In the morning, with the sun shining through the skylight, they woke up in a tropical weather system. Drenched in sweat, dry-mouthed, brains loose in their skulls, steam particles in the slanted sunlight, condensation on the rolling hills of duvet—reminiscent of North Gower at dawn—they stripped off their jumpers, gasping for air, laughing, coughing, throwing their clothes down from the mezzanine bed, until it would have just seemed unnecessarily prudish, given their night together and the genuinely sauna-like conditions, not to take all their clothes off and lie on top of the covers, breathing.
Their matted hair, bodies shining with sweat, chests rising and falling. Patrick opened the window and let the light elliptical rain fall through onto them. It felt, in every way but one, postcoital. So, without self-consciousness, they kissed and hugged and fell back to sleep.
Something about this experience, Patrick felt, had sealed off the possibility of them getting together. They had achieved all the awkwardness and shy chatter of good friends who have slept together, but without ever having crossed that threshold. It would have seemed oddly regressive to suggest they start any kind of courting ritual, but equally he didn’t feel able to take the bolder route and talk to her about the thing that had almost happened and whether it could actually happen. As time passed, it seemed impossible to talk to Janet about that morning. He began to suspect she wouldn’t even remember.
Patrick managed to heave himself out of his chair and get to the kitchen cupboard. Among the other herbs, he had a jar of dried magic mushrooms that he’d picked last autumn. He needed something to try to turn his evening round and he thought they might open a few internal windows. Sitting back down, he chewed on three tiny caps, washed them down with the rest of the lassi, which he’d forgotten he was planning to keep, and tried to think of something positive.
That was when he heard the roar of a very large animal.
• • •
Upstairs, in the big house, Freya and Don were in bed, each sitting up with a book and their own lamp. She had her hair tied in a side ponytail so that she could rest back against the headboard. He was rereading Ways of Seeing and occasionally laughing with his mouth closed, which Freya felt as a series of vibrations in the mattress. He had two pillows under his right foot for drainage.
Closing the book, he watched his wife, then silently leaned across and kissed her on the cheek. “Silently” because eighteen years into their marriage, two years ago, Don had started to make an involuntary kiss-kiss noise (the noise didn’t sound like kisses; it sounded like a small sealed bag being opened) every time he was seeking, or was about to give her, affection. It just started one day. In the dark of the bedroom, she would hear the two quick vacuum-sealed, slightly wet noises and know that he was shortly to make contact. At the breakfast table, before his lips were on her neck, she would hear the pursed schlupping. The noise was similar to the one people make to attract the attention of a cat. She had never found his kisses repellent before, but something about the self-announcing quality of these noises—a comedian offstage, doing his own intro—really got to her. She had thought it only fair to let him know: “That thing you do, before you kiss me”—she wasn’t able to impersonate, so made a kind of chewing noise—“it’s awful, can you stop?” His small eyes widened. He had not been aware he was doing it.
Of course he would stop, he said. From that point, whenever he made the sound he’d halt and curse. He battled his auto-self. Eventually, after weeks of struggle, Don was able to kiss and receive kisses without making preemptive smoochies.
Except something of it remained: a ghost of the sound, the impulse but without its audible counterpart. She became attuned to Don’s repression of the noise and, lying in bed in the dark, knew with just as much clarity when she was about to feel his lips and the swish of his beard against her. In many ways, this was more distressing than the original kiss-kiss noise. The sound was gone but the idea lived on, made bigger, more upsettingly complex; a process between them.
She read the same line in her poem again and again. The line was “That is the way with amputations.” Recently, she’d been finding that if Don got to sleep before her, then she stayed awake, preoccupied by the light pan-pipe moods that whistled from his nostrils. She used to say how much she liked the chords his sinuses played, but not now that they kept her awake. When she was not sleeping she worried about her son.
More and more, she was seeing Albert skulk off to the workshop or pottery shed, both of which were far enough away to make it difficult for Freya to casually pop by to check on him without having some genuine reason for doing so. It had been Don’s idea to take Marina and Isaac out of the big house (since Janet was shortly to reclaim her room) and put them into the workshop’s spare room. Publicly, he said it would give them independence—“You can be your own family unit”—while remaining within the communal fold. In truth, he wanted to keep Marina at a distance. Don complained she was “too intense,” but what felt like overintensity to an adult felt to a child like that person was actually listening.
Although it was tempting to casually dismiss, as Don had, all her talk of a galactic eclipse, Freya preferred to understand the idea first and then be able to reject it definitively. A know your enemy sort of thing. Her online research showed that supermassive black holes did exist and that our spiral galaxy did indeed have one at its center: Sagittarius A*. It was invisible; dramatic photos from the Chandra satellite observatory showed where it wasn’t. An article on the NASA blog, written with, she assumed, preteen astronomers in mind, said the “SMBH” was “hungry” and “gobbling up all-comers” and that “beasts of its kind” had the power to “bend the space-time continuum.” NASA didn’t go as far as mentioning the end of days, but Freya wouldn’t have been totally surprised if they had. This was science trying to compete for the attention of the young imagination. But when she searched for “galactic eclipse,” that’s when the real nutters emerged: GaiaMind.org and ProphetsManual.com.
