Wild Abandon

7. RESULTS DAY

“They don’t smell like failure,” Patrick said, sniffing each envelope in turn.

He and Kate were on a bench next to the cycle path, looking out over the bay. It was raining at sea but Mumbles was bright.

“Open them,” she said.

Two Rollerbladers went past, sweeping their feet behind them.

“What does it mean if you get into Cambridge?”

“I won’t have got in,” she said.

She’d spent the last two months working through her reading lists, and when not studying, imagining Mervyn and Geraint bonding over her disappearance with fishing trips, remote control helicopters, and a compensatory meat marathon. She visualized their house suddenly brimming with chorizo, Coke-boiled hams, shanks, and T-bones. Or even worse, she thought, the continued path toward vegetarian enlightenment: walnut oil, a veggie box, sunflower seeds in clamp jars. The disappointing news from her time in Three Crosses was that, where she had hoped to find suburbia’s dark and seething underbelly, she had found the potbelly of contentment.

“Put me out of my misery,” she said. The electric tourist train went past incredibly slowly. Patrick’s wide fingers struggled to tear the paper.

“Oh ho ho,” he said.

Kate stared off at the pier, imagining herself high up in the sky and falling with rag-doll limbs into the green-blue sea.

It had been agreed that Varghese could make a filmed record of the party because new content would need to be online, in the days afterward, if they wanted to see long-term impact. “Stickiness,” Varghese called it.

Don said he could film whatever he wanted, on the condition that he steer clear of the goat pen between 10:30 a.m. and noon, though he didn’t tell Varghese why.

Just after breakfast, Varghese captured the party’s first genuine moment. Don and a team of wwoofers were building the live music yurt in the long field when three young lads turned up, carrying buckets. Although the party had been advertised as “an all-dayer,” Don had assumed that guests wouldn’t arrive until lunch. These lads had been up since dawn, low-tide fishing. They showed the camera the buckets of whitebait, razor clams, and wild oysters. They didn’t like oysters so Don took as many as would fit in the pockets of his tweedy suit jacket. “If all the young people who come today are anything like you,” Don said, “then our future is in good hands.” Varghese had to explain to him not to make direct eye contact with the lens.

At the last count, Varghese’s YouTube video of the community felling their electricity pole had almost ten thousand views and the requisite mixture of abusive and incomprehensible comments that, he reassured Don, were a mark of growth, “like zits during puberty,” and not to be taken personally. On the BassMusicWales.co.uk forum, genuine ravers now outnumbered Varghese’s various avatars on a thread titled “Rebirth of the Free Party!” Likewise, the environmentally conscious GowerPower.org had included them on its list of local days out.

Patrick drove Kate in his sponsored Mini Cooper with the top down and she sang, “If you’ll be my bodyguard” and he sang, “I will be your long lost pal.” Her hair made a comet’s trail behind her as she yelled, “Aaaa!” which was a representation of the four key letters she’d seen when she’d looked at her exam results. Patrick slalomed slightly once they were out on South Gower Road and honked at everyone. They were going for overpriced lunch.

Kate was too busy miming the bass solo to notice when he didn’t take the turning for Llanmadoc. In fact, it took Patrick coming to a full stop before she looked up and saw a poster attached to a tree that read: This Must Be the Place.

“Strange,” she said.

He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” she said. “It’s a nice idea, but I don’t want to come home. It’s not like I secretly want to but I can’t come to terms with it. Let’s go order food we can’t pronounce.”

He turned off the stereo.

“You should at least go and see your parents. Tell them the news.”

“Don’t do this. Stop being grown up. Let’s hit the road.” She thumb-pointed over her shoulder. “I’ll text them.”

She turned the stereo back on. “If you’ll be my bodyguard …”

Patrick killed the engine and pulled up the handbrake.

Kate let her head loll forward. “Really?”

He power-unlocked her door.

“Okay, listen. I will tell Dad the news and have some kind of epiphany, since that’s probably what you’re imagining, but there is no way in the world I’m staying, so I’m going to come back and you’ll still be here—won’t you—and we’ll go and eat hand-dived scallops, am I right?”

He nodded.

“You’re lying,” she said, then, holding out her hand, “give me the keys.”

It was both pleasing and disappointing that, walking into the community for the first time in months, nobody recognized her. After looking around, unnoticed, she finally spotted Don inside a chill-out teepee that was set up beside the fire pit. Through the arched entrance to the tent, she could see him, kneeling, arranging cushions in a diamond formation.

“Hello, Father.”

He stopped for a moment, spooked-seeming, and shook his head.

“It couldn’t be,” he said, not turning to look. “It must be her ghost.” He plumped a beanbag in a way that tried to be wistful, then turned and crawled out of the teepee, pretending not to see her.

“Dad.”

“So sad,” he said, standing up, his eyes wide, “to be haunted by my own daughter. Such a sweet girl.”

“Da-ad. I’ve got news.”

He started walking up the shallow steps to the big house, shaking his head.

“Oh we’ll miss her, I suppose. She wouldn’t even come home for the party in her honor.”

She bounded toward him and took a running jump onto his back, swinging her arms round his neck and her legs round his waist, yelling “Aaaa!” as he huffed and gripped hold of her and turned back down the steps at a canter, already heaving under the strain but absolutely not willing to put down his seventeen-year-old daughter until she explicitly said so. He started doing loops of the fire pit, neighing, and Kate’s laughter went up and down as the air got knocked out of her. She raised one arm in the air rodeo-style and didn’t say stop until she could hear some unsettling congestion in her father’s lungs. When she did say “Okay! Okay!” he halted instantly, gracelessly, falling to his knees on the soft ground, his face now a purplish, almost glans-like color and sweat beading between his eyebrows. His tongue was slightly out. He was old, she noticed.

Kneeling down in front of him with her high-beam grin on, the wonks in her front teeth, she said: “I got into Cambridge.”

Just saying those words made her capable of compassion. She watched his chest go up and down. He coughed a little and it became clear he had something in his mouth. Even this could not dim her torch of empathy. She handed him a tissue. He made the transfer, subtly, turning his head to the side. It was a big one. She glimpsed it, just for a second. The phlegm in the tissue like a sunrise through mist. Everything was beautiful.

“I’m so glad you came back,” he said.

There were two wet patches forming in the pockets of her father’s jacket.

“I’m not actually back. I just came to let you know.”

From the patio at the back of the big house, Kate noticed a tall South Asian man pointing a handheld camera down at them.

“You’re back,” Don said, glancing at the camera. “Here you are. Back.”

“I’m not staying. We’re off for extortionate lunch.”

“This is your celebration. Everything you see was made for you.”

“I don’t want that.”

“Anyway, who’s we?”

Patrick was sitting with his hands in his lap, the roof and windows down. He didn’t hear them approach. A solemn, narrator’s voice began: “Nearly a quarter century ago, in an office block in Lambeth, you introduced me to something that changed my life forever.”

Patrick turned to see the narrator standing at the passenger side door with his head bowed slightly and oysters, one in each hand, shucked and on the half shell. Of the first few months he and Don had spent together in London — their honeymoon period — the moment of greatest romance was spent shucking a dozen natives with a penknife, arguing about landownership, on a bench on Primrose Hill. Kate, behind her father, held up her hands and mouthed: Sorry.

“Come on, old pal, a peace offering,” Don said, presenting them, reaching into the car. “An invitation to the celebration.”

Patrick pressed a button and slowly, excruciatingly so, slow enough to allow the childishness of the gesture to really ring out, the soft top’s exoskeleton unfolded itself and pushed forward over Patrick’s head, forcing Don to take a step back as it clicked into place. He walked round the front of the car and came to the driver’s side window.

“Fresh off the beach today. Gower’s own.”

“Which one is poisoned?” Patrick said, and sniffed them.

One was huge and one was tiny. They were both bloodshot with Tabasco, which was how Patrick liked them. He took the small one. Without even getting out of the car, he necked it, took a couple of bites, and felt it slide down inside him.

Don held up the huge one in his hand and seemed unsure. Patrick allowed himself to make a small ch noise that he knew would be just enough.

“Fine,” Don said, and lifted the frilled edge to his lips. It had real depth, the shell, fist-sized, definitely a wild oyster — an alpha male. Patrick thought about something sarcastic along these lines but decided it wasn’t necessary. Don had the creature in his mouth and, it became clear, could not swallow.

Patrick looked around for Kate so that they could enjoy this moment together, and saw her, but also, next to her, an outsize brown-skinned man pointing a handheld camera at Don. His giant finger was on the zoom, and it was apparent that Don realized he was being filmed. A little creamy liquid eked out at the edges of his mouth as he finally swallowed, a full chest gulp, leaving him bent over, his hands on his knees.

Patrick felt unthreatened and reckless.

“Right, I’m off,” he said.

“Don’t leave me,” Kate said.

“It won’t be the same without you,” Don said, still bent over, mouth open.

Patrick imagined Don telling everyone at the party: “I held out an olive branch, but the old man’s still not ready to grip on.”

“You’re really just going to dump me here?” Kate said.

“I really am.”

“You’ll be missed,” Don said, unconvincingly.

“Give me the car keys, Kate.”

“Come get them,” she said, and held out the key on the palm of her hand.

He raised his eyebrows. “Are you really going to make me?”

“I really am,” she said.

Patrick shook his head and breathed out. He got out of the car and walked around the front. She took a few backward steps as he approached, now dangling the key from her index finger.

“This is not dignified,” he said.

“How’s your ankle for running?” she said.

He stopped. Behind Kate, the cameraman stepped back for a wide.

• • •

Albert swung and felt the compost give. “She’s back.”

Isaac stabbed the thick gunk, climbed onto the garden fork’s hips with both feet, and waited there, elevator-style, as it sank in.

“She’s come to fuck things up,” Albert said.

He had heard someone yelling “Aaaa!” and, going to investigate, had seen Don giving Kate a piggyback.

The mattock’s blade went shung as it entered the mulch. Albert yanked it back and a green-yellow pus seeped out of an eggshell. The smell was vicious. Isaac dropped his fork and ran back toward the polytunnels, both hands over his nose. Albert was immune.

“But don’t worry because I have everything under control,” he said.

In between each swing, he looked up toward the goat pen. Isaac walked back over, sniffed the air, and picked up his fork.

“Total fuck,” Isaac said, and frowned.

“You got it, Eyes.”

Isaac seemed surprised to hear himself swear. He looked down at his muddy hands.

Don was shortly due to meet his wife and he had still not changed into his slaughterwear. Kate had asked him to give her and Patrick “the tour” of the festival. It would have been strange, given the enthusiasm with which he’d just welcomed them, to decline. He wanted to explain that the tour would need to be very quick because he was going to meet Freya, for the first time in weeks, and he really wanted their meeting to go well — which his daughter would understand. But he could not risk telling her that he also needed enough time both to change into clothes that he was happy to see spattered with goat’s blood and to access a meditative state of pre-slaughter calm. This she might find upsetting. So he said nothing.

They started at the bottom of the long field, beside the yurt, which had its sides uncovered and a low stage at the back.

“The live music arena,” Don said.

“So who’s headlining then?” Patrick said.

“No one. Or rather, everyone. Everyone is headlining.”

Don ushered them toward the top of the field where the first visitors had arrived from other communities, Tipi Valley, Brithdir Mawr, Holtsfield. They had to walk at Pat’s pace, which, with his ankle, was approximately that of a pallbearer. They passed a converted Royal Mail van, a Honda Civic, an American school bus, and a bathtub, all parked at angles. A pony drank from the tub. Don kept getting a few paces ahead, then waiting for them to catch up.

Don stuck to firm ground to allow for Patrick’s ankle, hoping it would help him pick up the pace, but it didn’t.

“Would you like a hand?” Don said finally, and he honestly hadn’t meant it to sound patronizing, but sometimes old patterns of communication have a way of asserting themselves.

Patrick said nothing but walked quicker all the same, just the tiniest of hobbles creeping into his gait, clearly unwilling to express any discomfort. Kate put one arm through Patrick’s, like husband and wife, to support him.

They stopped at the goat pen while Kate jumped the fence to say hello. They heard her apologizing for having gone away. Don looked around. It was a matter of minutes until he was due to meet Freya at this exact spot.

They walked over to the front of the big house, where the sound system was being set up beneath a big blue seven-cornered tarpaulin, amoeba-shaped. It shaded half the yard, having been stretched and tied between the rain gutters of the schoolroom, the apple tree, and the roof of the workshop.

“The Rave Zone,” Don said, with audible capitals, then looked at his watch.

Kate watched two young guys — not much older than her — carrying speakers from a white van, setting them up on a row of pallets, and lashing them together with buckle straps. There were eight cabinets, two high by four across. The upper ones had militaristic casings. By the looks of it, the sound system had been her father’s key investment in the future of the community, that and the semicircle of portable toilets set back behind the workshop. On a plastic school desk next to the speakers there were CDRs, a mixer, and an amp. One of the boys opened the driver’s side of the van, came back with a disc, held it up in the air — flashing sunlight off its underside — and said: “Sound check.”

“You know, Don, this system’s gonna project like billy-o?” Patrick said. “Good morning, pensioners of Gower!”

They looked around but her father had gone. Apparently the tour was over. Kate hadn’t been able to work out if his nervousness had been just a symptom of the party, or if that was what he was like all the time nowadays.

