Mervyn began to wonder if Kate was timing her showers so that she always tottered back across the hallway with wet hair, chest flushed, wearing just a tucked towel, at times when he was picking out a shirt from the second wardrobe that stood on the landing. It happened every weekday. He tried to strike a naturalistic balance between completely ignoring her, which was, in its own way, an admission of interest, and gawping. He said “Morning,” made eye contact, but didn’t linger or enjoy the smell that stayed in the air behind her as she made a point of squeezing past him to Geraint’s room, where she now slept. Liz had said that it was time to let her “come out of quarantine.”
He had to provide normalcy, he knew, during her time of upheaval. The last thing she needed was to be sexually harassed by the adults she was trying to trust.
Early on in his marriage, Mervyn had cheated on Liz with an older woman he’d interviewed about the suicide of her grown-up son. He’d asked questions in the darkened back room of her house. She was a beekeeper and had been drinking Martinique white rum. She answered his questions by taking her tights off. She had red bumps on her ankles. They had sex twice, and Mervyn didn’t speak to her again.
The day after the woman’s son’s funeral, he’d come home from work to find her in his back garden, getting on famously with Liz, who was on the verge of sending off for a mail-order hive. After that the beekeeper blackmailed him into having regular, admittedly thrilling, sex with her. For Mervyn, this marked the beginning of his problems with sleeping. All the while, his wife read up on hive intelligence. Collectively, they make honey yet no single bee understands how it’s done.
Then the beekeeper’s house got repossessed. Liz wanted to let her stay in their spare room while she got settled. Mervyn didn’t think it was a good idea. He lied and told a story about her trying and failing to seduce him, using the detail about the tights and the bumps on her ankles. Liz instantly believed him, cut all contact with the beekeeper, and ever since has enjoyed telling the story, among good friends, about the madwoman who tried to “sting her husband”—and each time she told it, Mervyn had to shrug and chuckle.
All the while, the woman continued to threaten him. She was living in public housing in Clase. She warned him that she could describe his penis in a way that his wife would instantly know was authentic. The color of it, she said. To this day, there had never been any genuine resolution—just her demands, first for sex and later for money, growing more and more infrequent. He hadn’t heard from her in years, but that didn’t mean it was over. Mervyn believed that since he had created the problem, he deserved to take the burden of worry that, any day, if she was feeling drunk, sad, jealous, spiteful, she might call.
Over the years, as the Evening Post’s go-to death-knocker, meeting people at times of heightened emotion, Mervyn had been in more than one tempting situation. His method—post-beekeeper—was to take the time to imagine the true details of what it would be like with that person: turn something romantic into something journalistic. Acknowledge the inappropriate feeling, then flesh it out with details until reality leaches the charm out of it.
So it was, that afternoon in the office men’s room, he imagined Kate’s body. In his fantasy, she was double-jointed. After he’d filled a hand towel that he imagined to be her flushed chest, he made himself keep the fantasy going in his mind, her weeping in the back of the Jeep, digging her nails into her palms, and, through strings of saliva in her mouth, saying she loved him. He kept the story going: he and Kate having a nocturnal relationship, silent orgasms in front of muted News 24. After a few weeks, Kate convincing him to elope with her in the Jeep—an implication that she might kill herself, if he didn’t go along with it, is how Mervyn imagined it happening. A queen-size foam mattress squeezed in the back, driving through the Irish lowlands, and at first it being exciting but by the fourth day it already becoming clear that, although they got on okay and the hypermobile sex was fun, they were too different for it to work in the long term—and the cold-weather mosquito bites made her calves and ankles swell up in a strange, watery way. Then, one morning, Kate disappearing, lost among the hills and suicide-friendly cliffs south of Galway, and Mervyn searching for three days before returning home to tell Kate’s family what had happened—only to discover she was back there with them.
