“Put me out of my misery,” she said. The electric tourist train went past incredibly slowly. Patrick’s wide fingers struggled to tear the paper.
“Oh ho ho,” he said.
Kate stared off at the pier, imagining herself high up in the sky and falling with rag-doll limbs into the green-blue sea.
It had been agreed that Varghese could make a filmed record of the party because new content would need to be online, in the days afterward, if they wanted to see long-term impact. “Stickiness,” Varghese called it.
Don said he could film whatever he wanted, on the condition that he steer clear of the goat pen between 10:30 a.m. and noon, though he didn’t tell Varghese why.
Just after breakfast, Varghese captured the party’s first genuine moment. Don and a team of wwoofers were building the live music yurt in the long field when three young lads turned up, carrying buckets. Although the party had been advertised as “an all-dayer,” Don had assumed that guests wouldn’t arrive until lunch. These lads had been up since dawn, low-tide fishing. They showed the camera the buckets of whitebait, razor clams, and wild oysters. They didn’t like oysters so Don took as many as would fit in the pockets of his tweedy suit jacket. “If all the young people who come today are anything like you,” Don said, “then our future is in good hands.” Varghese had to explain to him not to make direct eye contact with the lens.
At the last count, Varghese’s YouTube video of the community felling their electricity pole had almost ten thousand views and the requisite mixture of abusive and incomprehensible comments that, he reassured Don, were a mark of growth, “like zits during puberty,” and not to be taken personally. On the BassMusicWales.co.uk forum, genuine ravers now outnumbered Varghese’s various avatars on a thread titled “Rebirth of the Free Party!” Likewise, the environmentally conscious GowerPower.org had included them on its list of local days out.
Patrick drove Kate in his sponsored Mini Cooper with the top down and she sang, “If you’ll be my bodyguard” and he sang, “I will be your long lost pal.” Her hair made a comet’s trail behind her as she yelled, “Aaaa!” which was a representation of the four key letters she’d seen when she’d looked at her exam results. Patrick slalomed slightly once they were out on South Gower Road and honked at everyone. They were going for overpriced lunch.
Kate was too busy miming the bass solo to notice when he didn’t take the turning for Llanmadoc. In fact, it took Patrick coming to a full stop before she looked up and saw a poster attached to a tree that read: This Must Be the Place.
“Strange,” she said.
He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel.
“I know what you’re trying to do,” she said. “It’s a nice idea, but I don’t want to come home. It’s not like I secretly want to but I can’t come to terms with it. Let’s go order food we can’t pronounce.”
He turned off the stereo.
“You should at least go and see your parents. Tell them the news.”
“Don’t do this. Stop being grown up. Let’s hit the road.” She thumb-pointed over her shoulder. “I’ll text them.”
She turned the stereo back on. “If you’ll be my bodyguard …”
Patrick killed the engine and pulled up the handbrake.
Kate let her head loll forward. “Really?”
He power-unlocked her door.
“Okay, listen. I will tell Dad the news and have some kind of epiphany, since that’s probably what you’re imagining, but there is no way in the world I’m staying, so I’m going to come back and you’ll still be here—won’t you—and we’ll go and eat hand-dived scallops, am I right?”
He nodded.
“You’re lying,” she said, then, holding out her hand, “give me the keys.”
It was both pleasing and disappointing that, walking into the community for the first time in months, nobody recognized her. After looking around, unnoticed, she finally spotted Don inside a chill-out teepee that was set up beside the fire pit. Through the arched entrance to the tent, she could see him, kneeling, arranging cushions in a diamond formation.
“Hello, Father.”
He stopped for a moment, spooked-seeming, and shook his head.
“It couldn’t be,” he said, not turning to look. “It must be her ghost.” He plumped a beanbag in a way that tried to be wistful, then turned and crawled out of the teepee, pretending not to see her.
“Dad.”
“So sad,” he said, standing up, his eyes wide, “to be haunted by my own daughter. Such a sweet girl.”
