Its just over a month into the new year when Michael invites me round for dinner with him and Camille. Such little gestures are a frequent occurrence under normal circumstances, but in the last few weeks a bout of ‘flu has been doing the rounds in the village, and Joshua has imposed strict limitations on socialising to limit its spread, a measure that has only been used once before. It seems to work well though, and careful monitoring of the community shows that there are now new cases after less than a fortnight of segregation. Michael turns up the day after restrictions are lifted with the invitation. Camille is cooking one of her fantastic roasts, and I can’t possibly refuse.
I get Chris settled with Maria, a stentorian woman in her seventies who nonetheless is quiet and gentle with Chris as any mother bear with her own cubs, and walk around the edge of the village to Mike and Cam’s house.
The village has evolved somewhat in the couple of years since our arrival. The layout and buildings remain much unchanged – though the school building is new, as is the village hall in the centre of the settlement. The decision to establish an entirely new town makes sense to me now in a way that it didn’t when I first got here. The concentric rings and radial avenues that define the town’s unorthodox zoning scheme have created micro-communities that bring the scale of the community down to a more human level in neighbourhoods of around twenty. At the edge of the southern half of the town a half mile of meadow separates the town from its farm land, the meadow itself bisected by an eager stream that’s popular with the older children in summer. The farms extend outward from the meadow, their original meagre plots now dramatically expanded to cover several square kilometres. Despite the open offer of material and labour to any group in the community wanting to start another farm the three have existed in friendly competition for years, and will probably continue to do so for a long time to come.
To the north of the village is the “industrial” zone, a series of workshops, lumber yards, warehouses, and all of the machinery needed to keep the village growing and in its excellent state of maintenance. The communal garage is here as well, its facilities currently given over to maintaining one of the several huge tractors the community employs on the farms. At the far end of the industrial zone are the wind turbines and solar arrays that provide for our minimal electrical needs. This is Michael’s main area of expertise, and many of our foraging trips into the cities are to scavenge parts for this effort.
The town itself is modelled on a late nineteenth century settlement, though with considerably more modern construction techniques and built atop a sewage system that feeds directly out to the farms’ manure system. Our water supply is filtered and pumped from a river source half a mile away, split into two supply lines, one of which is then heated centrally in a solar collector (another of Michael’s ingenious designs) and feeds into individual homes off a branched mains system. The town was virtually complete when Clare and I arrived, our bungalow added to the outer ring on the northern segment. Michael and Camille share a splendid two-storey townhouse overlooking the meadow to the south. I never travel directly through the middle of town, preferring to take the longer – and less travelled – route around the perimeter. The journey half-way around the village is about two miles. The one thing our town has is plenty of living space, it’s very american.
I arrive at sunset, our timekeeping system now a mutually-agreed partitioning of the day delineated by phases of the sun’s transition of the sky. As the majority of the village is engaged in agricultural effort of some kind or another the convenience more than makes up for the imprecision. It’s comforting in a way – though some people do still continue the habit of a lifetime by referring to the traditional twenty-four hour clock, nobody worries about being on time, and there’s no such thing as being late any more.
Camille answers the door before I even knock, her bright red hair shining with its own fire in the light of the setting sun. Her smile is as broad as ever, green eyes and pale skin set off perfectly by the various green shades of her dress. We kiss each other’s cheeks and exchange a few words of greeting as she ushers me through into the sitting room. I pass off a gift to her, a Zinfandel that was part of a batch I recovered from a recent expedition. She waves me into the room and then walks off purposefully towards her kitchen. Michael is notorious for his inability to even boil an egg, and Camille is rarely not found working on some new dish, just one of the many ways that they’re a perfect complement to each other.
Michael is sat at the mahogany dining table, and to my great surprise he’s chatting away to Alice Reynolds. They look up as I walk in, and Michael rises from his seat to greet me with an enthusiastic hug. Alice just nods her head at me.
“I hope you brought some bourbon.” She winks at me behind Michael’s back.
“Sorry, I just finished the last of it cleaning my drains. We’re stuck with wine tonight.”
She grins, and Michael looks confused. “Bit of a private joke Mike,” she explains.
