“Actually, she did ask me to pass on a message. Said she’s too tired. Gone to bed.”
Don inhaled for a long time.
“I know it’s not what you wanted to hear,” Patrick said. “But you should try and have a good time anyway. You’ve worked really hard to make all this happen, and you deserve to enjoy it.”
Their relationship was not built on kindness and Don squinted in nonrecognition. Patrick took note and tried to even things out with a bit of trademark banter.
“I am reminded of something you said to me once. ‘Get stuck in, Pat. Sixty’s not too old.’ ” His impression of Don was camp. “ ‘All these tremendous women, intelligent, freethinking, body-confident.’ ”
“Are you trying to tell me to get laid?”
“I never said that. I’m just saying there’s a little secret that I know. You take this table leg off”—Patrick nudged the one he was referring to with his foot—“and feed it through the coat hooks on the back of this door. Et voilà—privacy.”
“Oh Christ,” Don said, and he put his head in his hands. “Is that what Freya hopes will happen? I’ll get laid and forget about her?”
Patrick didn’t reply; he wasn’t used to seeing Don vulnerable and it unsettled him.
“You know she’s talking about sending Albert to school?” Don said.
“I actually wanted to talk to you about that,” Patrick said.
Finishing off his wine in one, Don leaned forward and squirted himself a top-up from the box.
“I just don’t think it’ll do him any good. School won’t suit him. Maybe when he’s older, Kate’s age, it will. Plus it’s miles away. He’ll lose half his life going back and forth.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk about—the commute,” Patrick said. He knew there was a spot in the middle of the room that, because of its shape, produced a kind of reverb. He had always disliked how it made him sound, but for now he decided it would be better to speak with a certain omnipotence. He knew the spot by instinct; he took a couple of steps and one to the side, then raised his chin: “Freya said it wouldn’t take so long for him to get to school if she and Albert lived nearer the school.”
“You can’t teach that kind of rational thinking, Pat. That’s why I married her.”
Patrick stayed where he was. To get the special effect he had to keep his head in that position.
“And she asked me if she and Albert could live in my house, for a bit.”
The reverb smoothed the harsh edges off his voice, he felt.
“And what did you say, old pal?”
“Well, Don. I mean. To be totally frank, I said ye—”
It was the purest kind of uppercut. Don, seated on the very low futon-sofa, had made a fist and pushed himself up, reaching full height as he caught Patrick under the chin. His fist must have traveled four and a half feet along a vertical axis. At exactly the point in the word yes where the tongue darts out before the sibilant, it hit.
Patrick took a couple of steps back and held his throat. It hadn’t been that hard, both men knew, but it counted.
“Okay,” Patrick said, his voice no longer omnipotent.
His tongue was bleeding. Something in the less than wholehearted way Don had hit him—at about 65 percent strength—suggested a kind of resignation. It was almost an okay, you win. Don sat back down on the sofa and said: “Damn.”
At this point, Patrick had expected to feel more victorious.
She’d never heard music like this before. This was not normal dance music. Closing her eyes, Kate clearly imagined robotic dogs coming toward her over the horizon. Giant robotic dogs. Their feet were the drums and they were growling the bass line—no, they were chasing the bass line—the bass line was chasing them! Always running toward her but never getting any closer, like in the Steamboat Willie cartoon, but not scary at all. A guy without face paint danced against her. His features looked squashed but she didn’t mind so she pushed her bum into his crotch and laughed over her shoulder. He was one of the free-party ‘heads who had arrived at midnight, easily recognized by the girls’ fluorescent leggings and the boys’ sleeveless tops. Whenever the music dropped away, she heard the hydraulic rush of an entrepreneur, somewhere, doling out nitrous. There was someone who looked like her father, if her father had jaundice, standing near the edge of the dance floor, speaking intensely to a girl who was one of those blue-skinned aliens in hot pants.
She found the Hulk next to the speakers, watching his own hands with interest, dancing by a girl dressed as a peacock. He reached into the condom pocket of his jean shorts and teased something out, another pill, which he pressed into Kate’s palm. Gazing up at the amoeba-shaped tarpaulin, she felt an affinity with everything, right down to the single-cell organisms within her. She took a moment to contemplate the inside of herself, her internal neatness, before becoming aware of her bladder. She could not wait to go to the toilet, Kate suddenly realized. She was excited about it.
Avoiding the portable johns, she went to the bathroom under the stairs. She felt her breath go in and out and she looked at the ceiling and the walls and the toilet scrubber and the curlicued H and C on the faucets. She sat down, giggling, then read and reread the note that said: “Hello. If you’re reading this, you must be sitting on me. I like organic waste (that means piss, shit, and toilet paper—yum!). Everything else, feed to my friend, Senor Bin. Love, Joe Bog.” It was brilliant and clever. Then she wiped herself and saw red on the tissue paper. She stared at it. A watery red. She looked into the bowl and saw all her piss was red. Internal bleeding. The pills.
Fucking cheapskate pills, just typical, for me to die on the day of my unconditional acceptance. So this is how Geraint gets his revenge.
