They removed their boots outside the lodge; Pippa shrinking back as she heard the sound of singing. He, too, felt nervous at the thought of all that matey bonhomie, though Penny was already bounding in. He followed more reluctantly with Pippa; found the war spirit once again in evidence: tea being brewed; wet clothes drying by the fire; the troops belting out a rousing tune to keep up their morale. He hovered by the wood pile, self-conscious with so many eyes turned in his direction, but attracted by the cosy fug, the smell of fragrant wood-smoke and hot toast. This large and sturdy tepee provided a genuine shelter from the storm, and although the poles were creaking and the canvas straining like a ship under sail, it was a doughty ship which wouldn’t sink or founder.
He knew he must join the circle, not stay skulking at the back. He’d been told often enough by Penny and Corinna that circles were not only companionable, but sacred – a universal symbol of wholeness and perfection, infinity, eternity (and also represented feminine power: unbounded, oceanic, and opposed to ‘straight’ masculine power, whatever that might be). Even living in a tepee was apparently healing in itself, not only through the potency of its circular shape, but because it allowed direct contact with restorative Mother Earth. He shuffled forward, Pippa trying to hide behind his back. Claire smiled at him encouragingly, beckoning him over with her eyes. He hesitated. Pippa would object to being dragged so close to Rick. She was still extraordinarily hostile to the boy, and though he was baffled by her attitude, this was hardly the time to challenge it. It was enough that they got through the night without any further crises.
He steered her firmly by the elbow, and squeezed between Dylan and Anita, judging them relatively innocuous, and certainly preferable to Megan and her vile son Tim, who had arrived the day after the pow-wow in a clapped-out Daimler hearse. Megan had brought her elder sister Pat, who was said to be suffering from a malignant tumour on her thigh, though her strapping build and ruddy cheeks made her look anything but ill. Tim was there on sufferance, since there was no one to look after him at home – a fractious, unattractive child, who, although he was almost four (and thus not far off school-age), was still being breast-fed by his doting New Age mother. Even now, he was pushing up her jumper to grab a floppy breast, cramming it into his mouth and sucking with a violent greed. Daniel switched his gaze to the fire. He knew that women such as Megan considered breastfeeding a natural healthy function which could be performed just as well in public as in private. But personally he found it an embarrassment. It also presented him with a dilemma: if he viewed the proceedings with no hint of reserve, he would feel like a voyeur; if, on the other hand, he averted his eyes, he would doubtless be thought squeamish or reactionary.
He was relieved when Corinna passed him tea and toast: now he could concentrate on his own ingestion, rather than on Tim’s. The toast was charred to a crisp and tooth-breakingly hard. But then cooking on the tepee fire was a hit and miss affair. Only yesterday Happy had ruined a bean and barley stew, which finally emerged as a manure-coloured sludge stiffening on their plates. Still, it would be churlish to complain when he had been rescued from the deluge, warmed from within by scalding nettle tea, sustained by dry black toast.
The wind’s insistent howling sounded much more muted now, and apart from the odd drip or plop, the rainstorm kept at bay. It was also a relief to be sitting in the light, rather than lying in the endless dark, as he had done the last three nights. A pair of stalwart hurricane lamps cast a soft glow through the lodge, and the fire itself helped dissipate the black void of the night. Even the singing had mercifully petered out, while Happy and Corinna distributed not just sustenance, but relatively dry clothes for those like Rick and Anita who were soaked to the skin, or Andrew, who looked feverish and could speak only in a scratchy grunt. Daniel’s eyes kept returning to JB, who was sitting opposite the door, with a rapturous Claire one side of him and a sleepy Pat the other. Wasn’t it time he worked a few more miracles – cured Andrew’s sore throat, for a start, or better still, followed Christ’s example and calmed the raging storm? But his eyes were closed, his expression quite inscrutable, as if he had removed himself in all but bodily presence from the crush of damp humanity around him.
‘Okay?’ Daniel whispered to Pippa who had abandoned her own slice of toast; taken only a half-hearted sip of tea.
