After school one day, early in my second year of sixth form, my father was waiting for me in the carpark. One hand holding the open door of his SEAT Ibiza, one foot raised a couple of inches off the ground. In general, my father – a maths teacher in another town – took a gentle, hands-off approach to parenting. His favourite hobbies were butterfly counting, long distance running, and keeping an obsessive, disordered eye on his fat intake and gut health. He’d only ever picked me up from school when I was much younger, in the days leading up to the end of term, as the school where he taught broke up earlier than mine. The sight of him standing there, like that, evoked a regressive, Saturday-morning-cartoon kind of excitement. I checked an impulse to run and hug him as I had done as a child. When I approached, I realised that something was very wrong. His hair was ruffled and his shirt untucked. The back seat was festooned with empty takeaway coffee cups, cracked CD cases, shirts, ties and tattered Philip K Dick novels, like he’d somehow lived a year inside the car in the space of eight hours. I said hi, got in, and asked what was happening. No answer. I turned the radio on to Simon Mayo’s easy, classless voice. My father turned it off. We drove. ‘I’m leaving your mother,’ he said, staring straight ahead. I sucked in air through my nostrils. ‘This is very difficult for me,’ he said. ‘It’s cool,’ I said. Meaning: I’m listening, I’m prepared to talk. ‘It’s not cool,’ he snapped. ‘No,’ I said, and felt my face go hot. We parked up. I followed him out of the car and into the house. My mother was in the corner of the dining room. I stood against the wall. My father ascended the stairs to the bedroom and came back down perhaps one minute later with a suitcase. He hugged me and walked out the door. I realised that he must have already spoken to my mother (the atmosphere simmered with the afterglow of confrontation) and, according to some peculiar chivalric code, thought it proper and correct to break the news to me in person, forgetting in the process that he needed to pack more things before he actually left. He took leave from work and temporarily moved in with his sister in a nearby town, where he convalesced on the sofa and comforted himself with red wine, SSRIs and episodes of Diagnosis: Murder. Once or twice, I went over to find him huddled in a foetal position, headphones in, listening to Sigur Rós on a Walkman. I think he found that their cacophonous, mawkish post-rock created an acoustic architecture that could house and confer tragic or operatic status to his predicament, a soundtrack that (so long as it played) infused every moment with heightened emotion. My allegiances were split. I continued living with my mother, but felt I ought to spend time with my father. I was guilt-stricken whenever I did, and so I carried out such visits (I believed) in secret. It was around then that I started to spend more time with Adam, who decided I was ready to learn that the world was about to end. * In 2008 I lived in a village outside of Corsham, a market town stuck just beyond the southeastern edge of the Cotswolds. I worked a cash-in-hand weekend job at a family-owned shop on the high street which sold organic produce on the ground floor and supplements on the second. I was sixteen years old, and committed to a serious beatnik posture: the kind of teenager with grown-out hair who listened to The Doors, dressed in XXL army surplus parkas and burned Nag Champa incense. Adam came into the shop most Saturdays. He was in his mid-twenties, a local eccentric who lived one town over and sold high-grade Hindu Kush to sixth formers. He was a petite man, carried a big, battered rucksack with bird feathers sticking out the top and dressed in sandals and a toga-like garment. His hair, a confusion of matts and locks, was dirty blonde, and reached below his narrow shoulders. Everyone at school called him ‘Jesus’. His presence had a profound effect on me. I admired his composure, how obviously comfortable and content he was in his outsiderness. Adam was a walking object lesson that people are essentially good-natured and curious: despite his outlandish appearance, people rarely gave him a hard time; if there were widened eyes and stifled laughs, he counteracted these with salutations, questions, amity. And he was handsome, in an atypical way. We gradually built up a rapport. He bought speciality items. Cacao seeds, he said, are nature’s uppers (he offered me several from a pack after I rang it up on the till); Macca root powder is especially good for male fertility and endurance. He complimented a beaded necklace I wore, something I’d picked up at a car boot in Bath, and asked if they were prayer beads (I didn’t know). My admiration for him made me self-conscious. Sometimes I pretended to be busy in the backroom when he came in, where I could observe him without being seen. Other times I would go about my tasks – restocking, cleaning – with feigned confidence, performing for him, imagining how I looked from his perspective, waiting for him to come up and greet me. I was desperate not to seem young in his eyes, because I wanted to have what I