The communal desktop computer was in the attic and had a button next to it that allowed thirty minutes of access to the Internet at a time. For Albert, this meant that he took his access seriously, going up there with a list: solar flares (12 mins), galactic equator (10 mins), knife-vest (8 mins). Freya’s concern was not just that he believed in the same things as Marina but that her beliefs were gateway beliefs into the vast, unquenchable fruitiness of cyberspace.
All this had come together to convince Freya that she ought to remove Albert from the community for a time. That she also needed a break from Don was just a lucky symmetry. The simplest and cheapest solution was to go to the roundhouse, a twenty-minute walk away through the woods; not much of a holiday destination, but it would give him (them) a little breathing space. The roundhouse was made of cob, which was, put simply, mud. It had originally been built as an educational tool: a group of visiting undergraduates on a Sustainable Built Environment degree had assembled it over four days, spent two nights in it, then tried to take it apart again. It was a testament to the hardiness of cob housing that destroying it was more hassle than building it; the students gave up, and left the structure mostly intact. After that it became the community’s overflow sleeping area, though it had not been used in a long time.
It didn’t seem like a big thing to be asking Don: a fortnight’s time-out, for her and for Albert. A month maybe. After all, they both agreed that something needed to be done. Yet she found herself unable to broach the subject. All of which went some way to explain why, this morning, after a night of maddening sleeplessness, she had decided it would be a good idea to type him a letter about it. She got as far as Dear Don, then her daughter came in, and that was the point that Freya realized she was behaving like an unstable, sleepless person, not a wife communicating to her husband about a shared concern.
Freya let her poetry book drop to the duvet. Her reading glasses fell off her nose and hung round her neck. She turned to her husband, but he started speaking before she could.
“I told Patrick he needs to finally forget Janet,” Don said. “Don’t be the victim. Stop moping. Quit the demon weed. He was still puffing on that pipe—some potent concoction.” There was a tone in his voice, and an angle of his chin in delivery, that let her know he was saying something he’d already practiced in the well-attended auditorium of his mind. He spoke up toward the curtain rail. Sometimes he would premiere a statement with Freya, then over the next few days she would hear him say the same thing to other communards, perhaps editing a word or two, depending on the audience. A good strong utterance might see nine or ten outings before being archived. “You live in a community with a constant flow of young, attractive left-leaning men and women. Get stuck in, Pat, I said. Sixty’s not too old. All these tremendous women spending time here, intelligent, freethinking, body-confident. Get out there. It feels good to make other people feel good. Be active. Sweat out your problems. Let’s reanchor the fences. But I think he’s worried about dislocating his shoulder. It’s his mind dislocating that I’m worried about.”
“Don.”
He turned to look at her. He had the sheen of an uncollected sneeze in his mustache hair. He saw something in her expression and closed his book, let it drop to the duvet, and patted the back cover. “Yes,” he said.
“I’m worried about Albert. I don’t think it’s good for him to be spending so much time with Marina.”
“I’m with you, Frey. You know that.”
“I was thinking he and I could go to the roundhouse for a while. A fortnight, maybe. A kind of holiday.”
Don blinked twice. She felt the mattress shift as he sat more upright. “But the roundhouse is half-built.”
“I thought that could be part of it. I’ll show him how to finish the cobbing. It’ll be educational.”
He looked around the room. “When did you think of this?”
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while.”
“You’re saying you want to move out of the house, you and Albert?” The volume of his voice spiked.
“I thought we could talk about it.”
“All this because of Marina? Let’s not go crazy. Why doesn’t one of us just speak to Albert? Education, not prohibition, we could”—she saw the hairs on his neck ripple as his Adam’s apple bounced—“dig out the Personal Instrument?”
“You’re kidding.”
“I honestly think it might help.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Why are you being like this?”
They stayed in silence for a while. The Personal Instrument was a learning tool that, according to her husband, helped “encourage young people to make active choices between right and wrong.” He had built it himself. Every young person, shortly after their thirteenth birthday, got to wander the farm wearing the device. Don liked to say the experience was equivalent to the vision quest in Native American cultures. It was frightening to glimpse the gap between Don as he viewed himself, and the reality. She pulled back her side of the duvet and swung her legs out. He watched her get dressed and take a blanket out of the bottom drawer of the dresser. He listened to her go down the corridor and knock on their daughter’s door.
• • •
Patrick was standing in the middle of the geodesic dome in shapeless boxer shorts, holding a table leg with both hands, in a baseball stance.
It had been little comfort for him to realize that the growling animal noise, which had got so loud that he felt vibrations in the soft flesh along his jawline, was not the sound of a beast, awoken after thousands of years, come to wreak vengeance on this earth, but a Saab Avail, announcing Janet’s boyfriend’s exit, presumably with her purring in the passenger seat. After that, when he felt the second half of the lassi start working, he climbed up the wooden staircase into bed and, lying beneath two duvets and a blanket, started to feel nervous. Soon nervousness became twitching paranoia and, not long after that, twitching paranoia blossomed into a higher state of pure understanding: his fellow communards were not his friends; they were planning his removal.