Her nod was equally half-hearted. But then he could hardly expect her to be bouncing with enthusiasm about this eccentric get-together in the middle of the night, cooped up with a bunch of offbeat people she would never have chosen as companions in a thousand years. He felt much the same himself about the company, but made an effort to be sociable, more for Penny’s sake than anything. He turned to Anita with some comment on the storm; froze in horror as he saw the glass of golden liquor in her hand. He knew he should be used to it by now, but it never failed to revolt him – the fact that she and Andrew drank their own pee. She endorsed the practice with the name of urinotherapy, claiming that lamas and yogis had been doing it for centuries, which explained their radiant health. He watched her take a generous swig and swallow it with relish; quickly looked away, only to catch sight of Penny feeding Corinna with a flapjack, breaking it into morsels and popping each into her mouth with lingering sensuality. He snapped his own burnt toast between his fingers, crumbled it to dust.
Anita put her glass down, smiled at him encouragingly. ‘I hear you’re seriously considering living this way permanently?’
‘What?’ he said, aghast.
‘Penny was talking to me about it just last night. You see, I used to live in a tepee village – a small one down in Devon. In fact, that’s where I met Andrew. It was a wonderful experience! We were absolutely committed to the ideal of community, so we shared everything we had – food, clothes, vehicles – the lot. And there was no division of labour. We took turns at all the chores, whether it was changing dirty nappies, or digging the latrines, or carving tepee poles, or making bread and yoghurt. That broke down the usual barriers between men and women, and parents and non-parents, and drew us all much closer. I mean, Andrew knew nothing about kids. He was an only child, and didn’t even have friends with children, so it was enormously enriching for him to share in the child-care and feed other people’s babies.’
Daniel looked nervously at Tim again. ‘Enormously enriching’ was not the phrase he’d use for sharing in this particular child’s care. Tim was swilling like a pig at trough; his mouth clamped to Megan’s right nipple, while his fist was latched to her left breast, as if he were staking his claim to a second course.
‘And we shared our feelings, too,’ said Anita, tugging down her borrowed scarlet sweater, which was too short in the body and revealed a gap of naked flesh. ‘We had meetings twice a day, when we all opened up and thrashed out any problems, whether it was jealousy, or anger, or maybe someone fancying someone else, or resenting them, or …’
‘Oh yes,’ croaked Andrew, leaning over to join in the conversation. ‘I got to understand women terrifically well. I mean, once you’ve discussed PMT or painful periods, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what it’s like to have a female body.’
‘And another thing,’ Anita pointed out, ‘is that you relearn all the skills you’ve lost. When people lived more naturally and simply, every member of society could build a shelter, or weave a blanket, or make music, or heal the sick. But we’ve now handed over those roles to so-called “experts”, and impoverished ourselves in the process. But in a commune, you can reclaim your skills, especially if you’re living outside, in tune with nature.’
Daniel sipped his tea. He had no wish to weave a blanket, build a shelter, or learn to play a drum, and he felt totally incapable of healing anyone, but he feared Penny might be all too keen on reclaiming her lost skills. And in theory he could sympathize. The notion was actually quite a sound one, and he had to admit to a sneaking admiration for Anita and Andrew’s ideals – urinology apart. He had heard them talking two days ago about cooperatives and permaculture, and had fe
lt selfish in comparison: a small-minded materialist, more concerned with feathering his own nest. And although he shied away from the idea of sharing feelings and/ or child-care, it couldn’t be denied that he might be far less daunted by raw emotion and helpless screaming infants if he’d had more practice in handling both. Yet he doubted if he could change now – he was probably too set in his ways. What he feared was Penny changing – as she’d done already, alarmingly. They seemed set on a collision course: she embracing the community ideal, while he longed to have her to himself in the sort of bourgeois marriage abhorred by New Age thinkers.
‘Listen, everybody,’ Claire pronounced, breaking into his thoughts and interrupting the general aimless chatter. ‘I think we ought to sing one of Robin’s chants. They’re just the thing for a time like this, because they’ll help us to relax. Remember what he said about getting rid of tension by opening up the voice?’
