Wild Abandon (15 page)

“Cheat!” Albert said. “Massive cheat!”

Isaac looked down, made a face, then picked up the deck.

“Do you want to play, Mum? I bet you’re terrible.”

“I was actually popping in just to update you on Patrick,” Freya said. “The good news is he’s on the mend, but the bad news is the doctors don’t think he’s quite ready for visitors.”

“But Kate’s been to see him,” Albert said.

“Well, they don’t want him to be overwhelmed.”

“But she is overwhelming.”

“Maybe he just needs a few days to get his bearings,” Marina said, speaking quietly to Albert, holding his shoulder. “He must be feeling confused.”

Albert conceded with a frown.

“But I thought of something fun we could do instead, since it’s sunny,” Freya said. “How would you guys like to build a house out of mud?”

The syringe hissed. Kate watched the fluid snake toward his arm. Eventually his fingers went slack and uncurled. The plastic box stayed in his palm, tipping on its keel. He came in and out like this, fading to unconsciousness, then eventually drifting back in. Half an hour later, his eyes opened and he rolled his head toward her on his pillow.

“Ah Katie,” he said. “How’s your boyfriend?”

“He’s okay. We have fun.”

“At your age, you should be single. Where’s Janet?” he said. His lips were dry and ill-defined, seeming to fade into his skin.

“At home. Why do you ask?”

“You should leave Blaen-y-Llyn and do something with your life. Meet men. Have sex. How old are you?”

His voice sounded croaky.

“Seventeen,” she said.

“I thought you were older,” he said. “You have to leave as soon as you can. Don’t lose your entire life.”

His thumb continued pressing the gray morphine dispenser button, like someone absently clicking the lid of a pen.

“I think my parents are breaking up.”

She saw his Adam’s apple nod. “Well, that’s for the best. Your mother could do better.”

Kate concentrated on remembering when Patrick had been likable. She remembered the dawning of her vegetarianism when she was ten. It had been dark and raining—everyone was outside in the garden, with many different kinds of scissors, committing genocide on the slug population. She had learned that slugs could climb trees—
that they could bungee down on lengths of mucus
—and it was unacceptable to her to kill a creature who had that kind of ambition. When Patrick found her she was standing in the rain, crying, arms out like a scarecrow, a slug moving surprisingly fast up her forearm. Patrick had dimmed his head torch, knelt in front of her, plucked the slug off, attached it to his upper lip, and spoken with a French accent: “Come with me, mademoiselle. En Fronce we treat zee mollusc with respect.” He carried her away from the sound of the scissors, down to the edge of the woods. She managed to both sob and laugh. Plucking his mustache off, she set it free by a nettle patch. They stayed to watch its long slither to freedom.

When the nurse came to look at his morphine intake, the machine told her he’d pressed the button 115 times since his last dose.

“Go easy on this stuff, sir,” she said. “It’ll bung you up.”

Patrick didn’t say anything, he just thumbed the gray button a couple of times, confrontationally.

“Unless you want me digging around in your rear end?” she said, and she wiggled her pinkie in the air.

He started grinning and pressing the button as fast as he could.

A little while later, the syringe hissed again. Kate waited for it to take effect, then she broached the subject.

“Don says everyone’s really missing you at home. Maybe they could visit, now you’re settled in?”

There was a wait and Patrick’s eyes lost focus.

“Not a chance,” he said, smiling. He looked around the ward, rolling his head back and forth on the pillow. “So long, geodesic dome—praise be, four walls.”

She told herself it was the morphine speaking.

His lunch arrived: minced lamb with creamy mashed potatoes and finely cut carrots and zucchini. All the stomach’s work done in advance.

“Bellissimo!” he said, and blew a kiss for the nurse. “Dinner!”

“
Lunch,
” the nurse said. “It’s one o’clock, light outside.”

As she walked away, he pointed at her with his knife: “Attractive, not beautiful.”

Kate watched him put more minced lamb in his mouth, a sheen of watery gravy around his lips. She didn’t want to be at the hospital anymore but neither did she want to go home. Patrick’s left hand held his fork, digging around in the vegetables, while with his right he rhythmically thumbed the gray button. After he’d finished his lunch, the syringe hissed once more. Once it had taken hold, she got out her mobile and dialed the number. She’d had enough of being responsible.