saw in him: self-assurance. Adam’s autobiographical asides over the till gave me a glimpse into a complicated adult life. He told me he was a father, that he and Catherine, the mother of his young child, were separated, but on amicable terms. Then he came into the shop one day with Catherine, who carried their baby wrapped up in a sling (I never saw Adam with the baby alone). Catherine, also in her mid-twenties, was someone for whom goodwill and kindness seemed default. I thought she was radiant, and was overeager to help, would rush to hold the door open for her whenever she came in. But I thought she and Adam were more like brother and sister than former partners. They bore a close resemblance to one another, and their relationship (or its public-facing incarnation) was characterised by a deep familiarity and obvious strains, so that one or the other often seemed on the point of tipping into exasperation, as often happens with siblings. Not long after my seventeenth birthday, Adam and I exchanged mobile numbers and agreed a time and place to meet: the high street, on a Sunday in spring. Waiting for him to arrive, I was nervous to see him – to be seen with him – outside of the cashier-customer dynamic. I felt that by merely being near him (to ‘Jesus’) out there on the street, I was associating myself with oddity and deviance, and would be considered odd and deviant in turn. We walked out of town and followed a lane that unravels, like a proboscis, into an extensive valley – a patchwork of farmland, wild meadows, new and ancient woodland. The valley floor is veined by trickling rills, which run off from a larger brook (a tributary of the River Avon), its banks fringed with the ruins of fulling mills, collapsed stone walls and huge pieces of rusted machinery. This was all familiar to me. My father, sister and I walked the dog through it every Christmas afternoon, while my mother was at work. Adam’s familiarity with the area was different. He displayed an encyclopaedic knowledge of its unique ecology, which he constantly demonstrated, pointing out and giving names to the wildlife, flowers and trees. He spoke about oolitic limestone, soil compositions, water quality. I didn’t feel lectured. He was inducting me into a richer understanding of this environment: it gleamed with a new essence. He demonstrated which plants are edible (Sorrel, Goosegrass, Chickweed, Hawthorn, Hogweed seeds), his nimble hands moving quickly and carefully through the greenery. He grasped the base of a stinging nettle and in one swift motion tore upwards, denuding the stem of its leaves, which he then crushed, made into pellets and swallowed, all without getting stung. He stripped a thistle with an Opinel No. 9 pocket knife and cut up the stalk into pieces. It was tough and fibrous, and tasted bitter, but I ate it. I ate everything that he gave me. Adam’s knowledge of foraging was self-taught. Despite his bedraggled appearance, there was a level of perfectionism to him, an exaggerated commitment to personal development. He didn’t tell me, though, how he had occupied the six years since graduating sixth form. He wasn’t working, and lived with his parents, though his ambition, he made clear, was to go off-grid and live self-sustainably in a bender tent in the woods. As we walked (Adam always pacing ahead, leading the way) he spoke at a steady, constant rate. He lamented modern society and the spiritual penury that capitalism had trapped us in. Some nights, he said, he lay awake, unable to sleep, thinking about how many cars were manufactured each day, how many metric tonnes of CO₂ were being pumped into the atmosphere each minute. He was articulating a truth I had long felt in my bones, but which nobody else in my life had the courage or wisdom to admit: there was an innate hypocrisy in the way we all lived, a hypocrisy which (if one thought about it for even a second) should give anyone insomnia. When I came home that afternoon, the cluttered rooms of my childhood home – which already felt uncanny in the wake of my parents’ separation – now seemed a sham refuge, a place of deadening safety, part of the system against which Adam lived his life. His talk had deeply affected me. There was an oppressive sense that I could not reverse the time I had spent with him, that I could not un-hear the things I had heard. I was at once regretful that our rendezvous had happened, and eager for it to reoccur, a contradiction not dissimilar to the nausea one can experience after a certain kind of hookup: an intimacy too sudden and shallow, and the panicky need to repeat the encounter, to prove it wasn’t a mistake, to deepen that intimacy and make the connection good. * Adam liked to get high – he did it with determination and frequency. But he considered Cannabis sativa a holy herb, preferably ingested, or rolled in RAW paper and smoked without the toxic additive of tobacco. Cannabis effectuated, he thought, a state of deepened connection with ‘the Mother’. That was his name for the natural world, all living things, the universe in toto: the Mother was synonymous with God or Godhead. He told me all this when we met up for our next walk. By contrast, my friends