“Alice was just telling me about you dragging her out of the woods whilst we were enjoying the sights and sounds of the big city.” Mike’s never phased by conversational acrobatics. I suspect this is a result of Camille’s ability to carry on half a dozen conversations at once, often with the same person.
“I was explaining what a great start we got off to;” Alice has a hand gesture to accompany every syllable, something I hadn’t noticed before; “and how I had to limp back a week later to fetch my stuff.”
I had made an attempt to find her tent and retrieve it, but her directions were hopelessly vague and I ended up walking in circles for the best part of a day before giving up. I suspected at the time that she’d sent me on a wild goose chase, but sure enough she had walked out on the morning of New Year’s day and returned in the afternoon with a backpack and tent. I have to admit, she’s got a lot of guts.
“Well, if you would go jumping off cliffs…”
“Oh behave you two.” Camille glides through the room with a tray of appetisers, and Alice and I grin at each other. For someone who talks nineteen to the dozen, Cam can be brutally direct when she wants to be.
“Sorry auntie Millie.” I mimic Christopher’s most contrite voice, and she ruffles my hair on her way out of the room. Alice raises her eyebrows.
“Mike and Cam are sort of aunt and uncle to my little boy, Christopher.” I explain. “Cam only has to look at him and he comes over with a guilt complex and apologises compulsively.”
“Yeah, she has that effect,” Michael agrees.
Camille’s voice floats in from the kitchen: “I heard that.”
“Sorry auntie Millie.” Mike sing-songs. Alice guffaws.
Camille’s roast is as good as ever, and the conversation hits a lull whilst we devour the succulent, tender chicken and crisp, fluffy potatoes. The wine is a good match for the meal, and vanishes quickly. Camille disappears into the kitchen for a fraction of a second before re-emerging with another bottle. Alice sticks her tongue out at me, as if to remind me that I am not the only one at the table with good taste in booze.
After the meal Michael and I take the plates into the kitchen to wash up, leaving the girls to chat in the dining room. Mike washes and I dry, and we make short work of the greasy plates and dishes. I decide that now might be a good time to talk about some of the things Alice told me about him.
“So Mike, when we were out in the woods Alice mentioned that you were here right at the beginning, getting things up and running with her and Joshua…”
“Yeah, Alice has got a big mouth like that.” He doesn’t seem to upset by me raising the subject, so I decide to press on.
“So what happened?”
“What exactly did Alice tell you?”
“Just that you and her and Joshua came up with the plan for the village and got people out here with your radio broadcast, and that you and Joshua had some kind of disagreement that caused you to leave for a while, but she didn’t tell me any details.”
“Sure, okay. Well, Josh came up with a lot of the ideas for what became the village, but he had something of an aversion to hard work and Alice and I ended up working our asses off to put everything together. When we first met, Alice and I were kinda directionless, so Josh coming along gave us a purpose, and we loved him for it. Then after a while we realised that the plan he had to build a community was for his own benefit – he wanted to recreate society and install himself as its leader.”
“So Alice and I tried to talk him into letting control fall to the community itself, you know? Adopt a hands-off approach to leadership. But he was too involved in his own vision of what the thing should be that he just wouldn’t listen. Alice didn’t want to cause a confrontation so she just disappeared from the community as a whole, and has been doing her whole ‘walking the earth’ thing ever since. Me, I had a blow-up fight with Josh that ended in punches. I had to walk away after that, and Cam and I spent a while driving around Canada, you know, just sort of exploring the boundaries of where human civilisation was being overtaken by nature. We were gone about a year, and when we came back Joshua was in complete control of the village. I guess by that point he just sorta assumed that we’d learned our lesson, and welcomed us back.”
“So, the whole community is a sham? It’s just Joshua’s private dictatorship?”
“Holy shit Brian, you don’t get out much do you?” He pauses to let the rhetorical question sink in. “It’s been Joshua’s community since before you arrived, he just invokes Alice’s name because she’s the voice of the village, the one that made it real for people before they even got here. She doesn’t make a fuss about it as long as he doesn’t do anything too egregious, and he maintains the illusion of democracy with the public fora.”
“Wow, I didn’t realise that things were so fucked up.”