“Da-ad. I’ve got news.”
He started walking up the shallow steps to the big house, shaking his head.
“Oh we’ll miss her, I suppose. She wouldn’t even come home for the party in her honor.”
She bounded toward him and took a running jump onto his back, swinging her arms round his neck and her legs round his waist, yelling “Aaaa!” as he huffed and gripped hold of her and turned back down the steps at a canter, already heaving under the strain but absolutely not willing to put down his seventeen-year-old daughter until she explicitly said so. He started doing loops of the fire pit, neighing, and Kate’s laughter went up and down as the air got knocked out of her. She raised one arm in the air rodeo-style and didn’t say stop until she could hear some unsettling congestion in her father’s lungs. When she did say “Okay! Okay!” he halted instantly, gracelessly, falling to his knees on the soft ground, his face now a purplish, almost glans-like color and sweat beading between his eyebrows. His tongue was slightly out. He was old, she noticed.
Kneeling down in front of him with her high-beam grin on, the wonks in her front teeth, she said: “I got into Cambridge.”
Just saying those words made her capable of compassion. She watched his chest go up and down. He coughed a little and it became clear he had something in his mouth. Even this could not dim her torch of empathy. She handed him a tissue. He made the transfer, subtly, turning his head to the side. It was a big one. She glimpsed it, just for a second. The phlegm in the tissue like a sunrise through mist. Everything was beautiful.
“I’m so glad you came back,” he said.
There were two wet patches forming in the pockets of her father’s jacket.
“I’m not actually back. I just came to let you know.”
From the patio at the back of the big house, Kate noticed a tall South Asian man pointing a handheld camera down at them.
“You’re back,” Don said, glancing at the camera. “Here you are. Back.”
“I’m not staying. We’re off for extortionate lunch.”
“This is your celebration. Everything you see was made for you.”
“I don’t want that.”
“Anyway, who’s we?”
Patrick was sitting with his hands in his lap, the roof and windows down. He didn’t hear them approach. A solemn, narrator’s voice began: “Nearly a quarter century ago, in an office block in Lambeth, you introduced me to something that changed my life forever.”
Patrick turned to see the narrator standing at the passenger side door with his head bowed slightly and oysters, one in each hand, shucked and on the half shell. Of the first few months he and Don had spent together in London—their honeymoon period—the moment of greatest romance was spent shucking a dozen natives with a penknife, arguing about landownership, on a bench on Primrose Hill. Kate, behind her father, held up her hands and mouthed: Sorry.
“Come on, old pal, a peace offering,” Don said, presenting them, reaching into the car. “An invitation to the celebration.”
Patrick pressed a button and slowly, excruciatingly so, slow enough to allow the childishness of the gesture to really ring out, the soft top’s exoskeleton unfolded itself and pushed forward over Patrick’s head, forcing Don to take a step back as it clicked into place. He walked round the front of the car and came to the driver’s side window.
“Fresh off the beach today. Gower’s own.”
“Which one is poisoned?” P
atrick said, and sniffed them.
One was huge and one was tiny. They were both bloodshot with Tabasco, which was how Patrick liked them. He took the small one. Without even getting out of the car, he necked it, took a couple of bites, and felt it slide down inside him.
Don held up the huge one in his hand and seemed unsure. Patrick allowed himself to make a small ch noise that he knew would be just enough.
“Fine,” Don said, and lifted the frilled edge to his lips. It had real depth, the shell, fist-sized, definitely a wild oyster—an alpha male. Patrick thought about something sarcastic along these lines but decided it wasn’t necessary. Don had the creature in his mouth and, it became clear, could not swallow.
Patrick looked around for Kate so that they could enjoy this moment together, and saw her, but also, next to her, an outsize brown-skinned man pointing a handheld camera at Don. His giant finger was on the zoom, and it was apparent that Don realized he was being filmed. A little creamy liquid eked out at the edges of his mouth as he finally swallowed, a full chest gulp, leaving him bent over, his hands on his knees.
