his trousers.

“Why don’t you come up to the big house?” he said.

He waited for an answer, and when one didn’t come he turned and started looking around, first at Freya’s bed, the Celtic knot of dark hairs on her pillow, then at Albert’s quarter-circle of the room. His made-up bed was demarcated by the Japanese dressing screen patterned with clouds and non-Welsh dragons.

“I overheard Albert describe himself as being of no fixed abode,” Don said.

Freya watched him. Some thunder revved and white light flashed at the porthole window.

“I’ve been speaking to someone,” she said. “The headmaster at Bishopston Comp. He says there’s room for Albert to start school in September.”

Don turned to look at her. “You never mentioned that.”

“I’m mentioning it.”

“We need to discuss this.” He tugged up the thighs of his trousers and sat down on a stool opposite her. “I thought we agreed that learning should be child-led. Look at what Kate’s achieved. She’s way ahead of her peers.”

“It was different for her. Albert’s got no one to learn with. Besides, I worry that without contact with people his own age he’ll get too … strange.”

“Right now he’s ballroom dancing on the shoulders of an ex-professional chef. How will that go down in Bishopston Comprehensive?”

“All I’m saying is he might benefit from a teeny bit of peer pressure. He’ll make friends. He always does.”

“I’m sure he and the school psychiatrist will get on well.”

Don was a little pleased with that, she noticed. Her socks were drying on the wood-burner. She turned them and they sizzled like rashers of bacon.

“You know,” he said, “since Varghese has been handling our online presence, we’ve had loads of e-mails from teenagers as well as their parents, because the system they’re part of is failing them. By September, the community’ll be overrun by young people looking for a decent education. We’ll be wishing the little sods would leave us alone.” Don stopped speaking as the sky grumbled but no lightning came. He went on: “And what about the things school can’t teach Albert?”

“Like what?”

“Like a million things. Like how to build his own home, live with other people, grow his own food, kill his own food — now you’re gone, there’s nobody to pass on that knowledge. Another skill set slips between the generations.”

“Get someone trained up then. Train yourself up.”

She watched him. Don stared at the stove.

“You know I’m not cut out for that kind of thing.”

She opened her mouth with an impulse to say something cruel, but decided to let it go.

“Just for example, Arlo’s been looking forward to making this traditional Sardinian meal for the party,” he said. “He’s been going on about it—sanguinaccio! Blood soup, basically. But without you, we can’t do it.”

“Take the goat to an abattoir, Don. I don’t live at the community anymore. I’m not killing your animals for you.”

“No, of course,” he said, then stood up off the stool and started looking around again. “But it’s an example of how skills and traditions get lost over time.”

She breathed through her mouth. He examined the fanned, self-supporting pattern of the roof beams. Raising his arms to test one, he grunted as his feet came off the floor.

“But Freya, the thing is, the abattoir’s in Cardiff and the blood needs to be fresh that day. Arlo says it has to be straight outta de throat and onna de stove.”

“Tell him to cook a different recipe.”

“Have you ever met Arlo?” Don said, in a funny voice.

“Then do it yourself. Christ.”

“You know what I’m like,” he said.

You know what I’m like. That was it for Freya.

“I won’t let you put this on me. You do it. You should do it.” Her voice suddenly loud. “Then the skills and traditions won’t be lost, if you fucking do it.”

She breathed hard. Don had a dazed look on his face. She turned the socks again. This time they didn’t hiss. She felt the same impulse as before, but now gave in to it.

“I went to see Kate,” she said.

“What?”

“I went to see Kate, at her house.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? What’s the address?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What’s the street name?”

“I’ve forgotten.”

“She won’t answer my calls. I’d just like to know, for my own well-being, her postcode.”

She shook her head.

“I’m her father, Frey.”

As she opened the stove door, flames flared in the rush of oxygen. He walked a full loop round the edge of the rug.

“You’re just doing this to be cruel,” he said.

“You’re right,” she said.

“Okay, well, good then. Good. Now we’re getting somewhere.” He slapped his hand against the beam above his head. “And tell me — how else would you like me to suffer?”

