“Albert, I’m late.”
“This is not an exit,” the wall said.
“You know I don’t like going, but I have to.”
“Apologies for the inconvenience.”
“I’m going to knock this over now, okay?”
As she pushed a load-bearing shoe box, the structure toppled into the hall. Albert was standing back, in his dressing gown, with the solemn look of a squatter watching the developers move in. She clambered over the rubble and made her way downstairs. Her brother climbed over the first-floor banister and hung from the handrail, his feet dangling. She stood beneath him, on the bottom step.
He said: “If you go, I will end myself.”
“You wouldn’t die. You probably wouldn’t even break your legs.”
“I’ll turn in midair so I land on my head.”
She saw that the bottom of his left foot still carried its foliage of verrucas. He’d promised her they’d gone. She reminded herself again: no more shared showers.
She walked across the hall, ignoring a Portuguese wwoofer who was sitting on the tiled floor, crying, with the house phone held to her ear.
“You have to tell me everything!” Albert yelled, as his sister opened the front door. “It’s not fair for you to know things I don’t know!”
As she walked outside, she heard her brother screaming that he was now in fact dead. His most ambitious attempt to stop her going to college had been a typewritten letter, purportedly from her principal, that began:
Dear Kate,
I find you a real downer.
She understood why it was hard for her brother. Now that she wasn’t around, there was only one other young person at the community whom he could have lessons with, and that was Isaac, who was six. It was a long way from when Kate was her brother’s age and the community was awash with bright, multilingual children with dazzling names. (Stand up, Elisalex De Aalwis.) With classes of nearly a dozen young people of all different ages, subject matter had been pitched to the cleverest person, but with simpler alternatives. Their education had peaked with Arlo’s now infamous class on cinquecento Italian architecture, which involved a high-level discussion of the villas of Palladio alongside an ambitious attempt to build “La Rotonda” from Legos. Other popular lessons included Patrick’s introduction to centrifugal force, with its reliance on fearless young volunteers with coins in their pockets. But since then, the numbers of young people at the community had dwindled, and nowadays it was unusual for lessons to consist of anything more than Albert and Isaac, at the dining table, quietly filling out workbooks.
As the first new young person in nearly two years, Isaac had been highly prized for how he tilted the community’s age profile. That was the main reason he and his mother had survived their trial week and got an interview; no one had particularly trusted her; her luggage included a Yeo Valley tote bag that contained the full back catalog of a pamphlet series titled The Paradigm Won’t Shift Itself. Kate felt bad that her brother had no other friends, but she couldn’t hold back her own life to keep him entertained.
Kate got her bike from the barn, the basket preloaded with books.
After breakfast, Albert and Isaac sat in the schoolroom, side by side on the Kerman rug, cross-legged, each with a notepad. Albert was practicing trying to draw a perfect freehand circle. Isaac chewed his pencil like corn on the cob. He had a fringe halfway down his forehead and a few ideally placed freckles. With his white-blond hair, all the better for being badly cut, and a burlesque redness to his lips, adults were prone to falling silent in his presence.
Patrick went to stand in front of the TV to give his lesson. He was wearing a green fleece that, as it happened, for the first time in more than a decade did not smell of bong water. Patrick was fifty-eight but seemed older, had a likable, shapeless nose, watery eyes, and big, glowing ears that looked hot enough to dry socks on. After five clearheaded days, he was glad of the opportunity to share his intellectual energy. It was a rarity, nowadays, for the boys to be getting a formal lesson, so they were excited too.
“Okay, guys,” Patrick said. “Have either of you ever seen an advert before?”
“Of course we have,” Albert said. “We’re not idiots.”
“I saw one about people who work in aeroplanes,” Isaac said.
“I saw one about this excellent soup,” Albert said.
Patrick held his palms out. “So you haven’t seen many?”
Isaac shook his head, the pencil clamped in his mouth.
“Good. And that’s why our community is great. But the important thing to remember is that adverts are not bad, per se. You’ve just got to know how to handle them. We’ll start with something easy.”