and I treated cannabis more like a sport. I tried to impress him with some anecdote that exaggerated my tolerance and appetite for the drug, but this only provoked a dissatisfied look. I had blundered. Clearly, I was not yet ready to communicate with God – a homemade bong is no form of prayer – and therefore he kept his supply to himself. Adam set various life experiences against the Mother (‘she’ was forever teaching him lessons, revealing things to him, or showing him the error of his ways). He made it seem like the immediate environment was instilled with sphinx-like sentience, like God was not merely an abstract question of faith, but an interactive, tactile presence, something that constantly asserted its own existence and issued signs that Adam knew how to decipher. The Mother was something he could touch, and taste, and talk to. He encouraged me to mirror him: I was to walk over the grass in bare feet, dunk my head into the river, imitate the call of a buzzard when one flew overhead. He believed humans could communicate with all animals by creating a particular hum, which he demonstrated to me by making a beak of his thumb, index and middle fingers and placing it between the eyes of an untamed horse in the valley. He then produced the most astoundingly strange, inimitable sound from his throat, approximate to an electro-larynx crossed with a kazoo. It’s true that the horse remained calm and still throughout this interaction, but the animal wasn’t especially troubled beforehand, either. Adam began making cryptic references to a cataclysmic event that he believed would take place in the near future. He drip-fed the details to me, slowly, over a series of encounters, allowing them to percolate in my mind. After a few weeks in his company, I learned that societal collapse was coming, collapse on a global scale, and that we would do well to prepare for it. Everything, he said, would change. All of this crap people obsessed over – TV, careers, fashion, money, social status – it would be revealed for what it was: meaningless. It would be prudent, Adam said, for me to prepare a Go-Bag (a grab-and-run survival kit containing essential supplies) and to leave this in a safe, secret location. I spent late nights in bed on my Dell laptop, on Google Earth, scanning aerial views of the surrounding countryside for hidden places, isolated places, green places far from the town, away from roads and paths but accessible by foot. I expanded my search area. I explored remote parts of Wales, the Scottish Highlands, then the Pyrenees, the Alps. When the collapse came, I’d disappear into woods and jungles. I’d vanish into the trees. I seriously considered spending a £1,000 inheritance from my grandparents on a third-hand camper van (I couldn’t drive) which I’d modify to run on chip fat oil. It would be my mobile sanctuary, somewhere to keep me safe while the world burned, although when this would happen, exactly, was still unclear to me. * I remember my father’s car parked up on the pavement, outside the house. Even though my mother was away for work and couldn’t possibly know that he was here, the vehicle seemed horribly conspicuous. He had come over to take the dog for a walk. The dog was deliriously happy to see him and he was overjoyed, to the point of tears, to see the dog. I waited in the kitchen, looking out the window, anticipating disaster: in my mind’s eye I saw my mum’s car creep around the corner and down along the lane. I had facilitated the visit – had let him know that it was only me in the house – but I wasn’t exactly a copacetic conspirator. He hadn’t asked me how I felt about his coming over, a lack of concern that, by proxy, made me feel I had no choice but to be complicit. After he left (the dog whining now, confused and distressed) I was convinced my father had left some trace that proved his trespass, something so obvious and commonplace as to be invisible to me. By that point I was seeing Adam often. He taught me about foraging mushrooms. Soon, I was able to differentiate between edible and inedible kinds, to identify and avoid deathcaps, seek out fairy rings (portals) and of course spot those which, properly prepared, had psychotropic properties. He spoke of the recurrence of fly agaric and psilocybin as symbols in European folklore, their importance in Shamanic rituals, the role that mushroom-induced hallucinations had played in the formation of different world religions. John of Patmos, he said, based the Book of Revelations on visions that he had while under the influence of such mushrooms. He became more vocal and specific in his eschatology. He finally put an actual date on the end of life as we knew it: 21 December 2012, only four years away. That date marked the conclusion of a civilisational cycle of several millennia, he said, heralding global change. This was prophesied by the ancient Mayans. Although he had initially framed the coming change as a calamity (I imagined ruins, death and destruction, billions of corpses) he now spoke of it as the dawn of a new era, a spiritual evolution. Adam suggested there were others in-the-know, others who had – like him – educated themselves, learned to correctly