Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

She dropped her shoulders. “It's not that I'm saying we shouldn't go, Jake. It's just, what will we do there?”

“It's my home, that area. Now that my father is dead Sara needs me. I need her. Please, Helen, bear with me, trust me.”

She had bowed her head towards the book she was holding and had resumed reading. “I'll try,” she said, and patted his hand when he leaned in to kiss her.

If nothing else, she knew when a game was lost. He had already had a job interview, and been offered the position, and accepted it, almost within the same breath. A day trip there and back, dropping in on Sara for long enough to visit the grave and then turn on his heel before dark descended. It had been hopelessly easy. Architects were rarely prepared to move to rural northern areas, not with the great London rebuild happening. In his interview he had been effortlessly impressive; he faced three men in their fifties, and talked at length about concrete. With a piece of paper he made a small, impromptu presentation of the possibilities.

“Concrete is a gift for the architect,” he'd said, curving the paper into a series of flowing shapes. “By pouring it into moulds it becomes a very graceful material, you see, it has a freedom about it that other hard-wearing materials don't.” He formed it into waves, domes, folded it into triangles.

The men nodded — this was hardly breaking news but they agreed, wholeheartedly — and they asked him for a portfolio of work which he produced: suburban developments mainly, and six tower blocks in south London. He showed them series of shots of a Victorian street damaged by time and war. There it was in the first few photographs, a slum almost, with blackening brickwork and rows of drab doors and smashed windows. There, in the next photograph, in precisely etched detail, was the same scene flattened into red rubble. And there in the next set of pictures was the same location again but this time a silky-flat square of poured concrete with low, light, regular buildings around it bearing shop fronts and library signs, cafés, launderettes, bookmakers, Odeon signs.

The three men had nodded and run their hands over their chins; they said they would call him in for a second interview, and the next day a letter came that dispensed with the interview and suggested he start at his earliest convenience.

Walking through the zoo they saw animals churned from their enclosures while someone in overalls scrubbed their excrement from the ground. The tigers, having ripped up their meat with long, delicate teeth and claws, stood perfectly still and watched the few visitors passing; he scrunched his nose and stared flagrantly at them until their returned stare made him uncomfortable. An overbearing urge came to him to put his hand through the bars and beckon them, then to stroke their long spines and see if the orange hair felt different to the black. He resisted of course, but only because he thought, if he beckoned, they wouldn't come. Their stares were dignified and rejectful; he checked his clothes and posture and wandered on.

When they reached the aviary he passed the child to Helen and stood with his hands in his pockets. The aviary was newly built; he remembered having read about it, and about its architect Cedric Price. He had seen Price once, walking down the street near the Festival Hall — not that he would have known it was Cedric Price if his colleague hadn't pointed him out. He had always been rather ignorant about these things, a little parochial, clueless, and wayward. Nor did he pretend to know what he didn't, in fact the older he got the more he valued ignorance as a kind of kudos in itself — that one didn't need to pad their existence with trivia, or simply couldn't be bothered to direct their attention into such small corners.

The aviary was a vast structure of glass held aloft by tension cables and aluminium castings. He had never before seen so much glass in a building; the sheer rise of it, the complexity of its frames, the very overengineering of something made for creatures as blasé as birds. The very overengineering of something that was supposed to emulate a simple sky.

“Look, Henry, look,” Helen was muttering. “Look at that, look at those birds! What sound do birds make? Do you know? Do they go cheep? Cheepcheep?”

Henry looked startled, but apparently not by the birds or the tower of glass, more, perhaps, by the general rigour of being newly alive.

He seemed to remember then that Price had been an imposing man, black-haired, a sincere intelligence — not a tenth as imposing as his creation, admittedly, but then that creation now seemed to lend its grandeur back to its maker, as if its only function were to add to that which had given it life. In retrospect, through the convex lens of memory, Price became a sudden god of sorts.

Cedric Price, architect of the birds. Jake Jameson, architect of the high-rise tenant. Architect of Harold Macmillan and his winds of change. What did the birds know, what did the tenants know, of philosophy or politics or the aspirations of one man, and what did they care? The real function of the building, he thought in that moment, was to please and bolster the architect, nobody and nothing else. He stood for a long time simply taking in the angles of glass, enjoying the mathematics that held it there and the humdrum screwing of metal into metal by way of sums scrawled on paper. The way it decided what sort of life the birds should lead, and the way it half led that life for them.

“Do you think it's big enough for the birds?” Helen worried.

“Yes,” he said. “It was built precisely for birds.”

“Do you think they know that's the sky out there?”

“Yes.”

“So they must miss it.”

“But they don't have a memory.”

“Why would they need a memory?” she frowned. “You don't need a memory to know you're trapped.”

“They're not trapped, Helen — there's sky outside and sky inside, and a pane of glass between, which is just a collection of atoms like air itself, or like rain. Glass is liquid, just liquid. The birds live happily as the glass tells them to, like they live as the rain tells them to, like they fly at certain altitudes because the air tells them to.”

“But—”

“You must understand.”

He went to put an arm around her waist but she gave him the baby and walked towards the glass until her nose was against it. There were one or two people ambling some distance from them, but otherwise the zoo was struck with early-morning silence. Against the brightness of the glass his wife was part silhouette, her smallness, slenderness tucked neatly inside a brown dress — a sparrow, he thought, or a thrush, something very English, and something lovely not in its entirety but in its detail. The way she tended to consume minor moments by tapping her toes or scratching a very particular area on her right cheek.

He turned from his wife then to see that approaching the aviary was a man with a large cage of birds, not parrots, too small, but audacious and colourful nonetheless, and the man put the cage down heavily while he opened a glass door, and went inside.

Helen marvelled: “Where did the door come from? I didn't see a door—”

True, neither had he. It had appeared and then swiftly disappeared in a trick of glass and metal. Once in, the man began releasing the disoriented creatures, tipping them out of the cage so that they stuttered on the air and then flew any which way in an outpouring of colour. Both Helen and Henry were staring openly at the man as he ushered the birds out with his small white hands, Henry reaching his own hands out in exploratory swipes at the space around him.

At that another three men came, carrying containers. They, too, stepped in through the invisible door and began laying down trays of seed and fruit salad, flinging tubs of cockroaches and mealworms up onto platforms above their heads. The birds came from their perches and boxes, slapping their astonishing wings, singing, squawking, diving, rising in trails of prime, high-pitched plumage.