Joe Dunthorne - Wild Abandon

As he walked passed her this morning, he had heard her lecturing the wwoofers: “A frost this late will murder tomato transplants, aubergines, sweet peas, and put onions, broccoli, and kale on suicide watch …” Cloches, blankets, unclaimed jackets, rugs, and tarpaulins were piled up in the yard, ready to insulate the vegetables. He watched her hot breath clouding as she sent the young people to work.

It was helpful then to have the distraction of teaching Albert and Isaac an important lesson about advertising — that is, until Don had stepped in to flex his ideology, at which point Patrick had come up to the flat roof to cool off. That was some hours ago. His hands were now so cold that he couldn’t close them properly.

He didn’t hear Don, presently, climbing out of the window. Instead he felt a hand on his shoulder as Don lowered himself down and sat next to him on the edge of the bitumen roof.

“Wondered where you’d gone. I’m really sorry if I embarrassed you earlier, Pat — I didn’t mean to, if I did — but I just think sometimes it’s better for the children to be innocent of that stuff.”

Patrick stared out at the farm. He didn’t want Don to see his unbloodshot eyes. It was vital not to give him the satisfaction. So, in mimic of his old self, Patrick got out his pipe, a brass one-hitter, and turned his body away from Don. Patrick still carried all the paraphernalia with him. With his half-numb hands, he managed to open a small plastic bag that was now filled with cherry tobacco. He tore off a bit and tamped it down into the cone.

“I noticed that one of those things was a car advert,” Don said. “An executive Saab. The same car as the one that Janet’s new fella drives.” Don made an elaborate hmmm sound, then put his hand on Patrick’s thigh and tried a little warmly mocking laugh but didn’t quite nail the warm part. Everyone in the community knew when Janet’s boyfriend came up the drive because his car, as Don had observed, sounded like the MGM lion. The geodesic dome was right beside the lane and the engine noise, as it passed, vibrated Patrick’s bookcase.

“Yes,” Patrick said, staring straight ahead. “It’s the same car.”

“It Has Been Noted,” Don said in his Big Brother voice, making his eyes go wide. “So many other women here, Pat. I’ll say it again: take a break from the grass. Rediscover that crazy libido. Unleash some famous PK charm.”

“It’s not famous,” Patrick said, then took a deep breath, pushing his shoulders back to open his lungs.

“Some of these wwoofers coming through,” Don said, pointing down toward a volunteer in three-quarter-length jeans who was selecting unconventionally shaped cucumbers. “Woof.”

“You’re off the mark.”

“Still hung up on Janet after how long? If you stopped smoking so much green, you’d realize.”

To Patrick, there were few things more galling than Don being right about a thing.

“Not so.”

“Well, you should be hung up on her, Pat. She’s tremendous.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Isn’t there a saying about love not knowing what time it is, or some such?”

Patrick patted his chest for the shape of a lighter in his shirt pocket. He hooked it out with his forefinger. Shielding the pipe with one hand, he lit it and sucked the whole lot through in one, in the style of a hit, his lungs burning.

“I get the feeling it’s not easy for you to see Janet with someone like that,” Don said. “Do you see a little of your old self in him?”

Patrick’s chest pulsed — he held on for a few seconds longer — then let the smoke out in a megaphone shape, blowing it away from Don.

“I guess it’s easier to talk about an advert for her boyfriend’s car than it is to talk about her.”

“I’m going to go now,” Patrick said, and he tapped the pipe on the edge of the roof, pocketed it, then stood up, wavering slightly with the head rush. He was easily high enough above the patio, if he were to fall, to crack open his nearly hairless skull. Behind them, the sound of a car over-revving as it pulled into the yard.

Don reached up and held Pat’s hand.

“Got you.”

After her canteen lunch with Geraint, who once again showed off the charisma of his appetite, they both went to sociology class. Somehow their tutor had discovered that Kate was from an unusual upbringing. This was not good news. They were reading Emile Durkheim, who viewed society as a collective consciousness. Durkheim said that collectively agreed morality was maintained by people performing deviant or unconventional acts, and that without people testing the boundaries of behavior, society would collapse, and how could there be a nuclear family without the opposite, and did Kate have anything she’d like to add?

“I think people like to know that somewhere, someone is testing out a different way of living,” Kate said, “so they don’t have to.”

“Any examples from your own home life?”

She felt Geraint’s gaze on the back of her neck.

When she went to the bike shed after class, it was raining hard. Geraint pulled up in his white Fiat Punto with red four-point seat belts. He’d had it cleaned. The wet poured off the peak of her anorak. He got out of the car and, with rain darkening the shoulders of his powder-blue MILK IS DELICIOUS T-shirt, he said: “I’m giving you a lift home.”

He helped her take the front wheel off her bike. Putting the seats down, he did not say a word as a slash of chain grease marked one of the headrests as they wedged the bike in. He was drenched by the time they sat back in the car. He pulled a CD wallet out of the glove box and handed it to her.

They drove off and she looked through his music collection, judging him, but then feeling bad for judging him — blaming her parents for making her judgmental — and then putting Sean Paul on. Geraint did a fairly lame gangster’s click with his fingers and was possibly adorable. A line of inflamed pores ran round his neck like a choker. His face was shiny from the wet. He drove, she felt, in a wealthy way, with his hands sitting softly on the part-leather thick-stemmed steering wheel — hands not gripping but resting flat, except for the tops of his fingers, which were bent, as you might rest your hands on a stranger’s shoulders during an organized cha-cha.

“What was that question about, in sociology?”

There was no point hiding it anymore. If she was going to tell him, she might as well be bold: “I grew up in a commune. I never went to school.”

She was hoping for a bigger reaction; he somehow kept the car on the road.

No one in the community ever used the word commune ; they used the word community . The word commune had a special and dangerous power, and with great power came great responsibility. Geraint straightened up in his seat and tried to be nonchalant. They passed Gower’s tiny airport as a biplane took off. The roadside sheep looked gray.

“I drove to a free party once in a commune in Brecon,” he said. “ Proper mental. A bloke set himself on fire. Bet you get some right nutters?”

As he drove, she described Blaen-y-Llyn with the broad, lazy strokes she had been raised to avoid — the clichés that were expected from local journalists (or, at least, the ones who did their research online): yes , synthetic drugs; yes , boundary-testing sex; yes , chanting and nudity and nameless individuals waking in their vegetable garden. The latter had once actually happened, but Kate told the story as if most days they found gentlemen visitors asleep in a cloche. It felt good, watching Geraint’s increasing alertness as she told him these things. By the time she was done, he was nailing it, breaking the speed limit through Gowerton.