It would be so easy. There were no locks on the doors. So Patrick got out of bed, took the loose leg off the table, and barred the double doors by feeding it through the two coat hooks. He tried to go to sleep again. It didn’t work. He listened to the ash tree outside groaning like a man slowly dying. He heard the distant sound of laughter that might well have come after a vicious but finely judged joke regarding his personal odor. He heard an unknown dog barking with a hoarse mindlessness, starved and bloodthirsty. He got out of bed again, took the table leg off the door, and stood with it in his hands like a bat, which is where he was now, waiting for them to burst in.
Listening to the noises outside his room, Patrick constructed a narrative: for years, Don had been looking for a way to get rid of him, had been telling everyone about his creepy, masturbatory, weirdo-in-the-dome obsession with Janet. Don had been saying that Patrick was a hermit, a recluse. He’d told them he was no longer useful, he was spent, a drain on resources, but by dint of Patrick’s financial liquidity, he was difficult to expel.
First, they had paid off his dealer, Karl Orland, then they had waited for Patrick’s stash to run dry. Second, they had made bets on how long it would be before his mental collapse. Third, at a secret brunch-time meeting, they had planned in exquisite detail his final hours, discussing every contingency: disposal, legal matters, a bonfire of his guitars, and through their commitment to putting Patrick in the ground there would bloom a new communal solidarity, as though he were the finest possible compost.
Fourth, this very afternoon, when Patrick had taken the car without asking, and hadn’t helped with the cloches, and hadn’t returned the car key, they all knew he was going to the bus bay outside Shepherd’s, so they made the decision to act. Later, when one of their spies came past and said, “Someone’s having a party,” she reported back that he was brewing a strong dose and would shortly enter a state of reduced motor function.
Albert—who was good at climbing—was in the ash tree above the geodesic dome, with his hands on a high branch and his feet on a lower one, stretching and bending his legs, making the tree creak loudly, knowing the fearful sleeplessness this would bestow.
Marina had brought out her four-octave Korg keyboard with the surround-sound speakers and set them up in a circle around the dome. With total disregard for electricity consumption, she was using “Set 665: Unnerving Sound Effects,” working “Fearful Wind” with one hand and with the other, “Laughter at Your Expense,” and occasionally “Growling Dog in Blood Lust.”
This was all in aid of getting Patrick into a state of terrified paralysis so that when Arlo, Marina, Freya, Don, and a number of masked, ambitious wwoofers who wanted to show their commitment to the community came into his room, chanting his name and wearing robes with deep hoods, to take him at last, Patrick would stay still, shaking in his bed and, given his family history, in addition to previous addictions, perhaps suffer a fatal embolism. If his heart held they would simply lower the rainbow-colored pillow onto his face, pin his arms and legs down, and continue chanting until his body stopped moving. Then they’d lay his arms across his chest in an X and in the morning, they would say: “So peaceful, he must have known it was his time.”
They would dispose of his body in the compost, and he would be replaced, for there were tens and tens of people who’d take his position, and they were younger and supple and spoke more than one language.
His only option was action. He could not stand still waiting for them. He would have to duck through the low double doors, step out of the porch and into the moonlight, swinging his blunt implement, smashing the keyboard first, which was something he’d been wanting to do anyway, then targeting Freya, who was more dangerous than her husband, then cracking Arlo’s skull like the top of an egg, on and on, one after the other, notches on the table leg, though even in Patrick’s wildest delusions, Kate was not involved.
Last of all would be Don. Patrick would drag his unconsciou
s body to the deep part of the river, where he would wait for him to wake up, then, as though absolving himself of every wrong, washing away every bitterness, skimming off his misery, Patrick would baptize Don, again and again, under many different names.
Breathing hard through his mouth, Patrick kicked out the double doors. As he stepped outside into moonlight, the cold landed the first punch, smacking him in the nose. He couldn’t see the keyboard. He couldn’t see the hooded figures. There was a bonfire smell. The market garden was still covered with a patchwork of tarps, rugs.
As he stepped along the slate path that led toward the yard, the cold ran up through his feet, his ankles, rattled past his knees, and settled in his stomach. He tried to be positive: in just his underwear, he would be that much more nimble while they, in their ungainly robes, would be like sacks of steak to tenderize. He thought of punching Don again, this time with the ring that was a present from Janet, and leaving a cattle brand on his temple. He looked back at the dome, checked the roof. Nothing. He looked up into the bare ash tree; it creaked of its own accord. But then, at last, there was laughter. A knowing, hollow laugh.
As he made his way across the yard, the sharp gravel made him wince. Keeping close to the south wall of the big house, he stayed out of the patches of moonlight. He was shivering. Mud clotted the thick hairs on his calves. As he walked down the stepped wood-chip path, he saw there were some people around a small fire at the bottom of the garden, which was not unusual for a Friday night.