The person who answered was not Albert, which was unusual. A Germanic wwoofer said: “Ha-llo.”

“It’s Kate. Can you get Don please?”

She wondered if Albert was already at the roundhouse. If her brother was not around, it made her feel a little less bad about what she was about to do. Patrick rubbed the crown of his head on the pillow.

“Dad, it’s me.”

Patrick turned to look at her. His hands closed; the IV in his arm strained against the surgical tape.

Don was glad to be the chosen emissary. He drove above the speed limit for most of the way. Within an hour, he was stepping out of the car with a bunch of wildflowers in one hand and a reusable shopping bag of clothes in the other. Kate had said she needed a change of outfit, and he hadn’t asked why. In his trouser pocket, he had a letter from Janet that she had asked him to pass on. This letter, as with all her business letters, was sealed with pink wax that had been stamped so that it looked like a male nipple. Janet was right to assume that otherwise Don would have read it. Walking through the hospital, he passed the smell of vats of watery mashed potato and admired the murals on the walls: waves crashing on Viking ships, a cloud city. He considered the word
ward
and its connotations of medieval boroughs, administrative districts, dominion, bureaucracy.

Kate was waiting for him outside the double, plastic-lined doors to Patrick’s ward.

“Hey, Pops,” she said, and she kissed him on his cheek and took the bag of clothes. “I’ll let you two have time alone.”

When Don pushed through the double doors he put the hugest smile on—like it had been rigged from behind, like it
should have had a credit list: lighting, set design, cinematography, technical support.

Watching Don approach, Patrick felt the cords in his neck tauten. He let go of the ergonomically designed morphine dispenser, which slid off the bed and swung in the air just above the linoleum.

Don said hello to all the nurses.

“Hi, I’m Don. Here for Pat.”

They eyed his beard as a possible source of infection.

It was just after two in the afternoon. The linoleum was patterned with stripes of color—Don walked across blue, yellow, green—then Patrick, with a yell like a weight lifter in the clean-and-jerk, whirled his right arm round, gripping the night bag, the big plastic sack of honey-colored piss and little wisps of smoky blood that he had worked on all through the quiet hours, one and a half liters, and he swung it over his own broken ankle and let go, sending it up in the air, and Don—who had decided, above all else, that when he saw Patrick he must present a positive and hopeful outlook—thought for just a second that maybe it was some kind of welcome, a conciliatory balloon perhaps, and this expression—
a golden balloon, for me?
—was the one he had on when it hit.

The only thing stopping the roundhouse from being entirely round or, as far as amenities went, a house, were the walls. The Sustainable Built Environment students had left them unfinished, with various potholes and, on the east side, a V-shaped wedge missing, probably a failed window.

The boys had helped stomp-mix the cob (earth, straw, sand, and water), which was now rolled into sticky, grapefruit-sized
balls, ready to be slapped into the gaps. Albert’s style was to apply it meticulously, smoothing down each patch in turn. Isaac liked to make a series of well-padded, breast-shaped mounds.

Marina and Freya worked in uneasy silence on the big hole in the east wall. Through the gap, they could see the inside of the roundhouse, about the size and shape of a sumo ring, with a wood burner made from a milk churn in the middle. A cantilevered bench was built into the far side, beneath a pattern of green and blue glass bottles plugged in the walls to let in light.

“So what made you think to come down here?” Marina said.

There were two answers, one of which was
Because I don’t want my son to be near you
. She decided to give the other one.

“It’s been a bit of a rough time, me and Don.”

This didn’t seem to take Marina by surprise, and she carried on working her patch of wall. “Well, it’s good to be sensitive to that. A bit of headspace makes all the difference. I had noticed you two not quite connecting.”

This claim at intuition irritated Freya, but she let it go. Marina continued shaping the walls, her skills as a potter coming in useful.

“How long will you spend down here?” Marina said.

“A fortnight, I think. Don and I are calling it a holiday. A fortnight’s holiday.”

“Costa Del Mud-hut.”

Freya laughed more than the joke deserved. Albert appeared round the edge of the house.

“Mum, are we going to stay here?”

“Well, I thought it might be a fun place for us to come for a while.”

“How can it be fun?”

“Just for a few days. Me and you versus the wilderness.”