interpret the signs and discover the truth. And he was right. Millenarianism and apocalypticism are closely linked belief systems that have recurred within religious and social groups throughout human history, but the former is often described as a subtype of the latter. Where apocalypticism describes the belief that the end of the world is imminent, millenarian thinking posits that the apocalypse will effectuate or be proceeded by a golden era, or period of betterment. Adam’s particular millenarian beliefs weren’t at all unique or uncommon, but part of a wider set of end-of-days narratives known, now, as the 2012 phenomenon – stemming from the assumption that the expiry of the Mayan Long Count Calendar signified global cataclysm or radical change. The source of this idea can be traced to a single paragraph written by American anthropologist Michael De Coe in his landmark book The Maya(1966), a popular introduction to ancient Mayan civilisation, where he suggests, without elaboration, that the Mayans believed ‘Armageddon would overtake the degenerate peoples of the world and all creation’ on the final day of the calendar. In the 1970s, this notion took hold in New Age belief systems, and soon cross-pollinated with conspiracist thinking. Doomsday scenarios proliferated, variously involving shadow governments, nuclear holocaust, the Second Coming of Christ, the New World Order, and the arrival of malign or benevolent extraterrestrials. On 21 December 2012, such forces would variously triumph or be vanquished. The phenomenon was so widespread that, according to an Ipsos Mori poll carried out in 2012, nearly one in ten Britons believed the expiration of the Long Count Calendar that year heralded the end of the world. Like many breeds of millenarianism, the 2012 phenomenon emphasised a narrative of declension or return. The modern era, so the thinking went, was tarnished and spoiled, but in some long ago past there was an Eden. Where bleaker predictions contended that divine retribution would brutally rid the world of the scourge of humanity with great floods, earthquakes, solar flares, super volcanoes (as in the 2012 of Roland Emmerich’s 2009 blockbuster, 2012), narratives like Adam’s imagined the transition to this new Eden as a spiritual transformation. Both scenarios tended to suggest that an elect cadre of enlightened individuals would be saved: the chosen ones, privileged tenants of utopia. In Adam’s view, the impure would remain trapped in the spiritual undergrowth (the system was conspiring to keep as many people trapped as possible), while those who were cleansed would be propelled to higher levels of harmonic consciousness and psychic communion. This new reality – a liminal forest-realm, a time-out-of-time – was a future he could not wait for. It was a future that gave purpose to his days. Soon, he said, we would be lounging on hammocks, ‘eating bananas in paradise’. Adam believed that it was his role – that it was within his power – to identify and select others whom he would prepare and convey through this great change. I was one of those he had selected. There would be a ritual, he said, a ceremony, and I’d go through it with him (he’d lead me through it) when he decided that I was ready to be spiritually reborn. He didn’t elucidate any further. Whatever this ceremony involved he kept secret. Adam’s beliefs seem to me, now, a fuzzy interpenetration of concepts borrowed from Pantheism, Gainism, Gnosticism, Druidry, Paganism and Buddhism, all of which he shaped and deployed in service of this millenarian vision. There were notes of Rastafarianism, too: Adam referred to global capitalism as the Babylon System, borrowing the Rastafari terminology (and his dreadlocked hair) from Bob Marley, whom he venerated. Marley’s dissident message touched Adam on a level far deeper than most white millennial kids, those of us who passively bobbed our heads to ‘Buffalo Soldier’ while getting stoned and playing Halo. He felt that Marley modelled a heroic or salvific masculinity from which he took inspiration: Marley spoke on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised, and his lyrics contained teachings. At the time, Adam seemed to converge these disparate traces of knowledge into one coherent whole, a philosophy that he understood, and that I was beginning to grasp, but which was kept tantalising out of reach and partially obscured. He made reference to these things – the Mother, the end of the world, Babylon, Eden – as though they were commonplace or everyday observations, a conviction that made me feel like the holes in his logic were a result of my own ignorance, a failure of comprehension, youthful naivety. Although I did not fully believe in the things that Adam said – they just seemed too unlikely – neither did I entirely disbelieve them. There was always the lingering question: what if he’s right? I was not immune to the tantalising promise of a new and radically better future. Nor was I immune to the generative, fantastical, nightmarish pleasures of trying to imagine the unimaginable: a world post-rapture. It was a future in which (so Adam said) I could feature, because I was special. And I wanted nothing