Now that they were sharing a room, Kate and Geraint felt a pressure to act like a proper couple. This meant bed sex, which felt somehow much further along the relationship timeline, much closer to marriage and therefore death than Jeep, woods, or pool sex. Quickly they formed a routine, a side of the bed, a sleeping formation (“the turnstile”), and pet names that will not be recorded here.
Geraint had started to change. He’d put his name on the waiting list for an allotment. He’d been reading about Blaen-y-Llyn online and kept signposting his knowledge, in conversation: “I can see the value of a sustainable housing village.” He kept asking her when they were going to go for dinner at her mother’s. He’d Googled Freya Riley and unearthed some of the dreadful articles, hatchet jobs, written about the “Lost Tribe of Gower.” It was when Kate spotted Geraint in the utility room, turning electrical devices off standby, that she felt a portcullis come down between them.
More and more she looked forward to the thrill of her secret visits to the lounge, to sit next to insomniac Mervyn. She liked the extra risk of being careful not to wake Geraint as she got out of bed.
She brought her goose-pimpled legs up on the sofa, didn’t tug down her “Life Begins at Forty” T-shirt, which, having now experienced Liz’s washing temperatures, had shrunk.
She watched the screen. It said: “… school spells fifty truants …”
Mervyn didn’t notice. He kept watching the TV.
She breathed. He turned to look at her and they made eye contact with each other and she smiled. He had a sympathetic expression and she imagined it was the one he used for interviewing the recently bereaved.
Although they were already off-grid, Varghese had said it was important to have something up online so that people could understand, visually, the dramatic change. As such, they shot a short film of the community chopping down the electricity pole at the bottom of the garden, although now no power was running through it. Varghese got various talking heads on video to describe it as sticking out of the ground like “a crucifix,” “a middle finger,” and “the hilt of a knife.” Isaac said electricity was “like a waterfall of fire inside the walls of the house.” He looked unfeasibly cute and muddled. A tracking shot followed Arlo with an ax over his shoulder and Don carrying pruning shears, both men side by side down the stepped path. It was clear by the way they walked that they imagined their own theme music. Having climbed the pole and severed the cables, Don sat on top like an awkward, judicial bird, squinting down at the camera, only sky behind him.
Everyone had a go at chopping, and when they heard the wood creak they ran back and watched. It fell slowly, hitting the ground like a last-round knockout, like a victory for the featherweight outsider. Varghese asked them to hold one another’s hands aloft, then made them do it again, in better light. He made Isaac hold up a piece of slate with a message chalked on it:
A-Level Results Day Party, 2012
All Welcome.
At Blaen-y-Llyn (aka The Rave House), North Gower
The apple tree in the yard had been first planted to mark Don and Freya’s wedding day. In turn, it produced the fruit that made the gum-tingling cider that they got drunk on before conceiving Kate, loudly, on their platform bed. Their daughter’s birth, in turn, had an impact on the community at large: raising morale and, in time, bringing in young families. This allowed for sharing child care with other parents, which gave Freya and Don more time for each other. And so on. It was symbiotic, Don knew, the relationship between his marriage and the community. They fed off one another.
He was standing in the entrance hall, by the phone, turning through the Yellow Pages. He noticed there were several punctures right through it—the
y looked like bullet holes—which he had not seen before. He turned to P and dialed in the number carefully.
“Hi there. I was wondering about hiring a sound system.”
Just as Kate’s fifteenth birthday party had created its own legacy—The Rave House—Don hoped that this summer event could build a new reputation for the community. By making it an A-level results-day party, he hoped to guarantee his daughter’s attendance.
“An outdoor event.”
It would change public perception and bring in new, younger members and remind Freya of the reasons they started all this.
“About three hundred.”
He’d suggested to Arlo some special dishes that would utilize Freya’s unique talents as slaughterer in chief, some way of involving his wife in the party preparations, investing her in it. Arlo wanted to help.
“Naturally. How much?”