As the boys switched on the equipment there was a sense of air moving, of latent energy. The first sound was of a helicopter landing. Patrick actually looked up. Then the beat came in. It was physically loud, akin to being groped. Kate put her fingers in her ears and watched the boys bounce together behind the school desk, lip-synching. The noise brought people out of the house and gardens and into the yard. A woman with an intricate facial birthmark emerged with her hands over her ears. Marina appeared from her bedroom at the far end of the workshop, making the universal hand signal for turn it down. More people came out of the big house: a pale man in his early thirties making gang signs; Arlo doing the robot, holding tongs; Janet, squinting, wearing a straw hat; two new wwoofers; and then Isaac, sitting in the dirt at the side of the workshop, making mud pies, drumming his pan on the off-beat.

Everyone saw Kate and Patrick. They saw everyone.

“We’re back!” Kate yelled, barely audible, raising both arms.

Patrick held up a hand in acknowledgment.

Arlo slotted his tongs into his back pocket, wiped his hands on his apron, and led the charge. Janet followed, removing her hat to reveal blow-dried hair. Everyone held out their arms — too many hugs to choose from — all smiling and calling their names; people Kate had never seen before, moving toward them with arms extended like the undead. The first hug was from Janet, who put her arms round Patrick’s waist and her ear to his chest; he kept his arms up awkwardly, as though wading through pond water. Then the rest fell on them, one after another, Kate’s vision darkening a notch as she was enveloped and squeezed and told that she had never left their thoughts.

Someone turned off the sound check. Through the clot of heads she saw Albert, watching from the side of the workshop, holding a three-quarter-size wheelbarrow of compost. It was not the circumstances in which she had hoped to have their reunion — her suddenly famous and swamped by groupies. Marina squeezed Kate’s shoulders and whispered, “Your brother missed you,” into her ear. Albert dropped the wheelbarrow, made serious eye contact with his sister, pointed toward the house, then ran inside.

As the giga-hug disbanded, only Janet and Patrick remained, Patrick trying to peel off her arms. Kate excused herself, saying she needed to catch up with her brother.

In the schoolroom, there was a man with an alcoholic’s ripe nose making paper lanterns, two nonidentical twins cutting colorful people holding hands out of tissue paper, drawing a unique expression on each, and a boy with a square fringe folding origami cranes. They looked up at her with the nonjudgmental but slightly questioning expression that she herself used to adopt when finding unknown persons wandering the house.

In the kitchen, a skinny woman fed a cinder block of cheese into the industrial grater, producing a blond wig in the bowl below.

She finally found Albert in the scullery, wearing an apron, washing potatoes at the butler’s sink. It was odd to see him washing them because he still had not washed himself. He had a kind of Hollywood tan. He wore special black scrubbing gloves that said POTA across the right knuckle and TOES across the left. The way he rubbed his gloved hands around the potatoes reminded Kate of an evil genius formulating a plan.

“Hey, bro. I’m back.”

He ignored her. His hair looked salt-stiff, almost glued. Her instinct was to smell him, to take a hit off his neck.

“Don’t mind if I help, do you?”

She picked up a peeler and started skinning, slimy strips piling up on the counter, their wet sides glistening. He kept on formulating. She looked across at him with a half smile to convey impending fun — the kind of smile you do before tickling someone.

“Albert, I want to say I’m sorry that I went away. It can’t have been easy for you.”

He stared straight ahead, gazing at the paintbrushes in a jar of dark water on the sill, then glancing up at the community’s only wall clock. It was 10:27. She tried to think of some common ground between them.

“Guess what I saw the other day? Steamboat Willie, remember that cartoon, where he peels potatoes?” she said. “How scared we were?”

She mimed throwing the potato over her shoulder and whistled the tune.

“Why would that scare me?” he said.

“You used to have nightmares,” she said, nudging him. “We both did.”

He responded to her nudge with an elbow, then reached down and got another potato. There were only ten or so left. Outside she noticed Patrick, now Janet-less, making his escape, gingerly moving down through the kitchen garden.

Albert reached down and grabbed another.

“I’ve missed you,” she said.

“Gotta problem, you fuck?” His voice suddenly loud in the brick-tiled room.

She examined his profile, imagining licking her finger and writing something witty on his cheek. “I just want us to be friends, shithead.”

“I’m not letting you near me. You’re not getting anywhere near.” He looked up at the clock. “And stay the hell away from Mum.”

He still hadn’t turned his head toward her, not once. She saw that Patrick, despite his weak ankle, was already way down at the bottom of the garden, disappearing into the trees beyond.

“Two left,” she said.

“You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem,” he said, “and Arlo says he wants the skins left on.”

Mud swirled down the drain. He looked at the clock and tossed the last one in the colander. Turning round, he picked up a fresh sack of potatoes, unwashed, and poured them into the sink with a flourish. He took off the gloves and handed them to his sister.

“This is the least you can do,” he said, and was gone.

It was 10:31 and Freya and Don were standing by the goat pen. He was wearing gray joggers, a Phoenix Suns T-shirt with the basketball bursting through the front, and a blue baseball cap. His slaughterwear. They heard a blast of hip-hop from the sound system and Don turned his cap to the side. No response from Freya, who was not about to let him start enjoying himself. There was the sound of hooves clacking on wood and they looked across. All six goats were stood on the roof of their pen, huddled together in sunlight, as though longing for a crag to inhabit.

“Are you ready?” she said.

“I’m waiting for my helper.”

“You don’t need a helper.”

“He’s on his way.”

“Which goat are you choosing?”

“Belona.”

“But she’s four years old. She’ll taste like boots.”

“I delegated the responsibility for choosing. I just want to say, before my helper gets here, he’s been fantastic. Really thrown himself into the research.”

Freya squinted. A voice came from behind her. “Belona will have a delicious gamey quality, ideal for stews and curries.”

“Oh no, Don, please,” she said, as small arms reached around her waist.

As Kate washed the potatoes, she came to terms with her own brother distrusting her. Although he could not have known about her behavior with Mervyn, she worried that Albert understood instinctively the type of person she had become. She was glad, then, of this punishment, the endless-seeming potatoes. The job took quite a while, and once she’d finished she took the clean ones through to the kitchen.

After that, she went and sat up on the flat roof watching silhouetted paragliders turning this way and that above the downs, more today than she’d ever seen. They looked like a child’s drawing of a flock of birds. She had a good view of the party taking shape: the kitchen garden and polytunnels were busy with people she didn’t recognize, kneeling, crouching, bent at the waist; one figure she found familiar but couldn’t name was moving along the runner beans; a rash of tents had spread across the top of the long field; a hay-bale pyramid was halfway to completion, making arena-style seating for the music yurt. At the blind bend, good-natured car congestion formed, people waving each other on, and above the downs she watched a paraglider either in a death spiral or really showing off, disappearing behind the hill before she could find out which.

The familiar-looking slouched person was now in the polytunnel, obscured by plants. Whoever it was moved instinctively among the tomatoes, plucking the ready ones with a firm tug, filling a salad bowl with reds and yellows. She only realized it was Geraint when he stepped out of the tunnel, framed by the doorway. He had grade-three’d his whole head and was wearing a white vest. He had a farmer’s tan with arms the color of teak. She felt dizzy and unsafe to be on the edge of a roof. He noticed her watching. He stopped and squinted.

He made binoculars with his hands to stare back at her.

All the years that Freya had known Don he had talked a good slaughter. She remembered that before eating roast dinners, he often took a moment to visualize the relevant animal’s living conditions and the circumstances of their death — to check that he was morally comfortable (he always was) — before digging in. If Freya walked away from this now — and she had a good instinct to — then Don would be let off the hook again. She wanted him on the hook. And although Freya didn’t like her son’s involvement, the truth was that Albert would probably be calmer than most of the wwoofers, and certainly calmer than his father.

She and Albert led Belona to a secluded spot, a clearing between trees behind the barn. There was a young tree, she knew, that had a low branch they could use as a gambrel. Belona had two leashes round the top of her neck. Freya held one and Albert the other. They stood on either side of her, keeping the ropes a little slack so that she could scarf from her feed pan.

“Will this be painless?”

“It’ll be as humane as is possible.”

Belona tried to jump but the leashes kept her grounded. Albert dropped to his knees, let go of his rope, and hugged the goat round her middle, resting his head against her warm flank.

“Hope you enjoy your last meal.”

“Try not to make her nervous, Al.”

Don came round the corner of the barn carrying a molded plastic storage case with the word Blitz in red on it. In size and shape, it resembled his shaving kit. His cap was facing forward now. Belona made a noise from her stomach as he approached.

“Albert, would you like to say a word of thanks?” Don said.

“Don — please.”

“Thanks for everything,” Albert said, still with his arm round Belona’s neck, speaking into her ear. “This will teach me how to kill goats. It will allow us to survive in the end days.”

Freya made a small tsh noise. Don knelt down, laid the briefcase on the grass, and clicked it open. The bolt gun resembled a relay baton, but nickel plated. He lifted it out and hefted it in his hand. Albert stood and, copying his mother, picked up his leash and wrapped it twice round his wrist.

Don was testing his grip — one-handed then two — on the trigger lever.

“You’ve got to load it first,” Albert said.

“I know.”

Don spun the gun’s lid until it came off. Opening the small tin of 9-mm cartridges in the carrying case, he carefully pinched one out and immediately dropped it in the grass. Freya breathed deeply while he scrabbled around looking for it. She chose not to think about him doing the job badly and something terrible happening to Belona. He’d be relying on this weakness in her, she knew, hoping his incompetence would oblige her to step in.

“Take your time,” she said.

Eventually he found the cartridge, loaded it, and screwed the cap back on. By now, Belona had already half-emptied her feed pan. Once she finished eating she would be that much more difficult to control.

“She looks nervous,” Albert said.

“Don’t anthropomorphize,” Don said, and with his free hand he reached forward and stroked the goat’s jaw tassels. Then he rubbed the spot on her forehead where he would be aiming for. A look came across his face. He stood up, turned his back, walked toward a patch of nettles, and let out some excess saliva.

Freya took deep breaths. This was part of her husband’s show. She remained calm. Eventually he came back toward Belona, whose head was still down, the bottom of the feed pan just visible now. Don held the baton in both hands, out in front of him, the way Italian waiters hold pepper grinders. She felt he was trying to seem ill-matched for the task.

“Dad, the firing pin’s still down,” Albert said.

Don nodded. He took one hand off the baton and, with difficulty, lifted the safety.

“Mum, I don’t think Dad’s very good at this.”

“Let your father be.”

“I’m fine,” Don said, and he dropped to his knees to get a better angle.

“I’ve been practicing on the Yellow Pages,” Albert said. “I’d be way better than him.”

As Don shuffled a little closer, Belona made a quick wail. Her tongue darted around the bottom of the pan, dabbing up the last of her food. Don’s lips disappeared. Freya could tell he was making the internal 3 … 2 … 1 … of children on high diving boards. At least she could see he was genuinely trying.

“It will be part of my education,” Albert said.

“Let him concentrate.”

“I just need to do it,” Don said, speaking to himself. He made a kind of two-handed stirring motion with the gun as he tried to get himself in the mode.

“Don’t think,” she said.

“Easier said than done,” he said.

His eyes were half-shut and this was the first time it really struck her that this was cruel.

“It would help me learn about responsibility and consequence,” Albert said.

Belona finished her food, made a throaty noise, and brought her head up to look at Don. He made the mistake of looking into the goat’s eyes, the letterbox-shaped pupils.

Albert said: “Why don’t I take over?”

“Leave your father alone.”

Don was still making eye contact with the goat, whose jaw was masticating.

“Young people are fearless,” Albert said.

“Don, you’re doing fine,” she said, surprised to find herself becoming straightforwardly encouraging now, wanting him to do well. Don noticed it too and glanced up.

“Okay, okay, fine,” he said, and his jaw tensed. “I will do this.”

As his voice grew loud, Belona kicked and pulled against her leashes, and Freya and Albert both had to step back and tighten their grip. Now that the goat was without the distraction of eating, which had kept her head lowered, Don had to stand up to get a better angle. He took a step back, as though a short run-up might help.

“I would be ruthless,” Albert said, leaning back. Belona’s head was stilled by their leashes.

Don began nodding now, redoubling his commitment. His knuckles showed white and he seemed to be saying something under his breath. Belona made a vibrato noise and a look passed across Don’s face.

“She’s nervous because you’re nervous, Dad. Probably best for me to take over.”

“Don, now’s your chance.”

His back hunched and he raised the gun above one shoulder. He held that position, the shiny baton aloft, the fact that his hands were now shaking making him look a little — Freya could not help but notice — as though he were preparing a cocktail. In truth, he did not resemble a killer.

Don’s expression was of a man who had surprised himself. He’d secretly thought that, for all his avoidance over the years, when it came to it, he would probably be able to go through with this. For Freya, here was his moment of self-awareness that she had been hoping to provoke, only now that it was in front of her, she realized they would both have been better off in ignorance.

Albert said: “Let’s face it. I’m the man for the job.”

Then Don, still with that same startled expression, held out the baton to his son.

Geraint was in the coop, lifting up the swing-down door on the hutch.

“How long have you been here, Ger?”

Kate watched him through the chicken wire as he reached in and stroked one of the hens.

