Don didn’t look at Freya for long. He carried on speaking, raising one finger for emphasis. Albert wrote: Reel ourselves in. Forge onward.
She watched Don lean forward, a little awkwardly, his sleeves rolled up, planting his palms flat on the table.
Albert wrote down: Off-grid. Must vote. Now is the time. So little of it left! :-(
All around her, hands went up.
One night, very late, when waking and going downstairs to get a glass of water, Kate saw the TV on through the rows of rippled-pond-effect glass squares in the door to the lounge. Mervyn was watching News 24 on mute with live subtitles. It surprised her that he could bear to spend his sleepless hours watching the news, given that he was a current affairs journalist. She looked through the door and smiled in the small, intimate way people smile to each other as they pass in a narrow corridor, late at night, on a sleeper train.
The phone lead stretched across the hall and into the bathroom beneath the stairs, the door of which was locked.
“Hello. This is Albert Riley of The Rave House. I spoke to you a month ago … Yes, I’ve changed my mind.”
…
“I know. My parents say I must live my life my own way. Make my own mistakes.”
…
“Yes, they are both happy to sign the release forms.”
…
“You’ll have to take my word for it.”
…
“They won’t be around to meet you. Is that a problem?”
…
“You’re making a big mistake.”
…
“Fine. Forget it. My father says your industry is inherently evil.”
…
…
“Hello. This is Albert F. Riley of The Rave House. I spoke to you a couple of months ago.”
A few nights later, in the spare room, Kate was woken by her phone buzzing against the floor. The screen said she had three texts from her father:
NEWS FLASH: BLAEN-Y-LLYN GOING OFF-GRID! Momentous Day Will Be Tinged With Sadness If All-Important Member Of Community Not Around To Enjoy Momentous Day, Sources Close To The Community Reveal.
FYI—Off-grid day is being timed to coincide with F and Alb’s return from holiday, next week. Twice the celebration!
Also, also, Albert’s not washed since you left. Half expect to see centipedes, woodlice etc when he takes off his boots!
She lay awake, being alternately annoyed with, then sorry for, her father, and unable to reconcile the ecstatic tone of his texts with the time on her phone’s clock: 3:12 a.m. Was it possible that he did not know the messages were instant? Did he think they would arrive in the morning, like the mail?
After being awake for a while, she became conscious of a high-pitched whine in the house. It took some time to realize what it was.
She went downstairs in her pajamas. Her T-shirt, a baggy yellow vintage one, a hand-me-down from Janet, said: “Life Begins at Forty.” The silky pajama bottoms were Liz’s.
Mervyn was again watching News 24 with real-time subtitles. She opened the door and waved. He waved back, then made space for her on the sofa. The leather exhaled as she sat down and brought her legs up underneath her. He put down the remote on the coffee table.
“You okay?” he said, turning toward her. “Couldn’t sleep?”
She nodded. He made his face for supportive-but-not-intrusive.
“We’d best keep quiet,” he whispered, then pointed to the ceiling, where his wife was asleep.
“Can’t stop thinking about my exams,” she said, which was half-true. Two images had stayed with her from her open house day at Cambridge: a professor in full subfusc billowing through a Japanese garden and a boy with one overdeveloped bicep punting along the canal.
“I’m sure you’ll do brilliantly,” Mervyn said.
They sat and watched the mute news with the colored subtitles that came up one word at a time. He leaned toward Kate, and spoke quietly: “The subtitles are written live by stenographers—like the people who record what’s said in court. Fantastically skilled. They work in fifteen-minute bursts because it’s so intense. Between 4 and 5 a.m., at the end of their shift, they make more mistakes, I’ve noticed. My favorite: ‘Russia backs away from Gran’s missile deal.’ ”
He laughed with no sound and she smiled.
More interesting to Kate than stenography was the question of what dark dreams kept a grown man with work in the morning awake in a suburban home watching rolling news. He came out like the carpet slugs, silent and lost, trawling the lounge by night. She cultivated thoughts like this—clues about the hollow core of link-detached living—and had more than once watched Mervyn and Liz in the raised pool at the end of the garden and thought that their heads looked severed, bobbing back and forth.
Mervyn was wearing a navy fleece dressing gown on top of his gray cotton pajamas and he sat with his legs wide apart, which she always thought of as a macho way to sit. Pretty much all the men of her childhood sat cross- or closed-legged. Open male legs would probably have been enough to get a black mark from Don, if seen at interview.
Mervyn smiled suddenly when another mistake came up. “… have developed body armour that is even resistant to snark attack …”
The words body armour made her think of her brother. She chose not to explore the thought further. In truth, she tried not to dwell on anything to do with her own family, preferring to analyze the Reeses instead. The last time she had seen Albert, he had been catching her tears and eating them. She listened to the small shifts in Mervyn’s body weight, the leather creaking. The small outward expression of a large inward thing: sleeplessness as a symptom of the discontent that slithers through plush bedrooms at night, leaving a trail behind it. For her part, she angled her legs toward him and enjoyed breathing in a heightened way. It made living in the house more interesting, which was why she did it, she decided.
