Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

In the garden he pulled himself up onto the wall and stood; from his vantage point he could see the outline of Sara's aggressively clipped hedges and shrubs, and into the next garden, neatly turfed, and out across the fields to the steelworks churlish on the near horizon. Steel and sugar, he thought. Such mixed exports, as if the people here really had no idea who they were.

He heard somebody in the bathroom, and then the lights went out upstairs. He didn't know whether Rook had gone home or had settled on the sofa or had gone to Sara's room. It was too far, he decided, for him to have walked home, and if he had arrived here by car certainly there had been no sound of the car leaving. Rook's manifestations never had a history or a process, he simply issued from nowhere one minute and dispensed himself to nowhere the next.

The clouds of smoke that rose from the factory chimneys were tin coloured, and to their right the orange gas flame seared the night sky. He had always found these sheer, hard colours rebellious and brilliant, strangely clean. It was so unlike the sugar-factory clouds that, dispersed in the toxic lights, came up neon orange and yellow and faded eventually into something sickly. He remembered standing on this wall as a child, watching the flame, brewing the courage to jump, and then one day finally jumping and landing two-footed, with a plump thud. But surely no; he had never lived in this house as a child. That was not a memory at all but a fabrication, perhaps a dream. He was drunk, he realised, on holy cherries. Still, he held his balance on the wall and tasted the residue of wine on his tongue.

It was plain jealousy, with Rook; he could see that now. All the teenage years of warring with the man had suggested a complex power struggle between them, when in fact its cause was simple. He was jealous of Rook for winning Sara's love. At the same time he genuinely liked and respected the man for that success, and of course like and respect were integral features of the jealousy. Sara should be with Rook; it wasn't just that she loved him, it was that she loved him in a difficult way, with risk and insecurity, the sort of love she had always lacked with her own husband, and the sort that was equally returned. Despite Rook always meaning to him the loss of his mother, he also denoted some kind of deeper discovery of her, and he found himself hoping that Rook had gone off into the darkness of Sara's room, that they were together there now.

But when he heard the scuff of shoes he knew it was Rook and was hardly surprised. The tall figure appeared as a shadow and remained so. Neither of them spoke. Rook rolled a cigarette with a series of deft flicks, lit it, and handed it up.

He smoked, crouched on the wall, and handed it back to Rook without a word. The menorah was still burning inside the window. Its message was striking: here we are, here we live.

Seeing Rook's eyes gleaming judgement in the darkness, he was taken by a thought.

“You think I've failed,” he said.

“I do?”

“In coming back from London.”

The old man's eyes looked up at him. “On the contrary, you think you've failed.”

“On the contrary.”

He looked away from Rook.

“London was too easy. It's full of pioneers. You can see where pioneers are by the colour they leave everywhere, do you understand me? The lights and the way they fill in all the black spaces. There isn't a black space left in London. Here though—”

“So you're here to colonise.”

“The potential here—”

He extended his arms to the darkness.

Rook coughed. “What's this big idea that we're in control of our own characters and destinies anyway, Jacob? Much easier to give in to the pull.”

“Maybe.” He took the cigarette again. The jealousy surfaced on a new, convenient level. “What were you doing with my wife?”

Rook straightened suddenly as if he'd had a brilliant idea. “Isn't she great”'

“I think so.”

“And that she gave up so much for you. Brave girl, to take the plunge. It's a responsibility, my boy. Now of course she's yours to look after. All yours.”

He rolled the smoke around his mouth and frowned. “Gave up?”

“Her engagement.”

“Engagement?”

He thrust the cigarette back to Rook and shifted his weight, rubbed the smell of sugar from his nose.

“You do of course know about her engagement, Jake?”

“To whom?”

“A good man of the cloth, a believer. Her parents were very keen. Very disappointed when she chose you instead. Still, you are an architect I suppose. That's something.”

They muttered humourless laughter together; Helen's father had nothing but disdain for architects, England was going to the dogs and it was the buildings that were sending it there; buildings were not what they used to be, progress was peril, the road to hell was clad in cement, and so the rant continued along this same weak vein. He looked along the top of the wall and felt incensed.

“I've got no idea what you're talking about, Rook, and to be honest I don't even believe you. Why would Helen tell you that when she hasn't told me? It doesn't make sense. You never make sense.”

Rook shrugged and wandered away from the wall. “Believe me or not.”

“Why wouldn't she tell me?”

“Everybody has a secret life,” Rook whispered. He took a red leaf from the hedge he was standing next to and burnt regular holes into it with his cigarette. Then he pushed it up against the shadows on his jacket. “A ladybird, Jake,” he said, coughing, peering down. “See it?”

“What do you know about him then, this man?”

Rook flicked the cigarette into the hedge and put his hands into surrender. “Ask your wife, my boy. Ask your wife.”

“Oh for God's sake, you started this.”

“You started this,” Rook mocked.

On an impulse he jumped from the wall and lurched towards Rook, thumping the man's chest. Rook laughed thinly and lashed out, swiping his leg from under him. He pulled Rook down with him and they scrambled ludicrously on the ground, both knowing that they could have stayed standing if they had wanted; that it was part game. He knew also that, unlike their fights when he was a child, he could now probably kill Rook without much trouble. They dug punches in each other; he felt Rook's knuckles pushing into his face, not punching but grinding almost, as if he wanted to wear him down to sugar.

It would be easy to stand up now, throwing the old man off him, shrugging, swinging a ferocious punch to his head. He could break every subservient cycle of his life, bring the glass house into being with one sterile and excellent act of violence. Pinning Rook to the grass he thought of Helen's giggle earlier, and the way she crossed her arms like a child; he entertained jealousy, suspicion, he doubted his wife and jabbed Rook in the ribs for it. He tried to feel jealous about his wife's man of the cloth, but the emotion kept redirecting itself instead to Rook, to the fact that Rook had got her to confide where he couldn't.

Then he stood and let Rook give him a savage kick in the shin, accompanied by a wheeze of apparent joy. Rook stood, and they flailed their arms again in the dark. Some punches found their target, most didn't. There was a little blood at the corner of his mouth that tasted pleasant; this was where he always knew that the fine and confusing line between fight and play was crossed, and that play had won. When one of them bled Rook always laughed and he always followed, and Rook would take the blood on his fingers and say, Watch, watch it turn from scarlet to burgundy. And they would do so, utterly detached from the violent fact of the fluid and how it had come to be there.

Rook did not reach his fingers for the blood this time. He sat on the grass and gave out steam on his laboured breath. He was laughing as usual.