“Basically since the day you left. I came here looking for you, but then I decided to help out.”

Kate wondered why no one had told her this.

“What do your mum and dad think?” she said.

“They’ve been really supportive.”

“Have you found out your results?”

“I haven’t had time,” he said. “Liz and Mervyn might bring them over later.”

He used their first names. He held a pudgy hen and nuzzled its wing feathers with his nose.

“I’m really sorry about leaving,” she said.

“No need.” It looked like he was talking to the hen. “You handled it badly, but you did what was right for you. Things worked out. My fault for not seeing there was a problem.”

He put the hen back down, felt around in the straw, and pulled out a small pale egg. He held it up and admired it. There didn’t seem to be much of his old self left, and for this she felt responsible.

Just then they heard an impact somewhere and saw birds complaining in the sky above them.

When Don heard the shot, it took him by surprise and he put his hand to his chest. He was standing in the corner of the barn, not more than ten meters away from his wife and son but no longer visible to them. He had been listening to their muffled voices, unable to make out exactly what they were saying so filling in the gaps himself. He was still wearing his slaughterwear but had taken off his cap, while he leaned his forehead against the brick.

Behind him there were two long tables and, on each, stacks of wooden plates and a cutlery tray. On stands on a workbench there were four barrels: mild, dark, perry, and “Lucky Dip Cloudy Cider.” He went to the table, took a reusable pint cup, held it beneath the tap, and watched the glaucous yellow liquid dribble in. A memory of Patrick and a golden balloon. Once the glass was full, he took a long drink. In the corner of the barn, a red light came on.

“You okay, boss?”

Varghese stepped out, his camera held up.

“Yes.”

“Everyone’s arriving. You ready to give me that tour now?”

There was the eek-eek-eek of the rope working against the branch as the goat’s body jolted, the muscles still contracting.

“How do you feel?” she said.

“Sad.”

Albert watched the blood stream from the tip of Belona’s tuft of beard. As the metal bucket filled, the sound changed from tacktacktack to a pitter-patter.

“Mum?”

“Yes.”

“I’m worried about Dad’s survival in the next stage. What will happen to him?”

“He might adapt.”

Albert watched the bucket. Once it was half-full, a raspberry red, Freya swapped it for an empty one.

“You can take that to the kitchen.”

“Okay.”

“You did very well,” she said, and kissed him on the head. “Do you want to help me with the rest or have you had enough?”

“I think I’ve had enough.”

“Okay.”

He held the full bucket carefully, both hands on the handle, and carried it through the grass, across the yard. It caught the light: a full moon.

In the kitchen, Arlo was dicing onions with ex-professional flare. His cheeks were wet but he did not wipe his eyes. Albert clanked the bucket onto the tiles.

“I bring-ah blood,” Albert said, but didn’t feel up to giving his Mediterranean accent the usual oomph.

“My boy! My butcher!” Arlo said, and he knelt down and hugged him. Albert felt Arlo’s tears wet against his cheek.

“Okay. Now, say after me: co-ag-u-la-re.”

“Coagulare,” Albert said, without enthusiasm.

“Perfect, Albert. Benissimo.”

“I would like to be crying too.”

“I can make that happen,” and from the hugging position, Arlo picked him up with a fireman’s lift and held his face above the onions.

Sitting on a garden chair with a chopping board on his lap, Arlo cut the seams of fat out of the liver. In an iron pan on a trivet over the fire, there were onions, chili, mushrooms, garlic, and fresh kidney sizzling. Albert stood by the fire with a long-handled wooden spoon, prodding at the pan. They heard footsteps and looked up to see Kate coming down the stepped path toward them.

“I smell death,” she said.

As his sister got close, Albert wiped his eyes with his forearms. He took a paper plate and served himself an unnecessarily large portion.

“There was no suffering,” Arlo said, red-handed from the liver.

“The hens can tell when something bad has happened,” she said, quoting Geraint now. “They won’t lay anymore today.”

Flopping down onto the bare grass near the fire, she lay on her back and stared up at the sky.

“Nice one, bro. Your first kill. One notch on the bedpost.”

Albert kept tucking into his food, undisturbed.

“First a goat, next your parents,” she said. “How do you feel?”

“Your brother is upset, actually, Kate. I think he surprised himself.”

“I was not. I didn’t surprise myself,” Albert said, and he put a big forkful in his mouth. “Killing her was easy.”

The pan applauded as Arlo threw in more liver.

“Her? Don’t you always kill a billy?” Kate said.

“That is the usual,” Arlo said.

Kate breathed out heavily. Albert was chewing and now bobbing his head side to side, as though listening to a song he liked. The fire popped and the alignment of the wood changed.

“So who did you go for? Better not be Belona. You know she’s my favorite.”

Arlo stopped chopping and looked into the fire. Albert made appreciative food noises. Kate got up on her elbow. The smoke was drawn toward her.

“Arl?”

He didn’t move; he had a stained chopping board on his knees. Kate held her hand in front of her eyes.

She blinked. Her eyes were reddening — the smoke from the fire.

Albert had got a chunk of liver on the end of his fork. He was chewing. He stopped. He looked at his sister and — with blood on his teeth — he smiled.

She actually ran away. She ran, into the woods, rubbing her eyes as she went, trying not to think about Belona rotating, the line of people with paper plates, the disappointing, chewy meat, dry and overpowering, the pile of scraggy bones on the compost heap. She tried not to think about that. Just because she now ate meat did not mean that it stopped being murder; it just meant that she had become a murderer.

When she stopped running she found she had arrived, without consciously deciding to, at the place she always used to come when she was upset: where a chain-link fence dangled in the river, catching inexplicable bottles of Japanese bleach and blue rope. This was where the old version of herself would have come to wipe her eyes when someone had failed to live up to her high standards. Instead, she carried on into the woods, away from her special place, away from the sound of the cattle grid rattling in the distance as more people arrived for the party.

As she walked, she tried focusing on the letter A, and what it meant to her. She tapped into that part of her that was already in Cambridge, reading difficult fiction in a quadrangle.

She walked until she didn’t recognize the path anymore. After a while she saw, up ahead, smoke coming out from some tall grasses. Getting closer, she realized that it was, in fact, the roof of the roundhouse, its stovepipe breathing.

The last time she had seen the roundhouse was years ago and she was surprised how cozy it looked: a rack of pots and pans by the front door, pairs of boots lined up on either side of a welcome mat, and, looking through the porthole washing-machine window, Patrick, brewing industrial-strength chai, and Freya, unzipping a suitcase.

Don had reached a point, somewhere between two and three large cloudy ciders, where he wanted to be in front of a camera. Varghese filmed him, still in his basketball tee and joggers, but mercifully having given his cap away. He stood in the middle of the long field, called for the Frisbee, made a difficult catch, then threw it again, as hard as he could. It went off-camera, so it didn’t matter where it landed.

Varghese filmed Gower’s only magician, Herod the Significant, who was having trouble convincing anyone to lend him their valuables until Don took off his watch. Don preferred being in front of the lens; there was something transformative about it, in the same way that a miserable holiday, when viewed through its photographs, becomes a stream of joyful moments. He now had a glass of perry, which he sucked through a straw as Varghese followed him past a band who were practicing, sitting on stools outside the back door of their van, one playing a melodeon, one a mandolin, and a harpist who took away a hand to wave at Don; he blew a kiss back and tried ostentatiously counting them in (“Ah one, ah two, ah one two three four …”) and it actually worked: they played a silky two-step as he rumba’d up toward the kitchen garden, where he called hellos by name to the wwoofers whose names he knew and just hellos to those he didn’t. Don went through a polytunnel, joking that a hanging cucumber was a boom microphone, tapping it—“Is this thing on?”

• • •

Kate had reached a point, somewhere between two and three large mugs of chai, where she felt numb. This was a useful emotion because, since stepping inside the roundhouse, she had learned two things. First, she discovered the real reason her father had been in a hurry that morning. Second, and this was the big one, Freya had now decided, unilaterally, that Albert would start school in September. Not only that, but she had arranged with Patrick for her and Albert to stay at his house in Mumbles during term time, because it was close to the school.

So Kate now found herself helping to pack up their stuff. While Freya folded the Japanese screen, Kate put clothes in a suitcase. It didn’t feel great to be taking an active role in dismantling her own family, but she couldn’t disagree that her brother needed help. Patrick, meanwhile, had gone to bring the car round so they could start loading up. Kate had noticed he seemed pleased. He had even offered to “nip up to the party” and “run it all past Don,” since Freya was unwilling.

“Okay, I can finish up,” Freya said. “You should get back to celebrating your genius.”

Kate carried on folding a collarless shirt.

“Hello?” Freya said. “Are you there, overachiever?”

“I’m not going back to the party.”

Her mother frowned and they listened for a moment to the distant noise of the sound system. “You’d rather pack suitcases with me. How sweet.”

“I’m just trying to steer clear of my brother.”

Freya frowned for a long time. “What did Albert tell you?”

“He told me that being a murderer is easy.”

“Ah,” Freya said. She leaned the Japanese screen against the wall and came to kneel beside her daughter. “Sorry to tell you this, Kate, but your brother couldn’t go through with it. He’s not the psychotic he’d like you to think he is, I’m relieved to say. He got very upset.”

“So who did it then?”

“You can probably guess who the real murderer was.”

Kate realized, then, she’d been folding the murderer’s cardigans.

Albert and Isaac were in the upstairs bathroom, pissing into the same bowl. Isaac had wanted to get his face painted but Albert said that they needed to stay focused.

“We’re lucky, Isaac.”

“Why’s that?”

“Most people in the world don’t even know it’s going to end.”

The sound of drunk people ignoring their inevitable fate drifted through the open window.

They double-teamed a dried-on streak on the bowl.

“Get it,” Alb said.

“I’m trying.”

“You and me together.”

The stain started to disintegrate and fall into the pan.

“Spraying hot acid, you and me.”

Albert got a single sheet of toilet paper and dropped it into the toilet. They watched the paper dissolve into tiny bits, churning in the water, a yellowy cloud, an open portal.

“I’m done,” Isaac said.

Albert zipped up, then Isaac did the same.

“Good,” Albert said, and he reached to the windowsill, pulled the toothbrushes out of their mug, and held it up for Isaac to smell the rank bacterial backwash. Isaac shook his head. Albert looked stern and brought the mug closer. Isaac sniffed, then gagged.

They climbed in the bath, shoes on, to further their plans. Sitting cross-legged, they faced each other, Albert with his back to the taps.

“Remind me, how will the world end?” Albert asked.

“Um.” Isaac looked around. “It’s gonna come up through the plug’oles?”

Albert reached into the plug and pulled out a slug of human hair.

“Like this?”

“Like that.”

“Smell it.”

“I don’t want to.”

“We both smell it.”

Albert held up the rag of greasy hair and they both sniffed, both gagged.

Just then, through the open window, Albert heard a voice he recognized. Immediately he climbed up onto the sink and stuck his head out, looking down at the patio.

“I thought I’d driven her away but now she’s back and putting on a disguise,” he said. “My sister is evil.”

“Is she?”

“Yeah, she is. She wants us all to die. We have to get rid of her or she will undermine our message.”

“Okay.”

“But we probably shouldn’t kill her though, before you say it.”

• • •

Varghese was showing Don some of the footage they’d shot. With each new scene Don’s on-screen face got a shade redder, so it looked like a continuity error. As he watched, however, Don did not notice this. In fact, through his cider-fug he imagined that off the back of this short film a series would get commissioned, and the money would be enough to put them in the clear, and they would attract new members: bright, forward-thinking, child-laden people — enough children to make Freya see that sending Albert to school wasn’t necessary and from that point on his son would return to being the bright, hopeful boy of old and Freya would try to kiss Don, having seen him represented in this way, natural on-screen and heading up a worldwide growth in secular but authentic communal living.

When Kate had cautiously approached the patio at the back of the house, which was now the designated fancy dress area, she had been intending to apply only a couple of tasteful tribal stripes, to give the impression she was getting into the party spirit without actually getting into the party spirit. Her mother had convinced her to find her brother and try, again, to connect. But as she approached, someone had called her name — it was Geraint or, as he was now, the Hulk, sitting on a school desk, his green legs hanging in the air, surrounded by pots, tins, and tubes of face paint, jam jars full of brushes, cubes of sponge, pallets, rags, torn clothes, and the oval mirror. Being the Hulk just meant being algae-green from head to toe and topless, with his newly acquired farmhand’s body and small cutoff jean shorts. He had called Kate over and demanded complete creative control, which he was exercising now, as she stood in front of him, letting him take aesthetic revenge. It seemed like the least she could do. With everyone painting one another’s faces, there was a kind of domino effect, each person avenging the botched job that they’d received at someone else’s hands.

Next to them was the wicker dressing-up box from the attic, its leather straps untied, vomiting woolens, leggings, BabyGros, a ball gown, a straw hat, and an old stripy shower curtain onto the grass. Around them, people were becoming blocks of color, breakfast foods, worms, skulls, X-Men, robots, suns, munchkins, devils, Oompa-Loompas, peacocks, lions, elephants, minstrels. All human life was there.