• • •
Freya woke up late and the roundhouse was empty. Blue and green daylight came through the recycled bottles that were plugged into the wall. This was the day that she and Albert were due to return home to the big house. Moving him down here had done nothing to change his outlook. His visits to Marina had continued apace. If anything, living in the roundhouse had given him a taste of the “challenges ahead” and made his commitment more fervent.
Last night, after she had cooked him a special final-night meal of stewed eggplant followed by rice pudding, he had said: “I’m excited about us going home.” Then, when she woke this morning, he had already packed and gone, leaving her a pan of porridge on the wood-burning stove with a note that said: Morning Mum! Porridge for you, here. See you at home! She sometimes wondered if he felt like he was looking after her, not the other way round.
She got up and tried to eat, but found she had no appetite. She got dressed slowly, then, instead of packing, just picked up her empty suitcase and started off up the hill. Although the bag was empty, it seemed to her to weigh a lot. It was mustard colored, a stiff old 1970s number with brown leather trim. For the first year of the community, she’d lived out of it—when their only private space was their luggage. It was still in good condition, largely because, in the intervening years, she had not traveled anywhere. In those early days, when a relationship wasn’t working, everybody knew about it. In a way, that made it easier because you couldn’t hide anything. Over the years, she’d seen some couples arrive at the community with, it seemed, the express purpose of putting pressure on their relationship. Famously, Tony and Angela Whishaw, too cowardly to end their marriage simply because they were miserable, came to the community and were relieved to find that temptation, jealousy, and, as it turned out, serial adultery could be grown in greenhouse conditions. Freya remembered the couple she’d worked with in London. Five times a day, the kerrrr-chisss sound of his attempts to open Holsten Pils quietly beneath his desk and his wife, as though wearing her own Personal Instrument, selecting not to hear it.
When Freya got to the big hous
e she could see, through the window, Don speaking to Isaac and Albert in the schoolroom. She left her case in the hall and watched them from the doorway. The boys had their back to her, looking up at Don, who was explaining the new charge controller: a machine to help them manage their electricity usage, to help their transition to being off-grid. It was made from off-white plastic and was the size of a shoe box, attached to the wall above the upright piano.
“So, what if there’s a massive storm and the wind is blowing insanely and the sun is shining like a beast,” Albert said. “What then?”
“Well, then we come inside, look at the meter, and if we’re producing more electricity than we can use, then yes, it’s in our interest to use that energy up. Because if there’s nowhere for that excess energy to go, then it can end up burning out the circuits or even causing an explosion.”
“Hell yes!” Albert said.
Don frowned. The meter made a clicking noise, like a camera, every time they used a unit of stored power. Their battery was in a wooden beehive out in back of the schoolroom.
Click.
“Sah-weet!” Albert said, and he looked up at the ceiling. “So, if there’s a storm then we can install lasers in every room.”
“Well, I think the point is that we learn not to desire those things, Bert.”
“Not desire lasers?” Albert said, trying hard to raise one eyebrow.
Isaac watched them earnestly.
Click.
Don sniffed and tugged the end of his nose.
The tip of Isaac’s tongue appeared between his lips when he was concentrating, like now. “I don’t understand,” he said.
Don went down on one knee to speak to him.
“Think of electricity like a river that runs through the house. Sometimes the river’s full and sometimes it’s dry. A river made of fire that you must never go near that flows in a big loop behind the walls.”
Isaac reached out and held on to Don’s nose.
“Okay, boys. I think we’re done. Go and get everyone together so we can make that phone call.”
Don looked up and saw Freya.
“You’re just in time,” he said.
Albert stretched out the cord so that he could take center stage in the middle of the hall. Everyone had gathered to listen to him phoning Swalec, the electricity company. Marina and Isaac were sitting on the herringbone woodblock floor, their backs to the wall beneath the coat hooks. The wwoofers were standing on the lower steps, arranged like a choir. Arlo was watching from the kitchen door, one of his hands cradling macadamias. On the landing halfway up the stairs, her back to the wall and looking down, was Freya. Just in front of her was Don, who kept looking back and forth between Albert’s showboating and his wife, to check she was appreciating this monumental moment in the history of their lives together.
“This is Albert Riley. I’m calling to end our relationship.”
Albert twirled so that the phone cord wrapped around him.
“… No, we’re not switching providers.” He had a piece of paper with a few notes on it. “We’ve been drifting apart for years. It’s not me, it’s you.”
A small ripple of applause from the stairs. Don smiled with his mouth open.
“We don’t need you. We’ve moved on. You should have seen it coming.”
Albert held the receiver away from his face and made a yapping mouth with his left hand. Everyone liked that. Don looked back to share this moment with Freya, but she’d gone.
“Are we sure?” Albert said, and he held the handset out to the crowd.
“We’re sure!” they chorused.
Albert put the phone back to his ear. He read out their account number and address from a bill. But it turned out that a call wasn’t enough. They’d need to do it in writing.
