Free We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek Page A

the rest. But the mind was democratic, a synthesiser. It connected. He remembered, for instance, that Sophie had watched how he looked at Lucy’s cleavage, sharp andyoung in the deep bare scoop at the front of her small dress. That everyone, and not only Lucy, had heard him tell her that she looked sexy. That he’d called Joe Betchcott ‘a fucking fascist wanker’ long before the war question had occurred, when he only had one drink in him. The hardest thing was that he hadn’t been drunk at any time. He needed to drink now, to quell the inertia of the organising mind. He needed to be controlled. He needed to put it out of himself that his answer to the war question had anything to do with him coming into the dining room and seeing the pounds of bright cutlery there, the multiple forks, and him picking up one and putting it down and remarking to Cunnery about the surprising lack of silver snail tongs in a way that sounded sarcastic, envious and sly. Could he fairly malign the only child Cunnery for putting his deceased parents’ silver out for dinner guests? Was it that, as an avowed socialist, he was supposed to have sold the silver and donated the proceeds to the struggle? Perhaps. Yet as long as Cunnery had the tableware, Kellas would have taken greater offence if the places had been set with pressed steel knives and forks. Kellas’s soul hadn’t been pinched in the same way at other feasts. It had been a kind of lavish show when Rab Balgillo held his wedding reception at his father-in-law’s farm in Orkney a few years back, and this had seemed no worse than generous. Balgillo had spent, and his family had spent, and the bride’s family had spent; everyone had spent, including Kellas, and the whole long weekend in Orkney had been nothing but joy. The M’Gurgans were profoundly in debt at the time, and Kellas had been earning well as a freelance. It had taken him days of persuasion to get Pat and Sophie to agree to take his money to cover their expenses on the trip and then to promise that they would never try to pay him back, or mention it again. The feast days had flowed out to gather them; Kellas and Katerina had flown from Prague to Edinburgh, hired a car and driven to Duncairn to stay with Kellas’s parents. Pat and Sophie had joined them and they’d driven up to Thurso together and taken the ferry to Stromness from there.
    It’d been midsummer in the north and the sun scarcely set. They’d spent their nights suffused in red and gold. Although Katerina was by some way the most beautiful person at the wedding, this was not meaningful in the evening light; in the radiance all human shapes and skins seemed to realise a dearly-held intention implicit in their being. Pat, Sophie, Kellas, Katerina, Rab, his bride Leslie and the artist Hephzibah Cooper lay in the long grass by the standing stones, listening to the insects, tickling each other with sedge and talking nonsense about the universe and the islands. When the wind blew it was warm and carried the smell of peat and salt water. Kellas spent a long time gazing at the thin gold chain on the back of Katerina’s neck while Hephzibah talked about how the stones went three yards underground, and somebody asked her how she knew, and she said Rab had told her, and Rab denied it. The voices and laughter came to Kellas through the waving seed heads and he listened, waiting for the next dart of wind to move Katerina’s hair and for her to put it back in place.
    The party was held in and around a barn, decorated with the farmer father-in-law’s real hay and with the father-in-law’s ponies saddled and haltered for the guests to ride. The guests had been instructed to dress Western. Kellas and Katerina wore jeans and checked shirts, with cowboy hats and sheriff’s stars from a toy shop in Kirkwall. Sophie had found hand-stitched boots, an embroidered shirt, a bootlace tie and a real Stetson; Pat glowered as Pancho Villa, with bandoliers and a sombrero and a