It was almost dark. Patrick squeezed the last of the cardboard boxes onto the passenger seat and locked the car. He had parked at the top end of the new cul-de-sac development — scene of his injury — because it was the nearest spot for vehicle access to the roundhouse. The homes were lived in now, with cars in some of the driveways and a basketball net screwed into the wall above a garage. He felt a twinge at the memory of his lying there in the turning circle incapacitated. Of all the sensory revelations of that evening — the pain, cold, mind-bending paranoia — he was disappointed to note that the most persistent memory was of how Janet’s body felt against his back. In particular, her nipples. He also found he could clearly recall Don showing off his knowledge of hypothermia, displaying his talent for hijacking someone else’s life-changing trauma. This thought might have made Patrick angry had he not just finished carrying Don’s wife and son’s belongings to his car.

Freya had gone back to the roundhouse, where she claimed she was going to try to sleep, in preparation for the big move tomorrow morning. Patrick said that he would go back to the party to have an “air-clearing” chat with Don. He strapped on his head torch.

In the long field, the upper area was now so busy with tents that he had to walk a zigzagged route to avoid getting tripped by guy ropes. He passed four full-size tepees, their spikes prickling the dim sky. In the distance he could hear the bass. It sounded gastric. He could see, at the bottom of the field, the hay pyramid and the main stage where alt-folk four-piece Endless End were creating the evening’s first proper dance: a ceilidh-cum-circle-pit. There were probably close to two hundred people standing and sitting on the grass, smoking, eating, and drinking.

As he strolled among them, he imagined what he would say when he came across Don. Hand in your badge, old man. Or, more realistically, but just as cruel in its mannered way: I know this must seem like I’m moving in on your patch but I want you to know that I’m motivated purely by what’s best for Frey and Albert.

Patrick peeked into the barn, where the big vat of blood soup, labeled Very Non-Veg, was on a long table. Nearby, a small dog had climbed into the tray containing a whole salmon, and was currently holding the head in its mouth.

Skirting the rave arena, Patrick watched the young and relatively reckless dance under tarpaulin, lit by the house’s outside lamps and lanterns stuck in the ground. Patrick noted, with some affection, the three boys he used to buy weed off smoking ice bongs in a flower bed. The party, as far as Patrick could see, had funneled into two camps: the young, up here, with the sound system and the unyoung at the live music stage, with cross-pollination at the fire, food, booze, and toilets. The only exception was Don, who was standing just beyond where the dancers’ limbs could reach him, dressed now as the sun, with a rubber Statue of Liberty souvenir crown painted yellow; his face, his drink, and the basketball bursting out of his T-shirt were all colored yellow too. He was having his ear chewed off by a girl who was entirely blue. To Patrick, she seemed to be the sky, though she was supposed to be Mystique from X-Men. Don spotted Patrick and immediately started waving him over.

Kate was an endangered mega-fauna, with big white eyes and black earmuff ears, smoking Benson & Hedges on the pyramid of hay. Everyone on the flammable pyramid was smoking. It felt huge in her hand, almost like a wand, and she sucked on it and sprayed the smoke, turning her head back and forth while looking for her brother in the crowd. She couldn’t see him. People were watching the band in threes and fours, all drinking perry then slipping away to piss in the nettles. So far, the bands had been sharing their gear with good humor, except for some inevitable queenyness over snare drums.

“Hello? Delivery for Kate.”

She looked round and saw Isaac beside her, holding a tray, a tea towel over his arm.

“From your brother,” he said. “He’s sorry. He sent this tomato soup and salad that he made himself with a little help from Arlo, which I walked all the way down from the big house without spilling any.”

He handed the tray to Kate.

“Okay. Where is my brother?”

“He drew a letter K in coriander, which is the first letter of your name.”

“Great. Tell him he’s forgiven, and to come and see me. Where is he?”

Isaac bowed then turned and climbed down the pyramid and went away. She held the bowl up and took a big sniff and felt better. Geraint, who had been clambering up and down the pyramid like a temple monkey, asking for filters, leaving scuffs of green paint on the hay, returned. He smiled at the sky, which was dark now, then tried to pick something out of the small, impractical pockets at the front of his jean shorts.

“I saved you two greenies,” Geraint said. “They’re amazing.”

His bin-lid eyes stared at the pills in his hand the way children stare at emergency stop buttons they’re not supposed to press. He put one on the end of his tongue and stuck it out toward her. She’d never taken one before, though everyone assumed she was an old hand. She thought of Kit Lintel, and mushrooms, and the evening she had spent pretending to have a life-changing experience. Growing up in a community she had always found drugs a bit embarrassing, something that old people did, the way most teenagers think about opera.

His eyes narrowed as his tongue started to burn from the chemicals. She looked at her soup and was glad to think her brother might have mellowed. It was beginning to seem like she might be able to enjoy herself this evening. Geraint put his hands on her knees and wagged his tongue like a dog. She sucked it off in a quick hard slurp that tasted of smoke and ketchup, and washed it down with soup.

Patrick and Don kept walking through the market garden, away from the noise, until the geodesic dome emerged into view, Patrick’s old home, looking like a testicle veined with fairy lights. It had been made available to the revelers — a banner read THE THUNDER DOME! — but it was empty, which, for Patrick, said everything about its eternal position in the community. They went inside, shutting the door and the windows, which just left the sound of the kick drum pushing through, a feeling in their chests of perpetual resuscitation.

“Phew,” Don said, and he sat down on the low futon-sofa.

“I think that girl liked you,” Patrick said.

“She liked everything.”

It shouldn’t have surprised Patrick that they hadn’t kept the dome as he had left it but, nevertheless, he stood, looking around at the bare, triangulate walls. The only decoration was a photo of whoever was sleeping here of late, a giant brown man and his miniature girlfriend, holding hands in a park. In anticipation of the difficult conversation ahead, Patrick instinctively checked the cupboard where he used to keep his stash. Inside were rows of labeled tapes and a pile of cue cards, each of which had handwriting on it. He read one:

Day Sixteen. Tape 3/5. 00.00–00.41 audio only — Marina interview** (thoughts on D, F, A and “The Future.”) 00.42–00.58 audio only — covert recording of communal meeting. 00.59–01.20 long of D in garden, lecturing wwoofers on power usage (audio not usable but good video)

“She thought we were a cult, Pat. She asked me how many wives I have.”

Patrick shut the cupboard and turned round. Don had scuffs of blue on both cheeks where the girl had said goodbye in the French manner. He was filling two wooden cups with Merlot from a box by his feet. He passed one up to Patrick.

“And how many wives did you tell her?”

Don didn’t find that funny.

“Have you seen Freya?” he asked.

“Actually, she did ask me to pass on a message. Said she’s too tired. Gone to bed.”

Don inhaled for a long time.

“I know it’s not what you wanted to hear,” Patrick said. “But you should try and have a good time anyway. You’ve worked really hard to make all this happen, and you deserve to enjoy it.”

Their relationship was not built on kindness and Don squinted in nonrecognition. Patrick took note and tried to even things out with a bit of trademark banter.

“I am reminded of something you said to me once. ‘Get stuck in, Pat. Sixty’s not too old.’ ” His impression of Don was camp. “ ‘All these tremendous women, intelligent, freethinking, body-confident.’ ”

“Are you trying to tell me to get laid?”

“I never said that. I’m just saying there’s a little secret that I know. You take this table leg off”—Patrick nudged the one he was referring to with his foot—“and feed it through the coat hooks on the back of this door. Et voilà—privacy.”

“Oh Christ,” Don said, and he put his head in his hands. “Is that what Freya hopes will happen? I’ll get laid and forget about her?”

Patrick didn’t reply; he wasn’t used to seeing Don vulnerable and it unsettled him.

“You know she’s talking about sending Albert to school?” Don said.

“I actually wanted to talk to you about that,” Patrick said.

Finishing off his wine in one, Don leaned forward and squirted himself a top-up from the box.

“I just don’t think it’ll do him any good. School won’t suit him. Maybe when he’s older, Kate’s age, it will. Plus it’s miles away. He’ll lose half his life going back and forth.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk about — the commute,” Patrick said. He knew there was a spot in the middle of the room that, because of its shape, produced a kind of reverb. He had always disliked how it made him sound, but for now he decided it would be better to speak with a certain omnipotence. He knew the spot by instinct; he took a couple of steps and one to the side, then raised his chin: “Freya said it wouldn’t take so long for him to get to school if she and Albert lived nearer the school.”

“You can’t teach that kind of rational thinking, Pat. That’s why I married her.”

Patrick stayed where he was. To get the special effect he had to keep his head in that position.

“And she asked me if she and Albert could live in my house, for a bit.”

The reverb smoothed the harsh edges off his voice, he felt.

“And what did you say, old pal?”

“Well, Don. I mean. To be totally frank, I said ye—”

It was the purest kind of uppercut. Don, seated on the very low futon-sofa, had made a fist and pushed himself up, reaching full height as he caught Patrick under the chin. His fist must have traveled four and a half feet along a vertical axis. At exactly the point in the word yes where the tongue darts out before the sibilant, it hit.

Patrick took a couple of steps back and held his throat. It hadn’t been that hard, both men knew, but it counted.

“Okay,” Patrick said, his voice no longer omnipotent.

His tongue was bleeding. Something in the less than wholehearted way Don had hit him — at about 65 percent strength — suggested a kind of resignation. It was almost an okay, you win. Don sat back down on the sofa and said: “Damn.”

At this point, Patrick had expected to feel more victorious.

She’d never heard music like this before. This was not normal dance music. Closing her eyes, Kate clearly imagined robotic dogs coming toward her over the horizon. Giant robotic dogs. Their feet were the drums and they were growling the bass line — no, they were chasing the bass line — the bass line was chasing them! Always running toward her but never getting any closer, like in the Steamboat Willie cartoon, but not scary at all. A guy without face paint danced against her. His features looked squashed but she didn’t mind so she pushed her bum into his crotch and laughed over her shoulder. He was one of the free-party ‘heads who had arrived at midnight, easily recognized by the girls’ fluorescent leggings and the boys’ sleeveless tops. Whenever the music dropped away, she heard the hydraulic rush of an entrepreneur, somewhere, doling out nitrous. There was someone who looked like her father, if her father had jaundice, standing near the edge of the dance floor, speaking intensely to a girl who was one of those blue-skinned aliens in hot pants.

She found the Hulk next to the speakers, watching his own hands with interest, dancing by a girl dressed as a peacock. He reached into the condom pocket of his jean shorts and teased something out, another pill, which he pressed into Kate’s palm. Gazing up at the amoeba-shaped tarpaulin, she felt an affinity with everything, right down to the single-cell organisms within her. She took a moment to contemplate the inside of herself, her internal neatness, before becoming aware of her bladder. She could not wait to go to the toilet, Kate suddenly realized. She was excited about it.

Avoiding the portable johns, she went to the bathroom under the stairs. She felt her breath go in and out and she looked at the ceiling and the walls and the toilet scrubber and the curlicued H and C on the faucets. She sat down, giggling, then read and reread the note that said: “Hello. If you’re reading this, you must be sitting on me. I like organic waste (that means piss, shit, and toilet paper — yum!). Everything else, feed to my friend, Senor Bin. Love, Joe Bog.” It was brilliant and clever. Then she wiped herself and saw red on the tissue paper. She stared at it. A watery red. She looked into the bowl and saw all her piss was red. Internal bleeding. The pills.

Fucking cheapskate pills, just typical, for me to die on the day of my unconditional acceptance. So this is how Geraint gets his revenge.

She pressed her hands on her stomach. Suddenly there were no unthreatening robotic armies, just a slow, painful death in a brightly lit hospital, and she remembered Patrick in an eight-bed ward, the forked capillaries at the side of his nose. Kate realized she would never stride purposefully through the university library’s impossibly complicated annals. Annals. Never annals for her. She would never have one-on-ones with outlandish lecturers. So many stains on their jumpers, shoelaces untied, that she would never see. She would never punch well above her weight, academically and romantically, would never fall in love with a boy of an opposite social background — even more opposite than Geraint’s, the son of a wealthy foreign diplomat, perhaps — and they would never toss off the shackles of each other’s ideas of what a relationship could be, and discover that, when it came down to it, they were similar — both fleeing their childhoods, both social explorers — and they would never hold each other in a postgraduate carrel amid the smell of rare and expensive books and wake full of knowledge, not the kind of knowledge found in books but something deeper, about themselves, about each other.

She stared into the bowl. What was she worried about again?

Oh yeah, the watery blood that suggested a slow, agonizing death — with hours to decide her final words, hours to edit and redraft. She couldn’t think what her final words would be. I love you. Was that an awful cliché? It felt true, though. I love you. I love you. I love you.

“He-llo? I’m dying out here,” a female voice said.

Kate pulled up her knickers and flushed. She straightened her black skirt and unlocked the door. As she came out, a Pierrot clown shoved past and slammed the door behind her. Kate went back to the kitchen, where there had been a fight with raw onion. It was everywhere. She felt her eyes start to sting. She sniffed and remembered that she was going to die. She’d forgotten. She started crying. There was a big red bloody patch on the chopping board on the table. She stared at it. Next to the board were a pile of beetroot scalps.

She stared back and forth between the board, the bloodstain, the beetroot.

The board. The bloodstain.

The beetroot.

She was like some completely useless detective.

It took maybe eleven seconds.

“Beetroot salad,” she said. “I ate beetroot salad.”

There was a boy she didn’t recognize at the fridge — not in fancy dress — digging at a carrot cake with his hand.

