Wild Abandon A Novel by Joe Dunthorne

Author:Joe Dunthorne
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 9781400066841
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

NEWS FLASH: BLAEN-Y-LLYN GOING OFF-GRID! Momentous Day Will Be Tinged With Sadness If All-Important Member Of Community Not Around To Enjoy Momentous Day, Sources Close To The Community Reveal.

FYI—Off-grid day is being timed to coincide with F and Alb’s return from holiday, next week. Twice the celebration!

Also, also, Albert’s not washed since you left. Half expect to see centipedes, woodlice etc when he takes off his boots!

She lay awake, being alternately annoyed with, then sorry for, her father, and unable to reconcile the ecstatic tone of his texts with the time on her phone’s clock: 3:12 a.m. Was it possible that he did not know the messages were instant? Did he think they would arrive in the morning, like the mail?

After being awake for a while, she became conscious of a high-pitched whine in the house. It took some time to realize what it was.

She went downstairs in her pajamas. Her T-shirt, a baggy yellow vintage one, a hand-me-down from Janet, said: “Life Begins at Forty.” The silky pajama bottoms were Liz’s.

Mervyn was again watching News 24 with real-time subtitles. She opened the door and waved. He waved back, then made space for her on the sofa. The leather exhaled as she sat down and brought her legs up underneath her. He put down the remote on the coffee table.

“You okay?” he said, turning toward her. “Couldn’t sleep?”

She nodded. He made his face for supportive-but-not-intrusive.

“We’d best keep quiet,” he whispered, then pointed to the ceiling, where his wife was asleep.

“Can’t stop thinking about my exams,” she said, which was half-true. Two images had stayed with her from her open house day at Cambridge: a professor in full subfusc billowing through a Japanese garden and a boy with one overdeveloped bicep punting along the canal.

“I’m sure you’ll do brilliantly,” Mervyn said.

They sat and watched the mute news with the colored subtitles that came up one word at a time. He leaned toward Kate, and spoke quietly: “The subtitles are written live by stenographers—like the people who record what’s said in court. Fantastically skilled. They work in fifteen-minute bursts because it’s so intense. Between 4 and 5 a.m., at the end of their shift, they make more mistakes, I’ve noticed. My favorite: ‘Russia backs away from Gran’s missile deal.’ ”

He laughed with no sound and she smiled.

More interesting to Kate than stenography was the question of what dark dreams kept a grown man with work in the morning awake in a suburban home watching rolling news. He came out like the carpet slugs, silent and lost, trawling the lounge by night. She cultivated thoughts like this—clues about the hollow core of link-detached living—and had more than once watched Mervyn and Liz in the raised pool at the end of the garden and thought that their heads looked severed, bobbing back and forth.

Mervyn was wearing a navy fleece dressing gown on top of his gray cotton pajamas and he sat with his legs wide apart, which she always thought of as a macho way to sit.

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