Don managed to get a job that related to his film studies
degree, working at the twenty-four-screen Elephant & Castle UCI. He squeezed out bags of nacho cheese, grease-sprayed the hot dogs and, best of all, emptied bladders of salsa that looked like liposuction fat. Popcorn dust clogged his sinuses.
Each screening had to be checked every half an hour to make sure nobody was smoking or having full intercourse in the deluxe seats. He never saw whole films, just glimpses as he moved from screen to screen: a man being tortured with a vise, a boy hugging a dog, animated clocks dancing, a male nurse talking about love, a series of massive explosions, snow on a lake, blood on bedsheets, a gondola trip … and so on, for twenty-four screens. His dissertation had been called “Collage and Sleep in Late European Cinema” and it was in this essay that Don had first put forward the idea that it was valuable to think of life as a film. Not that the individual was the star and there were cameras watching, but that our eyes and ears were a camera that was always recording. We had to make decisions about what our lives—a live broadcast, one-shot, uneditable film—were going to be about. In Don’s life-film, there was no sound track. He preferred the ambiguity of silence, he said. This was just one justification, of many, for why Don could not enjoy music.
He became irritatingly discerning, saying he would not consume toxic food or toxic culture, saying that nacho sauce,
Lethal Weapon 3
, and Margaret Thatcher all spawned from the same toothless maw. The UCI radicalized him. He knew by heart the trailers for
A Few Good Men
,
Batman Returns
,
Basic Instinct
, and
Aladdin
. He knew the taglines from numerous high-end adverts: Tanqueray, Omega, Bosch. When he was made redundant, he said this to his boss:
“Your mind—it is the center of your life. Everything you see and hear and feel. How would you know if someone stole your mind?”
It was from the trailer to
Total Recall
.
Freya worked in the admissions department of the School of Oriental and African Studies. Her two colleagues were married to each other and the office sometimes felt like an extension of their bedroom, with pet names and passive-aggressive whispering. The man was an alcoholic; five or six times a day they’d hear the conspicuous hiss of a can of Holsten Pils spitting froth onto the underside of his desk. It was never mentioned, though at the end of each workday he had the cans lined up by his feet. As far as Freya could tell, it had got to the point in their marriage when it was easier for his wife to pretend that the regular
kerrrr-chisss
sound was a normal part of the administrative bustle: keystrokes, photocopying, continental lager. As a way to feel better about her job, Freya stole and cycled home so much good-quality stationery that she started to get a backache. The notepads and rollerball pens would become key tools in planning the community.
Meanwhile, Janet worked in a vintage clothes warehouse. Campaigners used to come in and slash the furs. Addicts used to steal novelty ties from the one-pound bin. The clothes arrived in huge, tightly wrapped bales, which, once cut, flopped out, trebling in size: marshes of dead people’s dirty glad rags. There was no heating because heating was pointless in a space that size, so Janet had a permanent dust cough and sniffles and was eventually diagnosed with bronchitis.
This said, the three of them were reasonably happy: Freya and Janet bonded by jobs they despised while Don, newly
jobless, was the stay-at-home housewife, cleaning and cooking. Then Patrick arrived. The recession had hit the rental market and he’d had to sell off a property. They didn’t find out until later that the one he sold was the one he had been living in. He was homeless. They thought he would only stay for the weekend, but on Monday evening Janet and Freya came home from work to find he had laid out a bribe: two dozen oysters and a bottle of champagne. Since he’d quit cocaine, he had taken up eating. As Janet frowned and prodded at one of the frilled, quasi-testicular sacs, Patrick realized that oysters were no guarantee of seduction. Don, on the other hand, dove right in.
During those first two weeks, Patrick made himself indispensable, doing practical things like building plasterboard walls, which, Don claimed, were mainly motivated by his desire to achieve privacy with Janet. Then Freya got made redundant too and Patrick offered to cover the shortfall in rent, at which point he became permanent. While Janet went to work, the three of them explored free London: morning swims in Hampstead mixed-sex pond, lunch from the Hare Krishnas, museums in the afternoon. Each night, when Janet was at her most tired and susceptible, Patrick would show her his leather-bound notebook full of primitive sums proving that, with a mixture of mild benefit fraud and some extra roommates to lower costs, Janet could quit her job and join them in enjoying
the summer of the slump
. One glorious evening, when she could feel a new chest infection brewing, Janet caved.