more than that. To be told that I carried around a weird light that set me apart from the rest. I had become isolated. I wasn’t talking much to my parents – every interaction with them was now an ‘eggshells situation’ – and while I maintained friendships with schoolmates, these primarily facilitated drinking, smoking and sex, pastimes that felt pre-scripted, a Skins simulation in which I was content to play a diminished role, disinclined to harsh the vibe with talk about the apocalypse. I didn’t want to share Adam’s ideas with anyone. I knew they would be mocked, and this, by association, would discredit the notion that I was in any way unique. * Adam invited me over to Catherine’s for dinner. She lived in a council flat in a three-storey postwar block in an estate a few minutes’ walk from the town centre. Weathered Saint George’s flag bunting drooped over the balcony above hers like a set of discoloured teeth; a child’s deflated paddling pool was left on the communal front lawn throughout the season. The block’s internal stairwell was incredibly cold (I could see my breath) but Catherine’s flat was extremely warm, a cozy one-bed filled with mandala wall hangings, dream-catchers, macrame and candles. Already gathered in the flat were three people I recognised: a girl in the year above (graduated) named Alice, who bore a slight resemblance to Jane Morris in Rossetti’s Proserpine, and a boyfriend-girlfriend, Lydia (sixteen) and Justin (eighteen), neither of whom had gone onto sixth form. Lydia and Justin had a muzzled Siberian husky with ice-blue eyes which sat on the sofa between them, eerily calm and composed, like that dog in The Thing just before it turns into the Thing. Adam had spoken to me about Justin before (he had nothing much to say about Lydia), referring to him as his ‘brother’. They had an intensely masculine connection, which they made a show of through exaggerated bear-hugs and Roman handshakes. Justin was pale, laconic and talked through gritted teeth, like he had permanent lockjaw. He wore camos and leather boots, kept his head shaved and carried around switchblades. Lydia was more friendly, the kind of girl teachers describe as ‘bubbly’, by which they mean agreeably acquiescent, but there was a twitchiness about her too, a breathy need to prove that she was au fait with all things the Mother. It made sense. She was scarcely sixteen, the youngest person there. Except for the baby. I expected Adam to use the dinner to hold court, or lecture, but he didn’t. He became part of the group, only a shade more vocal and outspoken than anyone else, even awkward and bashful at times. Even so, he was obviously its nucleus. We sat in a circle on the floor. He and Catherine had prepared food. Adam served us – homemade tabbouleh and raw flaxseed bread, as dense and dry as mortar – and we began to eat. I was extremely conscious of my body. I was sweating, bloated, and squirmed around, dreading that my stomach would soon start making embarrassing noises which would be amplified in the stilted social atmosphere, the lack of fluid conversation. Alice spoke up first, a small and earnest voice: she asked if we had heard of a folk musician named Laura Marling, whose music she found beautiful. Lydia stroked the husky’s head. Justin looked somehow personally offended by the gentleness of the remark. She’s so young, Alice continued, only seventeen, how can someone that young be so talented? Adam and Catherine, sitting beside one another, were nonplussed, in that way we all are when we first encounter a schism between our cultural references and those of people far younger than us. Adam brought proceedings back under his sway by removing an object from his backpack, something bundled in muslin. He ceremoniously unravelled the material to reveal a huge jar stuffed with Moroccan olives. He popped it open, picked out several, thick and mucous as slugs, and offered them to us from his palm. Then he rubbed the residual oil between his hands and fingers, and massaged it into his forearms, which were strong but sinewy, and now glistened in the reddish light. It’s good for the skin, he said, smiling in an impish way. It feeds the skin. It was clear that Adam maintained close individual relationships with each of us, and that we had all been exposed to his ideas, one-on-one. In the group, he only needed to make a passing reference to 2012 for the consciousness to shift. We signalled to one another, without fully realising it, that we shared the same point of view, the same general philosophy. We believed the world would undergo radical change in 2012 and Adam, and Adam alone, could guide us through. I found this unspoken groupthink unsettling. It made me mistrust the sense of community and belonging that appeared to be on offer. One-on-one with Adam, I received his undivided attention. I was free to fantasise about my prestige, a private, enchanted state of mind shared between only myself and him. In the group, I became generic, one of a set. The fantasy became diffuse, while the enchantment crystallised into a collective conviction, one that soon began to feel inescapable. The dinners became a semi-regular occurrence that autumn