Patrick felt unthreatened and reckless.
“Right, I’m off,” he said.
“Don’t leave me,” Kate said.
“It won’t be the same without you,” Don said, still bent over, mouth open.
Patrick imagined Don telling everyone at the party: “I held out an olive branch, but the old man’s still not ready to grip on.”
“You’re really just going to dump me here?” Kate said.
“I really am.”
“You’ll be missed,” Don said, unconvincingly.
“Give me the car keys, Kate.”
“Come get them,” she said, and held out the key on the palm of her hand.
He raised his eyebrows. “Are you really going to make me?”
“I really am,” she said.
Patrick shook his head and breathed out. He got out of the car and walked around the front. She took a few backward steps as he approached, now dangling the key from her index finger.
“This is not dignified,” he said.
“How’s your ankle for running?” she said.
He stopped. Behind Kate, the cameraman stepped back for a wide.
• • •
Albert swung and felt the compost give. “She’s back.”
Isaac stabbed the thick gunk, climbed onto the garden fork’s hips with both feet, and waited there, elevator-style, as it sank in.
“She’s come to fuck things up,” Albert said.
He had heard someone yelling “Aaaa!” and, going to investigate, had seen Don giving Kate a piggyback.
The mattock’s blade went shung as it entered the mulch. Albert yanked it back and a green-yellow pus seeped out of an eggshell. The smell was vicious. Isaac dropped his fork and ran back toward the polytunnels, both hands over his nose. Albert was immune.
“But don’t worry because I have everything under control,” he said.
In between each swing, he looked up toward the goat pen. Isaac walked back over, sniffed the air, and picked up his fork.
“Total fuck,” Isaac said, and frowned.
“You got it, Eyes.”
Isaac seemed surprised to hear himself swear. He looked down at his muddy hands.
Don was shortly due to meet his wife and he had still not changed into his slaughterwear. Kate had asked him to give her and Patrick “the tour” of the festival. It would have been strange, given the enthusiasm with which he’d just welcomed them, to decline. He wanted to explain that the tour would need to be very quick because he was going to meet Freya, for the first time in weeks, and he really wanted their meeting to go well—which his daughter would understand. But he could not risk telling her that he also needed enough time both to change into clothes that he was happy to see spattered with goat’s blood and to access a meditative state of pre-slaughter calm. This she might find upsetting. So he said nothing.
They started at the bottom of the long field, beside the yurt, which had its sides uncovered and a low stage at the back.
“The live music arena,” Don said.
“So who’s headlining then?” Patrick said.
“No one. Or rather, everyone. Everyone is headlining.”
Don ushered them toward the top of the field where the first visitors had arrived from other communities, Tipi Valley, Brithdir Mawr, Holtsfield. They had to walk at Pat’s pace, which, with his ankle, was approximately that of a pallbearer. They passed a converted Royal Mail van, a Honda Civic, an American school bus, and a bathtub, all parked at angles. A pony drank from the tub. Don kept getting a few paces ahead, then waiting for them to catch up.
Don stuck to firm ground to allow for Patrick’s ankle, hoping it would help him pick up the pace, but it didn’t.
“Would you like a hand?” Don said finally, and he honestly hadn’t meant it to sound patronizing, but sometimes old patterns of communication have a way of asserting themselves.
Patrick said nothing but walked quicker all the same, just the tiniest of hobbles creeping into his gait, clearly unwilling to express any discomfort. Kate put one arm through Patrick’s, like husband and wife, to support him.
They stopped at the goat pen while Kate jumped the fence to say hello. They heard her apologizing for having gone away. Don looked around. It was a matter of minutes until he was due to meet Freya at this exact spot.
They walked over to the front of the big house, where the sound system was being set up beneath a big blue seven-cornered tarpaulin, amoeba-shaped. It shaded half the yard, having been stretched and tied between the rain gutters of the schoolroom, the apple tree, and the roof of the workshop.