They brought in an old university friend, Li, who was clever, lonely, and had a nose bridge so slight she had to tie on
her glasses. Don suggested they invite Ash—the real estate agent—by handwritten letter because, as Don wrote, “I thought I saw something in you that was longing for the other,” but they got no reply. They brought in Perry, a skinny would-be scriptwriter who built himself an actual garden shed in one corner of the room for live/work. There was Chris, who was repetitive but useful, an eco-carpenter in the days when eco-
something
didn’t just mean he had once climbed a tree. There was Alana, who “disliked bread” and brought with her a hypoallergenic kitten. There was Arlo Mela, a young Welsh-Sardinian sous-chef who worked so many hours at Le Gavroche that they were never sure if he slept in his bed or just muddled the duvet for effect. With each new recruit, they rearranged the walls to make new bedrooms. The rent dropped. They shared food. Sunday lunches were gourmet—oysters not unusual—with above-the-rooftop views.
By the end of the summer, the recession began to subside. On the roof of a neighboring office, a crane appeared. Drunk, one Sunday, watched by all his housemates, Don decided to leap across the small gap between the roofs and climb it. At the top, by the driver’s seat, he found bottles of Celtic Spring mineral water, filled with piss in different shades of dehydration. He wanted to yell, “The heart of the capitalist dream,” but didn’t. Instead he “noticed his desire” to. At that time, he was into noticing his emotions.
By autumn, the surrounding office blocks were nearly full: ergonomic shoemakers, licensed taxis, and a life-science industry magazine called
Research? Research!
They had grown too used to feeling that the building was their own, and their
neighbors, people with real jobs, didn’t like walking past on a lunch break and seeing shutters rattle up on a tableau of dropouts in bathrobes. One morning, Ash turned up with two big blokes from the council.
After they got served their month’s notice, Don made one of his speeches. Except at that point he didn’t make speeches, so it just seemed impromptu and genuine. He said they had two choices: either return to the familiar, piss-drinking drudge of city life or run with the summer’s energy, the shared skills, the collective joblessness, their youngness, and try a different life, in the countryside. That’s all he called it. The countryside. “The city will still be here, waiting to eat us up, the moment we want to come back.”
This speech was not a surprise to Freya. She and Don had already talked at length about it—had even discussed how best to pitch it to their housemates and how best to hide it from Alana, whom no one liked. But Freya played along, pretending to be struck, right then, by the idea’s ripeness.
“I’m ready,” she said, standing up. “Who else is with us?”
Out of seven of them, only Arlo stayed seated. A few weeks later, they heard he’d won a scholarship to work as a pâtissier in New York. Not only that but it was with his culinary hero, a legendary Austrian chef with an empire of restaurants and his own range of implements, including a signature veal mallet.
They spent the next couple of weeks doing road trips in two cars—one Chris’s, the other Li’s—searching for an appropriate property. They went to Yorkshire, Northumberland, Dumfriesshire, Mid Wales, North Wales, South Wales—anywhere that was cheap. In North Gower they found a
building that was previously a parish school, a single classroom its best feature, and a run-down cottage attached. It sat on unpromising-looking farmland on the gloomy west side of The Bulwark with an almost-fantastic view of Rhossili beach if it weren’t for the downs in the way. But it was undeniably cheap, and the farmer who was selling it, in a charming reverse of their other experiences, did not hide his desperation to get rid of it. He said: “I’m desperate to get rid.” He had tremendous visible capillaries in his nose. His only attempt at spin was when he referred to the Gower peninsula’s “microclimate.”
After showing them the house, he walked with them to the top of The Bulwark, which rose up behind the farm. From there they could see north, the Loughor Estuary; west, Worm’s Head pointing out to the Irish Sea; south, the Bristol Channel and the cliffs of Devon beyond. To the east was Swansea and industry and that which they were trying to escape. For Don, to whom such things were important, a peninsula had the right implications: something that pushed out from the mainland, making an
insular
path into the unknown.
