Wild Abandon (23 page)

“Dad, you need to go home.”

They watched the floating phone light get closer.

“Right-o, well maybe I could—”

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

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

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

“You deserve a drink after that.”

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

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

“I hope so.”

They clinked.

“And I just wanted to say …”

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

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

Kate covered her mouth with her wineglass.

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

Kate nodded, drank, swallowed.

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

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

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

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

Liz put the clothes in Kate’s lap.

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

• • •

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

“Who goes there?”

“Me.”

“Hi, me.”

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

“Don’t ask. I’m a loser.”

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

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

“Are you okay?” he said.

“Fine, I guess.”

“Want to talk?”

“Nope.”

“You coming to bed?”

She shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Have you not been to sleep?”

“I think I must have.”

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

“Anything you want to talk about?”

“Not really,” she said.

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

“Don’t be.”

She didn’t feel sleepy.

“Liz gave me a present,” Kate said.

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

“Very becoming.”

“I haven’t tried them on yet.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You still there?” she said.

“Still here.”

“Will you stay?”

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

“I don’t want to talk.”

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

She road-tested some heavier, sexualized breathing.

She heard him respond with the same.

The wind, also, joined in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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