“The Rave Zone,” Don said, with audible capitals, then looked at his watch.
Kate watched two young guys—not much older than her—carrying speakers from a white van, setting them up on a row of pallets, and lashing them together with buckle straps. There were eight cabinets, two high by four across. The upper ones had militaristic casings. By the looks of it, the sound system had been her father’s key investment in the future of the community, that and the semicircle of portable toilets set back behind the workshop. On a plastic school desk next to the speakers there were CDRs, a mixer, and an amp. One of the boys opened the driver’s side of the van, came back with a disc, held it up in the air—flashing sunlight off its underside—and said: “Sound check.”
“You know, Don, this system’s gonna project like billy-o?” Patrick said. “Good morning, pensioners of Gower!”
They looked around but her father had gone. Apparently the tour was over. Kate hadn’t been able to work out if his nervousness had been just a symptom of the party, or if that was what he was like all the time nowadays.
As the boys switched on the equipment there was a sense of air moving, of latent energy. The first sound was of a helicopter landing. Patrick actually looked up. Then the beat came in. It was physically loud, akin to being groped. Kate put her fingers in her ears and watched the boys bounce together behind the school desk, lip-synching. The noise brought people out of the house and gardens and into the yard. A woman with an intricate facial birthmark emerged with her hands over her ears. Marina appeared from her bedroom at the far end of the workshop, making the universal hand signal for turn it down. More people came out of the big house: a pale man in his early thirties making gang signs; Arlo doing the robot, holding tongs; Janet, squinting, wearing a straw hat; two new wwoofers; and then Isaac, sitting in the dirt at the side of the workshop, making mud pies, drumming his pan on the off-beat.
Everyone saw Kate and Patrick. They saw everyone.
“We’re back!” Kate yelled, barely audible, raising both arms.
Patrick held up a hand in acknowledgment.
Arlo slotted his tongs into his back pocket, wiped his hands on his apron, and led the charge. Janet followed, removing her hat to reveal blow-dried hair. Everyone held out their arms—too many hugs to choose from—all smiling and callin
g their names; people Kate had never seen before, moving toward them with arms extended like the undead. The first hug was from Janet, who put her arms round Patrick’s waist and her ear to his chest; he kept his arms up awkwardly, as though wading through pond water. Then the rest fell on them, one after another, Kate’s vision darkening a notch as she was enveloped and squeezed and told that she had never left their thoughts.
Someone turned off the sound check. Through the clot of heads she saw Albert, watching from the side of the workshop, holding a three-quarter-size wheelbarrow of compost. It was not the circumstances in which she had hoped to have their reunion—her suddenly famous and swamped by groupies. Marina squeezed Kate’s shoulders and whispered, “Your brother missed you,” into her ear. Albert dropped the wheelbarrow, made serious eye contact with his sister, pointed toward the house, then ran inside.
As the giga-hug disbanded, only Janet and Patrick remained, Patrick trying to peel off her arms. Kate excused herself, saying she needed to catch up with her brother.
In the schoolroom, there was a man with an alcoholic’s ripe nose making paper lanterns, two nonidentical twins cutting colorful people holding hands out of tissue paper, drawing a unique expression on each, and a boy with a square fringe folding origami cranes. They looked up at her with the nonjudgmental but slightly questioning expression that she herself used to adopt when finding unknown persons wandering the house.
In the kitchen, a skinny woman fed a cinder block of cheese into the industrial grater, producing a blond wig in the bowl below.
She finally found Albert in the scullery, wearing an apron, washing potatoes at the butler’s sink. It was odd to see him washing them because he still had not washed himself. He had a kind of Hollywood tan. He wore special black scrubbing gloves that said POTA across the right knuckle and TOES across the left. The way he rubbed his gloved hands around the potatoes reminded Kate of an evil genius formulating a plan.