Patrick—now at the peak of his love for Janet—paid the deposit. They got a joint mortgage that named Patrick, Freya, Janet, Li, Perry, Chris, and Don as tenants-in-common, dividing up proportions of ownership, and therefore of repayment, according to what each person could afford. At the same time, Patrick had a solicitor draw up a declaration of trust that, in an act of clear distrust, committed each person to pay a little each month, beyond their share of the mortgage, to reimburse his deposit. He was happy to see his experience as a landowner coming in useful and he set up a sinking fund and bought
comprehensive insurance. In October they moved in, when the only space with a fully functioning roof was the schoolroom, so that’s where they slept. It was lucky that London had got them used to living in close quarters. They brought their gas stoves and favored slow-cooked stews and curries because they radiated more heat into the room. They had not expected snow on the beach by Christmas.
During that first winter, they worked on pinning down the project’s details, from breeds of unusual vegetable the microclimate would support—breadnut, gumbo, black salsify—to the stepped permaculture garden; the badminton green; an Aylesbury drake and six ducks; the yurt village; a Gloucester Old Spot pig; radicchio, garbanzo, cowpea; their right to a lobster pot at Broughton; and fully off-grid power: hydro, solar, wind, and car batteries concealed in beehives.
By spring, they’d lost two members: Li, who said the damp was making her ill, and Perry the scriptwriter, who’d gone to live with his parents and write a feature-length script about life in a commune. With seven people living in one room, privacy was hard to find. Everyone knew how Patrick felt about Janet and they watched to see if she would capitulate. With no TV, they became the soap opera.
Their numbers swelled as the weather got better, and under Chris’s supervision they got to work on repairing the house and outbuildings. The stairs were rotted in a slapstick way and they used a wood-fired, steam-powered log saw, Chris’s pride and joy, to cut planks. The gas-fed Rayburn oven, which they had assumed was ruined, awoke from hibernation, a roar of flames in its stomach. The house and gardens
were in such a state that hour by hour the impact was dramatic. After a day with scythes and machetes, clearing brush, nettles, brambles, and weeds, they could celebrate around a victory bonfire. The whole first year, in fact, was characterized by this sensation of making big steps.
Official meetings were, and remained, on Thursday mornings, at first weekly and later fortnightly. They were chaired by a different member each time until they realized it was easier to allow Don to be permanent chair than it was to try to control his contributions. One of his earliest suggestions was to change the name of the farm to Welsh. Don expressed his support of the Meibion Glyndwr movement—a then still-active group who had been firebombing English-owned vacation homes on Anglesey and the Llyn peninsula. He said the Anglophone destruction of Welsh culture was unforgivable. To watch Don pronounce
Meibion Glyndwr
was to see a man battle his own genetics.
“Good on ’em, I say,” said Don, whose family was English, but who had a dram of Scots blood somewhere way back in his ancestry.
“I’m sure they’re relieved to have your support,” said Patrick, who was, with his Welsh mother, the only one among them who could claim to be returning to the motherland.
They bought an English–Welsh dictionary and set about trying to mash together the two words that best captured their geographical location, since Welsh house names tended to be purely descriptive: “house on triangular piece of land,” for instance. There followed a fortnight of grueling discussion, long lists, short lists, blind voting, and, each day, the
sound of people absently repeating different combinations of words—
Ty Nant, Cwm Mawr, Trem Coed, Treffoel, Dolclogwyn
—to gauge how they felt in the mouth.
Blaen
meant “extremity” and “beginning,” both of which, Don felt, said something about their reasons for being there. It also referred to a place at the head of a valley. They were at the side of an almost-valley. And
Llyn
, meaning “lake” or “pool,” referenced the swimmable section of river in the woods. All that first winter they had talked about how they would bathe and picnic there, in much the same way that people buying more suburban homes visualize barbecues they will never have. Don liked the name for its challenging consonant and forbidding stand-alone extra vowel.
Blaen-y-Llyn
was a mark of their early commitment to the language and would subsequently be a reminder that some of the grown-ups never moved beyond a toddler’s conversational Welsh.