Sometimes if they look just too buttoned-down, I ask about a good bar that’s open late. After a bit of chitchat they always accompany me into some dodgy spot, they start to grope me, they get careless—and Don films it.”

DON

Continues. “Exactly, I film it, then I step in, we show the nutter the footage and ask him politely for his credit card and PIN. Usually there’re a few hours during which we can relieve their accounts of cash and go shopping in a select few shops.

There’s just been a nationwide conversion to cashless payment systems. If our current strategy ceases to work at some stage, we’ll come up with something else.”

They always come up with something else.

That’s the upside of a childhood without parents putting on Mozart at dinner, without a father admonishingly saying: “Sit up straight, Benedict.” The advantage of growing up without the limitations of a so-called education, without the active imposition of moral definitions and without any inculcation of a sense of right and wrong.

Children driven in opulent electric SUVs to school and afterwards to go horseback riding or to ballet class, who were read bedtime stories from the collected works of Ovid, and for whom the biggest conceivable catastrophe seems to be the possible separation of their parents, grow up with the idea that the world is a threat and they can protect themselves only with the help of the police. Children like that would stand helplessly in front of the cold heater in the case of an EMP bomb and they’d be the first ones eaten by the rest in a nuclear bunker.

One can say this for an absolutely solitary childhood: a fearlessness surrounds the four children, who had learned that it could always get worse, and thus they fear nothing. No panic during a power outage or a flood, no tears when there’s nothing around to eat, the four don’t believe in the system. They don’t believe in the fucking system and trust only themselves. People who survive a childhood without love, in poverty, surrounded by brutality, do not expect any gifts.

They just get by.

And

Don

Is satisfied.

The hall looks almost

Well—

If sunlight were to stream through the leaded glass windows it would almost be romantic. The children have pushed their mattresses surprisingly close together. They could easily have a huge amount of privacy in this nearly four-hundred-square-meter space, but they lie close together around a TV, with green plants scattered around. A homemade table of brick and boards, stools.

Once they’d declared the hall their hall, the children, who are no longer children but adults, who drink coffee, had taken great joy in furnishing their life. The ark is now very well equipped. One of the first donations from a friendly mid-forties man had financed the solar panels on the roof,