Wild Abandon (3 page)

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
mmm
ing 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.

Next morning, with his eyes not visibly open, he went to the airing cupboard beneath the staircase where he dried his soggy, mellow homegrown and discovered there wasn’t any. That was okay because he was expecting a visit from Karl Orland that lunchtime. Karl was a singer-songwriter and steel-guitar man who funded his lifestyle by selling bags of bush weed. But Karl Orland didn’t turn up. Patrick had hoped one of the wwoofers or day volunteers would have an eighth he could buy. He went round, asking, making sure only to approach people in enclosed, private spaces because he didn’t want Don to see him “talking to new people” and think it was the result of one of his improving suggestions. But the whole farm was dry; there wasn’t even any resin.

That night, Patrick had cleared out the carved wooden smoking box and found enough leftovers for a spliff. The next morning he smoked the dog-ends in his CN Tower–replica stand-up ashtray. That night he scraped out the cone of his ice bong and chewed on the tarry gak. Then there was nothing left.
Fine
, he thought,
I’ll stop smoking for a few days. Either that or Karl will come
.

For two days he had done well, enjoying renewed energy, hand-eye coordination, and inklings of short-term memory. He continued to steer clear of Don, who, he feared, would sense his straightness and come and give him a big encouraging hug.

On the morning of the third day, strip lights had batted on in Patrick’s mind’s attic. Junked memories. Cardboard boxes, one labeled
my version of events
and another,
knowledge to pass on
. He decided that, for too long, Don had made him feel that he had nothing of value to teach the children. So he made lesson plans. “Introduction to the Political Spectrum.” “Ideas of Class in Modern Britain.” “The Invention of the Teenager.” “Are Ads Bad?”

On the morning of the fourth day, he had woken up angry. He had not been angry in years. He found young people—by which he meant wwoofers, people in their twenties—awful.

On the morning of the fifth day, there emerged—the worst of all his symptoms—the first gnawings of sexual desire. He had walked out of the dome in his green fleece and wellies and, as he passed the seedbeds, saw Janet, wearing a wartime work shirt and fingerless gloves, her hair pinned with chopsticks, surrounded by a group of keen-looking young volunteers. She had on one of her own necklaces.

Janet was one of the community’s founding members and ran a successful mail-order business—Accessories to Murder—making and selling one-off pieces of proto-Gothic recycled jewelry: earrings of diary keys, necklaces made from shattered windshield glass, antique lockets that opened onto photos of keyhole surgery in the small intestine. Her work sold internationally. Fashion magazines loved that she spent
half of each year in a commune and—as Patrick saw whenever he periodically looked her up online—
Elle
magazine wrote: “From horticulture to haute couture, both her lifestyles are controlled by the seasons.” In more than one interview, she had said that the community “kept her sane.” Every now and then a groupie would visit, just to spend a few days cleaning the toolshed under her modish command. For the past decade, she had been spending April through September at the community and October to March in Bristol, where her studio was. Half her earnings, for the half of the year she wasn’t in Bristol, came back to the community. Don had given Patrick a copy of
The Waste Land
with the first few lines highlighted, since every April she cruelly swept back in, creative and healthy, with her perfect work-life balance, handing out gifts of last season’s stock. This last time she had returned with a boyfriend. After years of failed relationships with handy, politically switched-on men, there was Stephan, who lived in Clifton and represented—and was proud to represent—the victory of market forces. This was Patrick’s pet theory, anyway. He hated himself for needing a pet theory. The six months Janet spent away each year were never quite enough time to forget her. Even with the dampened libido that his bong helped maintain, he still found green shoots of sexual desire each springtime. It didn’t help that she made him presents: this year, a signet ring with a cattle brand instead of a family crest.