He lifted the receiver away from full contact with his ear, as though it were hot. There was a long silence, then Don got out his rarely seen personal debit card and, bravely, two digits at a time, read the long number.
Kate had two minutes remaining on her last exam, and was now checking for spelling errors. The light came in from the sports hall’s high windows.
She was almost sad they were over. There was something enjoyable about the tarot of turning over an exam paper: a whole gymnasium full of people reading their fortunes. Kate had hit her specialist subjects on both sections, first the French Revolution, then German Resistance, allowing her to helicopter in an aside about reweighing contemporary German guilt.
She found no spelling mistakes.
Outside the hall, she stood at the top of the stairs that led down to the parking lot, letting other students stream past her. Geraint was standing at the bottom holding six balloons, red, yellow, green, two of each. Since having his final geography exam three days previously, he’d had time to get his first decent burn of the summer and looked good.
She skipped down the steps and the six colored balloons jostled and squeaked above him as they kissed.
“How’d it go?”
“I destroyed it,” she said.
He smiled and admired her and she imagined the balloons, carried by the wind, slowly lifting him out of the lot.
There was someone calling her name. She looked around and saw Patrick standing in one of the empty diagonal bays beside a bright new Mini Cooper. It had an advert for John Burn’s Gym on the driver’s door and, on the hood, Walkabout Bar. He waved a big, two-armed wave.
They sat on the flood barrier eating North Poles with chocolate sauce that Patrick had bought for them. Kate was in the middle. Patrick wore a white shirt with red pinstripes that was only on its first or second outing, judging by its stiffness.
“So where do you live, Pat?” she said.
“Right on the seafront. I can pretty much swim to my door.” He seemed pleased, and sucked on the little red spoon.
“Is that your way of saying that you’re homeless?” she said.
“You can see my house from here,” he said, and pointed along the cycle path.
“You live in the little shed where they keep the pitch-and-putt clubs? You’ve done well.”
Patrick laughed. “And this,” he said, pointing up and down the coastal path, “is my commute. You’re speaking to Mumbles Pier’s most senior croupier! You two should come and redeem a free game of Bowlingo.”
“Thanks, we’ll definitely do that,” Geraint said, then, leaning forward to make purposeful eye contact with Patrick, “Do you mind if I ask you something?”
• • •
As they drove to Kit Lintel’s house in Llanmadoc, Geraint could not stop talking about the community. Despite the fact that Patrick’s account of life there had included choice phrases such as “the longest winter of my life” and “the deceit of kinship,” this had only succeeded in piquing Geraint’s interest. Kate tried to explain to him that the reason Patrick had seemed so contented now was that he had finally escaped the community. Geraint did not buy it.
Kit’s parents’ cottage overlooked the salt marsh. He had a big garden with a swing. Geraint had suggested that to celebrate the end of their exams they should do something different. As Kit represented the entirety of their college’s alternative scene, he had been chosen.
Kit brought a cassoulet pot out onto the dining table. His black hair had an ambition to become dreadlocks but currently resembled a bird-eating spider clambering out of a nest. The smell was rank, like old flannels, and it stuck in the back of their throats. The mushrooms looked absurdly phallic, twenty severed dicks sliding around in the bottom of the pan. Geraint smiled nervously as he poured the dishwaterish liquid into three mugs. She smelt hers and wrinkled her nose. Kit held his mug out for clinking.
Geraint downed his and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Kit did the same and picked a slimy whole mushroom out of the bottom of the pan, simulated oral, then chewed it. Kate mimed sipping hers but didn’t open her mouth. She had no need for mind-expanding drugs. Her mind was at its perfect width and depth.
“Mine’s too hot,” she said, and she got up to go to the sink. She ran the tap and held her finger under it. With the other hand she discreetly poured hers away, then half filled it with water.
She turned back to the boys and made a show of tasting for temperature.
“Better,” she said, then necked it.
