Free Wolves by Simon Ings Page A

Fifty feet away, a pampas grass has been set on fire. It burns with a roiling, liquid flame. The air stinks of petrol. There’s a dip in the land behind the house. Behind it, trees make a dense black screen – a false horizon. There’s a sound system in the dip; its noise seems to be emanating from within the earth. Its industrial beats melt to form something ponderous and wet – a faltering heart.
    In the middle of the lawn, a boy with a shaved head is pouring petrol onto a pile of furniture and floorboards scavenged from the house. There are upholstered chairs there. Leather trunks. Clothes. A child’s bed. The boy takes a swig of petrol from the can, flicks a lighter in front of his face and blows fire. A cheer goes up and the heap explodes. The boy falls back, rubbing his face. The bonfire catches in stages, a staggered spectacle, the turning on of civic illuminations. Somewhere deep in the pile, batteries pop. A pair of silk knickers rises on the expanding air and catches fire.
    Hanna takes my arm and squeezes. I turn to her, thinking she must be enjoying this, but her expression is carefully blank. Coming here was Michel’s idea, not hers. Michel, grinning, waves his phone in the air, saluting us, and wanders off, snapping pictures as he goes. Then Hanna moves away and I am left alone, wondering why the hell they brought me here. What’s here for me? A bunch of kids on heat, demonstrating their lack of materialism by destroying someone else’s stuff. It is an unpleasant reminder that the human world falls apart, not through catastrophe, but from mounting internal failure. I wonder where the house’s owners are.
    Partygoers gather round the flames, shouting. They seem determined to incite my paranoia. I step away from the noise, but my gaze is held by the shapes in the flames – turned wood and latticework – and metal-salt colours spilling from the curtains jumbled on top of the pyre. I’d lay money not one kid here has a clue how to turn wood, or make a chair, or knit a blanket for a child. They still live in a world of affordable plenty. Stuff, for them, is a utility, on tap. They rate this evening a misdemeanour, like flooding a public bathroom. Everything can be replaced. They believe this. Soon they will wake to discover that, blinded by fictitious capital, they have been torching what few riches were left.
    The world ends, not with flood or plague or famine, but with a man torching his own house.
    A boy tries to sell me a can of lager from a barrow parked under a tree. Rebellion against the market system can only be taken so far.
    The kitchen has been left more or less intact. There has even been some attempt at catering. There are plates piled on every surface. By the sink there are plastic washbowls full of punch, black under the weak fluorescent light. It’s crowded, as kitchens always are. Near the door, surrounded by girls who crowd her round like acolytes, I see a woman in late middle age. She’s standing with her back to me. Her hair is grey and shaved so short I can see her skull.
    ‘Mind,’ comes a voice beside me.
    I cannot move – neither do I want to.
    ‘Fucking mind .’ Someone opens a fridge door into my foot. I move aside, lose sight of the woman a second, and push through the crush only to find that she is gone.
    I look around for something, anything, to drink. There’s a half-full bottle of vodka on the windowsill. I need something to steady myself. I need room to think. She looked like Mum. She looked exactly like Mum, the last time I saw her alive. It cannot be her – but what if it is? Her being here would solve all mysteries – all, barring the mystery of how she could possibly still be living.
    In the hall the stairs are jammed with girls waiting miserably for their turn on the one working toilet. ‘I’m off to shit in the garden,’ says one, the fattest of them, barrelling me into the wall as she goes. ‘Mind,’ she says.
    ‘Mind yourself, you fat fuck.’
    She