“I thought I was dying, but I’m not!”

She pulled the other pill Geraint had given her out of her pocket and took it with a glass of Five Alive.

The last image that Patrick had of Don was of him, with frightening intensity, twisting out the last dregs from the foil bag of box wine, as though breaking the neck of a rabbit. Don had asked to be left alone, and so now Patrick was standing at the edge of the live music yurt. He kept deliberately clipping the cut on his tongue against his front teeth, wincing, then doing it again. The band were called “Palindromeda.” As they finished one particularly awful song, Patrick heard a voice at his shoulder.

“You’ve been avoiding me.”

He knew who it was. Only now, somehow, with his car full of another man’s wife’s belongings, and with his tongue swollen in his mouth, did he feel able to see her. He turned to look — her face was flushed at the forehead from dancing and wearing a neckerchief — then he went back to watching the band. The front man said: “This song’s called ‘Called songs, this.’ ”

She said: “I’ve missed you.”

Patrick felt the back of her hand against his cheek.

“What happened to your face?” she said.

Albert wandered the party, trying to decide on the best position from which to make his announcement. He needed to take into account where the biggest crowd could gather, the audience’s sight lines, and which position would give him the best silhouette. They would not be getting any more trouble from his sister, who, Albert could only assume, had tasted the soup, realized that she was drinking one of her oldest friends, and was right now releasing tears into the wild, somewhere very far away. He walked past the fire pit and saw Zinia, a woman who he had once loved like a grandmother until she left the community to live in Christiania years ago. She had curly hair and an alpine chest.

“Bertie!” She used to call him that. “My boy, you’re huge!”

“I know.”

“Slask fitte!”

He repeated it. “What does it mean?”

“I saved it for you. It’s Swedish. It means something unspeakable.”

“Okay, thank you.”

Up at the yard, he tried to ignore his father sitting on the bench by the schoolroom with a Smurf on his lap. Albert examined the flat roof as a possible podium. He walked back toward the dance floor, into the noise, avoiding the flailing elbows, to check that he would still be visible from there. When he heard his name yelled, he turned round in time to see someone who resembled his sister wrap her clammy arms right round him, wetness and heat coming off her neck.

“Bro!” she said. The hug went on and on. Her face paint was smudged to an ashy gray. When she let go, there were black smudges on Albert’s forehead. She looked him up and down.

“What are you?” she said, dancing as she talked. “Are you a sea captain?”

He was wearing wellies and a blue naval utility coat. The coat, which he’d got from the dressing-up box, was to give him authority as a public speaker and to point toward the possible floods ahead.

“Why are you still here?” he said.

“I came to see you!”

She bobbed her head from side to side. She was holding a bamboo pole, the panda’s glow stick, twizzling it. He could feel the music in his lungs, the air moving. The smoke machine exhaled, the green laser came on, and his sister reached up to break the beams. He needed to hurt her more.

“The soup,” Albert said. “It was made with the blood of your goat. Belona’s blood.”

“Cool,” she said, and she tried to get him to dance, taking hold of his hands and puppeting them up and down.

“It was cool,” he said, in an overly sinister way, then waited for her to scream.

“What did you say about Belona?”

He cupped his hands round her ear and yelled.

“The soup was made with her blood!”

Her dancing slowed a little. Just her feet going.

“I thought it was tomato.”

He didn’t mind repeating himself.

“You drank her blood. We mixed it with tomato to fool you.”

“Oh my God, that’s weird.”

He watched her smudged face crack. Her teeth floating there amid the black paint. It was a smile, he realized. An unfathomable response. Her feet were still going from side to side, shoulders shifting.

“Brother of mine,” she said, kissing him in the middle of the forehead, then leaning right into his ear, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned tonight, it’s that I love you so much. And you’ll never stop loving me either. I know why you do everything. I love everything you are.”

She pulled his head into her chest and kissed him again, really hard on the crown. He could smell her. Maybe she was in shock — that was the problem. He had to make her understand.

“I stuck her, Kate. She was pissing blood like a fountain pissing blood.”

He felt her move in time to the music.

“I know what happened. That you weren’t capable of pulling the trigger. I spoke to Mum. It’s great that you’re sensitive. Don’t fight it — you’re a good person by nature!”

She wouldn’t let him go, squeezing him and trapping his arms at his side and moving his body in time with the music as though dancing with a doll.

“That’s not true,” he said.

“I’m so proud of you!”

Letting go of him, she put her hands in the air as the synths came in. The bass dropped monumentally — a dynamited tower block.

As the smoke cleared, Albert looked to where his dad had been sitting but he was gone.

“Yeeeeeaaah!” she said, her voice going scratchy.

Little bits of spittle got Albert in the face. Her head went back, looking up at the tarpaulin. He gazed inside her nostrils, tiny nodules of dried snot attached to hairs like a miniature and impractical abacus. He did not know who this person was.

“Don’t feel bad. She had a good life. Better than most animals’ lives. Mum said Belona was pretty chilled out, even at the end. Come on, come dance, this is amazing,” and she pulled him closer to the speakers, his heels dragging in the grit. He yanked his hands away and put them over his ears. The bass rattled his insides and he thought of the way the innards had flopped out of Belona onto the grass, and of how there had been a sound like hundreds of people licking their lips all at once. He thought of the way the heart had kept thumping after the brain was mush. He looked around at the brain-dead people, his sister among them. There was an apocalyptic clown, blood around his mouth, with a top hat and cane, the white paint cracking at his jaw where he was gurning.

“You should think about how she bled to death and seemed to be in pain,” Albert said, though he was starting to get upset.

She mimicked using a steak knife and fork, cutting off a chunk, chewing it, but all this in rhythm with the music.

“It’s fine. I love you. And you may not know it but you love me.”

He was blinking a lot. “I don’t.”

She did the one where electricity runs up one arm, across her shoulders, and down the other arm.

She tried to pass it to Albert, but he’d gone.

Don was in the dome, down on one knee, tipping the table up with his shoulder as he took one of its legs off. The Sky was above him on the mezzanine bed, swinging her blue legs in the air.

“What you gonna use that for?” she said. “And will I get splinters?”

He wedged the table leg into the coat hooks and tested the door to make sure it didn’t open.

“You know all the tricks,” she said.

Don was full of different drinks and his ears were ringing and he had even slightly pulled his hamstring when dancing. It made him sad that the thing he was doing might be the thing his wife hoped he would do. He climbed the few stairs, holding on to the rail made from an elm tree branch while trying to disguise a limp.

He crawled onto the bed, took the girl’s drink out of her hand, then leaned in and put his tongue in her mouth. Her skin was soft, even with paint on. He experienced dizziness, having recently downed a Martini, and he worried about a possible fall from the mezzanine.

She lay back on the mattress and he carried on kissing her, leaning over with an arm on either side of her upper body. She felt the crotch of his trousers. He asked himself a question he had not asked in some time: Did he have clean genitals? Yes, thoroughly so, because he’d hoped that something might happen with Freya.

She pulled off her top and revealed the parts of her body she had not painted. He tried not to think about anything and groped her and kissed her. She slipped her hand down the front of his trousers and tugged inexpertly.

“This is probably pretty normal for you,” she said. She had to stop kissing while she concentrated on his belt. “It’s cool that here sex can just be sex and nobody has to get het up about it.”

Her speaking reminded him of how young she was, so he kissed her to keep her quiet. She shoved off her jean shorts, along with her underwear. He didn’t want to say that this was moving too quickly, but he wondered if it was a generational thing: this was moving too quickly. She was of his daughter’s generation. Twenty-four, he had discovered, a graduate. More white clouds now, among the blue. She had shaved all her pubic hair off. He had never seen that in person before. It pretty much appalled him. He tried to buy time by going down between her legs. She was scentless. These weren’t real genitals, as far as he knew. So much had changed since he was young.

“I’m married,” he said, from between her thighs. “I have a wife.”

“I know; I get it. Do you want me to meet her later or something?”

“I mean I’m properly married. Legally.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t think you do. I think I might have to stop what we’re doing here.”

She looked down at him.

“Yes,” he said, “I definitely think I’m going to stop.”

“Weird.”

“I just realized. I’ve also hurt my hamstring.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“Whatever.”

Isaac stood in the gloom behind the generator, yawning a lot and feeling sick from the fumes but knowing that the human race’s survival depended largely on his standing there, staying awake, feeling sick. He looked up at the flat roof of the big house and could make out a shape moving around. He waited for the signal. Isaac was happy that there were lots of other children at the party, some of whom he knew from before, like the three blond sisters from Tinker’s Bubble whom he used to be friends with when he lived there. They were all wearing bridesmaid dresses and had jumped on him when they first saw him. They called him “Eye Sack,” which he always found funny. Then, later on, he had been riding piggyback on the oldest sister Anya, whose plaited hair swung so high as they ran that it tickled his ears. That was when Albert saw them and made a deadly face so that Isaac had to climb down and take Albert’s hand and come stand here in the dark behind the generator to finish the plan. Albert had explained that his sister had not been upset at all by the blood soup. She was now entirely without a mind, so there was nothing more they could do. Isaac thought about how his mother had said they would be moving on again soon, to a new community. She said that she was unsettled and that the energy interplay was shifting and she did not want to be here on the fifteenth of October when Mars came a-knocking. She said the party was a good opportunity to meet people from other communities. She had told Isaac to let Albert know it was possible they might leave in the morning, if they met someone who was willing to give them a lift. His mother didn’t like the party being filmed and photographed as she believed that films and photographs took something away from you that they could never return. There was the shape on the roof, silhouetted by the dusky clouds, dragging a rectangle out of the skylight. His mother had very small eyes, eyes that always looked closed in photos even when they were open. He had heard people taking photographs say, “Let’s try again, you blinked,” so many times that in the end she had to say, “That’s just how my eyes look.” He had not got his mother’s eyes. He had someone else’s eyes. For some reason the fumes made Isaac never want to eat bacon again. Isaac had seen a number of photos of himself and was extremely pleased with all of them. No one was noticing the noise the generator was making because of all the other noises. Don sometimes called the generator “Jenny.” His mother said that Don was “messed up on some deep level” and that any community with someone that competitive at the heart of it would have problems. His mother said that they needed to find somewhere more genuine because it was important to be somewhere genuine, especially now. Isaac had not told Albert that they might be leaving so soon. He was scared about what Albert would say. His mother had been invited to a community in Northumbria and had printed out pictures and Isaac could not deny it looked nice with a big wooden structure for morning meditation and a choir that did not care if you could sing. He stared up at the flat roof above the kitchen. There were a few rectangles up there now and a shape tending to them. His favorite place had been Tinker’s Bubble, where he’d had three girlfriends, all sisters, all blond, and sometimes they’d carried him around like a corpse. There was a waterfall there that trickled down the side of the hill and the posh house at the bottom had a trampoline in the garden that he and the girls used to sneakily bounce on until lights came on in a window and someone yelled. His mother became friends with a nice man named Daniel who smelt of damp wood chips, which was a good smell. Daniel wrote a song about his mother that rhymed Marina with hyena and ballerina and was Isaac’s favorite song for a good while, until his mother said it was not a good song anymore. Then they went to High Copse Court, which his mother tried to become a member of but was not allowed because, as she explained to Isaac, their minds were locked shut like a beehive. Then they came here and Marina told Isaac to be extra nice, which he was. He was happy to meet Albert, and Albert was happy to meet him. The shape on the roof wasn’t moving anymore. He heard a woman’s voice nearby, saying in an American accent: “Varghese, I think you should come up the house quick and catch this. Albert’s on the roof.” This made Isaac pleased that they were doing something important. Then there were the torch flashes. Dot dot dash. Dash. Dot dot. The signal. Isaac knelt down, gripped the thick textured plastic where the cord went into the generator. It would turn off the music and lights in the rave arena but would not affect Albert, who was plugged into the river behind the walls of the big house. Before he’d even pulled the plug, somewhere someone screamed really loudly and for a long time. Isaac held the cord with both hands and leaned back.

Patrick and Janet took their shoes off at the door to her room. At the end of the corridor, extension cords were running through the window and out onto the flat roof. As they went inside and Janet shut her door behind them, the dance music stopped. She nodded as though the ability to mute the outside world was well within her powers. Through the walls, they heard a muffled, amplified voice and the sounds of cheering. They sat on school chairs opposite each other.

“I’m so glad to see you.”

“Sure.”

Their voices sounded intimate in the sudden quiet, which Patrick didn’t approve of. She examined his face in the light from a double-helix lampshade that hung above them. She smoothed out his forehead with her thumbs, which made him realize he was frowning.

“I never got to say sorry in person for not coming with you in the ambulance. I desperately wanted to but I was worried that I’d make things worse — since you seemed to believe I was plotting to kill you.” She opened her eyes wide in mock horror.

Patrick tried not to take in what she was saying. She looked down at his ankle and asked if she could have a look, which was just the sort of thing that he had been training himself to avoid. He wanted to say: No, that’s not appropriate. But he didn’t say that. Instead, in the quiet room, he stayed silent. She put her hands on his knee to see if he reacted, then slid off her seat and knelt in front of him, running her hands downward, feeling his left shin through his trousers.