Freya went into Don’s room and put her suitcase down beside the bed. She had the feeling Don had made a special effort so that the community felt vibrant and reinvigorated for her return, which it did. In their room, however, everything was exactly as she’d left it, right down to the glass of half-drunk water on her bedside table, the unwritten letter in the typewriter. The room had a curatorial atmosphere. It was expecting her back. She stood at the window, feeling numb, and watched a shadow move in one of the polytunnels.
After a while, she heard the bedroom door open, but she didn’t turn round. Her empty suitcase was there and she waited for him to see it and realize what was happening. Perhaps there would be no need for her to actually say it, Don would just understand. He would wordlessly acknowledge her leaving. She waited and heard the floorboards ache beneath him. He was behind her. She listened, expecting the sound of his crying. It would be easier, actually, if he cried. Instead, she felt someone’s lips on her neck.
As far as she knew, this was not the mouth of her husband. She had not heard the preemptive kiss-kiss noise or sensed the repression of that sound that would have signaled his swooping in. No small sealed bag opening. These were foreign lips on her neck, soft and a little tacky, possibly moisturized. She knew well the feeling of being kissed by her husband: the wet lips, the loofah of his beard, the enthusiasm. Like being worked on, somehow, buffed up. This was not that. It could not be him. Don did not have his hands on her, was not holding her at the waist then shoulders. She shut her eyes and focused on how it felt to be with someone new.
It was easier this way—so she rolled her head back and let his mouth attend to the curve where her neck became her shoulder. Then the stranger’s hand groped her chest in a way that was unlike her husband. Then the stranger’s other hand bunched her knee-length skirt up, lifting it, and all this in front of a window that made them visible to people for whom the husband was a figure of authority, and this was definitively not like her husband. The person went to work on her neck, breathing heavily. She pushed back against him, being careful not to look over her shoulder. It was still light outside and there was a girl down by the compost, hacking away. Freya heard the fizz of his fly. The stranger didn’t care who saw, and he reached under her skirt and awkwardly pulled down her underwear. The stranger knew her name, it became apparent, because he started saying it, over and over.
She leaned forward with her arms wide and planted her palms flat against the window casement. His mouth sucked her shoulder. The sun was falling behind the downs and she could see the first hint of her own reflection in the glass, and the silhouette of the stranger’s head. He didn’t bother with extensive foreplay, which was unlike her husband. She felt him bend his knees slightly then push inside her and she made the sort of sound she had long ago stopped making.
The light outside kept fading, and in the glass she could make out the outline but not the face of the man who was gripping her hips, his head down, watching himself. The stranger said he missed her. Then he came inside her and told her he loved her and he was glad she was back and he was sorry. Then she heard him sit back on the bed.
She kept her arms out against the window casement. The light outside was dim enough to see the details of her own reflection, and the expression she had was not at all the look of someone rediscovering sex with a new partner.
Pulling up her underwear, she adjusted her skirt, and when she turned round Don looked up at her. Without his beard, the skin on his neck, his jaw, and around his mouth was a pale pink color, a litmus pink, and slightly raised, almost water retentive. He did look younger, but also smaller.
“Thank you for coming back. I wasn’t sure you would.” He buttoned up his trousers. Standing, he went round to the suitcase. It became clear that he thought it was full, the case. He had the tensed shoulders and slightly widened stance of a man about to make light work of something heavy. He gripped the handle with two hands and lifted, but when it gave little resistance it put him off balance and he rocked back on his heels before coming forward again, dropping the bag on the bed. It was a couple more moments before the information was processed. She watched it happening. But he needed to see it, so he put his hand on the zipper and led i
t along the edge of the old-fashioned case, the four curved corners. He lifted the lid. The inner lining was gold.
Kate couldn’t sleep. She was surprised and disappointed to find herself thinking about the community going off-grid and wondering if it had been a success. She had even stooped to the ignominy of texting her father to ask but had got no reply.
At 2 a.m., she heard the bat-squeak of the TV coming on and decided to go downstairs for a glass of water. She got a drink from the kitchen and went into the front room, where Mervyn was watching his muted news. She waved at him and he waved back. Downing the lot in one go, she breathed hard and put the mug on the glass coffee table with a clink.
“Thirsty,” she said, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“You just missed it,” he whispered. “Humanitarian aid to war-torn Susan.”
She sat down on the sofa and tugged down her T-shirt.
“You okay?” he said, not looking at her.
“I’m fine.”
“Want to talk about anything?”
Her bare legs were tanned from being in the garden. “No.”
She knew it was a cliché but she went for it anyway. She uncrossed and crossed her legs.
He blinked three times but still didn’t look.
She liked passing the time this way.
The TV said: “First U.K. tropes come home.”
Once they were fully off-grid, Don developed a new structure for electricity usage. There were grade-one appliances—washing machine, disc sander, band saw, computer/modem/scanner—which he said could only be used one at a time, and only when the battery was fully charged. He went round the community marking these with a red sticker. On the side of the charge controller, Don attached a small red flag, like the one on their American-style mailbox, which was raised if one of these core appliances was in use. The grade-two appliances (which he dotted yellow), including TV, DVD player, and the hi-fi, could be used freely, and simultaneously, whenever the battery was 95 percent full, or above, but were restricted to “emergency only” below that. He said that he would verify what constituted an emergency.