Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

Eleanor crossed her legs uncomfortably and tapped her bare knees.

“Honestly, I don't have your strength to believe.”

Helen leaned over and put her hand on Eleanor's knee. “You have all the strength in the world. You especially, of all people. It's plain to see.”

She stood and picked up the sign. Then she climbed the ladder and hooked it back in place, wavering, humming. He was afraid she would fall and he thought he should go and help her.

“With this sign, I call the woman clothed with the sun to The Sun Rises,” she grinned as she descended. “I call the People of God to the wilderness.”

“I hope the People of God drink a lot,” Eleanor answered.

“The People of God do everything, they are everyone.”

He stared up at the sign; it looked good in situ, and the woman seemed to be staring straight back at him, precisely at him and nowhere else. He winked at her.

Then later, Eleanor straightened her legs into the quiet strip of sunlight and smoked. Rook was there and Helen was not. They sat on the low wall around the bright rectangle of concrete as the sun set.

“Cannabis,” Eleanor said, passing it on. “I have it for the aches in my back. It's not just for coloured people anymore.”

He straightened his legs along the wall too, sun-filled, dusty, and tired after the day of work. He held the cigarette between his fingers; of course, it was not a cigarette, but he was so ignorant about drugs that he had no proper word for it. This had all just been beginning in London when he left, he had started to see it, people smoking in parks here and there, a sort of immature excitement gathering that had not been present before.

“Thanks,” he murmured.

He smoked, loosening instantly, and passed it to Rook, who was folding minute paper birds from cigarette papers — elegant long-necked cranes with wings bent and poised for flight.

Rook refused. “Too old. You shouldn't smoke that, you bad children.”

Fuck off, Rook, he thought happily. With a hazy concentration he inspected the long tight roll of tobacco. So much more interest in an object you have no word for. He inhaled more before passing it to Eleanor.

His mind was milky and he wasn't sure how he came to be here, where Helen had gone, where Rook had come from. Having worked his way through much of Eleanor's bottle of gin, and having eaten only mussels all day, he was drunk and hungry; he was optimistic, too. He had the sudden feeling that all his decisions had been right, coming here, marrying Helen, that a potential chaos was being fought back, and that Helen was instrumental in this — no, necessary to it. That peace he had seen in her earlier, it was a peace missing in himself. Somehow it seemed she had a wisdom that could presage and protect them, a wisdom he should not mock.

“We did good work today,” he said. “We made a difference.”

He looked up at the rear wall of The Sun Rises and then across the silken concrete and out over the moors. He loved the way this low, random wall marked man from nature, how there was so little separation. So little, but enough. Under the concrete the few remaining weeds were dying. The peat glowed in the sunset as if on fire.

“There's so much we can do,” Eleanor said. She sat upright for a moment to clear a path for inspiration. “We can start doing food. Why don't we get some tables and those chequered tablecloths?”

Rook flew one of his paper cranes across the garden where it landed and nestled the tip of its wing in the wet concrete. “We can bring back the debating groups.”

“You know, the red-and-white ones, and candles in bottles. Sara can do the cooking.”

“We can have snail races.”

“We can have book clubs, Nescafé, we can have dances—”

“We can start an Assassination Club.” Rook swilled whiskey around his glass. “We can jointly and democratically decide who to kill, and then we can fashion weapons from unlikely objects and go forth and murder. Being humble folk it may be messy at first but practice will improve us.”

“We can begin,” he cut in on Rook, tired of this nonsense, “an action group. A pro-Israel lobby group.”

Rook laughed. “This is Lincolnshire. You might not find many supporters.”

“On the contrary, areas without any strong leanings this way or that are good fertile ground for this sort of thing.”

“Why would you want to?” Eleanor asked, slumping her body weight onto her knees and gazing, as though longingly, at the creamy concrete beneath her. She looked tired.

“Listen, it isn't enough just to give a people a block of land and then deny them their history. They're surrounded by countries who deny there was ever a holocaust. What the hell are they doing there, then, if there wasn't a holocaust? Why didn't they just stay in their nice European apartments? Has it ever occurred to you that they might not want to live in Israel any more than you and I do? Maybe they'd like to go back to Vienna or Berlin — the places they were born. And now everybody says the Jews are a — what was the word I heard? — an unscrupulous race. A naturally unscrupulous race. Why? Because they won't settle for being trampled? Because now that they've been given a piece of land and have to live with the hatred of their neighbours they would like something more?”

It was the first time he had ever really voiced these views. Anger — albeit an anger that was blunted with smoke and drink — surfaced, ebbed, and surfaced. He was angry, not because he cared about a distant race but because he wanted to defend his mother, and his mother, if she were here now, wouldn't want him to do so. She would shake her head and say, Asch, Jacob, you would be better not worrying about it, you would be better starting up a wine-tasting club.

“We don't want to become too — political.” Eleanor frowned.

“Take this place,” he argued, “your uncle left it to you, a building, some land, a business. It's all very well, but do you want it? Is it enough, without any love, or—”

He gave up on the thought. The word love had slipped out with the smoke and he wished it might disperse with the smoke.

“No.” Eleanor pursed her lips tightly around the sound. “But I'd be stupid to think it's not enough when it's all I've got.”

He felt slightly ashamed by the question, but then kicked the shame away. By Eleanor's argument nothing would ever improve or progress, it was a terrible, overly humble, defeatist thing to believe.

Rook slung his legs over onto the moors side of the low wall and stood, cracking his knuckles. “For pity's sake don't start up some ridiculous Jewish group, Jake. You'll upset your mother.”

“She might want to come along.”

“She will not want to come along.”

They eyed each other for a few moments and then he stood too and picked the butts off the wall. It was time to go home to Helen, he thought, and get some sleep. It had been a long day.

“We could have a vegetable-growing club. A poetry club!” Eleanor, laid out along the wall, clapped her hands in fantasy. “We could be the hub of the community. We could have coffee mornings with custard, apple cake, apple strudel, ice cream, chocolate sponge—”

In that moment he suddenly missed his father. He looked at Rook and was angry with him for his flippancy. For all that was disappointing, violent, and rigid in him, his father would not have joked childishly about assassination clubs, and he would have spoken up against the triviality of poetry and ice cream; his father was a man of strong political ideals. Circumstance meant that he could only live them through the impotence of nostalgia, but he defended them viciously in that domain, locked in his mind, locked in his colonial anecdotes. Ice cream would never have been on his agenda.