He gripped the sides of the chair and stared at her work table: four ice-cream-cone devil horns were drying on newspaper. Underneath the desk was a mound of bubble wrap, Jiffy bags, and antique presentation boxes printed with “Accessories to Murder” in an italicized font.

She took hold of his left foot and lifted it up, straightening his leg out. He watched her. She pressed the sole of his foot to her hip, then reached up his trouser leg, found the top of his thick walking sock, and rolled it down and off.

Smells are good for bringing back memories.

It was the first week they lived in Blaen-y-Llyn together. They all shared the schoolroom, eight of them. No stench or bulge or habit was disgusting. Janet’s hypersonic bat farts in the night. She and Patrick would sometimes lock together, him waking with her tucked in flush against him.

Outside there was more cheering.

She pushed up his trouser leg, then ran her fingers down the flat of his shin toward his ankle, its yellow skin, the hair worn away by the cast. She watched him breathe in, his chest expanding, those lungs. Then she found it, the scar.

“What was the real reason you left?” she said, while examining the marks, which looked like a quadratic equation. Locating two metal screws, just below the surface of the skin, she pressed her thumb against them and Patrick inhaled.

“Don says the only reason I stayed here so long was because I was in love with you, but being in love with you was the reason to leave,” he said.

She smiled and slid her hand up to his knee, just beneath his trousers. Her other hand held the underneath of his calf. It felt like she was ready to draw him in, hand over hand.

“Am I really that bad?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Am I doing it now?”

“Oh yes. Absolutely.”

She looked down at her hands.

“Sorry,” she said, and let go.

He stood up from the seat and moved awkwardly to the door, hobbled by a hard-on as well as his ankle. She threw him his sock. He was unable to bend to put it on. They listened to the crowd outside. Some were chanting.

“You never replied to my letter,” she said.

“What letter? You never sent one.”

“The one I sent when you were in hospital. I gave it to Don to give to you.”

Patrick pretended he hadn’t heard that and leaned back against the wall, managing to get the sock on.

“Well, if you didn’t get it, I’ll tell you what it said. It said I was so sorry about your accident and that I had wanted to come in the ambulance but didn’t want to upset you. I wrote about why I was awake that night, and drunk; it was because things weren’t going well with Stephan. I laid all my feelings on the line. How much I care about you.”

“Was it a love letter?”

He thought of the way she sealed her letters: pink wax stamped to look like a man’s nipple.

She looked at him. “Maybe not in those exact terms, no. More of a kind of get-well letter, but with added content.”

“Did it suggest that we start a full sexual relationship?” His voice was loud.

She showed her teeth. “Not that I recall.”

“Sounds like your typical high-grade bullshit then.”

“So that’s what you want? A full sexual relationship.”

“Yes. Or nothing.”

“Right.”

It had taken him years — actually, decades — to say that. Among some other emotions, there was definite relief. “The answer is nothing, isn’t it?” he said.

“I think so,” she said.

“Fine. Good. That’s cleared up. Anyway, where’s old Stephan? I looked for his Saab,” Patrick said, “but couldn’t see it. I wanted to key him a message in the paintwork.”

“He’s not here,” she said, sitting back on her seat and looking up at the ceiling. “He’s back with his wife.”

Patrick felt giddy. He was close to laughing in fact, but then told himself that this could be one of her stunts, though her expression said that it was not. Something about knowing she had been hurt made certain conversations more possible. Patrick smoothed down his trousers. His hard-on was gone. He felt freed.

“You need inequality. That’s what you get when you’re with someone like me. What could be simpler, more pure, than one person unfalteringly adoring another person, and that person quite liking being adored?”

“Right.”

“You don’t even need to find me attractive. In fact, it’s better if you don’t!”

“The type of relationship you are referring to is called friendship. Happy to renew that with you, Pat.” She looked at him. “You’re pretty much perfect, but I just don’t want to fuck you.”

It was a kind of exhilaration to hear those words.

“I’m hoping for early onset menopause,” he said, his voice suddenly cheerful. “Take sex out of it and I’m looking like a strong contender. Au revoir, libido; hello, Patrick.”

She nodded slowly twice. “You’re playing the long game?”

“Twenty years in, no turning back now. Let me know when you feel the hormones dwindle,” he said, and looked at his watch. “How old are you?”

“Forty-two.”

“And counting,” he said. “You’re just entering the zone. Keep me on speed dial. You may find your priorities change. Oh ho, I wish you’d told me this a long time ago.”

She stood up and came toward where he was standing by the door.

“I did tell you. I told you by never having sex with you.”

When the outdoor lights and music shut off, everyone beneath the rave canopy made a big synchronized boo, which, Albert knew, was just a small slither of how bad they would feel when the world as they knew it really did go through the industrial cheese grater.

Albert had hooked himself up to the big house mains. He had the karaoke machine from the attic and a microphone on a stand. He was on a low stool that was so close to the edge of the flat roof that if it were to tip forward he would be hospitalized, he estimated. He was ghoulishly lit; in a circle beneath him were five upturned reading lamps, each installed with contraband hundred-watt bulbs. He lifted the clay megaphone that Marina had made for him to his lips and yelled at the microphone.

“I have something important to tell you!”

In the yard, the only remaining light was from the mosquito repellent lanterns. He couldn’t make out the faces of the people who were turning to notice him, spinning and pointing up in the way that people point at superheroes. There were some people still talking loudly, and some laughter.

“Listen to me! This is important!”

Having never been to school, he had never seen the silence-produces-silence technique.

“Listen!” he said.

Someone shouted: “We love you, Albert. Don’t jump!”

There was a round of applause and a hydraulic gushing sound, then everyone went quiet apart from one or two drunks somewhere singing “Heeeey-ay-baby,” but Albert decided that it was fine for those people to die in the paradigm shift so he ignored them.

“I have invited you all here today to tell you some very bad news.”

Huge, pantomime-style, sympathetic aww sounds from the gathered throng.

“We have a limited number of days remaining on this planet.”

The quiet held for a moment. The clay megaphone hurt his lips.

“We must learn to discard the material world.” There was a shout-out for Madonna that Albert didn’t understand. “Pass this message on. If everyone here told just two people a day, and those two people told two people, and so on, for all of the remaining days, then we would reach the whole world.”

He started to hit his rhythm and was getting some strong calls of support.

“When it happens we are going to have to be ready. Before we enter the next paradigm, we must learn to perceive it. Some people will try to tell you lies.”

A scattering of applause and, it was hard to be sure, some kind of bowing hero worship happening in one section of the crowd, which was the sort of thing he had been hoping for. Possible Mexican wave. There was a red light too, pointed at him, like a robot eye.

“Who’s with me?”

He’d hoped a few natural leaders might emerge in the crowd and start organizing people but, as yet, that hadn’t happened. Down by the generator he could see someone had a flashlight, and just then there was the tinnitus of the sound system coming back online, his audience suddenly visible to him, expressions lit by fairy lights on the trees and security lamps in the grass. Perhaps they were turning on the sound system so that they could plug Albert’s microphone in and he could project his news even farther. The red light was Varghese’s camera. That made sense, because it was important to record a moment like this.

“Thank you for listening!” Albert said. “Go — now — it’s time!”

He dropped the megaphone and it fell off the roof and landed in a plush flower bed below, although it didn’t smash dramatically; it just cracked in two.

Someone in the crowd pointed and yelled “It’s behind you!” at Albert, and there was a huge cheer, bigger than anything he’d got for his speech. He turned round and saw something terrifying: sea mist. It was coming in quick, thickening tangibly, smudging everything out. The revelers were captivated. It was quite possible this was the beginning of the end, in which case his speech had come too late. This would be permanent darkness. The world was shrinking. As Albert walked offstage, someone had lined up Prince’s “1999” as the first record and everyone went absolutely nuts.

Smoke machines were obsolete. Albert walked out of the big house and across the yard, which was now a gray room. He found Isaac and took his hand. The DJ couldn’t resist putting the strobe on. People kept coming out of the mist and patting Albert on the back and saying things like “Nice one, dude” and “Thanks for the tip-off” and “The prophet walks among us” and Albert tried to give them all the death-eyes but it wasn’t having any impact. They gave him the death-eyes, though none of them seemed to realize.

Isaac was fidgety and had stopped speaking. He had a look on his face that Albert didn’t like. The mist made them feel that, wherever they went, they were still inside.

They looked in Isaac and Marina’s bedroom at the far end of the workshop. It was bare, apart from a load of cardboard boxes and suitcases stacked at the far end. Isaac was upset and Albert told him to grow up.

“Where’s your mum?” Albert asked.

Isaac squirmed and Albert gripped him by the wrist as they walked back along the candlelit path through the market garden to check for her in the pottery shed. As they got close they saw that the shed’s strip lights were on. Albert wanted to ask Marina what the best plan was, now that the world was officially full of idiots who would soon be dead. He found her, kneeling, wrapping a fruit bowl in newspaper and putting it into a cardboard box full of other parceled-up shapes. There was a can of Red Stripe by her knee on the concrete floor and behind her a huge stack of detritus: a noseless surfboard, a wooden toolbox, tent poles. He realized what was happening.

“We’re leaving, aren’t we?” he said, standing in front of her. “It makes sense if we are. It’s probably a good idea for us to leave. I’ll get my mum.”

She reached forward and put her hands on each side of his cheeks and admired him.

“And we’d love to take you with us.”

Her lips were wet. He’d never seen her drinking before.

“Well, I’ll go get my stuff then,” Albert said.

She laughed and smiled at him in a way that said she found him endearing. Being thought of as endearing was one of Albert’s least favorite things.

“We can’t very well take you away from your family,” she said then, with a sideways glance, “much as you might like us to.”

It was supposed to be a joke of some kind, that last bit, because of the way she’d said it, but Albert had no idea what she was getting at. Isaac had appeared in the doorway behind him, Albert knew, because of the weedy sniveling noise.

Marina’s eyes flicked to the doorway and back to Albert. She still had his cheeks between her hands. “Did Isaac tell you where we’re going?”

Albert felt his face go hard. When things were annoying he found his face went hard and sometimes he breathed through his mouth.

“Where are you going?” Albert said.

“Didn’t Isaac say? Northumbria. Not so far away.”

Albert heard the sound of Isaac sniffling behind him. Marina had her hands on his shoulders now. The jacket he was wearing had epaulettes and she dusted them off. If she dared call him a little trooper or soldier then he would lose it.

“We’ll visit you. You and Eyes can be pen pals.”

“Pen pals,” Albert said.

Somehow those two words felt incompatible with everything he knew about the future of the planet. Either she was treating him like an idiot or she was an idiot herself. Albert’s experience of the evening so far had been, broadly, that nobody was his intellectual equal.

“Why can’t I come with you?” he said.

“Because you have to stay with your family. They love you and they’re the most important thing.”

It was becoming increasingly clear with each answer she gave that she no longer knew what the right priorities were.

“You and Isaac have got a little while to say goodbye to each other. We won’t leave until this mist clears.”

“Did you hear our announcement?”

“What’s that?”

“We made an announcement about the bad news.”

She looked surprised and then made a face of recognition, but not a convincing one.

“Oh yes, I heard something. I was in here, packing up, but I heard it. I thought it was … yes. It was great. It was excellent.”

“It wasn’t excellent. Nobody listened.”

“But it sounded like everyone really enjoyed it.”

He had a bad feeling that there was literally no one he could think of who wasn’t in some very significant way a letdown. At least his own mother had been asleep all this time. There was only limited damage she could do to her reputation while sleeping. He had known people to leave him all through his childhood; his best friends were always leaving. He had a way of dealing with it, which was to stop being friends with them. In the time between hearing the news they were leaving and the time they left, you stopped being friends so that, on the day of their departure, it was a total breeze. For want of anything better he put his arms round Marina. Up close he noticed that her gray hairs had a different texture from the other ones. They looked like the hairs on a horse or a pig. He tried crying but found nothing there.

He said: “I’d like to say goodbye to Isaac now please.”

After kissing him on the cheek, she carried out a box of prized creations, leaving Albert and Isaac alone. The shelves along one wall were still populated with people’s ill-conceived clay models. The pottery shed had been the official safe place, being out of the way and one of the few lockable rooms, so all the stuff cleared out to make way for the party had been stashed here: a red Gibson SG, furred with dust; a portable TV; some French oak planks.

Albert went to the door, shut it, turned the key. The pottery shed was filthy, spattered windows suppressing the first hints of daylight outside. The concrete floor was textured with dried-on blots of clay.

“I’m going to miss you,” Isaac said.

“You didn’t tell me you were leaving.”

“I was scared. I’m sorry. I don’t want to go.”

“How long have you known?”

Isaac looked befuddled as he tried to count on his fingers. To Albert, Isaac didn’t look cute. Albert didn’t get cuteness.

“I’m not letting you go,” Albert said.

“Good. ’Cause I don’t want to.”

Albert scanned the piles of stuff that obscured the back wall.

“But if I do go then Mum says we can write real letters to each other and you can visit me.”

One of the shelves rattled as the bass glissando’d an octave.

“Just ’cause we’re apart dun’t mean we can’t be friends.”

When Isaac was upset he reverted to babyish language.

“You can’t even hardly fucking read, Eyes.” Albert picked up one end of a surfboard and dragged it out of the way. He was looking for something. Isaac stared at the ground and started rubbing his eyes. From this far away, the female vocals sounded gagged.