“That’s just it. The system works. We need somebody in charge who can make the tough calls, and the facade is just enough for everyone to have some kind of say, even if they can’t make a difference. That’s why I left – not because I disagreed so strongly with Joshua – but because deep down I knew he was right, and if the village was going to succeed then the last thing it needed was an apparent power struggle between its founders.”
I don’t know what to say to that. Michael’s always impressed me with his unflappable nature and ability to think through problems to a logical conclusion, but I never really thought of him as being so selfless. No wonder he keeps to himself at the edge of the village community. It explains why he and Camille took me and Clare under their wings when we first arrived, and why they’re both so keen to get out on expeditions. I find I have a new understanding of my friends, and a new appreciation for them.
Alice too, is turning out to be a more complicated and interesting person that I had given her credit for. I’d always thought of her as a figurehead who stayed out of the public eye, instead deferring to Joshua to run the community for her. The fact that there’s such an enormous disconnect between the woman and symbol is a curious disparity that I am still struggling to reconcile. The fact that the woman herself is rude, irreverent, and extremely attractive is an additional curiosity that has drawn me into … into what exactly?
Mike and I rejoin the girls, and Camille produces a trivial pursuit board from their entertainment collection. We divide into teams, Mike and myself versus the girls, and play for several hours. Mike’s knowledge of science is a good balance against my complete ignorance of american culture and entertainment, and we’re about equally matched for general knowledge. All four of us struggle with sports, but in the end Alice and Camille collect their six wedges and storm home to an easy victory. Much teasing ensues, and Alice and I pick cards at random to test each other without the strict rules of the game to bind us. We barely even notice Mike and Cam surreptitiously slip out into the kitchen.
“What’s the capital of Hungary?” I am picking geography questions on the basis that as an American she might have trouble with the wider world. It’s not working.
“Easy, that’s Budapest.” I drop the card to the table and try to decide what category is next. “Who played Captain Pike in the pilot episode of Star Trek?”
“No idea.” Star Trek was never my thing. “Besides, wasn’t that Captain Kirk?”
“Nope, it was Pike and the episode was called The Cage.” She picks another card before I can read out my question. “How many number one hits did The Beatles have prior to ninteen ninety?”
“US chart or UK?”
“US, I guess.”
“Damn, give a guy a break, okay?”
“Wrong!” She makes a noise like a game show buzzer. “How man wives of Henry the Eighth were beheaded?”
“Two.”
“Name them for a bonus point?”
“That’s evil. Catherine Parr and Anne Boleyn?”
“Not even close.”
“Still, I got the question right.”
She concedes my point. I look at the card in front of me and grin.
“Where is the crown of Tsar Nicholas the Second kept?”
“The State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.” She sounds confident.
“Wrong.” I reach for anther card.
“Fuck you it’s wrong.” She snatches the card out of my hand and reads the answer on the reverse. “You cheating bastard!”
“Nope,” I tell her, “the card’s wrong.”
“Says you.”
“Yep.”
“Okay then mister smarty-pants, where is it?”
“It’s in the cupboard in my hall.”
“Yeah,” she says, “right.”
“Really, it is. We brought it with us when we came over.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding.” Excite bubbles over in her voice, and her eyes are wide. “You stole it?”
“I prefer the term ‘liberated’, but the effect is about the same. Wanna see it?”
“Hell yeah.”
“You free tomorrow?”
She seems about to say something, and then think better of it. “Tomorrow’s just fine.”
Cam and Michael come back into the room with a steaming pot of coffee. I realise how late it’s getting; I need to head back and let Maria get home.
“Did you know Brian has got the crown of Nicholas the Second in his closet?”
“Oh yeah,” Camille enthuses, “it’s stuffed behind his collection of da Vinci paintings.”
“Right.” Alice looks deflated, as if we’re winding her up. I don’t have the heart to tell Camille that they’re mostly Raphael’s work.
I rush through my coffee and bid everyone a good night. Alice follows me out the front door and Cam and Mike retire inside.
“Tomorrow night then?” Alice is uncharacteristically shy all of a sudden.
“Just after sunset,” I tell her.
“It’s a date,” she says, and plants a kiss on my cheek before heading back inside and closing the door.
I guess it is.