Patrick watched the storm through the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran the length of Mumbles Pier Arcade. He was in his booth. The weather had kept away the regulars, leaving only Karl Orland, his ex-dealer and now occasional dinner companion, who sometimes dropped in at the end of Patrick’s shifts. Karl was playing Cash Invader, crouching down to peek up the reels.

Patrick’s official title was croupier. The title he gave himself, however, was Human Change Machine. He didn’t just slide stacks often-pence coins across the counter, but also sometimes laminated pamphlets from Proclaimer’s Mental Health Support. This wasn’t his dream job, but despite early success as a businessman and landlord, twenty years at the community had left him with a pretty wonky CV. Mortgage lenders no longer considered him “a worthwhile gamble,” which was appropriate.

He was renting a little sea-view two-bed with a back patio that opened on to the cycle path. It was paid for by the rent from his student house in Norwich, which was still, according to his agency, “attracting moderate interest.” He had no desire to ever go back there or to discover how badly the agency was ripping him off. All he knew was that each month the cash that arrived in his account, along with the piddling wage he earned as a Human Change Machine, allowed him to live in what felt like extravagance — relative to the geodesic dome.

Karl jabbed the spin button with his knuckles, then stood there frowning for a while, waiting for the music to return to idle and the lights to start swirling. Patrick had discovered the real reason Karl had never turned up that week, back at the community. Jury duty. It really tickled Patrick — to think the hand of democratic bureaucracy was still able to influence the community, and drag him back to the mainstream.

It was Friday. On a normal weekend night, the arcade would be full of gamblers exploring the impact of lager on probability, but tonight, with the weather, Patrick decided to close early. He locked the front and side doors, then put the cashbox in the safe.

He and Karl went outside to the little smokers’ area and sat on the covered bench that overlooked the sea. Behind them, the noise and patterned lights from the machines — cartwheels, snakes, tractor beams, sunrays, building blocks — and, in front of them, the bay and the seafront lights curling round.

Patrick coughed steadily until something came up, which he spat into the water. Karl patted Patrick on the back. He was the sort of drug dealer who genuinely supported a client’s attempts to quit.

A sheet of lightning hit out at sea; gray cloud appearing in a chamber of sky then sucked away into the night’s black lungs. Thunder followed.

“The sky has chest infection too,” Karl said, and was pleased.

They heard the oddly homogenized and comforting noise of drunks walking along the seafront. Girls screaming, either in hysterics or terror. Boys in tight white T-shirts and Italian jeans walked like Ken dolls toward the pier. When he had come to Swansea from London, Patrick had at first assumed that this was a sign of a really vibrant and open gay scene: tanned men in muscle tees, walking with their outsize arms around each other’s shoulders, openly checking one another out.

Lightning hit again, flashing the city’s off-color teeth.

“A beaut,” Karl said, and he brought a spliff from behind his ear. “Do you mind?”

Patrick shook his head. He no longer felt the remotest temptation. Then there was the opposite of a sound as the city suddenly flickered out and the lights went off in the arcade behind them. Every machine, swirling, running rivers of colors with fairground noises, suddenly went blank and quiet. Swansea had disappeared. Either a blackout or the world was ending. There was just the tip of Karl’s spliff, flaring in darkness, and, at the far side of the bay, the tops of the steelworks’ smokestacks burning.

• • •

It was midnight as Don drove through the storm with Radio 3 on. In return for his daughter’s address, which was in Three Crosses, Don had agreed that he would slaughter the goat at the party, under Freya’s supervision. Supervision, as far as he could tell, was her way of saying she wanted to be there to watch him suffer. He tried to explain to her once again that killing was just not part of his nature, and that perhaps she should view that as a good thing, but it didn’t go down well. She had always thought he faked his fear of animal slaughter, and in all honesty he had hammed it up a little, but, he asked her, if a person feels the need to ham something up, then isn’t that evidence of a genuine problem? There had been no response.

On the upside, this did all mean that she was now tied to spending a few hours at the community, on the morning of the party. If he could just get her to start enjoying herself, see some old friends, have a drink, then there was hope.

The windshield wipers briefly conducted Dvořák before falling out of time again. In preparation for the party, Don had started trying to enjoy music. An example of how he was willing to develop himself, to change.