“But I’ve got my own bedroom.”

Freya opened her mouth but didn’t know what to say. She had been planning to present the idea to Albert in an exciting way. Marina’s voice came from behind her. “If you think about it, Albert,” she said, “being able to build and survive in your own sustainable housing is likely to be a key skill for whatever lies ahead.”

Freya’s eyes tightened but she stayed silent.

There was a pause while Albert looked at the house. Two layers of extra-heavy draft curtain stood for a doorway. A washing machine window was a porthole. On the turf roof, meadow grasses had grown as tall as the stovepipe.

“Okay then.”

Freya turned to Marina and mouthed the words
thank you
. Marina nodded and said, “Anytime.”

“Can Eyes stay as well?” Albert said.

Isaac was creating a D cup on the south-facing side.

“Of course he can!” Marina said. “But you must both come and spend some time with me too, so I don’t get lonely.”

“Oh thank you!” Albert said, and he threw his arms round Marina’s waist. She looked at Freya while running her hands through his hair.

Walking back up to the big house, the boys were far quicker than their mothers. So it was that Albert came into the yard first, to find his father shedding his power with a pair of
kitchen scissors. Don was sitting on a log in the last of the sunshine, shirtless, with a towel round his shoulders. Latvian wwoofers were cross-legged on the gravel beside him, angling an oval mirror up.

Albert stood in front of him and watched the clumps of black, gray and white tumbleweed blowing across the ground. Don offered his son the scissors and Albert just stared. During their upbringing, the beard had been a place of infinite possibility, allowing his father to effortlessly portray wizards, gods, samurais, lions, and the sun. All the role models. When Albert felt shy, he used to sit on his father’s lap and hide behind it.

“This isn’t right,” Albert said.

Isaac was standing behind him, looking worried.

Having trimmed his beard back, Don opened the shaving set: a hard case with the words
Hale and Wigmore Hairdressers
printed on it in a white serifed font, which had been a hand-me-down from his own father.

“And they say our bourgeois clutter only drags us down,” he said, clicking the latches, letting the spring-loaded mechanism lift the lid.

The velvet-padded interior couched a cutthroat razor with deer-hoof handle, a battery-powered trimmer, a china pot of Gentlemens balm, and a stubby, wood-handled brush, like the one used for egging pastry. Don’s father’s initials, A.D.R., Albert’s namesake, were embroidered in the velvet.

“You can stop now, Dad.”

“Thanks, Alb. But this is something I have to do.”

Albert was having trouble swallowing.

“You’re making a big mistake. Wait till Mum gets here.”

Don attached a plastic grader to the trimmer and proceeded
to chirpily buzz his jaw. Albert watched the fizz and spit of gray-black hairs. The tone of the motor changed—struggling—as it met his dense sideburns.

“Where’s Kate? Is she back from hospital? She won’t stand for this.”

Albert yelled her name three times at the top of his lungs. This brought spectators. Arlo emerged from the workshop, sharpening a carving knife flamboyantly. Janet—in rubber dungarees, spattered with pond slime—had been working in the three-tiered permaculture zone.

Albert knelt down to pick up the lopped-off hair, big nestlike chunks of it. Isaac was sitting on the bench now, looking upset. Albert held the clumps tightly as his father took the lid off the Gentlemens balm. It wasn’t just the effeminate way in which he dabbed at the cream that was upsetting, or the long, lingering strokes he made along the length of his jaw, but that now he was humming, a kind of wartime picker-upper—a morale-raising jaunt—nodding his head side to side.

Albert said, “Where’s Kate?” again and ran into the house to look for her. On the hallway wall, above the table with guest and detest books, there was a photo collage showing images of grinning volunteers, ambitious fancy dress and busy classrooms from the community’s golden age. One image showed Kate, age four weeks, naked, hanging from her father’s beard. In the photo, Don was standing smiling with his arms out. Her eyes were wide open, her rugby player’s thighs kicking at the air.

Albert went into the kitchen to look for her. That’s when he saw the note on the round table.

Sitting on a log, now surrounded by his audience, Don pulled the blade out of its hoof. Isaac didn’t like that and he got off the bench and went to find his mother and Freya. Don’s snow-beard of shaving cream made his expression difficult to read and showed the real color of his teeth.