Wild Abandon Read Online Free Page B

singer-songwriter and steel-guitar man who funded his lifestyle by selling bags of bush weed. But Karl Orland didn’t turn up. Patrick had hoped one of the wwoofers or day volunteers would have an eighth he could buy. He went round, asking, making sure only to approach people in enclosed, private spaces because he didn’t want Don to see him “talking to new people” and think it was the result of one of his improving suggestions. But the whole farm was dry; there wasn’t even any resin.
    That night, Patrick had cleared out the carved wooden smoking box and found enough leftovers for a spliff. The next morning he smoked the dog-ends in his CN Tower–replica stand-up ashtray. That night he scraped out the cone of his ice bong and chewed on the tarry gak. Then there was nothing left.
Fine
, he thought,
I’ll stop smoking for a few days. Either that or Karl will come
.
    For two days he had done well, enjoying renewed energy, hand-eye coordination, and inklings of short-term memory. He continued to steer clear of Don, who, he feared, would sense his straightness and come and give him a big encouraging hug.
    On the morning of the third day, strip lights had batted on in Patrick’s mind’s attic. Junked memories. Cardboard boxes, one labeled
my version of events
and another,
knowledge to pass on
. He decided that, for too long, Don had made him feel that he had nothing of value to teach the children. So he made lesson plans. “Introduction to the Political Spectrum.” “Ideas of Class in Modern Britain.” “The Invention of the Teenager.” “Are Ads Bad?”
    On the morning of the fourth day, he had woken up angry. He had not been angry in years. He found young people—by which he meant wwoofers, people in their twenties—awful.
    On the morning of the fifth day, there emerged—the worst of all his symptoms—the first gnawings of sexual desire. He had walked out of the dome in his green fleece and wellies and, as he passed the seedbeds, saw Janet, wearing a wartime work shirt and fingerless gloves, her hair pinned with chopsticks, surrounded by a group of keen-looking young volunteers. She had on one of her own necklaces.
    Janet was one of the community’s founding members and ran a successful mail-order business—Accessories to Murder—making and selling one-off pieces of proto-Gothic recycled jewelry: earrings of diary keys, necklaces made from shattered windshield glass, antique lockets that opened onto photos of keyhole surgery in the small intestine. Her work sold internationally. Fashion magazines loved that she spenthalf of each year in a commune and—as Patrick saw whenever he periodically looked her up online—
Elle
magazine wrote: “From horticulture to haute couture, both her lifestyles are controlled by the seasons.” In more than one interview, she had said that the community “kept her sane.” Every now and then a groupie would visit, just to spend a few days cleaning the toolshed under her modish command. For the past decade, she had been spending April through September at the community and October to March in Bristol, where her studio was. Half her earnings, for the half of the year she wasn’t in Bristol, came back to the community. Don had given Patrick a copy of
The Waste Land
with the first few lines highlighted, since every April she cruelly swept back in, creative and healthy, with her perfect work-life balance, handing out gifts of last season’s stock. This last time she had returned with a boyfriend. After years of failed relationships with handy, politically switched-on men, there was Stephan, who lived in Clifton and represented—and was proud to represent—the victory of market forces. This was Patrick’s pet theory, anyway. He hated himself for needing a pet theory. The six months Janet spent away each year were never quite enough time to forget her. Even with the dampened libido that his bong helped maintain, he still found green shoots of sexual desire each springtime.