He turned in to Three Crosses. It was only then he noticed that none of the streetlights were on.

It had been Geraint’s idea for them to come together and “enjoy the power cut.” Gathered in the double-glazed conservatory, they were watching the weather with their backs to one another in the style of superheroes surrounded by foes. Kate was wearing a gingham shirtdress that Liz had bought her. Against her will, she rather liked it. The rain made a satisfying takataka noise on the plastic glass. There was lightning and Mervyn laughed and Liz screamed in a theatrical way and Geraint told his mother to grow up. It felt like they were in it, the storm, as a family. They unfussily held one another’s hands behind their backs, and she was holding one of Mervyn’s, she knew, because of its size and the seams of rough skin at his joints. The ground shook, and in the lightning flash Kate thought she saw a figure standing on the hyperfertilized lawn. She didn’t say anything. It could have been her imagination. The killer who comes to torture suburban families when a power outage disables the burglar alarm. Just then, her pocket buzzed. She pulled out her phone and read the message.

Hi sweets, mum told me you live in Three Crosses. Very posh!

I was just driving back from town and noticed the power cut.

Are you guys okay? xxxx

She put the phone away immediately and prayed to all gods that the man on the lawn was a serial killer and not her father. Her back stiffened and she gripped Mervyn’s hand behind her.

There was another flash and this time, Geraint saw.

“Oh my fucking God, there’s a man in our back garden.”

Mervyn put his hands against the glass and looked outside.

“Maybe he wants to borrow a torch,” Mervyn said.

“Then why doesn’t he knock on the door?” Liz said. “He’s probably a looter.”

“It’s my dad.”

She let that piece of information sink in, then she read the text message aloud to her family. Ever since she’d arrived, she’d been enjoying painting a picture of her father as a kind of lunatic, and now he was living up to it. Liz said Kate was well within her rights to call the police. Mervyn and Geraint said they’d be happy to have words, on her behalf. Her new family made her feel brave. She rang his number. In the darkness of the back garden, they saw a dim light ping on. As the number started calling, she turned on speakerphone and put her mobile down on the wicker and glass coffee table.

“Kate!” came her father’s distorted voice. “I’m so glad you called.”

They could hear his voice outside, as well as in.

“Dad, what the hell are you doing? I can see you.”

“So I found the right house then! I just wanted to check you’re okay, because of the power cut.”

“You’re in our back garden.”

“Couldn’t read the house numbers in the dark, but knew I was looking for a place with a swimming pool. Did I ever tell you that your mother and I did our courting in a swimming pool?”

“You’re on loudspeaker. Say hello to the people on whose property you are trespassing.”

Out in the rain, they could make out the blue-lit outline of the side of his face. Kate thought there was something different about him.

“Hello there?” he said.

Not a peep from her new family, and Kate liked them for that.

“What I wanted to say was that you’d all be very welcome to stay the night at ours — until you get power back. We’ve got plenty of room. There’s music, lights, and salsa dancing”—he tried to laugh but it sounded robotic through the phone’s crappy speaker. “We’re really enjoying ourselves and you’d all be very welcome to join us.”

They saw the phone light grow larger as Don came toward the conservatory. She realized what was different. No one had told her about his beard. Through the tinny speaker, there was the crackling sound of him breathing.

“Dad, you need to go home.”

They watched the floating phone light get closer.

“Right-o, well maybe I could—”

She ended the call. The pale blue light came closer to the glass, seemed to be waving. They couldn’t make out what he was saying. Then the light blinked off.

On the drive home, Don tried hard to enjoy Radio 3 because he knew how effective most people find music as a form of emotional release.

Liz and Kate were upstairs in the big carpeted bathroom, lit by two fragrant candles on the windowsill. Kate held the glasses while Liz unscrewed the wine.

“You deserve a drink after that.”

They sat next to each other on the step up to the circular, two-person bath.

“Things are going to get better,” Liz said.

“I hope so.”

They clinked.

“And I just wanted to say …”

Kate scrolled through the things that Liz might say next: My husband said your name in bed; if you break my son’s heart I will kill you.

