Free Wild Abandon by Joe Dunthorne Page A

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 away 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 keyboardwith 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