“Come and visit me,” Isaac said, and he took two steps toward Albert’s back.

“Lie on the floor.”

“What?”

Albert turned and punched him in the neck. Isaac took two steps back and then sat down. Returning to the mound of stuff, Albert yanked down a plastic box of metal coat hangers, which scattered over the floor.

“What are we doing?” Isaac said.

Crying brought out the puffiness in his face. Albert hauled out a bedside table, then flipped a blue mattress, launching fireworks of dust in the gathering light. Next he got hold of a camping gas stove and dragged it out, making a ga-ga-ga juddering noise on the concrete. Behind that he found a plastic case that had the word Blitz on it. It was normally kept in the barn, but Albert knew his mother had stashed it here so that none of the revelers would find it.

“Where I’m going in Northumbria,” Isaac said, “there’s a big slide.”

“You’re going to be so stupid when you grow up.”

He brought out the hard case and laid it on the floor. Clicking the latches, the case opened, showing a tin of charges, cleaning solution, two brushes, and the bolt gun, which looked like a switched-off light saber. Isaac knew what it was because together they had practiced putting holes in the Yellow Pages.

The bass-heavy music went through another buildup. Albert didn’t understand how these morons could get excited again and again. Every time, just when it seemed like something really was going to happen, it carried on with the same damp thump.

Albert picked up the gun and unscrewed the cap. He took a charge from the tin, slotted it into the top with ease, and put the cap back on. He pulled up the firing pin, which looked like the top of a sports water bottle.

“What’s the plan, Alb?”

Along the bottom shelf on one wall were the recently kilned creations. A stoneware goat looked like a square battery on legs. Albert held the base of the bolt pistol to the goat and squeezed the red trigger. The charge exploded and the model shattered in a satisfying way, tiny chits of clay falling onto the floor. It seemed easy now, and he didn’t know how he had been so weak with Belona. Isaac laughed, involuntarily. A wisp of smoke moved across the room. The smell was fierce. Albert was already reloading.

“Nice one!” Isaac said, and he stood up and pointed at a delicate milk jug. “My mum made that one — get it!”

Albert pulled up the pin, aimed, and the thing exploded, the noise reverberating in the small room. Isaac asked for a go.

“Shut up, Isaac,” he said, and kicked him in the knee.

Isaac sat again and held his leg with both hands. Albert reloaded and, one-handed now, squeezed the trigger and shattered quite a pro-looking hen. It wasn’t possible to see the bolt go in and out — it just looked like things were exploding at his command. Albert’s shoulder hurt, from the kickback. The smoke on the inside of the room wasn’t yet as thick as the mist on the outside.

“What are you doing in there?” Marina’s voice from outside. She tried the handle on the door. “Let me in.”

“Do this one,” Isaac said, standing up again and pointing at a miniature punk rocker sitting in an armchair. Albert reloaded and held the gun to the man’s head, managing to knock it clean off without damaging the body. The noise was loud, but they were used to loud noise. “You’re great, Albert.”

“Open this door now,” Marina said. Her voice sounded different from every other time Albert had heard her.

“You’re my best friend,” Isaac said.

“You’ll believe anything. We’re not friends anymore.”

“Alb.” Isaac put his hand on Albert’s shoulder. “It stinks in here!”

“Do you trust me?”

“Yes.”

“Open up this minute!” Marina said.

“Lie down then.”

“Okay.”

“Eyes and Albert! Enough messing around!” Her fist banging the door.

Isaac lay down on the concrete, legs together, arms at his side, coffin-ready. Albert put another cartridge in the gun, which was hot now. The light coming through the window was brightening and Albert had a shadow as he knelt at Isaac’s feet.

More banging. She rattled the door handle again, harder. The shape of a head appeared at the grid of small windows set into the door that were too dirty to see through. A hand wiped the glass but couldn’t clear it.

“I’m scared.”

Albert held the bolt gun with two hands. The last time he had held this gun, he had been unable to follow things through and he hated himself for that.

“Will you do everything I tell you to?”

“Yes.”

“Say ‘I’m a fucking idiot.’ ”

“I am a fucking idiot.”

“Say ‘I dunno who my dada is.’ ”

The tears were rolling out the sides of Isaac’s eyes and down into his ears.

“I dunno who my dada is.”

“What are you doing?” Marina yelled.

He hovered the bolt gun at the sole of Isaac’s left shoe. From where he was he could see inside Isaac’s nostrils. Outside, Marina was calling for help.

Albert shuffled round on his knees. He had his hands one above the other and moved the base of the gun over the end of Isaac’s toes, along the top of his foot, then followed his left shin to the kneecap, where he let it hover. He thought of the game with the electrified wire and the hoop and if you touch the wire you’re dead.

“Let me in or I’ll break this door down,” Marina said, and to Albert it didn’t sound threatening. She wasn’t believable anymore.

“Tell me how it’s going to end,” Albert said.

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me.”

The witching hour used to be midnight but nowadays, Varghese said, you have to run a party to four in the morning before it can take on a mythic quality. It was 4:48 a.m., and if it weren’t for the mist, it would have been full daylight, this time of year. Don was standing near the biofuel generator, ready to pull the plug. It was running on vegetable oil from Paco’s Diner and the smell held the memory of a thousand glistening breakfasts. It was lucky that Don still didn’t really like any music, because whatever this was, it was terrible. He was the oldest person he could see. Scattered across the yard were piles of shiny metal shells that he had learned were the by-product of nitrous, a drug he’d never heard of. Nearby, a couple were hard snogging on the ground, the boy’s hand unself-consciously cranked up her gore-soaked wedding gown. The mist made everywhere seem private. Varghese was wandering about filming people. He only seemed interested in the casualties, like the girl he was speaking to now, wearing animal slippers and a high-visibility jacket. Someone was yelling help and running through the mist, and Varghese immediately filmed the figure approaching. Don waited for the person to say “Help, help, I’ll die if I don’t find a king-size Rizla” or whatever, but she didn’t and it was Marina. Varghese tracked her. She grabbed Don’s hand.

When they got there, there was the sound of Isaac’s wailing, high like a kettle. Don couldn’t see through the window. He wiped it with his sleeve, but the dirt was on the inside. Hunching slightly, he spoke to the rusty lock of the door.

“Albert, it’s your father here. Are you and Isaac okay?”

There was a pause. When Albert finally spoke, his voice was quiet.

“I’m not okay.”

The key wasn’t in the lock. Don peered through the keyhole. There was a wait as he listened to a throaty noise that, he realized, must have been Isaac. He knew he needed to say something but doubted that, after what had happened this morning, his son would want to listen to him. All Don could offer was that, on this occasion, he would remain present. “Albert, your father’s here for you.” That was all. His physical self. He put his ear to the keyhole as Albert spoke.

“Turns out Marina has no idea what’s going to happen. Turns out she is actually an idiot, just like you always said.”

Marina stayed silent and just crouched down, her ear to the slatted wood. She showed no reaction. Don had to concede she achieved dignity.

“Dad?”

“I’m here.”

“I’m upset.”

Don could hardly hear his son’s voice. “I know you are.”

“What are you doing?” Albert said, with a note of distrust.

“What would you like me to do?”

“I don’t know. Maybe something big.”

“Okay, good,” Don said, and he knew that, whatever he did, it ought to be something his son could see and hear, something permanent.

“Albert, how about I put my hand through one of these small windows?”

There was no sound for a long time, then an affirmative noise. Don stood back from the door, stepped forward without hesitation, and put his fist through one of the twelve opaque coaster-sized windows. He went for the one just above the lock. He scraped the back of his knuckles and drew blood. The sound of glass on the concrete floor was pretty. He retracted his hand and peeked through the shattered mouth. The second time in one evening that punching seemed like the best option. The smell in the room was fierce. The key, he saw, was down on the floor next to Albert, who was holding the bolt gun, which was touching a boy’s left temple, and the boy was Isaac, who was trying to stay perfectly still and quiet. Albert’s eyes flicked across to his father at the window, and it was clear to Don that more was expected of him; he put his mouth to the broken window.

“Albert.”

“What?”

“I love you.”

“I know.”

“I realized I was wrong about not wanting you to go to school. You should go to school.”

Don had no nuance and was glad of it. Again there was a wait. It was probable that Albert kept expecting his father to say more, but he didn’t.

“Why?” Albert said.

“You will have a great time and they will absolutely fucking love you.”

“Don’t swear, please.”

Don was in some pain with his hand. It actually helped him concentrate.

“Those boys will be your friends. I think they were here tonight.”

“Which boys?”

“The quad bike boys.”

“I didn’t see them.”

“They came to see you. They’ll come again.”

“Oh.”

Don paused, then said: “And you’ll be getting your own quad bike, is the other thing.”

Don’s thinking mind, which he ignored, had a few things to say about the financial realities of this. A very long wait.

“I know what you’re doing. You’re buying my love.”

“Absolutely right. It’s expensive.”

“Okay.”

Don focused on the bleeding hand.

“While you’re at school, it’ll be best for you to live in Mumbles with Uncle Patrick.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you stay at his place during term time.” He clenched and unclenched the hand. “Those lads will be your friends. You will be ten minutes’ walk or three minutes by quad from school.”

“Dad, what will you do?”

“I’m going to stay here and turn the big house into a youth hostel.”

It was a surprise to himself. It sounded okay. Marina was squinting at him.

“What about you and Mum?”

“She’s going with you.”

“You should get divorced.”

“We will. I love you.”

“I know.”

Albert was now standing back by the shelves, grinding his eye socket with one fist and holding the bolt gun in the other. Isaac, still flat on his back, stretched his hand across and picked up the key, then crawled toward the door, army-style.

Marina listened for the key turning, and once it clicked she pulled back the door, swooped in and grabbed her son, picked him up at the armpits, and, without a word, disappeared into the grayness with her boy silent in her arms. Don stepped into the pottery shed and closed the door before Varghese, who, he only now noticed, had followed them, could come in.

The floor was scattered with severed heads, legs, bits of architecture. Don walked up to the shelves and stood next to his son, who was now pointing the bolt gun at the Eiffel Tower.

“Will everything keep going forever?”

“I believe so,” Don said.

At the far end of the shelf, there was a whole family of clay people that was supposed to be the Rileys. Some unremembered guest had made them as gifts, totems, voodoo dolls. Freya perversely obese, Kate with an ape’s posture, and Albert with massive biceps. Terrible likenesses.

“This is us,” Don said, and he pointed, dripping spots of blood on the concrete.

The model of his father was from the days when he had a beard. The artist had made it look as though the beard was just an extension of Don’s skull.

Varghese filmed them through the broken window.

Albert took aim.

Kate was searching through the mist, checking the bodies in the grass here and there to see if they were her brother. Up until a few moments ago, she had been in the porch of a stranger’s tent, finding that spliffs kept going out in her hand because she talked so much. She had been cheerily describing her parents’ breakup to the strangers, and it had felt totally healthy and normal. The Hulk had been there too, getting off with a tall girl dressed as a peacock, and every time they really went for it, the girl lost one of her feathers. Eventually they’d snuck off together — and Kate was fine with that.

But then, someone else had talked about the amazing performance art that had taken place, earlier in the night: the little boy, up on the roof, who gave a hilarious speech about how the world was going to end, which was all choreographed to coincide with the mist and that song by Prince, and how fucking great it was, and now Kate was outside, looking for him.

In the live music yurt, a man was either doing a very downbeat, a cappella, unplugged version of “Help!” by the Beatles or he was genuinely asking for assistance. She had to sidestep the stumbling shapes that emerged from the gray. She found the remaining heavy drinkers still going, swaying riskily next to the fire.

Father and son were in bed now, propped up against the headboard. Albert was fully clothed and staring at the mist pressing its face against the window. Somehow he didn’t feel tired. Don had his foot up on two pillows.

“Isaac’s going to leave as soon as the mist clears. I don’t want him to.”

At the bottom of the bed, the duvet was ickily warm from the previous residents, a couple who his father had kicked out but were still audible in Kate’s room. They heard the woman make encouraging noises—“That’s it, come on, that’s it”—as though running alongside a dog. The music was still physically loud, removed of all melody by the walls of the house, just the bottom end pushing through.

“Is the mist clearing?” Albert said. “It looks like it’s clearing.”

He felt his father’s hand on his shoulder.

“Albert, I wanted to tell you how proud I am of you about Belona — you did what I couldn’t.”

Albert slowly shook his head and watched the window. “I didn’t do it.” It took Don a little while to realize what he meant.

“Well, in that case, I’m even prouder of you. For your humanity. I know I’ve said it a few times now, but I love you very much.”

That didn’t cheer Albert up. The bass hit the right frequencies for the roof beams and dust snowed on them.

“I think you’ll feel better after a sleep.”

Don took a single sheet of toilet paper off the roll on the bedside table. A little plume rose as the perforations tore. He folded the sheet five times, spat on it, squidged it down with his fingers until it was about the size and shape of a thirteen-amp fuse. Then, turning his body and holding the top of Albert’s head with one hand, he squeezed the now gray-looking plug into Albert’s ear. The ear was filthy, as was the rest of him, and the plug had to displace some grit on the way in.

Albert’s mouth tightened. Don tamped another bit of paper into shape and let a glob of spit fall. He held Albert’s head the same way a hairdresser does, turned it, and dabbed the block inside. Don gave him the Are you okay? hand signal the way deep-sea divers do. Because he knew it was what his father needed to see, Albert made the signal back at him.

