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 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 open a can of lager. The woman like my mother says, ‘There developed among us an unexpected appetite for the anus. For the wrestle of probing muscle and sphinctered round, for the negotiation between these intimate forces.’
‘At all times of day and night.’ The boy has her rhythm now.
Hanna peers into my cup. ‘What the fuck is that? God.’ She takes a mouthful of beer and swills it round her mouth before swallowing. ‘Let’s get out of this shithole.’
She leads me back to the lawn. Someone is throwing books into the fire. I feel the need to comfort her. I put my arm through hers. ‘He probably thinks he’s being ironic.’
‘I can see why Michel wanted to come here,’ she says.
So can I. If he’s any sort of writer, he’ll be sat up in a tree somewhere with a view of it all, taking snaps, scribbling furious notes.
Hanna surveys the house, the grounds, the fires. She says, ‘You sink and you sink and you sink and one day you look in the mirror and there are creases around your eyes that weren’t there last year and you’ve done nothing, absolutely fuck-all that adds up to anything.’
‘Yes?’
Hanna makes a face. She is presenting herself to me, delivering the elevator pitch for ‘Hanna’. It’s not rehearsed, exactly – it’s not cynical – but she wants me to know she is more than just another counter-culture youth. She wants me to think well of her.