“… you’ve been living with us for a while now and God knows how hard it must be but I want you to know we think of you as part of the family. This might sound weird, but we’ve never been happier. Mervyn, especially …”

Kate covered her mouth with her wineglass.

“… you’ve made us appreciate what we’ve got. I hope you’re happy living here too.”

Kate nodded, drank, swallowed.

“That’a girl,” Liz said, and took a big swig herself.

Kate imagined telling Liz that she had taken her only son’s virginity in between the vintage benches of their four-by-four. Liz reached behind her and pulled, from the empty bath, a paper Topshop bag. She presented it to Kate.

“Surprise! Mervyn’s naïve but I’m not. Now you and Geraint share a room. I’m too old to wear this, but you’ll do it justice.”

When Kate didn’t immediately look inside, Liz pulled the two items out herself — high-waisted black lace knickers with beaded detail and a matching bra, longline, studded — which Liz held up against herself, laughing. Kate hoped her face for stunned horror was the same as her face for happy surprise.

Liz put the clothes in Kate’s lap.

“Put ’em on now if you like. And the rest of the bottle’s yours too. A power cut’s good for one thing: candlelight.” Liz winked. “And, by the way, Ger’ told me what you two got up to in the back of the Jeep.” Liz clapped her hands together. “Priceless! Just don’t tell Merv!”

• • •

Geraint was in bed, reading by torchlight. He shined the beam on Kate as she came in.

“Who goes there?”

“Me.”

“Hi, me.”

She walked over and sat on the edge of the bed. “What you reading?”

“Don’t ask. I’m a loser.”

She lifted up the big hardback book. The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency.

“Ask me anything about chutney,” he said, and closed it. She actually felt like Geraint’s mother, as she sat on the edge of his bed.

“Are you okay?” he said.

“Fine, I guess.”

“Want to talk?”

“Nope.”

“You coming to bed?”

She shook her head.

“I’ll be back in a bit,” she said, and then, feeling a bit bad for him, and bad for herself, she rubbed his back before leaving.

Downstairs, she sat in the dark lounge with two wines. Mervyn wasn’t awake and this annoyed her. Over the last few days, he hadn’t been regular in his sleeplessness. She thought of the words we’ve never been happier.

Kate drank from both glasses of wine, spilling spots on her gingham shirtdress. She held up a candle to look around the room for slugs on the carpet, but couldn’t see any. Something, perhaps a nonlethal house fire, some trauma, would be appropriate at this point. She sat trying, through the force of thought, to summon Mervyn, and when he didn’t come she tried summoning Patrick, and when he didn’t come she even tried bringing back her actual father until, finally, she fell asleep.

She only woke up because the shell-motif wall lights had come on, and so had the hallway light and the TV standby LED. The power was back. Outside, the storm had given way to steady rain. The candle was a puddle. She blew it out. There was a gentle throb behind her eyes and two empty glasses of wine on the coffee table. Next to the glasses, the bottle had a little left in it. She turned the TV on and, for old times’ sake, watched rolling news on mute with real-time subtitles. “Bad weather causes rolling power cuts across Southwest” with stock footage of lightning.

She batted away her headache by pouring herself the last of the wine and taking a big drink. Flicking through the channels, she eventually stopped at a cartoon. When she was young, she and Albert hadn’t been allowed to watch them very much. Her father’s line was that they eroded the link between cause and effect. But this was one of the few she had been encouraged to watch—Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon — because it represented “a pivotal moment in the history of the moving image.” As an eight-year-old, the scene that had really stuck with her — and came back in her nightmares — was of Mickey, sent below deck as punishment, peeling potatoes. He had a pile to the left and an empty bucket to the right. He’d pick one off the pile, take a couple of swift swipes with his knife, then throw it over his shoulder into the bucket. Grab, switch-swatch, throw. But the thing was, the pile of unpeeled potatoes never got smaller and the bucket never filled. This being one of the few kitchen jobs that an eight-year-old could tackle unsupervised, it scared the hell out of her.