and winter. For a young, single mother, Catherine extended miraculous levels of hospitality. Friends of hers and Adam’s – similar ages or older, in baggy clothes, with head-wraps and white dreads – came and went. I think Adam was selling to some of them. We ate together, food that people had prepared and brought, and which generally conformed to the raw vegan diets observed by most of the guests. Often, someone would bring produce salvaged from dumpster diving. On one occasion, Adam failed to arrive. The weather was bitterly cold and the roads were icy. It was the usual crowd. We assumed that Adam must be walking over, instead of cycling as he normally would. And so we waited. Still, he didn’t appear. Alice and Catherine became extremely concerned. Lydia eagerly matched their agitation. Justin glared out the window, husky at heel, its ears pivoting to pick up our conversation. We tried to contact Adam on his Nokia. The phone rang but he didn’t answer. Could he have had an accident? Had he been hit by a car? Perhaps we should form a search party. A collective image materialised: Adam mangled in the verge by the A4, bleeding out. Catherine put their child to sleep in the cot in the bedroom. There was an atmospheric change in the group. The worry was no longer only about Adam’s physical safety, but also about his general welfare and state of mind. It was agreed that he seemed overburdened, recently. That he was putting too much pressure on himself, had become intense, frenzied, obsessed: he was in deep. We strained towards a communal realisation or admission, towards a discussion about his mental health. We were on the cusp of asking: did he need help? But the question never came. Instead, we voiced our concern in the way one expresses concern for an artist consumed by the creation of a new masterpiece: Adam had reached the unassailable realm of genius, and we had put him there. At last he walked in. There was a chorus of relief, embraces from everyone, myself included. Adam was safe. He was fine. He was, in fact, oblivious to the distress he had caused, not to mention uncaring. The reason for his tardiness was, he explained, that he was cosmically high. We sat in the circle and prepared to eat. Catherine asked that we hold hands and chant our thanks to Gaia for the food, a deeply sincere children’s song that, even then, I found deeply embarrassing. I could barely bring myself to mouth the words as the others sang in unison and swayed back and forth, eyes closed in feigned ecstasy. I looked across the circle at Adam. He wasn’t singing, either. He sat cross-legged, lips pursed and pulled high in a grin. At the end of the evening, Adam handed out raw chocolates that he had made, pressed into heart shapes. I ate two, maybe three. The chocolates were dry and sickeningly sweet, with a strange acrid taste. Later, as I walked home alone in the cold, I began to feel peculiar. My breathing became rapid. I was dizzy and itched with sweat. By the time I reached the outskirts of town, where the houses end and the road slips through farmland, groping in the darkness toward the village, I was in full panic. Like, that cow just coughed, but it was a human cough. Had I been drugged? As I hurried past the derelict postal office (windows boarded up, but a light on inside?) I bugged out, became convinced I was being tailed by a bald man in a black suit. My thoughts chattered with fragmented images (Justin’s big leather boots, the husky on its hind legs, Mayans and ancient pyramids, ritual decapitation) and suddenly I was sprinting, racing toward home. At the door I fumbled and dropped the keys, hands like someone else’s, finally fit them in the lock, burst-open-slammed-the-door-gasped-for-breath and (like a sound bath, like a valium) heard the familiar, consoling tones of Gil Grissom coming through the tinny speakers of our rented TV. I skulked into the living room and stared at William Peterson’s soft, teddy bear face. My mother was watching on the sofa. I collapsed in the rocking chair. CSI’s opening credits rolled, and when Roger Daltrey of The Who sang ‘Who Are You?’ he was addressing the question to me, and me alone. * By the new year, my father had rented a small furnished flat above a converted coach house, into which he deposited a dozen books, a photograph of the dog, and a potted orchid. He gave me a spare key, and the place became a hideout in the two hours after school, before he returned from work, somewhere I didn’t have to speak to or see anyone, and where I would escape into the private, infinite autumn of Gilmore Girls, wishing myself into the shape and form of Rory Gilmore and/or Jess Mariano. Justin told me he’d gone through Adam’s ceremony. He wouldn’t give details, because the details were secret, but he was eager to stress that it had been arduous, akin to a trial or rite of passage, an experience that changed him, man. He was now (his hushed and reverent tones suggested) one of the elect. Spiritually reborn, he saw things differently. Next, it would be Lydia’s turn. He wondered whether she would be able to handle it. And what about me: would I be able to handle it? Alice had been spending a lot of time alone with