Don decided to start enjoying himself.
Marina stood up off her stool. “Imagine that this pepper mill is the earth and this”—she lifted a Merry Christmas mug—“is our sun. We all know it takes a year for the earth to orbit the sun, but the problem is that the earth’s path is not a perfect circle, it’s eccentric”—she showed the pepper mill doing ellipses around the mug—“and it takes twenty-six thousand years of orbits before we come back to our exact start point, right?”
Freya was listening hard.
“Absolutely,” Don said.
Arlo, it was clear, hadn’t been paying attention and was just now trying to catch up.
“Which of course the Mayans knew all about, along with loads of other cultures, the Sufis for one. Then eventually …”
Marina swung the pepper mill round the mug as she took steps round the curved edge of the table toward Freya. Don’s expression was now one of having happened across something really cute, like a cat standing on a cow.
“… eventually, twenty-six thousand years eventually …”
Kate could see Isaac and Albert examining and discussing something they’d found on a table leg; from her own years as a small person, she knew about the carpenter’s hieroglyphics on the table’s underside.
“… there will be an eclipse. But it’s a particular kind of eclipse.” Marina put the pepper mill down and then, with gravitas, put the Christmas mug—the sun—between the mill and the black hole at the center of the table. “We all know about lunar and solar eclipses, but next year, at the end of this twenty-six-thousand-year cycle, we’ll have a galactic eclipse. And that’s when the sun comes between us and this monster, Sagittarius A, at the center of the galaxy. And when that happens, well, no one’s totally sure—there’s a lot of conjecture—but when the most powerful force in the galaxy is blocked out, and remember, it’s millions of times more powerful than the sun, there’s going to be some major changes, it’s fair to say.”
Don was grinning now, absolutely loving it, not wanting the performance to end. “But you must have a theory on what you’re expecting?”
She looked at him. He had his mouth open, waiting.
“I’m genuinely intrigued,” he said, and just about managed to hold it together.
“Well,” she said finally, seeming a little awkward now that she was standing, trying to make her way back to her seat, “nobody knows for sure, but I’m anticipating a shift in gravity—and I mean gravity in the widest possible sense: gravity of the mind, the soul, relationships, moral and spiritual gravity. An untethering. A topsy-turvy world. Some people think the world will stop spinning; others expect South Wales to get the Mediterranean climate it deserves.” Arlo liked that. “All I believe is that something major is going to happen, and those who are ready to adapt will have to make the world new. It’s going to be a test. A real test. Because what’s a test if you can’t fail?”
Don clapped enthusiastically. He was known for his loud clap. Freya rubbed her eyelids. Beneath the table, Albert and Isaac were shaking hands.
“Brilliant,” Don said. “Absolutely brilliant.”
His wife wouldn’t look at him. Marina, still standing, shifted back to her stool.
“A really enigmatic iteration,” Don said, looking around. “People can be terribly drab with that sort of stuff, but I think you gave it real oomph. And the scientific data too. Is that your own, Marina, or can I look it up online?”
She looked at him, then down at the table, then she reached under it and said: “Come on, Isaac, we’re going.”
Taking her son by the hand, she marched upstairs to Janet’s room, where they were staying. Through the ceiling, they heard the sounds of first, a door slamming, then Marina noisily packing their stuff. Don held up his hands in apology.
It was then perhaps partly to show his humane side that her father went on to argue that they should be allowed to stay because Marina was “harmless enough” and Isaac “was key to the development of the community.” Patrick said it wasn’t right to invite someone to be a full-time resident just because they matched certain criteria. Arlo, in his usual, instinctive way, said he thought they were nice and should be asked to stay. Freya said it was obvious they were only at the community while they looked for something better. While this discussion went on, Kate could see Albert, with both arms round a table leg, listening earnestly to the sounds from upstairs. He cast his half vote in support of Isaac.
With two and a half for and two against, it came down to Kate to decide. Her brother had not spoken to her since she started college and, if she voted against him, she knew he would probably never speak to her again. While she deliberated, he knelt and, with ceremony, laid his head on the bench, with his eyes closed, in the manner of someone waiting to be beheaded.