She didn’t hear Mervyn coming downstairs, just saw the light in the hallway go off and a shape behind the squares of ripple-effect glass. He went into the kitchen, turned off the light in there, and came back to the lounge, pushing open the door. He had the puffy face of the just woken. He seemed surprised to see her.

“Have you not been to sleep?”

“I think I must have.”

He closed the door behind him and, barefoot, wearing jogging shorts and a white T-shirt, padded over to the sofa and sat next to her. Roles were reversed.

“Anything you want to talk about?”

“Not really,” she said.

He examined her face. “I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t be.”

She didn’t feel sleepy.

“Liz gave me a present,” Kate said.

She got out the underwear and laid it out on the sofa between them.

“Very becoming.”

“I haven’t tried them on yet.”

She held his gaze then, and lifted the bra up to her chest. Her new family sometimes treated her as though she were damaged, and sometimes it was easier to play along.

“Do you think it suits me?” she said, which was cheap, she knew, but she was impatient. He looked.

“Oh, definitely,” he said, and then chuckled in a way that felt forced.

She shifted her legs so that the leather sofa made a creaking noise as though a door was opening.

“How about these?” she said, and held up the knickers.

The eye contact kept going and she wasn’t going to back down. He broke the tension by laughing a little, and when he laughed his eyes fell, and when his eyes fell he saw her legs, and when he saw her legs he stopped laughing. Then the lights went off again and the TV died. They sat in silence and Stone Age dark. The storm hadn’t quite finished yet.

“You still there?” she said.

“Still here.”

“Will you stay?”

“Of course. I’m with you. Do you want to talk?”

“I don’t want to talk.”

They listened to the wind whip round the corners of the house. The double glazing made a deep wub sound when the wind pressed against it. She could feel him sitting just a few feet from her and she felt he was looking at her, or at the blank space where she was, or at the version of her that was wearing elaborate underwear in his mind. Neither of them said anything. They waited to see who was going to break the silence, but she knew it wouldn’t be her. The one sure way to spoil this would be to name it. She heard him breathing. The sofa creaked and she wondered if he was moving toward her. Leather was useful like that, amplifying every shift of weight.

She road-tested some heavier, sexualized breathing.

She heard him respond with the same.

The wind, also, joined in.

They kept this going until their breathing synchronized. She felt far away from herself. Inching along the sofa toward him, she slid her hand ahead of her. His breathing sounded like a recording of breathing.

He had decided to come downstairs. To sit down next to her. His decision was bigger than hers. Three times her age, married, kids: this was the full deal. She listened to the compulsion to act. The bare ends of her knees touched his left leg. He didn’t flinch but he held his breath. It felt as though a circuit had been completed; the only switched-on machine in a world without power.

She knew how he sat, legs wide, thirty-five degrees, with his statuette displayed. All she had to do was put her hand over and bring it down in the right place. This would be something she could navigate from — a reference point, moral north. She visualized his position from what she could feel of his leg, and by the lean of the sofa cushions and the sound of his breath, which had grown a little feminine. He couldn’t do it himself, was the implication; it was her responsibility to lead, to reach across and put the thing in gear.

She put her hand out, through the blackness. It helped to think of her body as remote controlled. Reach, descend, hold.

The hand met some fabric. He made a sharp inhalation noise. His crotch would reveal the truth about this family. It did not know how to lie. Time passed and her hand stayed there. She wondered whether this moment was perhaps not a good thing after all, not even a good-bad thing, not even a bad-but-useful-for-moral-geography-in-future thing — just bad. There was a humming noise first, a subterranean noise, a low buzz barely perceptible behind the wind and rain. It was automatic. Streetlights came back on. Ambient light highlighted the drizzle outside the bay window and some very faint light reached them in the lounge, where she could just make out Mervyn’s profile, his head back, lips slightly parted.

The wall lamps came on. Kate kept her hand where it was. Mervyn’s eyes were closed, his throat exposed, the swell of his Adam’s apple. It was a face of precarious ecstasy, maybe.

Either that, or it was the face of a man who, having forgiven himself for some bad decisions in his past, was finding sleep came to him often and inappropriately: with total darkness and reasonable quiet. As Kate imagined it, she had provided an opportunity for him to display his reliability as father and husband and he now dreamt of slugs moving over his body but they weren’t scary or nightmarish, quite the opposite — he was finding their progress relaxing.

