Free Wolves by Simon Ings Page B

hesitates and turns, squeezing her fists, the flesh squishing like dough, but the urgency in her bowels overcomes her annoyance with me. Someone on the stairs calls me a cunt. This, from people like this, I can live with. I take the stairs at speed. Hands and feet whip out of the way of my feet like fish darting for the shelter of rocks. ‘What’s your problem?’
    My problem is I’ve lost my mum.
    The upstairs rooms are empty. Not unoccupied. Empty. Everything has been dragged out of them, even the carpets.
    ‘Mum?’
    I move from room to room.
    ‘Sara?’
    It cannot possibly be her. The world cannot possibly knit itself over so well. There are no miracles. ‘Mum!’
    I take a breath, or try to. I feel as though I have been kicked. Air rattles in, as eventually it must, clearing my head. The fit – what else would you call it? – it passes.
    On the stairs, Hanna has joined the queue for the toilet. It’s much shorter now. ‘Everyone’s gone to piss in the garden.’
    ‘I’m surprised they don’t just use the rooms.’
    ‘Christ.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I’m sorry, Conrad.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘This.’ She glances round her, wincing, as if afraid of what new thing she might see. ‘It’s horrible.’
    The front door glass is bashed in. A hand reaches through and fiddles with the lock. The door opens and a boy enters, trailing a guitar. He wanders into a room and strikes up a folk song. Come the end times, we shall have no chairs, no beds, no blankets for our children. We shall have folk-singers, and we shall kill them with rocks and cook thin strips of their flesh over fires conjured from their smashed guitars.
    Hanna and I stand shivering in the gust from the open door. (The weather is definitely turning.) Horrible, the paint-spattered carpet. Horrible, the inept graffiti on the walls, and the shattered light-shade over the door, and the fragments of coloured glass from the panel the boy has idly smashed. Yes, horrible. Yet these judgements don’t just spring up from nowhere. ‘The thing you have to bear in mind, Hanna, is that everything’s still more or less in favour of being sensitive and civilised. And this stuff can turn on a penny.’
    Hanna’s not interested in my cleverness. Probably she gets enough of this sort of thing from Michel. ‘They’ve ruined it,’ she says, a brave bourgeois, standing up for value.
    I go and swing the front door shut. Squares of coloured glass crunch beneath my feet. I pull a blue square free of its twisted leading. ‘Close your eyes.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Close them.’ I stand beside her, and raise the jagged colour to her face. ‘Okay.’
    Hanna stares through the glass at the blue-tinted hall, wide-eyed, a child. ‘Oh,’ she says. She smiles. Nothing is horrible any more. Everything is new.
    This is a trick I have learned how to pull. This is my work. With tricks of mathematics and optics, we augment reality, smothering surfaces in warm, spicy notes of brand belonging.
    I turn, distracted by a voice.
    ‘I lived free among free women.’
    That woman even sounds like my mother. She’s back in the kitchen again. How the hell did she do that?
    ‘There were no inhibitions,’ says a boy, egging her on.
    ‘None, sonny, none.’ She is not my mother. She does suggest, with uncanny physical precision, what my mother might have become. She says, ‘We lived a life of perfect freedom together.’
    The kitchen is less busy now. I go over to the sink, but the vodka has disappeared. I rinse out a cup and dip it into a washbowl. The punch is as thick as blood. There are slices of orange floating in it.
    The boy says, ‘What was it like? How did it feel? Describe your freedom.’
    ‘Licky.’
    ‘You were licked?’
    ‘I lived among tongues. Among women’s unfettered tongues, singing, crying, tasting, supping. Tongues loosed in the mouth, free to probe and explore the soft mouthy interiors of the self, to sense and express.’
    Hanna comes and stands beside me. She snaps