It was dark by the time the Zapatistas reappeared, their breath evaporating against his driver’s side window. Patrick wound down the glass. One of the boys reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic bag, held theatrically between his index and middle fingers.
“High-grade hydro,” he said, his voice muffled by his scarf. “It cost twenny-five, naw twenny.”
Patrick blinked. “I admire your entrepreneurial verve.”
He had always suffered from low-level paranoia, and one of the best things about smoking cannabis was that it gave him something to blame his paranoia on.
“I’m naw lying. You owe us a fiver.”
The other two boys were on lookout, watching the road ahead and behind.
“You think you can do one over on me,” Patrick said as he scooped five quid of someone else’s money from the ashtray and handed it across.
They passed him the bag and he took a long sniff—it reeked—then dropped it in his lap. Driving back, he imagined everyone, especially Janet, wondering where he had gone with the car while they were in the cold, insulating the vulnerable vegetables. He thought about her wartime navy work shirt, sleeves rolled up, tangible biceps.
Turning into the community’s driveway, he switched off the headlights, hoping not to alert anyone to his return. He put the car in neutral to let it silently roll along the lane, parking just before the upslope that led to the yard. Maybe they had needed the car to get some vital bag of charity shop blankets and because of him there would be no asparagus this summer. Getting out of the car, he saw, parked parallel to him across the path, the moon reflecting its expensively undulating surfaces, the Avail. He imagined Janet’s boyfriend arriving to a hero’s welcome, the backseat of his car clouded with old duvets.
Walking a back route to the dome, he passed brassicas and endives covered by rugby coats and sheepskin rugs. Once inside, Patrick held the bag up to his bedside lamp. The bud was compact, bristling with tiny orange hairs and covered in crystals like it had been dipped in sugar. He didn’t like the way cannabis culture had become somehow macho: muscle-bound super-skunk. The great thing about Karl Orland, his usual dealer, was that he appreciated the pleasures of pale grass, twiggy and mild. Still, he would have to make do.
Normally he saved bhang lassis for the solstice, but since he’d been straight for about two hundred hours, he thought it only right to mix a catch-up dose. Emptying the lot into a mortar, he ground it with some brown sugar. It would save him time to mix a big portion now and ration it out over the next few days. He took his camping gas stove and heated the mixture outside, so it wouldn’t stink out his dome. At one point, someone walked past; he couldn’t make out who in the dark, only knew it was a woman when she said: “Someone’s having a party.”
• • •
Marina was sitting on a bench in the shed, with the pottery wheel between her legs. She sometimes let Albert control the speed of it, but mostly he just watched, as he was now, sitting beside her. Isaac had already been put to bed. The room was lit by a strip light that hung from two chains; it was pitch-black outside. She wet her hands from a bowl beside her and thokked a blob of clay onto the wheel. As she pressed the foot pedal, the wheel spun.
She centered the clay; then, delicately shaping her hands into a broken circle, raised it up. Albert sometimes laughed at the rude shapes the clay made but he was never really sure why he was laughing.
One of the most impressive things about Marina was that she could throw a teapot and talk at the same time. It gave her the air of a magician, the hands doing the trick, clay-charming, while she talked to Albert about the future.
“What are you making?”
“A present for you.”
“Yes! Is it a helmet?”
“No.”
“Is it body armor of any kind?”
“Not really.”
Along the middle shelf on the wall opposite were the unclaimed workshop pieces: mugs, butter dishes, scenes from the Nativity, a four-piece band. Albert had seen the pleasure that Marina took in her quarterly cull—the catharsis of visitors’ crappy vases, misshapen animals, and bad likenesses of friends shattering into a masonry-strength bin bag. On the shelf above that were her own elegant milk jugs and bowls.