She felt a buzzing against her thigh. Taking her hand away from Mervyn, she got out her phone; messages from her father pulsed in her palm. She felt sick. More thunder outside and then the distinctive churn of Mervyn beginning to snore.

Freya was woken by her bladder. The tip of her nose was wet. The storm had passed and there was the sound of drips coming off the leaves. Leaning out of bed, she opened the grate and jabbed the coals with half a table leg. She peered behind the Japanese screen but couldn’t see Albert. Standing up, she looked closer, still couldn’t see him. She pulled back the duvet. Her boulder was asleep, curled up, arms crossed, hands tucked under his armpits. He had come down here to sleep because he said it was too noisy up at the big house. She had asked why he didn’t just stay in the workshop with Marina and she had seen the awkward expression of his being caught red-handed, missing his mum.

She put on her dressing gown over her green nightie and went outside. The air needled her ankles, wrists, neck. The storm had passed and taken the warmth with it. She ought to have made it to the long drop but couldn’t be bothered. Her bladder ached. Holding a tree for support, she swung open her dressing gown, hiked up her nightie, crouched, and let rip. The steam rising up between her legs, the crinkling sound like embers, the smell of her vitamin C supplements and the feeling that she was being watched. She looked over her shoulder — the evidence she was being watched.

Patrick lay in bed, trying hard to believe that the noise of an armed intruder entering his seafront home was an auditory hallucination. Although it would be upsetting to discover that, after three drug-free months, he was having a paranoid delusional episode, this was still preferable to an actual, real live burglar downstairs.

When driven by fear, the imagination creates reality, he thought, listening to the astonishingly lifelike and left-to-right panning footsteps. It was, he hoped, an internal burglar. A groaning sound very much like the kitchen door opening, or a groaning sound very much like a burglar who, having been recognized as fictional, was slowly dying on Patrick’s mind’s patio.

Scientifically, it was entirely reasonable to suppose, Patrick supposed, that as a mind reopens its neural pathways and locked memory boxes after an extended cannabinoid addiction, trespassers must be allowed to clatter around in the internal kitchen before they will leave for good, empty-handed.

Since his accident, it hadn’t been easy reclaiming a secure mental footing. His key anxiety was that his mind was doughy and easily shaped. Paranoia about his susceptibility to paranoia. He had a feeling that all those years ago, when he first met Don, Janet, and Freya, he was the dupe, the tasteless money man, the rich patron who was allowed to believe that he “got” the art when in fact the art was an attack on all that the patron represented.

If this was an imaginary burglar, then, reasonably, Patrick ought to be able to apprehend him or her simply by thinking of something else. So he thought back to his time in the hospital with the mental health assessment officer, Kim, a young Christian with round teeth. She was the one who had suggested he might want to visit her church while he got back on his feet or, more accurately, crutches. “I think of religion as the opposite of mental health,” he had told her, and she had laughed generously.

When he left hospital, he had assured the doctors that he was going back to the community, where he would be looked after. In reality, he left Morriston, swinging his blue cast out of the parking lot, past the workers’ cottages, and up to the double doors of the unpretentious, redbrick Proclaimer’s Church. A poster pinned to the wall said: God is a DJ. Got any requests? If he was soft-brained, Patrick had thought, then he would soon know as much, when tested by Kim’s righteous enthusiasm.

The church had a guest bedroom, which they also used as storage space. It contained a giant octopus costume, Nativity sets, old arcade machines, and, in one corner, a mattress, sleeping bag, and bedside lamp. They gave him a bowl of the most astounding split pea and ham soup. He hadn’t smoked in weeks; his taste buds were as new.

That first night the church had a party for the local young people. They invited Patrick to join them. On the dance floor, loosened by three times his recommended dose of codeine and with certain frequencies vibrating the pins in his ankle, Patrick bobbed on his crutches and swung the bad leg. He thought again of his desire to pass on something of his life experience to the new generation. He had a semicircle of dressed-up teenagers giving him the thumbs-up every time he tried a fresh move. Behind the DJ, a video screen showed stills from the Chandra observatory. When he went to bed, they gave him a pair of fluorescent foam earplugs. Patrick was nearly sixty. At midnight, on the dot, the music stopped.