She pressed her hands on her stomach. Suddenly there were no unthreatening robotic armies, just a slow, painful death in a brightly lit hospital, and she remembered Patrick in an eight-bed ward, the forked capillaries at the side of his nose. Kate realized she would never stride purposefully through the university library’s impossibly complicated annals. Annals. Never annals for her. She would never have one-on-ones with outlandish lecturers. So many stains on their jumpers, shoelaces untied, that she would never see. She would never punch well above her weight, academically and romantically, would never fall in love with a boy of an opposite social background—even more opposite than Geraint’s, the son of a wealthy foreign diplomat, perhaps—and they would never toss off the shackles of each other’s ideas of what a relationship could be, and discover that, when it came down to it, they were similar—both fleeing their childhoods, both social explorers—and they would never hold each other in a postgraduate carrel amid the smell of rare and expensive books and wake full of knowledge, not the kind of knowledge found in books but something deeper, about themselves, about each other.
She stared into the bowl. What was she worried about again?
Oh yeah, the watery blood that suggested a slow, agonizing death—with hours to decide her final words, hours to edit and redraft. She couldn’t think what her final words would be. I love you. Was that an awful cliché? It felt true, though. I love you. I love you. I love you.
“He-llo? I’m dying out here,” a female voice said.
Kate pulled up her knickers and flushed. She straightened her black skirt and unlocked the door. As she came out, a Pierrot clown shoved past and slammed the door behind her. Kate went back to the kitchen, where there had been a fight with raw onion. It was everywhere. She felt her eyes start to sting. She sniffed and remembered that she was going to die. She’d forgotten. She started crying. There was a big red bloody patch on the chopping board on the table. She stared at it. Next to the board were a pile of beetroot scalps.
She stared back and forth between the board, the bloodstain, the beetroot.
The board. The bloodstain.
The beetroot.
She was like some completely useless detective.
It took maybe eleven seconds.
“Beetroot salad,”
she said. “I ate beetroot salad.”
There was a boy she didn’t recognize at the fridge—not in fancy dress—digging at a carrot cake with his hand.
“I thought I was dying, but I’m not!”
She pulled the other pill Geraint had given her out of her pocket and took it with a glass of Five Alive.
The last image that Patrick had of Don was of him, with frightening intensity, twisting out the last dregs from the foil bag of box wine, as though breaking the neck of a rabbit. Don had asked to be left alone, and so now Patrick was standing at the edge of the live music yurt. He kept deliberately clipping the cut on his tongue against his front teeth, wincing, then doing it again. The band were called “Palindromeda.” As they finished one particularly awful song, Patrick heard a voice at his shoulder.
“You’ve been avoiding me.”
He knew who it was. Only now, somehow, with his car full of another man’s wife’s belongings, and with his tongue swollen in his mouth, did he feel able to see her. He turned to look—her face was flushed at the forehead from dancing and wearing a neckerchief—then he went back to watching the band. The front man said: “This song’s called ‘Called songs, this.’ ”
She said: “I’ve missed you.”
Patrick felt the back of her hand against his cheek.
“What happened to your face?” she said.
Albert wandered the party, trying to decide on the best position from which to make his announcement. He needed to take into account where the biggest crowd could gather, the audience’s sight lines, and which position would give him the best silhouette. They would not be getting any more trouble from his sister, who, Albert could only assume, had tasted the soup, realized that she was drinking one of her oldest friends, and was right now releasing tears into the wild, somewhere very far away. He walked past the fire pit and saw Zinia, a woman who he had once loved like a grandmother until she left the community to live in Christiania years ago. She had curly hair and an alpine chest.
“Bertie!” She used to call him that. “My boy, you’re huge!”
“I know.”
“Slask fitte!”
He repeated it. “What does it mean?”
“I saved it for you. It’s Swedish. It means something unspeakable.”
“Okay, thank you.”
Up at the yard, he tried to ignore his father sitting on the bench by the schoolroom with a Smurf on his lap. Albert examined the flat roof as a possible podium. He walked back toward the dance floor, into the noise, avoiding the flailing elbows, to check that he would still be visible from there. When he heard his name yelled, he turned round in time to see someone who resembled his sister wrap her clammy arms right round him, wetness and heat coming off her neck.
“Bro!” she said. The hug went on and on. Her face paint was smudged to an ashy gray. When she let go, there were black smudges on Albert’s forehead. She looked him up and down.
“What are you?” she said, dancing as she talked. “Are you a sea captain?”
He was wearing wellies and a blue naval utility coat. The coat, which he’d got from the dressing-up box, was to give him authority as a public speaker and to point toward the possible floods ahead.
“Why are you still here?” he said.
“I came to see you!”
She bobbed her head from side to side. She was holding a bamboo pole, the panda’s glow stick, twizzling it. He could feel the music in his lungs, the air moving. The smoke machine exhaled, the green laser came on, and his sister reached up to break the beams. He needed to hurt her more.
“The soup,” Albert said. “It was made with the blood of your goat. Belona’s blood.”
“Cool,” she said, and she tried to get him to dance, taking hold of his hands and puppeting them up and down.
“It was cool,” he said, in an overly sinister way, then waited for her to scream.
“What did you say about Belona?”
He cupped his hands round her ear and yelled.