Patrick pressed play on the video recorder. There was a low-budget advert for a furniture warehouse in Pontypridd. It showed a couple in the showroom falling backward onto a white leather three-seater, their legs kicking up in the air.
All this week, only this week, fifty percent off everything.
It showed the sofa being lifted out of a van and then it cut to the couple snuggling on the same sofa—but this time in their home.
Come on down, we’ve gone soft in the head for sofas and beds!
Patrick paused the video, pulled across the Ad-Guard, and muted the TV. Albert and Isaac stayed staring up at the bright shapes and colors behind the square of shower curtain.
“I’ll let you think about it,” Patrick said.
They waited in silence.
“Okay, what do you think?”
Isaac looked at Albert, who said: “I think that—if we needed some furniture—then now would be a good time to get it, because of the discount.”
“Very true. What do you think, Isaac?”
“I don’t know. It was loud.”
“Good. Why was it loud?”
“So we can hear it.”
“Good. Why do they want us to hear it?”
Isaac winced and started working the tip of the pencil into the sole of his shoe.
“Okay, fine. Okay. Let’s talk about sales language. ‘We’ve gone soft in the head for sofas and beds.’ ”
Patrick said it in a game-show host voice and Albert laughed.
“Yeah, it’s funny,” Isaac said.
“The advert shows this smiley couple, bleached teeth, glossy hair, picking up the sofa, being all contented”—Patrick mimed carrying one end of a sofa and then grinned, his teeth brown at the edges—“and says that if you buy this soft furnishing you can be like them.”
“They are just an example,” Albert said. “How could we be like them?”
“We can’t,” Isaac said.
“That’s just it,” Patrick said, putting one finger to the tip of his nose and, with the other hand, pointing at Isaac. “Very good. It’s aspirational. People think they will be like them if they buy the sofa, but they can’t be.”
“Who thinks that?” Albert said.
“Stupid people,” Patrick said.
“I don’t believe you. Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Who are they?” Isaac said.
Patrick opened his mouth and then shut it. “Let’s try another one. This is a bit different.”
He pulled back the Ad-Guard, then picked up the remote control with both hands. Coming off the weed had had a strange impact on his relationships to children. He had discovered a desire to pass on knowledge from his own life. Knowledge from his own life. That was a new concept. He had spent two unstoned days preparing the video. He should have been helping to reanchor the fences, but his shoulder, which was known to dislocate at the slightest encouragement—in the bath, reaching for the contraband shampoo, for example—kept him indoors. He recorded hours of adverts and tried to ignore the distant dop-dop-dop of the post rammer. It’d been twenty years since he and Don had sat down with a map of their farm’s fifty acres—dividing it up with a ballpoint pen. They had lifted tons of freestone into the back of their narrow Bedford van and driven it acr
oss the fields. Slowly, shirtlessly, they had dug trenches, stacked stones, Tetris-style, and said almost nothing to each other, except in the pure language of manual labor, coming home each day sunburnt and ennobled—and in truth, everyone else found them pretty irritating, with their tiredness-as-honor shtick, as though they could return to the big house after a full day’s real work and just drop like, yes, stones, expecting admiration and exemption from washing up.
He pressed play on the remote. The screen went blank, then the Channel 4 logo appeared. “Here we go.”
It was a long car advert—thirty seconds—with a soundtrack of intricate electro. It showed a man in a silver car disintegrating into atoms, then re-forming as a toboggan team being led by the same man, then disintegrating again and re-forming as a snow leopard climbing an impossibly steep slope, the man a glint in the animal’s eye, then disintegrating and re-forming as two ballet dancers, the man and a beautiful Eastern European–looking woman, spinning on a lake, performing a difficult lift, before turning back into the car in a Nordic landscape, with the man driving but, now, the ballet dancer in the passenger seat, smiling, brushing snow off his shoulders. The car was called the Avail.
Patrick paused the video. He hadn’t noticed but Isaac and Albert were standing up.