All full-time members were asked to put in eighteen hours a week of work that contributed to the functioning of the community. Most of the friction around this idea arose not from people working too few hours, but from a shifting definition of what was a worthwhile contribution. Marina included her hours in the pottery shed as part of her quota because on the one hand she was teaching Albert and Isaac a useful skill, and on the other, as the community averaged a minimum of three pieces of broken crockery a week, she was helping replace stock.
Albert stood up off the bench and leaned over the spinning wheel, peering down on top of it, trying to hypnotize himself as the shape dilated.
“By the way, my sister thinks you’re a liar,” he said, still staring down into the revolving portal.
“That’s not very nice,” Marina said, concentrating.
“You should show her the truth. Is it a bowl? It looks like a bowl. I don’t really need a bowl.”
“It’s not a bowl.”
Her hands moved steadily. The tips of her fingers were gray. Some clay splatted on Albert’s trousers.
“Bowls are okay but not great.”
It was more conical than a bowl, and taller. She took her foot off the pedal and the wheel stopped. She looked at Albert’s mouth for a moment, then took a wire and cut the clay at its base. Lifting the cone up, she showed him it had holes at both ends. She rested the shape on a tray by her side.
“What is it?” he said.
“Guess.”
He chewed his lip. “A silencer?”
“Here’s a clue: I’m going to paint it with red and white stripes. It’s to help you get your voice heard.”
He started to look scared.
“It’s a megaphone, Albert.”
“Oh sweet!”
“It will be ornamental though, really. A symbol of your right to be listened to.”
“I’ve always wanted a megaphone,” he said.
Once he’d made the bhang, Patrick added pistachio and blitzed it in with the plain lassi. Little clumps of weed and nut whizzed past like fence posts in a hurricane. He watched the yogurt take on a green, ill-looking tint.
It was late now, gone midnight, and although he was tired, he didn’t want to sleep until he was stoned. He drank a third of the lassi and went for a walk around the garden. It was a brutally cold, clear night, and after thirty minutes he felt his mind rearrange itself in a familiar formation. Certain memories receded. Lights clicked off in his internal attic. He stretched his back and felt the blood slosh round his brain.
Getting back inside, he wound up the radio to full capacity and set it playing on Radio 3. Music was good again. He sat down in his overstuffed armchair. After a while, the radio died and he found he was incapable of winding it back up. Pinned to his seat, he felt his mind over-revving while he stared at the heptagonal skylight.
He thought about the dome, which had been built as a present for him. When they had first moved to Gower, Patrick used to stay in what was now Kate’s room, sharing a thin wall with Don and Freya. As an infant, Kate had a cot at the end of her parents’ bed, which is where she did her sleeping and, more to the point, her not sleeping. Patrick had little choice but to synchronize, napping in the one- or two-hour bursts of silence, a tasting menu of sleep.
On Kate’s first birthday, Don had made a speech in which he said: “I don’t think it’s fair Patrick should have to put up with our clatter and Kate’s air-raid siren, and it’s his birthday coming up, so I thought—I know he’s interested—we could get to work on a dome.”
There is no perceptible difference between something made with love and something made with spite, except spite works to a schedule. Six months later, they moved him in with his books and his spices and Don bought him a bag of weed to say thanks for keeping the big house smoke-free for Kate, and that was when he properly started smoking again. With resurgent paranoia, he began to wonder whether the dome had, in actual fact, been built as a way to get him out of the big house.
Patrick made the biggest monthly contribution to the community’s finances and, as such, was prone to believing that they only put up with him because of his money. He was also acutely conscious that if Don ever heard Patrick imply his wealth entitled him to better treatment than anyone else then Don would absolutely pounce, ideologically. Which meant Patrick had never—not once in twenty years—suggested that his position as financial load-bearer entitled him to not feel alienated.