When it got dark, the moon was out and bright enough to see by as they walked down to the estuary’s salt marsh, which Kit said was a guarantee of sensual overload, containing every kind of spongy texture, from foam to blow-up mattress to stress-relief toy. They walked across it, wrapped up warm but barefoot, leaving their footprints in the goo. Kate hammed it up, twirling her arms around, looking up at the sky—“I can see, like, all these dudes playing guitar solos”—and pretty quickly they were calling the moon a paracetamol, a glass of milk, a showerhead raining stars, a Nazi prison searchlight (“Don’t dark me out, Kate, please …”), and Geraint announced that paddling through a shallow sandy stream was “just about the fucking greatest thing of all time,” and Kate watched Kit do graceless roly-polies and she quite enjoyed herself—the feeling of a secret separateness—and she and Geraint held hands and laughed and he asked, “Are you laughing at what I’m laughing at?” and Kit had to sit down for a while, and they asked him if he was okay, and he said, “Give me a minute,” and then later decided he had to go inside and listen to Greek myths on cassette, read by Stephen Fry, which left the two survivors sitting on the circular bench that went round the ash tree in Kit’s garden, and he said, “I love you, Kate,” and she didn’t feel the need to respond.
Back in the house, they found Kit Lintel pouring orange juice into Kit Lintel’s father’s laptop.
“I feel fantastic,” he said.
A day later, they were lying under the duvet in the lower bunk bed. Kate was wearing his tartan pajamas. Geraint was naked and only now coming down.
“Do you think we’ll stay together when you’re at university?”
She was on her back; he was on his side.
“Of course,” she said. “When we go to university!”
Everyone spends their lives with everyone else, philosophically speaking, if we’re to think of human consciousness as a permeable membrane and time as a concertina’d illusion.
“I’ll probably go through Clearing. I don’t want to lose you.”
“You won’t lose me.”
“I feel sick, I’ve never felt like this,” he said, and he sucked his lips in.
“Aw, sweetie.”
Geraint, I liked you better when you were a meathead.
His skin was clearing up now that he ate what she ate. She missed the inflamed pores that ran round his neck.
“I’ve never felt like this either,” she said.
“You know, I really want to see the community. I feel like I’m ready.”
He’d stopped calling it The Rave House or The Commune.
/> “I just want to see where you come from,” he said. “Who you are.”
“It’s not exciting.”
I want to be able to leave you without feeling bad about it.
“I don’t care whether it’s exciting. It’s a part of you. That’s why. I want to see your origins. Meet your favorite goat. Bellamy?”
“That’s sweet,” she said.
Then he leaned over and gently—lethally—kissed her on the forehead.
I only came here because I wanted to do well in my exams. I am only with you because you seemed different from what I was used to. I will leave Wales as soon as I can. I will have written the letter breaking up with you before my first day on campus. I will walk straight to the mailbox in the autumnal sunshine in Cambridge/Edinburgh or, at a very outside chance, Leeds, and I will never think of you again.
5. OUTAGE
The schoolroom windows rattled as the sleet came in slantways. Everyone was standing around the charge controller, watching the hydro and wind needles creep up. The newest wwoofers, four Dutchmen on an alternative stag party, had their arms round one another’s shoulders in the manner of Eurovision contestants awaiting their scores. Early that morning, Arlo had walked through the community beneath paunchy clouds, cranking the windup radio, announcing a storm warning: “Severe weather for Wales and west!”
“Dad, is it dumping yet?” Albert asked.
Don peered at the dials. The wind played a minor chord across the chimney.
“Alright,” Don said. “It’s dumping.”
That was the signal. The community set to work. There was a moral responsibility to use electrical goods. To avoid the excess energy burning out the circuitry, they needed to plug in. It was wasteful for Albert not to turn on a hair dryer, play a CD of Harry Belafonte’s “Jump in the Line,” and film Isaac with his swishy blond hair, dancing in a wind tunnel. Clothes that had gone unwashed were washed, then dried in the microwave.