Rick made a face, but the others agreed with alacrity, except for Pippa and JB (still locked away in their mute and private worlds) and Pat, who seemed to be in pain. Daniel had noticed her grimace as she accidentally touched her thigh, then bite her lip, as if trying to restrain her tears. If she did genuinely have cancer, this primitive lifestyle could be really dangerous. Surely she would be better off in hospital than lying sleepless in a tepee with a storm rampaging outside, and forced to endure a raucous singsong on top of everything else.
‘Let’s have “We Are The Power”,’ suggested Happy, who was wearing a long nightshirt beneath a shaggy afghan coat (both garments mud-adorned). ‘To empower us through the night.’
‘Great! I’ll be the drum,’ joked Anita, seizing two spoons and banging with them rhythmically on Daniel’s enamel mug.
He winced. The night of the pow-wow, he’d been able to let go – had loosened up to an incredible extent, in fact – but he attributed that to alcohol. He could hardly get high on nettle tea (or pee). But he was aware of Penny smiling at him eagerly from the other side of the circle, urging him to join in. He mouthed the words at first, feeling inhibited and foolish in the face of Pippa’s silent disapproval.
‘We are the power in everyoneWe are the dance of the moon and the sun
We are the hope that will never hide
We are the turning of the tide.’
Tim stopped his suckling, as if affronted by the noise, and gave one last vicious pull before abandoning his mother’s sagging breast. Then, continuing his baby act, he crawled into the centre of the circle and began rolling on the ground, milk drooling from his mouth. As he cast around for plaudits from his audience, he fastened on Daniel as his next source of diversion, and, without any warning, hurtled across and threw himself into his lap. Daniel went rigid with embarrassment. Megan was looking at him fondly, evidently expecting him to play father to her adorable little son. The shared child-care had been unexpectedly foisted on him. He tried to make his arms more welcoming, without betraying the distaste he felt. Tim was butting him with his bullet-head, dribbling into his groin, and he was so unnerved by his new role that he went wrong in the singing; his baritone booming up the scale while everyone else went down.
‘We are the hope that will never hide …’
He longed to hide himself – better still to vanish altogether. He envied JB’s knack of shutting himself off, as if the drumming rain, the rousing chant and Anita’s jangling spoons were all happening on another distant plane. Tim began to scream, not in pain or misery, but emitting howls of sheer animal vitality, as if invigorated by the breast-milk. Daniel stole a glance at Megan (who was wiping her nipple with what looked like a paint-rag); imagined himself for one brief but startling moment suckling from that breast, instead of Tim. In his state of bleak exhaustion, he was attracted to the idea of plugging into an instant supply of nourishment and solace. And how fantastic to be able to sleep somewhere quiet and comfortable: even here in the lodge would do, if only the noise would stop. He wished he dared suggest that they all stretch out and shut up. There was room enough for everyone to lie down, a fire to keep them warm, plenty of rugs and pillows, and nothing to get up for in the morning save more rain, more wind, more mud.
The last words of the chant had died away, but the silence was short-lived.
‘Now let’s sing “Hepa Hey Ne Ne”,’ Penny enthused, cuddling even closer to Corinna. ‘I really love that one.’
Well, I don’t, Daniel thought, as the unearthly sounds soared up to the tepee-poles, merging with the descant of the rain. ‘Hepa Hey Ne Ne’ meant ‘bless the earth’, or so he had learned from Rob. At this particular moment, he felt more like cursing it: its damp hardness under his bottom; its refusal to relent and lay on a proper summer. Far from living close to nature, as Anita recommended, he was harbouring heretical thoughts of his house in urban Wandsworth – windproof, dry and probably environmentally unsound.
‘Hepa hey ne ne, hepa hey ne neHepa hey yana, hey ne yo wey.’
Anita was going wild with her spoons, Claire beating an accompaniment on her mug and then her knee. Rick added to the din by blowing a tin whistle he had scrounged from Rob before he left, while Penny and Corinna were singing in close harmony and rocking backwards and forwards together, as if they had fused into one body and one voice. Tim’s screams had reached a crescendo – he was wolf, hyena, jackal, all in one; a wild uncontrollable animal still butting with its head.
‘Stop it!’ Daniel snapped. ‘We can’t hear ourselves sing.’