“Motherfucker,” Albert said.
“Brilliant,” Isaac said.
They hugged.
“What you have to remember is that every advert wants you to think something; what does this one want you to think?”
“The car is an amazing car,” Albert said.
“What a car,” Isaac said, putting his arm round Albert’s waist.
“You see what it’s done to you?”
Don was watching from the doorway. He was wearing a jumper with the sleeves rolled up. He had stripes of mud on his forehead and cheeks. His beard had an actual twig in it, which seemed, to Patrick, a bit much.
“What’s happening, Pat?” Don said, squinting at the frozen image on the screen.
“Media Studies.”
“It’s amazing, Dad,” Albert said, and he ran to his father and lightly headbutted his stomach.
“Oh-kay,” Don said, squeezing his son’s shoulder, “and what are you learning about?”
In 2002, Don had invented the Ad-Guard after Kate, age seven, had learned a dance to an advert for yogurt. Pat remembered Don’s speech at the meeting that evening, where he said he could whistle the tunes to, he estimated, nearly two hundred adverts, and he sang (“Everyone’s a fruit and nut case, it keeps you going when you toss the caber …”), delivered slogans with perfect intonation (“It looks and tastes as good as fresh meat”), and then he said: “Wouldn’t it be better if our children could remember the words to poems, or songs, or stories? ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough / And stands about the woodland ride / Wearing white for Eastertide.’ ” This was in the days when his speeches really carried weight. He said he wasn’t suggesting they get rid of the TV entirely and—to seal the deal—he revealed his Ad-Guard, already made and ready to be glued on, cut from a square of shower curtain, attached to a rail, translucent enough to tell when adverts had finished, but misty enough to hide their content.
“I thought it’d be good to teach them how to understand adverts,” Patrick said, watching Don’s eyes narrow, “what they’re trying to achieve—and, as a result, remove their power.”
Both men knew that Don, with dirt on his forearms, grit in his T-zones, had the authority. “Whatever experiences we have—no matter how we try to mediate them—affect us,” Don said, putting his hand on top of Albert’s head, “and particularly young minds in ways we can’t comprehend.”
Isaac watched, looking back and forth as they spoke.
“But at some point they’re going to have to face seeing adverts,” Patrick said. “They should know how to deal with them.”
“That’s just it, Pat—that’s an assumption I’m not willing to make. Everything we see is a choice.”
A vein forced its way to the surface of Patrick’s neck. There were still another six adverts on the tape. He had planned the lesson so that, at the end, there would be a couple of funnies to lighten things up: one about a talking sloth and another about an army of dancing bacteria.
Kate’s first class was history. Leanne—they used tutors’ first names—was a large lady who kept her gray hair in a neat plait and wore local artists’ brooches in trapezium and rhomboid shapes. Her teaching style was to speak for the entire hour, with the implicit understanding that students were free to tune in and out, at will. Today she was talking about Von Stauffenberg’s failed assassination attempt on Hitler. When she talked about a briefcase with a bomb in it, she lifted up her own briefcase to help the class understand. When she read Nazi propaganda, she allowed herself an accent.
Kate’s mind kept drifting, trying to puzzle out the memory of her mother at the typewriter, writing a letter to someone who was in the same room.
Later, at lunch, she realized she had left her packed lunch in the fridge. Blaming Albert, she wished him a painful, head-led landing on the bottom step. Knowing that her sandwiches, unclaimed for a whole morning, would now be under communal jurisdiction, she made her way to the canteen. That was where she had first met Geraint. On that occasion also, it had been her brother’s fault: as part of his campaign to make her terminally late for college, he had hidden all Tupperware and plastic wrap. It was a pleasing irony that her brother’s attempts to sabotage her life had led to her meeting her boyfriend.