The earplugs meant he could hear his own heart. It was keeping pace with the kick drum.

Up at the yard, Kate found Varghese organizing a survivors’ photograph, herding drunks and wreckheads to stand in front of the house. The only person still dancing to the DJ was the DJ. The sun was beginning to burn off the mist.

Kit Lintel, whom she only now saw for the first time, was practicing the art of movement up on the flat roof in the first rays of dawn. He was sizing up a jump from the lip of the stand-alone bath, though she couldn’t see where he was planning to land.

In the house, she searched the schoolroom and kitchen, but still no sign of Albert. Upstairs, his room was empty. In hers there was a couple going at it on her bed, the slick hairs on the man’s back reminiscent of seaweed when the tide’s out.

She finally found her brother in her father’s room, awake, sitting up with pillows behind his back, knees pulled up. He had earplugs that stuck out like little cartoon explosions. He was still in his naval jacket, staring at the clearing mist. Next to him was her father, also propped up but without the earplugs and asleep, head slumped forward, eyes fractionally open, in close imitation of a man who has been shot.

Albert watched a small patch of blue sky that was just visible through the top-right window. Outside there was the noise of old-skool jungle being rewound and rewound and rewound.

Looking round, Kate saw her father had left deliberately odd-looking gaps where her mother’s pictures had been — untanned rectangles of wall — and the bookcase without her novels had a bar-code quality to it. Finally, someone managed to get the music off, and from outside she heard cheers and wolf whistles and just one disappointed-sounding person. The quiet seemed to help Albert, who looked at her for the first time. She sat on the side of the bed and tried to think what they could do.

She remembered something and got on her stomach to crawl across the duvet. They used to do this. Going over her father’s shins, but not waking him, she slid off the side of the bed, landed loudly on the floor, then came crawling back underneath it, kicking with her legs, before appearing headfirst on Albert’s side and sitting back beside him. “Remember that game? Sandworms!”

“You’re trying to cheer me up.”

“That’s right.”

“Please don’t.”

She brought out her tickling mandibles.

“Clack clack,” she said.

He shook his head. She stopped. She tried to think what else there was. Her mind was not agile.

“Tick.” She wasn’t expecting to say it.

“Don’t. Not now.” He went back to watching the window, his gaze now fixed, as if he had decided which direction he wanted his eyes to point and was happy to stick with that forever.

“Tick,” she said.

He had gone for a slightly raised angle, one you might use to read a departures board.

“Tick,” she said, and she held out her hand.

In the communal bathroom, weak sunlight came through the misted glass. There were gels, travel-size shampoos, and two-in-ones on the window ledge. Albert leaned back against the door, staring across the room at the window’s textured glass.

“I can’t do this,” he said.

She switched on the shower and it sizzled. “We have water pressure.”

It wasn’t clear to her if this was the right thing to do, but it would be worse to back down now.

“I’m racing you,” she said and, hopping, took off her sneakers. “I’m winning.”

She caught sight of herself in the mirror and realized that she no longer resembled a panda. Her pupils were sinkholes and her face paint was cracking along previously unnoticed wrinkle lines. Her panda had smudged to a ghoul. She went to her brother and undid the gold buttons down the front of the weird naval jacket he’d been wearing. We’re kids, she thought. This is fine. Pushing the coat over his shoulders, she tugged it down his arms and let it drop on the floor. He watched tentacles of steam creep out of the cubicle, frothing around the edges of the shower curtain. She got down and untied his shoes. He rolled the back of his head against the door. She lifted each of his feet in turn and yanked his shoes off. His striped socks were like second skin; she peeled them off, thinking nothing of the smell. There were motes of sock fluff all over his feet and ankles.

“Come on. Do you want to lose?” she said, not sounding convincing.

“I’m too old for this.”

Tiny particles moving around each other started to fill the room. She sat on the bench and pulled off her tights. He watched steam lit by spotlights.

“We’ll say that this is the magic portal,” she said, signaling to the cubicle, “and once we step inside, then we’ve been chosen, you and I, and when we step out, the world will be brand-new, and we’re linked forever, no matter what happens, we’re the survivors, and everyone else, even if they don’t realize it, they’re dead, and there’s you and me together, alive, in a world of zombies, and I’m sorry but Mum and Dad will have to die too because once we step in the chamber it’s just me and you and that’s it, okay?”

“I’m too old.”

His teeth were chattering, though it wasn’t cold.

“Put your hands in the air, motherfucker,” she said.

He shook his head but put his hands up anyway.

“Come on, the portal’s almost ready.”

She pulled his jumper and T-shirt up over his head in one. He was textured with bumps and she could see the shadows of his ribs through his skin.

“You’d better hurry up,” she said, and pulled her own T-shirt off.

Albert slid to the floor and pulled his knees up to his chest as she started to unbutton her black skirt. Her arms were painted black like sleeves, but her shoulders were bare and the paint made a V down her chest. Albert watched her and was glad that her face paint made her unrecognizable. Just a pair of weird eyes floating in a gray-black mess. He pushed himself into the corner of the room.

They were blurred, becoming smudges.

“We go in together, you and I — the world switches off and on, returns to factory settings, and when we come out we pretend everything’s normal despite the bodies everywhere.”

He watched her hands work at her bra clip, which was at the front, in the middle of her chest.

“Prepare for doom,” she said.

He put his head down against his kneecaps and covered his ears.

“This is it,” she said. “You can put an end to everything by stepping inside. It’s like Stars in Their Eyes but tonight, Matthew, we’re going to be the last two humans on earth in a world of corpses, cyborgs, and the brain-dead.”

“I think you should stop. That would be for the best.”

“The por-tal is clo-sing,” she said, and she turned away from him.

He saw a bra drop to the floor but told himself it was not his sister’s because this person was not his sister. A name floated back to him: Sheila La Fanu.

“I’m absolutely fine and need no more help,” he said.

Out the window, proper sunlight was coming through. He saw her feet turn to face him. Water particles had reached every corner of the room. They started to dissolve. She was tugging at him, pulling at his armpits, trying to get him up.

“Come on,” she said.

He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to. He looked. The gaze of her nipples, their slightly raised stare, the same raised angle as his father’s jaw whenever he was about to say something important.

“I’m too old,” he said, and he put his head back down again between his knees, squeezing the side of his skull as hard as he could. He didn’t like what was happening to him.

“I’m about to win,” she said, “and then you’ll be dead, you’ll be a zombie like the rest of them. Do you want to be a zombie?”

She charged into the cubicle, yelling “The change! The change!” as she did so. Throwing her head back, she spun in circles; the water running off her was the color of late-stage dishwater. Taking the showerhead off its hook, she fired it at him, where he was sitting. She kept firing and making machine-gun noises.

“Come on, wuss bag!” she said, stepping out of the cubicle with a bottle of shampoo. She squirted contraband onto his head.

The water was hot enough to be painful. Hot water meant that the photovoltaic cells were working, which meant that the sun was shining, which meant that there was no mist, which meant that Isaac had gone.

“Welcome to the land of the living,” she said, and more shampoo landed on him. She stood above him, using the showerhead as a watering can. “We made it and I love you more than anything.”

“You’ve taken drugs,” he said.

His eyes stung but he felt awake. He rubbed his face hard. After a while, he achieved a lather. The water was running under the door and out into the hall.

“You’re changing color,” she said.

“I know.”

Stretching the lead taut, she handed him the showerhead and he fired it at the center of his own face, from close range.

Barefooted, they stepped out of the bathroom and into the hall where water had run partly down the stairs, only halted by the slumped dead body of a man on the landing. He was painted to look like a full English breakfast. Next to him was a dead girl, her body turned blue. Albert was beyond tiredness and into the place that follows, the place that feels like you are watching a film of yourself. His sister had a towel round her waist and a T-shirt on and remnants of black paint along her jawline like a fashionable beard.

“Check for survivors,” she said.

Albert’s jeans dripped four tracks on the carpet as he walked to Janet’s room and pushed back the door. The curtains were closed but glowing at the edges. Two bodies were on the bed, arranged in crime-scene outline poses. He couldn’t make out their faces. He tried the light switch, then a stand-up lamp, but the power in the whole house was gone. Going closer, he saw that it was Janet and Patrick who had passed away, fully clothed. Albert observed that his hand had been under her shirt when they died.

He turned to look back down the corridor and mouthed the word dead at his sister. She checked in Don’s room and confirmed, by miming her own throat being cut, that he was a goner too.

They both checked their own bedrooms. Whatever Kate saw in hers, she didn’t like. In Albert’s room, there was a familiar-looking boy whose flesh was putrid green and, beneath the duvet, it was clear that some animal was eating him; the sounds he made as he died were horrendous. There were various long feathers on the floor next to the bed, which must have been torn off the animal during the struggle.

Light was coming in a tractor beam through the round window above the stairs. They carefully stepped over the bodies on the landing and went down to the hallway. In the schoolroom there was a jigsaw of corpses, laid out amateurishly, some in half-open body bags, some loose on the sofas with their hands dragging on the floor. Children’s clothes were tangled in the teeth of the loom. The smell was what Albert expected mass death to smell like.

In the kitchen there was blood on the chopping board and evidence of someone having decomposed, right there and then, into a pool of pungent sludge, half in the sink and half running down the cupboard door. The fridge was open and had been ransacked by scavengers. Also, something was cooking in the oven, but Albert did not dare look.

Out in the yard, the light felt thick. On the bench there was a wedding dress stained with red. Three bodies were lying shoulder-to-shoulder in the shade of the tarpaulin. On the gravel, one of the zombies had written I CUT MYSELF QUITE BA in blood but had died before it could finish the message. Near the workshop someone had drawn a cock and balls using vegetarian sausages. Scattered in piles here and there were shiny metal shells — used ammunition, most likely, it seemed to Albert. The slanted light gave the henge of portable toilets long shadows. One of them had been pushed over onto its door. They would stay like that for millennia. An empty pan had been tipped up next to the apple tree, staining the soil with blood, into which armies of ants and worms were amassing. The static of a burgeoning fly population. Apples rotting on the ground.

“Just you and me then, Albert.”

Kate went to the decks and held up the last ever record. Its label was blank, white, and Albert thought that if the world’s ending had wiped all human music, then in all honesty, after tonight, he wasn’t bothered to see it go. Just then the hens made a noise and it was good to know that at least the animals had survived. Somewhere, far off, the guttural yell of other beasts, unknown. Thin clouds filtered the sunlight and there was a bonfire smell. He and Kate stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the middle of the yard, waiting with the sun on their closed eyelids. Eventually they heard footsteps on the gravel behind them. They turned around to see their mother — or what looked like their mother — puffy and newly arisen, carrying a glass pint of orange juice and wearing men’s shorts and an unfamiliar jumper.

“Stay where you are, bro,” Kate said. “I know what this looks like, but it’s not really her. It is not even a her. Sometimes the body keeps moving after death.”

Kate walked slowly forward, then sidestepped round, coming behind the figure who resembled their mother and covering its eyes with her hands.

“Remember, we can’t be sentimental,” Kate said, then she leaned in close to its ear and said a few things that Albert couldn’t hear — presumably last rites — before letting go and taking a step back. “It’ll die down any second now. The last few spasms.”

She was right. The body immediately fell down on one knee. The glass bottle dropped from its hand but didn’t smash. Its mouth dropped slightly and the body keeled, falling sideways, silently mouthing “ow” as its head hit the ground. The body jerked a bit, its feet knocking the pint bottle, which rolled farther away, and it kind of nuzzled the gravel, its mouth ajar, close to a cigarette butt, little bits of dirt sticking to the side of its face and then one more jolt and it stopped, eyes still open.

“Sorry you had to see that.” Kate stood astride the body and spoke up to the sky. “Our parents are gone and we are orphans in a barren and ruined world.”

Albert came to look down at the body. He waited for it to move or twitch or for a little smile at the side of the mouth.

“It’s over,” Kate said. “Just you and me and one pretty major cleanup operation. Corpses for compost.”

The body’s mud-covered hands looked like they had been dead for centuries.

“I’m sad,” Albert said.

“Me too.”

“You’re not sad. You’re loving this. I’m actually sad.”

“Would our parents have wanted their passing to be a miserable affair or a celebration?”

“A miserable affair.”

“Do you want to close its eyes?”

The body had not blinked or visibly breathed and it was impressive.

“Not really,” Albert said, but he knelt down anyway. “Why do they close the eyes?”

“To show who’s living and who’s not.”

He reached forward with his thumbs and softly shut them.

Kate picked up the body’s arm then let go and it slapped on the ground as it landed, deadweight. Albert took hold of its wrist and felt around for a pulse but couldn’t find one. The body actually hadn’t moved or done anything apart from looking sincerely dead for some time, and this was no longer fun.

Albert put his ear to its mouth and listened for breathing.

“We don’t have time for your soppy bullshit, Albert. Take the legs.”

“Okay, stop now please, Mum.”

“You’ll feel better once it’s on the pyre,” Kate said, taking both arms, preparing to drag the body.

“Very good. Joke’s over.”

His sister waited for him.

“You can stop now,” he said.

The body stayed still. Kate stood there waiting. Albert shook his head and looked around. Then he took hold of both legs and the body opened her eyes.