The week he spent in the basement of the new-build church, his bowels were still so clogged up from the morphine that he felt like he was sleeping on pebbles. While attractive men and women brought him glasses of prune juice, he spent time mentally cauterizing his feelings for Janet. The metaphor he had developed, while in the hospital, and which showed a trace of the morphine’s imaginative flamboyance, was that Janet conducted relationships like a stunt pilot, flying as close to her spectators as possible, without actually touching them. Patrick thought of himself as a spectator — one of many — grinning and laughing idiotically with his hands in the air, every time imagining that he’d be able to grab hold of her long scarf as she sped by.

He counted himself lucky, in a way, that the damage to his ankle had provided a telling illustration of Janet’s feelings: on first seeing his injury, she was stricken, desperate, willing to do anything, and, judging by the way she passed her body heat to him, most people would have assumed, in love. But when offered the chance to spend two days at his hospital bedside listening to his unappetizing breathing sounds — a commitment that would have shown a deep connection between them — she declined.

In many ways, that time in the dome, long ago, when they had come close to sex but without the sex, was her ultimate loop the loop: getting as close to him as she could possibly be, absorbing maximum attention and love, without giving any of herself away.

Then, one profound morning that for Patrick was the key religious revelation of his life thus far, the prune juice finally had its intended effect. Kim offered to change his sheets. Such saintly hospitality, Patrick thought, would have been enough to lure in a weak-minded individual. But he was relieved to find he still had his rational disgust, and although he liked the engaging young people, the basement had given him new ambitions: to live out his years in secular hopelessness and never see Janet again.

Patrick heard the unmistakable hush of drawers being opened downstairs. He could think of no psychological analogy for this; it sounded like a bona fide robbery in progress, someone searching for jewelry. Pulling back his duvet, he sat on the edge of the bed in his boxer shorts. He leaned forward to the fireplace and grabbed the coal shovel.

Slowly making his way downstairs, Patrick held the shovel like a baseball bat. Adrenaline allowed him to take each step without wincing. His thin blue boxer shorts were the kind that mushroom up around the elastic waistband.

He got to the bottom of the stairs and looked at the plastic front door for signs of forced entry. It was locked and untampered with. The door to the lounge was closed and he pushed it open with his good foot, his bad ankle tweaking under his weight. The room was quiet. Walking slowly back through the house, he tested the lock on the door to the basement as he passed. Stepping into the kitchen, white-knuckled with the shovel high, he quickly checked behind the door, but there was no one.

He was now starting to realize: a psychological burglar was, in truth, worse than a real one. A real burglar was for one night only; an internal one was for life.

But then, looking around, he noticed the back door was open a couple of inches. He clicked on the garden’s security light and looked out through the big window above the sink. The only living thing was the pygmy palm at the back of the patio.

Swinging open the door, he stepped outside, raising the shovel. His ankle ached and tightened. A big moth butted the security light. There were dark footprints, unevenly spaced, marked out across the light condensation on the patio stones. They led to the double doors at the back of the garage, which were wide open but with no light showing through. He took a couple of small steps, barely lifting his feet off the ground. From inside, he could hear a snuffling noise, a nose-breathing, a crunching, like a hog troughing through human remains. He waited, gripping the coal shovel. He wanted this to be real. He stepped through the doorway.

A square pale light was floating in the blackness. A portal.

There was the smell of garlic and chicken. He flicked on the two strip lights, which batted awake in sequence.

Kate was standing behind the meat safe, hunched over a bowl of Indonesian jellied chicken, a tray of grilled garlicky eggplant and a lentil salad. She was using her mobile phone as a torch and in the other hand was holding a drumstick. There were black marks on her face and arms and streaks of spiced jelly down her dress. She was eating meat. She was eating meat. She was wearing a gingham shirtdress. She was wearing a gingham shirtdress. This was not the Kate he knew. Her mouth was half-full, and chewing. In the snow-globe moment of the strip lights, she stopped.