“The soup was made with her blood!”
Her dancing slowed a little. Just her feet going.
“I thought it was tomato.”
He didn’t mind repeating himself.
“You drank her blood. We mixed it with tomato to fool you.”
“Oh my God, that’s weird.”
He watched her smudged face crack. Her teeth floating there amid the black paint. It was a smile, he realized. An unfathomable response. Her feet were still going from side to side, shoulders shifting.
“Brother of mine,” she said, kissing him in the middle of the forehead, then leaning right into his ear, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned tonight, it’s that I love you so much. And you’ll never stop loving me either. I know why you do everything. I love everything you are.”
She pulled his head into her chest and kissed him again, really hard on the crown. He could smell her. Maybe she was in shock—that was the problem. He had to make her understand.
“I stuck her, Kate. She was pissing blood like a fountain pissing blood.”
He felt her move in time to the music.
“I know what happened. That you weren’t capable of pulling the trigger. I spoke to Mum. It’s great that you’re sensitive. Don’t fight it—you’re a good person by nature!”
She wouldn’t let him go, squeezing him and trapping his arms at his side and moving his body in time with the music as though dancing with a doll.
“That’s not true,” he said.
“I’m so proud of you!”
Letting go of him, she put her hands in the air as the synths came in. The bass dropped monumentally—a dynamited tower block.
As the smoke cleared, Albert looked to where his dad had been sitting but he was gone.
“Yeeeeeaaah!” she said, her voice going scratchy.
Little bits of spittle got Albert in the face. Her head went back, looking up at the tarpaulin. He gazed inside her nostrils, tiny nodules of dried snot attached to hairs like a miniature and impractical abacus. He did not know who this person was.
“Don’t feel bad. She had a good life. Better than most animals’ lives. Mum said Belona was pretty chilled out, even at the end. Come on, come dance, this is amazing,” and she pulled him closer to the speakers, his heels dragging in the grit. He yanked his hands away and put them over his ears. The bass rattled his insides and he thought of the way the innards had flopped out of Belona onto the grass, and of how there had been a sound like hundreds of people licking their lips all at once. He thought of the way the heart had kept thumping after the brain was mush. He looked around at the brain-dead people, his sister among them. There was an apocalyptic clown, blood around his mouth, with a top hat and cane, the white paint cracking at his jaw where he was gurning.
“You should think about how she bled to death and seemed to be in pain,” Albert said, though he was starting to get upset.
She mimicked using a steak knife and fork, cutting off a chunk, chewing it, but all this in rhythm with the music.
“It’s fine. I love you. And you may not know it but you love me.”
He was blinking a lot. “I don’t.”
She did the one where electricity runs up one arm, across her shoulders, and down the other arm.
She tried to pass it to Albert, but he’d gone.
Don was in the dome, down on one knee, tipping the table up with his shoulder as he took one of its legs off. The Sky was above him on the mezzanine bed, swinging her blue legs in the air.
“What you gonna use that for?” she said. “And will I get splinters?”
He wedged the table leg into the coat hooks and tested the door to make sure it didn’t open.
“You know all the tricks,” she said.
Don was full of different drinks and his ears were ringing and he had even slightly pulled his hamstring when dancing. It made him sad that the thing he was doing might be the thing his wife hoped he would do. He climbed the few stairs, holding on to the rail made fr
om an elm tree branch while trying to disguise a limp.
He crawled onto the bed, took the girl’s drink out of her hand, then leaned in and put his tongue in her mouth. Her skin was soft, even with paint on. He experienced dizziness, having recently downed a Martini, and he worried about a possible fall from the mezzanine.
She lay back on the mattress and he carried on kissing her, leaning over with an arm on either side of her upper body. She felt the crotch of his trousers. He asked himself a question he had not asked in some time: Did he have clean genitals? Yes, thoroughly so, because he’d hoped that something might happen with Freya.
She pulled off her top and revealed the parts of her body she had not painted. He tried not to think about anything and groped her and kissed her. She slipped her hand down the front of his trousers and tugged inexpertly.
“This is probably pretty normal for you,” she said. She had to stop kissing while she concentrated on his belt. “It’s cool that here sex can just be sex and nobody has to get het up about it.”
Her speaking reminded him of how young she was, so he kissed her to keep her quiet. She shoved off her jean shorts, along with her underwear. He didn’t want to say that this was moving too quickly, but he wondered if it was a generational thing: this was moving too quickly. She was of his daughter’s generation. Twenty-four, he had discovered, a graduate. More white clouds now, among the blue. She had shaved all her pubic hair off. He had never seen that in person before. It pretty much appalled him. He tried to buy time by going down between her legs. She was scentless. These weren’t real genitals, as far as he knew. So much had changed since he was young.
“I’m married,” he said, from between her thighs. “I have a wife.”
“I know; I get it. Do you want me to meet her later or something?”
“I mean I’m properly married. Legally.”
“I understand.”
“I don’t think you do. I think I might have to stop what we’re doing here.”
She looked down at him.
“Yes,” he said, “I definitely think I’m going to stop.”
“Weird.”
“I just realized. I’ve also hurt my hamstring.”