His best attempt at expressing his discontent had been just a few weeks ago. Cider-drunk on spring equinox, during those fearful few days before Janet’s most recent return, while sitting round the fire with most of the community, he had suggested that the geodesic dome, in its isolated position beyond the tubers at the top of the garden, and given people’s generally withering, lightly nostalgic attitude toward it (“Well, it must have looked like the future when it was built”), was an analogue for how people viewed him personally. He had thought the statement might come out as lighthearted, and that they would make jokes in response—“Yeah, Pat, we put you out there as, like, quarantine”—but his audience’s reaction was the kind of stonewall denial—“How can you say that?”—that people adopt when someone has absolutely nailed a thing.
He began to harbor a strong belief that people talked about him behind his back. You could always hear people talking somewhere, and he often heard double plosives that sounded like his name and, depending on that day’s psychological lean, he would provide the context. In a good frame of mind: “Patrick seriously delivered with the kedgeree this a.m.” In a bad one: “Is it me or was Patrick’s kedgeree pre-chewed?”
When he felt this way, he turned to music and art for comfort, and this presented another problem. It was not possible to hang art in the dome, all the walls being curved and omnitriangulate. When Patrick had moved out of the big house all those years ago, he had donated to baby Kate, in her new bedroom, a smoggy, oil-acrylic seascape and eight wildly imprecise line drawings: Studies for Any Female Nude I–VIII by Marcel Le Lionnais. On the day before Kate’s third birthday, Don returned them to Patrick, carrying them under both arms to the dome, saying they were “a bit much, for Kate, at this stage in her development.”
Since Patrick couldn’t hang the art, he had decided to make use of one of the awkward spaces that existed behind every piece of non-dome-specific furniture. Rectangular sofas, rectangular bookcases, rectangular wardrobes: anything not designed to back onto a spherical wall created dead space. So Patrick, in a fit of innovation, took the pictures out of their frames and put them into cardboard-backed plastic sleeves. He then stood the images on a cradle-style print browser that he’d bought from an art shop in Mumbles. It fitted behind the futon-sofa, thus utilizing, albeit awkwardly, the dead space. If he knelt on the sofa, facing the wall, he could then peruse the images at his leisure. This soon became one thing that made Patrick feel truly wretched and alone: the eight line-drawings now a kind of flick-book, creating the i
mpression of a naked woman exploding, limbs distending, tearing at herself, followed by the undeniably bleak and featureless gray-black-blue seascape. This final image captured Patrick’s feelings whenever he tried to enjoy his modest collection of original art.
The only wall decorations were Patrick’s string instruments. When they had built the dome, Don installed wall-mounted brackets for Patrick’s guitar and banjo. It was a small act of genuine thoughtfulness. Over the years, the community had bought Patrick a number of stringed instruments, each one smaller, quieter, than the last. Two Christmases ago it was the samisen, a three-stringed Japanese guitar.
The acoustics in the dome were unsettling. If Patrick sat on a stool in the middle of the room with his Spanish guitar, it added an unwanted 1980s-type reverb to his fingerpicking, making his compositions sound like restaurant music. He could never achieve a lo-fi, stripped-back sound. Also, much of his record collection became unlistenable and overproduced within these walls, which Patrick blamed Don for as well.
Through Kate’s mid-teens, Patrick had happily transcribed and played her favorite emotional indie rock so she could practice singing. He was one of the only people she would allow to hear her voice, plus she actually preferred how she sounded with the dome’s built-in reverb. The other advantage was that Patrick had no neighbors who could overhear them. He felt privileged to be, as far as he knew, the only person she talked to about her new boyfriend.
Now, as Patrick stared up at the raised, recessed bed at the top of the dome, he found himself thinking about the night that he and Janet had spent there. Not long after Albert’s birth there had been a party; Janet had gifted her own bed to two friends who were visiting, and the schoolroom floor was dominoed with people sleeping, so Patrick—in an honest-to-goodness unsleazy way—said there was spare room in the dome. It was freezing and raining when they ran across the yard, still drunk. They set the wood burner going, and climbed into bed fully clothed and hugging. The way the heavily insulated dome worked was that heat rose and kept the top a lot hotter than the bottom. There was a window above the mezzanine bed for ventilation, but if it was raining, as it was that night, it had to stay shut or the rain came in.