The chickens were free to roam this winter garden, although the sensible ones had gone to roost by now. Kara had said that some kind of fowl pest had been laying claim to the hens and the few stragglers that remained in the gloaming certainly looked rather lacklustre, their feathers dishevelled and their eyes dull. Terri cluck-clucked and chick-chick-chicked at them but they were indifferent to conversation.
Adjacent to the garden was a bumpy field full of some kind of mutant thistle that hadn’t died down in the winter cold. This was where the goats lived when they weren’t shut up for the night in a pig-pen. They were Anglo-Nubians, with floppy rabbit ears and devil-eyes – two nannies and two kids, a big one and a little one, this latter presumably the subject of tonight’s sacrifice.
‘Poor baby,’ Terri said, attempting to kiss it.
Although a little downcast, the goats were quite friendly, certainly friendlier than the chickens, and so we spent some time petting and commiserating until a genuine kind of darkness fell and it grew too cold to be standing around in a field so we made our way back to the kitchen from which was emanating an unappetizing aroma.
Jill was setting the table, trying to make a space amongst the candles and candle-making equipment that were strewn everywhere.
‘That’s my pièce de résistance ,’ Gilbert said, pointing proudly to a particularly ugly candle – a pyramid of brown studded with lumps of mauve wax. ‘We could light some of these candles,’ he suggested to Kara; ‘that would be nice.’
‘They’re to sell,’ she snapped, ‘and besides, we’ve got electricity, for heaven’s sake.’
Robin emerged from ‘the wine cellar’, which was actually another pig-pen, carrying several bottles of home-made wine – rose-hip, elderberry and a rather lethal-looking parsnip.
‘I’ll just uncork the reds,’ he said, ‘so that they can breathe for a moment.’ I had a sudden rather unnerving glimpse of the polite schoolboy lurking within the hairy chrysalis – of Robin helping out at parental cocktail parties, handing round salted nuts and topping up the tonic in large, middle-class gins.
‘Yeah,’ Robin admitted, shamefaced, ‘Surrey. Dad owns a firm of estate agents.’
‘Lucky you.’
Andrea and Shug had reappeared by now, their pupils dilated from either drugs or a bout of sexual activity or – more likely – both. Bob also turned up, although where he had been was less clear – another transporter malfunction, I suppose.
‘I am not a number,’ he whispered defiantly to me, casting about warily for a giant bubble that had apparently been chasing him.
Several people I’d never seen before made an appearance for the meal, all of them Balniddrians, presumably.
‘Balniddrians,’ Kevin said, writing the word down in a tiny little notebook. ‘Good name.’
The meal was a strange primeval slop of semi-identifiable ingredients – brown rice, potatoes, carrots, something that might or might not have been a vegetable, all of it vaguely goat-smelling even though not a morsel of goat was in it, according to a vow on his mother’s life that Terri made Gilbert swear on his knees.
‘What did you do with that pan of wax that was on the stove?’ Jill asked Gilbert, who pretended not to hear.
Proteus was ‘asleep somewhere’ according to a rather vague Kara but Jill’s unpronounceable child was up long past her bedtime and had to be force-fed her rice-carrot-wax sludge before falling asleep with her head on the table, by which time she had acquired an almost feverish complexion.
‘You should try Heinz toddler jars,’ Bob said earnestly to Jill, who said, equally earnestly, ‘Never.’
‘Babies should eat what we eat,’ Kara said.
‘I think we should eat what babies eat,’ Bob said.
‘I think we should just eat babies,’ Terri murmured, a remark which, luckily for her, went unheard.
Before long Bob found himself unwittingly taking part in the ‘what age should you stop breastfeeding’ argument, even at one point arguing vehemently against feeding on demand because it would lead to a generation of layabouts and slackers.
‘Watch it, Bob,’ Shug said, laying a reasonable hand on his arm, ‘you’re turning into a Klingon.’ Perhaps there was another Bob inside Bob – a conventional person who would grow up to be a teacher and vote Liberal and worry about his pension. A Bob who would one day rip off the rubbery facemask of the false Bob and take his place in the world of alarm clocks, Burton suits and lunchtime bank queues.
‘Is there a pudding?’ Kevin asked, trying to ignore the whole unpalatable topic of conversation of infant nutrition.