Adam, too. They had gone to Glastonbury together and bathed in the sacred springs. I had the sense that his interest in her company was a little more earthly than it was spiritual. Sometimes she and I left Catherine’s flat together and spoke in private. Things with Adam were getting out of hand, we agreed. All he could talk about was 2012. The idea hadn’t yet taken hold in our minds that we could, or should, walk away. We spoke about our concerns in lowered voices, as if he might be hiding in the hedgerows, listening in. Then Adam invited me over to his parents’ place in Chippenham. Maybe he sensed I was starting to grow distant. It was a twenty-minute bus ride from town and a short walk, and I knew that I would be on unfamiliar ground, but of course I said yes. Part of me still relished the deepened intimacy the invitation bestowed. I remember an unremarkable, humble house with a boxy front garden, on a cul-de-sac within earshot of an A-road that passed by a Premiere Inn, McDonalds Drive Thru and a half dozen car dealerships on its way to the M4. When we arrived I met Adam’s mother. She was courteous in a soft, non-specific sort of way. I had the impression that she didn’t really see me as an individual – she didn’t notice how young I was – but my being there made her proud of her son, attested to his affability and ability to make friends. I recall the presence of a father, although that presence may have been in a notable absence: alcohol was mentioned, and sickness, cirrhosis, empty two litre bottles of cider, a room with drawn curtains and shag carpeting, glowing with a dull amber light. His bedroom was small and cluttered. He sat on the edge of his unmade bed, I sat on the floor. He showed me some of his possessions, boastfully, like a child does when he invites his schoolfriend over for the first time. There was a notebook with information on the medicinal properties of local native plants, written out in longhand, and a print-on-demand paperback, well-thumbed, which purported to contain text from a lost scroll of the Bible in which Christ preached exclusively about love. There was a map of the Middle East pinned to the bedroom wall, and Adam talked at length about a pilgrimage he would take to different holy sites, beginning with the pyramids in Cairo, Egypt. He’d buy a horse and use it to travel around the region. Justin would join him. He didn’t know when they’d go, exactly, but there was time. 21 December 2012 was still three years away. There, in his childhood bedroom, he explained that everything was falling into place. He had identified those who he would save. Each of us (he and Catherine, Justin and Lydia, myself and Alice) had different star signs. We formed astrological pairs. He knew of others who would complete the Zodiacal circle. Through his ceremony, he would cleanse our spirits and prepare us for the new era, the new Eden. Before I left, he showed me a mask which he had carved from birchwood and kept beneath his bed. The mask was long and narrow, with little detail: two coin slits for eyes and another for the mouth, minimal features that nevertheless conveyed a masculine aspect. The wood was very pale and smooth. It had clearly required great patience, care and skill to make. It could have been a beautiful object – he had the talents to make it beautiful – but it wasn’t. It was ominous and unnerving. Adam sat opposite me and held that mask over his face, becoming hidden, empty and expressionless: a void where a person should be. * I tapered off my attendance at Catherine’s, stopped making an effort to find out when or if the group was meeting, and separated myself from Adam. I began to spend more time with school friends, embracing the more comfortable (and, so I thought, intriguing and unique) role of ‘freak’ in a group of normies rather than normie in a group of freaks. Younger kids in town looked at my long hair and hemp tees and started calling me ‘Weed Guy’. On results day, I pranked my father by telling him I’d failed all my exams, when I’d actually done better than predicted. He looked like his body was about to fold in on itself and disappear, true cannonball-to-the-stomach agony, and in that expression I apprehended something of the guilt he’d been experiencing since the separation. Soon after, he moved away, to live with a new girlfriend in a suburban neighbourhood in Hertfordshire which he described as ‘pure death’. Despite the finality of that diagnosis, he assured me that the move was temporary. He would come back. I cut my hair. Very early one morning, while I was still living with my mother, Alice turned up unannounced at the house, banging the door knocker. I was there alone; my mother was away for work. Alice was barefoot, soaking wet and covered mud. She was crying. I let her in, brought her a towel and we sat on the edge of my bed. She explained that she had gone through Adam’s ceremony. She spoke slowly, tentatively, as if she didn’t trust her own version of events. The ceremony had involved being alone with him, she said, for three days, during which they fasted. He only allowed her to consume apple juice. She paused, on the verge of tears. She seemed to waver between