Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

It was a moment, that was all, of extreme disorientation, but though it passed it did not, he felt, pass fully. He reached under the bed for the human-skin Bible and, kneeling over it on the bedroom floor, opened it at Psalms; perhaps he did not open it at Psalms at all, perhaps he scanned through page after page looking for something that might speak to him. He has remembered this evening so often that he has muddied it with his mind — but there it was in any case and however it came to be. There in Psalms it said, Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? And thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?

One cannot be expected to remember everything, and in fact remembering everything is a hindrance to living; if an event comes as a thousand details the brain needs to forget nine hundred of them in order derive any meaning from that event. So a woman with dyed red hair, coarse skin, and a pen in her hand has explained. But, she has also explained, too much forgetting is bad. He had wanted to take her to task over this: Define too much, define bad, who do you think you are, do you think I am a child?

I'm going to say three words and I'd like you to repeat them after me: house, shoelace, picture. He does not remember what answer he gave, only that he wished for the woman to look away as he strove to meet her ludicrous demands; and he knows that he must, despite an effort, have failed to please her.

“Please draw a clock face on this piece of paper for me,” she had said.

“Analogue or digital?” he asked, looking her acutely in the eye.

“Analogue.”

He had drawn carefully; despite this the outcome had been unusual. He could see that what he had drawn was not a good clock face and that there was something wrong, but he could not see what, nor why. One day, he supposes, he will not even remember that he does not know or remember, and the ageless face of that woman taking his drawing and saying, “Right, Mr. Jameson, thank you,” will constitute for him neither hope nor fear, it will just be an unknown face.

Once he asked the woman with the fox hair what was meant by the missing e. It was just that he kept remembering it, and she seemed to have all the answers. She told him if he remembered something and he couldn't think why, he should let it go; it didn't matter. He was edgy and restless. He did not want to let it go. Then there is the cherry tree, he told her: they had once had a cherry tree in their garden, come to think of it they still might. And there was the human-skin Bible. There was 1960. The year his father died, also the year Henry was born. She just nodded and offered a sympathetic smile, and rubbed her hand across her belly. He remembers that now, wonders if she had a stomachache, or if she wanted to go home.

What if he did not remember that? He feels desperately unreliable. The bed creaks as he shifts his weight towards the centre, and instinctively he folds his arms around the body lying there. He decides not to be afraid. When he looks in the mirror he does not see an old man, nor does he see a brain that lacks logic. He sees himself, greatly changed, but undeniably himself, and he is grateful to this self for persisting this long. For years he saw in others what he thought was anger or hostility and he wondered why, then, mankind should be so incalculably reclusive, so intent on making life worse than it need be. Now he sees that this is not anger but rather a simple refusal to be worn down or away. The old man who looks in the mirror and sees an old man beholds also a man who has given up. This is not him. There are vast tracts of his life which he believes unassailable by disease, and strings of days in which he is no less coherent and lucid than he was as a twenty-or thirty-year-old. He is amazed, thus far, at the banality of this land of forgetfulness.

It is dark and late, although he is unsure how late. He moves his arm from under the other body's weight and puts his hand on her hip. Eleanor, he mumbles, as if expecting her to wake up and make things right. Still uncomfortable he rolls to his other side so that he can see some night sky through the French windows. Out of sight are the branches of the cherry tree, perhaps heavy with cherries, or perhaps bare — he cannot think precisely, with his arm numbed like this and his brain half asleep, where in the year they are. The last clear recollection he has of today was looking at the map in the car, and even this, even this might have happened a different day.

That evening Helen had stood so firmly at the blade of the knife, her hands on her hips, that he had been sure she would not be physically capable of dying. She had thought she was getting old, and yet her hands were oddly young and childish. He had asked this anxious question — What is it I'm supposed to do now? — as if she might step down from the ladder and guide him neatly back to himself. It was not meant to be the last time he would see her alive. On the contrary, it was the sight of her so solid and gallant on the ladder, her pinafore blowing in a new wind, cherries falling into her bowl, that propelled him into blankness, timidity, and confusion. For the first time he did not find himself the better of the two, and for the first time he realised he might need her. He saw the wind pick up. He stood for a long time in a reverie, his hands to his chin, thinking he might go out and help her.

Their lives were in three suitcases, a suitcase per life. On their last full day in London he woke Helen up and suggested one final act before leaving.

“A last adventure,” he said. “You choose, it's for you.”

“The zoo?” Helen said sleepily, hoisting herself up in bed and blinking at the window. A chilly, grey light struggled into the room.

“The zoo?”

“I had a dream I was at the zoo.”

“Is that where we should go then?”

Gathering her senses, she tied her hair back and sipped water. “Yes. We must go there, Jake. Could we?”

Generally they obeyed Helen's dreams. Her dreams tended to be practical and prescriptive, the kind that come clearly and vividly and settle arbitrary dilemmas without fuss. Her dreams had directed them to the cinema on several occasions — they saw Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Hustler, West Side Story. It had directed them to buy the Mini before anybody else they knew had one. To stock up on Gentleman's Relish.

So they took the Underground, stepping out of a city that was still tired from the night before, into the open gaze of macaques and spider monkeys. It was early on a cold Wednesday morning and humans were outnumbered by primates— outnumbered and also scrutinised with a gnomic scepticism, a pointed finger slightly bent, or a deep frown that reached across the forehead, some scratching, some distracted eating.

“It's as I dreamed,” she said. “Like a hallucination, to find all this here in the middle of London.”

Helen wanted to show Henry the aquarium, the hallucinogenic flashes of neon fish in water imported from the Bay of Biscay — everything borrowed and other as in a dream. She wanted to see all this one last time before they left the city and plunged themselves into a life of — what?

“What?” she had said one evening, quite suddenly. “What will be there for us?”

“We can save money and buy land, we can build a house. It's cheap there.”

“Why do we need to build a house? We can buy a house, can't we? There's one just along the road for sale, that couple who are moving to Hackney. Our savings could help us buy that—”

“Our savings aren't for houses in Hackney,” he said. “Houses in Hackney already exist. They're for new houses. They're for making new things exist.”