He was either Mr. Universe or he was wearing the mother of all Puffa jackets. It was knee-length, collared, black, with a furred hood.

Freya squinted at him while still pissing, making mist.

“Sorry. It’s me, Geraint. Something’s happened to Kate.”

She looked over her shoulder at him for a long time. His eyes were puffy and half-shut. He had a quarter moon of toothpaste at the edge of his mouth.

“I’ll wait back here,” he said, and retreated behind the curve of the roundhouse to wait for her Morse code to stop. It was just getting light. She stood and tightened her dressing gown.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You can come in. Albert’s asleep.”

She waited while he knelt to take off his complex walking boots, then they slid through the draft curtains. She slotted some bits of broken-up pallet onto the coals, and they sat on stools beside the wood-burner. Geraint kept his voluminous coat on, his delicate nose poking out of his hood.

“She’s gone. I rang the community. Nobody’s seen her. I tried her mobile. My dad’s driving round looking. He dropped me here. We thought she might be with you.”

His breathing was shallow. The fire popped and Geraint glanced at Albert, hidden beneath his duvet. As far as he knew, Albert still wanted to kill him.

“Could she be with a friend?” Freya asked.

“Can’t think of any,” Geraint said, and held his stomach.

Then a duvet-muffled voice spoke. “I wouldn’t worry,” it said. “She’s almost certainly dead.”

Kate woke up in a strange bedroom and either her brain had swollen or her skull had shrunk — whichever, the fit was not good. She massaged her forehead. Her most recent memory was of entering a house via a coal chute. From that image, she worked backward. She had been sitting on a doorstep, drinking whisky from an Evian bottle. The doorstep was Patrick’s. She had got there by walking the streets along the seafront with her bag of clothes, looking for a convertible car paid for by advertising. Before that she had been at Blackpill, already drunk, cooling her feet in the lido. Her feet had needed cooling because of a long walk along the old train tracks through Clyne, overcoming the fear of rapists and slashers by taking shots from the sports-lid Evian. The bottle, as she now remembered, had been filled, just before she left their house, from Mervyn’s expensively packaged Oban whisky (which she never once saw him drink). Then she remembered the reason she had left their house. It went beyond shame, what she was feeling. Darkness and the texture of his jogging shorts. Two kinds of heavy breathing.

The room she was in was filling with the smell of death: this was what she deserved.

When Kate finally stepped into the kitchen, Patrick was in flip-flops, boardies, T-shirt, and a Slanket, holding a metal spatula: an alpha male at a one-man barbecue. She was wearing a silk-hemmed dressing gown, another Liz donation, and her skin was blotchy.

“Oh ho ho, look who it is!”

“Pat,” she said, swallowing.

“Hello, Burglar Bill.”

He put down the spatula and came toward her with his arms raised.

“Sorry,” she said, shivering on the tiles. He wrapped himself round her.

“Don’t be sorry. I’ll take whatever visitors I can get.”

She kept her arms by her sides as he hugged her. She had forgotten how much torso he had. He smelled of moisturizer.

“You’re still not great in the mor-nings,” he said, and let her go. “Or should I say … afternoons.”

“Please.”

“Just so you know, I rang the community to let them know that you’re safe.”

“Oh God.”

He went back to the cooker, pulled a plate from the oven, and put it on the table. There were beans, toast, two portobello mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, a hash brown, and a poached egg. She sat down and stared at the plate for a while. He watched her staring and made the sound of cogs turning.

“Something missing?” he said.

“Okay, Pat.”

“What?” he said, and he did a little Charlie Chaplin dance with the spatula, his flip-flops clacking on the tiled floor. He had a mid-price haircut.

“You win,” she said.

“What on earth could you mean?”

He did a twirl on the spot, his Slanket pirouetting out. He was really enjoying himself. He swung open the oven door, pulled out the middle rack.

“I’ve waited years for this,” he said, shaking the baking tray a little.

Scraping back her chair, she sighed and took her plate to the oven. She forked in three chipolatas, two pieces of bacon, a load of quartered potatoes that were fried with the meat fat, and then, hesitating for a second, lifted a slice of black pudding aboard.