Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

As they round the small shop he examines the food and realises that this is true for most things, and that his likes and dislikes have become peripheral trivia. A shoulder of beef behind glass. Some — what are they? He reads the label: clementines. He looks back at the beef, remembers a precise time he had it in a sandwich with the hot white sauce, what he was wearing (blue nylon trousers, hair thick around his ears), where he stood (by the piano), who with (Helen, playing Ir ving Berlin, Alice on her lap); the memory of the food is more real than the present, and in this memory he loves it — the taste and warmth of the meat, the fondness of the moment. But that slab of pink meat behind the glass, a lining of blood around its edge, makes him feel sick now. Vertigo overcomes him. He glances across to Eleanor to tell her but decides against it.

She loads the basket with dirty vegetables and he can't help but think how like her it is to have dirty vegetables. Always digging, her hands always a little sullied, her clothes, too. She unloads the basket at the counter and pays while he stands and watches. When the supermarkets came Helen was glad to be out of these awkward little shops. Into the clean and bright! You could get everything you wanted in one go. Eleanor struggles with bags, holds one out to him.

“Any chance you might help?”

He takes one, and then insists on taking them both. They get into the car, he into the driver's seat. The air feels thick and congested. Caught in it is the thought of himself as a young man, he is tall with dark hair and a leather coat, dark-blue nylon trousers, he is composed, beautiful some say, his skin tans the moment it sees the sun. He attracts stories, he wears them, and they are what make him alive. As he drives away, Eleanor chatting to herself, he wishes he could be more sure about the point of the missing e. So strong and sharp is the memory of it, and of the minutiae: the leaf that looked like a ladybird, the key chain, the deep orange of his mother's carpet, leaves elsewhere, a stain in the shape of a leaf, leaf banisters, woods. But what of it? What was its point? So sharp, and he has made a story around it, but now that he thinks about the story it resolves nothing. Nor is the tale necessarily true. He has begun to worry about the truth, and to become protective over it. That young man is nothing if he has no true stories. Just an empty and ongoing present.

Driving, though, he feels at ease. Today there is something he has to do. In these new restless, workless days there is something he has to do. He must remember a list of words beginning with d. The drive home passes in anticipation of it — finding the list, constructing patterns to order the words in the mind, applying some discipline and logic. Then sitting down to the test, a thing he has always enjoyed doing. There is a hope, more than a hope, that he will pass it. Impossible that he will fail.

At home he helps Eleanor unpack the shopping and then takes up a circular route around the house, beginning in the kitchen, coming through to the hall, ascending the staircase (letting his fingers bounce lightly against the leaf shapes wrought into the banisters, relaxing), following the landing to Henry's bedroom (leaving his footprints on the chocolate carpet), ducking through the secret door, crossing his own bedroom (past Joy's letters, which he eyes suspiciously, not sure why they are lying there on the floor), picking step by step down the pine treads of the second staircase into the study (cold draughts caught behind the books), shoving his weight into the jammed door that opens to the living room, coming back to the hall, and standing.

All the while he repeats: discard, devolution, demolish, dish, decrepit, drone, dynasty, diamond, drastic, day, develop, drip. As a method for remembrance, the circular route works. It sets his brain into a loop, and, if he concentrates on the nothingness of the loop, the turgid pointlessness of it, he finds that forgetfulness, having wilder gardens to explore, does not bother with him.

The more he is able to remember, the more the exercise brings him peace. There is a satisfactory quality about gathering the words into his mind, filling him like stones filling his pockets. He has seen a programme, at some point, in which a man gathers dark-grey stones from the shore and his children count the stones into the deep pockets of his coat. They are learning about the relationship between size and weight. If one pocket has small stones and the other large, he leans. At one point the balance is so uneven that he lies on his left side and his children have to grapple underneath him to remove the excess stones from his left pocket until he is standing. They comb the beach for stones that can form pairs. They become obsessed with the task of making him as straight as a plumb line, as if he is suspended from the sky. One shoulder is tilted; they remove a stone and replace it with a pebble. They add a shell and he is almost there; they add a few grains of sand and he squares himself, miraculously balanced, perpendicular to the horizon.

Demolish, drastic, drip. Each word a stone, one in this pocket, one in that. Day and demolish here, drip and develop there. Each word, he imagines, straightens him. He begins to feel their weight sincerely. There are moments when the sheer challenge of his illness feels blessed; he rises to it and the elevation brings new air to breathe, and memories come sharp as shards from nowhere, like this man and the beach. He thinks now, as he often thinks, that perhaps he is not ill at all, or if he is it is very mild, or his case is quirky and reversible; it is, after all, not like him to get old and unwell. He was always going to be assassinated in public like the empress Elisabeth. He was going to haunt his murderer as Elisabeth haunted Lucheni. There was simply no option concerned with fading away in cautious, anxious increments; it is not like him to forget who he is.

He can see Eleanor through the kitchen window, in the garden heaving up weeds; he thought she had gone out, or that she was not here today at all. He can't remember waking up with her this morning and her putting on that pearl-coloured suit jacket and trousers she is wearing now, tight over her broad figure. Her hair is illogical and her shoulders rounded against the effort of gardening.

The letters are still there on the kitchen table, forgotten about. Each time he comes back to them he has to begin the whole logical process again, fumbling with them, feeling unease fold itself up into fear, calculating the outcomes, then, in response to it all, wandering away in a state of pure distraction, his moral vigilance gone.

He makes coffee, pouring the grinds in, releasing the handle, hearing the water shoot through. Then he crushes ice, thinking that by now it must be late enough in the day for his first mint julep, and he assembles the drink with a careful adoring rigour. He sits. It is his greatest pleasure to have a mint julep in the afternoon followed by coffee and to see the evening in slightly intoxicated, his brain responding to the chemicals in his blood and the sense of life being to hand, and something waiting around the corner.

The water trickles through the coffee machine. He fidgets against the need to urinate. Eleanor comes in from the garden and washes her hands, commenting on the smell of the coffee. It occurs to him that there is little or no smell, not of coffee, nor of the delightful sugar, mint, and bourbon of the julep, nor the generic smell of the house, nor, he discovers, his own skin. There are smells perhaps, but they are ghosts. He puts his mug down on the table and breathes in deeply, closing his eyes.

“The cherries are coming,” Eleanor says with a forced brightness.

He is relieved by her brightness and forces his own, smiling and pushing his breath out through his nose. She runs her hand over his head and down his arm, holding his hand, then she comes behind him and presses her chest against his head, stroking him.