Wild Abandon by Joe Dunthorne

a rumor that the design of the hall was based on a low-security Swedish prison? And the way all students wore the same clothes! They were a cult! Don was not yet known for his charismatic public speaking, but with a skinful of opaque cider he started to build a reputation. Janet and Freyasat on the bed on either side of him, feeling the mattress shift as he gestured and worked up a rhythm.
    “All that hippie bullshit,” Don said, starting boldly, though giving the impression that he was not sure how the sentence would proceed, “just about ruined the project, just about sabotaged the whole idea, so they could spend a few years getting
idealism
out of their
systems
, then go succeed in their start-up businesses, running fucking plant nurseries and art supplies shops, and referring back to the wild years they spent trying to reinvent society,
man
[he made the peace sign, then flipped it round to a V]—telling their friends and children ‘imagine our naïveté’ and ‘
if
me-then could see me-now’—and the truth is, they were never going to get it right the first time, they were never going to just
think up
a new way of living, a new basis for society,
and
carry it out successfully, no chance, so you can’t call the hippie movement a failure—you can call them
weaklings
—but we should never forget it was just the first attempt, and it
was
decent, they should have kept going but the whole thing got dismissed as a fad, as educated druggies patting themselves on the back, as part of fashion, part of the sixties, because—and this is the real fuck-up—they let it get smeared with the
sexual
revolution, which has nothing to do with
new structures for living
.”
    “You’re
that
bloke,” Janet had said, sipping from her plastic cup. “My brother warned me you’d be at university.”
    Freya remembered noticing that after Don had said his bit he kept nodding, as though his sentence continued on, unheard, in his head. He strongly agreed with himself.
    In their second year, all three of them moved off campus into a mid-terrace place on Maud Street, of which PatrickKinwood was the private landlord. Janet was only willing to live with the couple on the agreement that they avoid all but the most cursory demonstrations of physical affections within her sight or earshot, saving it for the campus darkroom and swimming-pool changing rooms. This was perhaps one reason why Janet welcomed their landlord dropping by: he punctured the atmosphere of covert groping.
    With his rental properties, tinted glasses, coke problem, and loneliness, Patrick reinforced all they hoped was true about someone made wealthy by the greeting card industry. “He signals the impending collapse of consumerism,” Don said, and nicknamed him “the canary in the coal mine.” Patrick supported Norwich City Football Club, the Canaries, who played in yellow and green, and sometimes, when drunk, he was known to shout “I’m canary till I die,” and this pleased Don. It was obvious when Patrick had enjoyed an excessive weekend because he would turn up on their doorstep on Monday holding a toolbox, ready to work through his self-loathing with DIY. Their house had a lot of work done that summer.
    Don, meanwhile, was the tenant who told his landlord, “Property is theft.” It helped that Patrick was, at that time, mostly in love with Janet and would stop mid-sentence if she walked across the lounge in her towel. After a couple of months of getting to know Patrick, Don stopped calling him “the canary.” It had become difficult to see him as merely a representation of a particular worldview. Eventually there came a point when they were not freaked out to find their landlord—without the statutory twenty-four hours’ notice—waiting on their sofa for them to get back from seminars. Ithelped that the house was falling apart so there were always new reasons for him to turn up in grimy joggers. Being fifteen years their elder, but thinking of himself as