misprision and candid, volcanic confession. I felt her sense of loyalty to Adam had coalesced with a desperate need to divulge, to return to stable ground. I was impatient. I urged her to speak. I needed to know what had happened. On the third night, she said, Adam took her to a long barrow – a neolithic burial chamber – on the outskirts of Chippenham. Once inside the barrow, he gave her mushroom tea. It was very strong, she said. Exhausted, sleep-deprived and half-starved, she came up hard and fast. Adam had brought a drum with him, and the birchwood mask. He held the mask over his face, banged the drum, and chanted: the Devil is inside you, the Devil is inside you, the Devil is inside you. She ran away – escaped? – around dawn, and walked the six or so miles to my house. I was the only person she knew who would understand what she had been through, but who was no longer a firm acolyte of Adam’s. There was anger and terror in Alice’s words. I should take care of her, I thought. She should stay and sleep. I told her as much. But she insisted that she wanted to go back home to her parents’ house to be alone. By confessing to me, I had become an extension of the experience, a coda to the ceremony’s horrors. I was not neutral or safe. I was culpable. * That winter, I went to the south of France, where I worked on farms and smallholdings through the unfortunately acronymized WWOOFing community. I was determined to travel down the backbone of Spain and onto Tangiers, with a vague, naive intention of finding something more appealing than university. Six weeks into that trip, I received a call from my father’s sister informing me he had been diagnosed with advanced, acute myeloid leukaemia. I coached to Toulouse, spent a sleepless night at an airport hotel, and flew back to the UK. I was rehired at the shop, and over the following months shuffled between work, home and a hospital in London, where my father was undergoing treatment. Inevitably, back in Corsham high street, I bumped into Adam. It had been a while, half a year at least, since I’d last seen him. He was waiting outside the Co-Op for the bus. Things had changed for him, too. He’d also cut his hair. We exchanged a few words. He was calm, reserved. There was a palpable sense of rejection and distance between us, like two exes who find themselves forced to make bitter pleasantries in some unavoidable social context. He didn’t say anything about 2012, or the ceremony, or the Zodiacal circle. He didn’t speak of devils and visions. I told him about my father’s diagnosis. He said his father, too, had been diagnosed with cancer. Adam took this not as a coincidence, but as a synchronicity. He nodded his head and looked along the road as though our fathers’ illnesses confirmed to him that he and I were still, somehow, connected, and that his powers of perception – his ability to recognise the signs – were as sharp as they’d ever been. That was the last time I spoke to him. I lost contact with everyone in the group, except for Alice, with whom I maintained an uncertain, on-again, off-again friendship. I didn’t think about Adam much over the following two years. And on Friday 21 December 2012, I didn’t think about him at all. I was back from university, at the pub with school friends for a pre-Christmas get-together. There was lots of local gossip to catch up on – so-and-so’s brother had robbed William Hill with an air rifle and fake moustache. After several pints, I walked back to my mother’s house, fell into a drunken sleep around midnight, and woke up well after dawn, with an ashy mouth and no memory of what I had dreamt, if I had dreamt anything at all. How does someone live in the shadow of a failed rapture? When I thought of Adam over the years, I imagined him ageing into an ultra-fringe conspiracy nut, carrying out local ‘Do Not Comply’ protests against the Babylon System in the same vein as Piers Corbyn’s quintessentially British, anti-cashless strawberry theft at the Aldi in Greenwich. I thought of him, too, becoming a lovable weirdo living off-grid, tending to a little patch of land, growing vegetables and raising chickens, a kind of homesteader Boo Radley whom the adults let well alone and the kids tell stories about. The answer, I suppose, would depend on how much he truly believed in the new era, his green hallucination of paradise, and to what extent he knew it to be wishful thinking, a retreat into a reverie in which he was preeminent. It is an intoxicating idea – I had been intoxicated by it – that the world can be cleaved apart, separated into the enlightened few who are worthy of being saved, and the unthinking masses who are not. In the summer of 2013, Adam drowned in a pond, during a four-day trance festival. His companions had left him swimming in the water alone. The promotion for that year’s festival emphasised the lush, untouched, otherworldly nature of the site. It was located on a private farm, it read, deep in one of the most remote parts of the UK, surrounded by valleys, with quartz crystal everywhere, endless green hills, standing stones, wild ponies and horses: a place where the road ends. Image © (https://unsplash.com/license) Wolfgang Hasselmann