Tim’s only rejoinder was another savage butt. Daniel stumbled to his feet, clutching his bruised chest. He couldn’t stand this child a moment longer, nor the general pandemonium. And it was beyond his comprehension how anyone with cancer, who was obviously in pain, could tolerate it either. The decent thing to do would be to invite Pat to sneak out with him, but that was hardly feasible. Instead he whispered to Pippa that he was going to check the car and would she like an excuse to leave? He was stunned when she shook her head. She must fear him more than Rick, if she preferred to stay in this uncongenial company rather than take her chance to escape. JB was truly psychic to have picked up the antipathy between them, when he was only vaguely aware of it himself.
He started edging to the doorway, suddenly realizing that the chant had ended and everyone was looking at him. Even the healer had ceased his self-communing and was gazing at him fixedly. (He had already worked his magic on Tim – the child had quietened instantly and returned tamely to his mother.)
Daniel lowered his own eyes, stood dithering at the entrance. ‘I’m … er … just going to see if the car’s all right,’ he stammered. ‘I’m afraid it may be bogged down in the mud.’
Unlikely, when only yesterday they had moved all the cars to higher ground. Claire and Happy shouted after him, urging him to stay put – the weather was atrocious still and he already had a cold. Even Andrew grunted a hoarse warning, but Daniel ignored them all, went blundering out into the night, the relentless rain drowning every protest.
He rummaged in the back of the car to find another sweater. It was freezing cold without the heater, but he dared not switch it on when he was so worryingly low on petrol. The nearest service station was a good ten miles away, and the narrow lanes had become even more treacherous after four days of non-stop rain. He switched on the radio instead, tuning and retuning in search of the World Service, but all he could get was a crackly Welsh-language broadcast, which sounded as foreign as the ‘Hepa hey ne ne’, and definitely less benign: some angry man pontificating, by the sound of it. For all he knew, it could be a call to arms; the entire English nation threatened with extinction. He turned it off and listened to the rain, feeling a sense of total impotence that he had no off-switch for the weather; couldn’t tune from foul to fair. Irrationally and absurdly, he blamed JB for the storm – it was all part of some malignant plan to test his endurance to the limit, then finally break his spirit. Since arriving at the camp, he seemed to have been living on a roller-coaster – up with Margot’s ‘miracle’; plunged down at Greystone C
ourt; up again for the pow-wow, but staying down since then. Was there about to be another high?
He peered out at the night: the wind still blustering and whining; no break in the dense clouds; no glimmer yet of daylight. Any improvement seemed unlikely unless JB used his powers; hung a blazing sun in a blue and cloudless sky and ordered the bad weather to stay away for a week or more, until everything was dry. Camping was impossible in these conditions, when they were confined to claustrophobic tents, with damp matches, sodden clothes, a plague of slugs which crawled into the bedding, and a spiteful wind which blew everything away. Washing, dressing, cooking, had all become ordeals, and his thoughts had long since shifted from Third World deprivations to his own longing for the luxury of an electric kettle or tumble-dryer. In the middle of last night, he had drunk a mouthful of fruit juice from the carton and choked on a dead wasp. Then he’d struggled out of the sleeping-bag for a pee, stood behind the tent, with the rain lashing at him – laughing at him – while he tried to unzip his flies. (He slept in jeans and sweater – it was too cold for pyjamas.)
And yet, according to Anita, Penny wished to adopt this way of life for good – maybe not living in a tent, but at least in some community. He knew that both Happy and Corinna were keen to start one up, so doubtless Penny had been willingly co-opted as another founder-member. He couldn’t quite work out how he fitted into the picture. Would he be expected to give up his job (and Pippa quit her schooling, to learn yoghurt-making or shamanic rites, in place of maths or history), or would a husband and a daughter be regarded as an irrelevance – like sex? He still hadn’t managed to make love to Penny, no longer even wanted to. It was too cold and too uncomfortable, and there was rarely any privacy – always some emergency or interruption, as had happened the night of the pow-wow. Just as he’d stripped Penny of her rain-drenched clothes and was about to remove his own, he had heard an anxious Claire shouting from outside: her tent was leaking and could he help her patch the hole? In a matter of seconds, the lusty Great Plains Buffalo had changed to paltry handyman.
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