Joe Dunthorne - Wild Abandon

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.