If at First

enhancing their natural functions. His perception of the taproom began to alter, the physical abandoning him, leaving only people. They were their thoughts, tightly woven streamers of ideas, memories, emotions, interacting, fusing and budding. Coldly beautiful.
    ‘Go home,’ he told Eleanor’s father.
    The man was a furnace of anger and righteousness. Indignation blooming at the non-believer’s impudence. ‘This is not your concern,’ he told Greg.
    ‘Nor is she yours, not any more,’ Greg replied. ‘No longer your little girl. She makes her own choices now.’
    ‘God’s girl!’
    It would’ve been so easy to thump the arrogant bastard. A deluge of mayhem strobed through Greg’s mind, the whole unarmed combat manual on some crazy mnemonic recall, immensely tempting. He concentrated hard on the intransigent mind before him, domination really wasn’t his suit, too difficult and painful.
    ‘Go
home.
’ He pushed the order, clenching his jaw at the effort.
    The man’s thoughts shrank from his meddling insistence, cohesion broken. Faith-suppressed reactions, the animal urge to lash out, fists pounding, feet kicking, boiled dangerously close to the surface.
    Greg thrust them back into the subconscious, knowing his nails would be biting into his palms at the exertion.
    The father flung a last imploring glance to a daughter who was genuinely loved in a remote, filtered manner. Rejection triggered the final humiliation, and he fled, his soul keening, eternal hatred sworn. Greg sensed his own face reflected in the agitated thoughts, distorted to demonic preconceptions. Then he was gone.
    The taproom slowly rematerialized. The gland’s neurohormones were punishing his brain. He steadied himself on the bar.
    There were knowing grins which he fended off with a sheepish smile. Forced. A low grumble of conversation returned, cut with snickers. An entire generation’s legend born, this night would live for ever.
    Eleanor was trembling in reaction, Angus’s arm around her shoulder, strictly paternal. She insisted she was all right, wanted to carry on, please.
    Greg was shown her wide sunny smile for the first time, an endearing combination of gratitude and shyness. He didn’t have to buy another drink all night.
    *
    ‘Kibbutzes always seemed a bit of a contradiction in terms to me,’ Greg said. ‘Christian Marxists. A religious philosophy ofdignified individuality, twinned with state oppression. Not your obvious partnership.’ He and Eleanor were walking down the dirt track to his chalet in Berrybut Spinney, a couple of kilometres along the shore from Edith Weston. The old time-share estate’s nightly bonfire glimmered through the black trees ahead, shooting firefly sparks high into the cloudless night. A midnight zephyr was rucking the surface of Rutland Water, wavelets lapping on the mud shallows. He could hear the smothered-waterfall sound from the discharge pipes as the reservoir was filled by the pumping stations on the Welland and Nene, siphoning off the March floodwater. The water level had been low this Christmas, parched farmland placing a massive demand for irrigation. Thousands of square metres of grass and weeds around the shore that’d grown up behind the water’s summer retreat were slowly drowning under its return. As the rotting vegetation fermented it gave off a gas which smelt of rancid eggs and cow shit. It lasted for six weeks each year.
    ‘Not much of either in a kibbutz,’ Eleanor said, ‘just work. God, it was squalid, medieval. We were treated like people-machines, everything had to be done by hand. Their idea of advanced machinery was the plough which the shire horses pulled. God’s will. Like hell!’
    Greg nodded sympathetically, he’d seen the inside of a kibbutz. She was chattering now, a little nervous. The restrictive doctrine that’d dominated her childhood had stunted the usual pattern of social behaviour, leaving her slightly unsure, and slightly turned on by new-found freedom.
    Greg felt himself getting high on expectation. He was growing impatient to reach the chalet, and bed with that fantastic-looking body. Edwards’ face was already indistinct, monochrome, falling away. Even the neurohormone hangover had evaporated.
    The tall ash and oak trees of Berrybut Spinney had died years ago, unable to survive the Warming. They’d been turned into gigantic gazebos for the cobaea vines Greg and the other estate residents had planted around their broad buttress roots,