She remembered that day: it was not only her first time in the canteen, but her first time in any canteen. Her initial impressions of it had been largely as expected: blue trays and yellow food—chips, garlic bread, breaded turkey burger. The only hot vegetarian option had been cauliflower cheese, so she had picked that, with waterlogged carrots. After paying, she looked for somewhere to sit, realizing that she knew this moment too—this awkward searching for a seat, peering around half-casually. There was something comforting about finally taking part in mainstream rituals. No one had invited her to join them. The only other person sitting on their own had been Kit Lintel, well known in college though not well liked; Kit practiced parkour, or as he called it, the art of movement, around the blocky college parking garage stairwells and could often be seen standing neatly on the corner of a high wall with his arms out like Christ the Redeemer. She sat at an empty table.
She had trouble cutting through the cauliflower’s toupee of cheese. It looked bad but, once she got it in her mouth, there was no denying some talent at work. Was she imagining nutmeg? She made semiconscious mmming sounds. The cauliflower cheese’s deliciousness was the point at which the actual canteen had parted ways with the canteen of her imagination. And that’s when she had found her boyfriend-to-be standing over her with a full plate: beef lasagne, chips, lettuce.
“You’re in my sociology class,” he said, putting his tray down. “I sometimes see you cycling in. I drive past you in my car. I’m Geraint.” A man of simple statements. His voice had the pitch-shifting quality of the Llanelli Welsh, like a slightly chewed cassette.
“Hi,” she said, holding her hand to cover her mouth, still chewing.
That was it. That was all he had needed. He began to eat. She had never thought of herself as a slow eater until that point. He poured the lasagne in. His teeth patted the food on the way past, as though encouraging a long-distance runner. She watched his throat pulse as he drank his juice. As a general rule, she despised carnivores, even those who only ate “happy meat,” but something about Geraint (did he even know lasagne contained beef?) made him different.
That day, they had got down to some logistically awkward heavy petting across the bucket seats of his Punto. They had known nothing about each other and this was ideal. From then on, once or twice a week, they would consume one another, and afterward, he would ask to drive her home, and she would say no. That was the pattern. She didn’t want him to see where she
lived, because she knew it would change his opinion of her. When he finally pushed for a reason, she said, “Because my brother would try to kill you,” which wasn’t a complete lie. Since Albert had spotted a slug-like love bite on her neck, he had been making threats: “Tell whoever is sucking your blood I will not stop till there’s a stake through their heart.”
Patrick sat up on the flat roof, legs hanging over the edge, with his back to the stand-alone bath that—for most of the year—was a velvety green pond, dense with frog spawn. A VHS labeled “Are Ads Bad?” lay next to him. A halo of aphids circled his head. He stayed out there for a long time, his hands growing numb in the cold, as he ran through the stages that had got him to this point.
Eight days ago, Don had taken him aside after dinner, sat him down by the fireplace, and offered constructive feedback on the meal Patrick had just cooked. This in itself he could forgive because, according to Patrick’s pet theory, Don only became condescending when something bad was happening in his personal life. Patrick had noted that, during times of marital strain, Don would aggressively encourage individuals to streamline their recycling process, for example. But since nobody had heard Don and Freya fighting this time, it was unclear what had been the catalyst. There were no other major issues: the community was financially secure (mainly thanks to Patrick, it ought to be said) and Don’s implicit position as “leader” had long ceased to be something worth questioning. So, when Don had put his hand on Patrick’s shoulder and uttered the words “I thought you might be interested in some feedback on your tagine,” Patrick had responded by asking if there was anything that he wanted to talk about and Don had frowned as though not understanding.
After that feedback session, in which Don suggested that perhaps Patrick’s taste buds were being damaged by how much weed he smoked, Patrick, throbbing with a pure kind of humiliation that only Don seemed capable of provoking, had walked across the yard, past the workshop, through the market garden, and back to his geodesic dome, which, with its many panels, had suddenly seemed to Patrick to have the melancholy look of a partly deflated football, kicked to a corner and forgotten. Once inside, Patrick sat on the sofa and worked his one-hitter until it was too hot to hold without gloves, which was his usual way to de-stress.