Wild Abandon (10 page)

Nobody spoke.

And the blue light scrolled across their faces, which were sad and solemn and some defiantly smiling, until at last the right person gave in, and she said: “Okay.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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