Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

Then the recollection of his mother in that wood with those words: You will cause nothing but harm. I am telling you and you must listen.

Then the recollection of a gunshot which explodes his muggy ennui and levers open the air to provide a place from which he will never be excluded. His place. His moors. Every happening, every person, every defining instant, every sense has succumbed to this black gravity of the moors and to a flag of yellow like a flame in his brain setting him on fire. His whole life would appear to be an object hurtling towards a miniature window of time: Joy feeding a mint into his mouth, putting on her yellow silk shoes, and wrinkling her nose up to the weather swarming down the rattling old windows. Going to go to America as soon as I can, leave this rain behind, she said. Him, sucking the last bit of flavour from the mint, in no doubt that she had the courage to leave and wishing he had it himself. And then his life passes through that window and comes out the other side altered, as if a piece of glass embeds itself in him during the transition and digs in deep.

Now it is coming out. He is who knows how old; it is who knows what year; it has been who knows how long. There are letters to Helen from another man: Are you jealous? she asks from some dead place. He sees her hair touching Henry's in the garden and he thinks, yes, jealous of everything that ever touched you — sunlight, God, and death itself. But I am not jealous of the letters. The letters are my last chance at forgiveness.

The glass is coming out of his soul (if he has one, if he does), and with it the pain and sin, and with it the dream. Out goes the baby and the bathwater and the whole lot. Instinct tells him to hold on even if it is pointless. He makes another mark on the timeline: gunshot. Bang. That first gunshot was 1961. He makes four attempts at writing the number next to the line and the last attempt is good, neat for him, and clear.

Helen stood in the centre of the room and looked about her.

“So this is where you were born,” she said. She seemed pleased, he thought. Her voice was keen.

He nodded, yes.

“It's so — humble.”

“I suppose, yes.”

Humble it was, more so now in its dereliction than ever before. The Junk, they used to optimistically call this house, because it always looked as solitary there on the moors as a boat battling the oceans from China. Looking at it now he was taken aback by how small it was, and how derelict, and it was sinking into the peat so that one half of it was shrugged low like a hunched shoulder. Now more than ever, as it sank, and as it came closer to resembling a pile of useless rubble, it lived up to its name.

They stood in what had been the kitchen, a low room about ten feet by ten feet, separated by an unstable wall from a similar room to its left. That was a supporting wall. It would come down before long, what with the gradual collapse of the foundations into the peat. The peat acted like a sponge, pulling solidity into it. It was certain that the whole thing would collapse.

Before them, against the supporting wall, was a staircase that had not existed when he had lived there as a child. The staircase was open to the kitchen, without any banister. It was being pulled akimbo by the shifting wall — this not helped by the fact that it had been badly built in the first place without proper support underneath. It, too, would come down. He took it all in impassively, and then broke the silence.

“These stairs are new.” He banged the falling plasterboard that flanked them. “We used to get up and downstairs by a ladder on the outside wall.”

Helen raised her brows. She had not lived like this as a child; she was from middle-class suburbia and besides, was ten years younger than him, born the very year the war had started. Things were different when she was born, a decade made a difference.

“We hardly belong to the same generation,” he said.

The statement was a crude summary of a flurry of thoughts about time and childhood. It came out rather nonsensically.

“We belong to different generations? So Henry is both your child and your grandchild,” she joked, spreading a picnic blanket on the kitchen floor, stubbornly seeking pleasure in the face of this squalor.

Sitting cross-legged, they took food from the knapsack— some sandwiches, some Battenberg cake, apples, a flask of tea, and for him an inch of whiskey at the bottom of a bottle. It was chilly; she pulled the edge of the picnic blanket over her knees, took the Battenberg cake from the bag, and smiled.

“So what do you think, Helen?”

“Of what? Of this? Of knocking this down?”

“Yes.”

She took the cling film from the cake and handed him some.

“We can't ever afford it.”

He glugged back a mouthful of whiskey and felt it warm his throat.

“We can't afford it now, but we will.”

“You're obsessed. You get obsessed with ideas, Jake, and I never feel there's anything I can do to stop them. I don't even know why you ask me.”

“There'll be a steel frame, not timber, not the timber A-frame of the coach house, a discreet steel frame with a flat roof, glass walls, all glass with masonry walls either end.”

“We'll feel like fish.”

“We'll feel like pioneers.”

Helen watched him dissect his cake.

“You're eating the yellow sections first,” she remarked.

“Yes. I don't like them.”

“So in that case you leave them 'til last.”

“No, you save the best 'til last.”

She, too, was eating the yellow sections, because, he deduced, they were her favourite: the same action, opposite motivations. Like all things they did? Like getting married? Having a child? They both ate with strategy, a cube at a time, peeling the marzipan away.

“You don't like marzipan?” he asked.

“It's horrible.”

“Then you'll be left with it and you'll wish you'd eaten it first.”

“I won't wish I'd eaten it first, because if I'd eaten it first I'd feel sick and wouldn't be able to eat the rest.”

He shook his head and smiled. “No, no. It's like a sacrifice. Making an initial sacrifice before the feast — to appease the gods of hunger.”

“Gods,” she laughed, leaning forward and whispering. “You and your little pagan gods.”

He watched her eat, nibbling cake from the white napkin. Then he stood and wandered into the next room, a cramped and dusty space, ramshackle, cables hanging loose.

“Jake,” he heard her call. “Come and eat.”

“In a minute.”

“Come now.”

He stood still, gazing at the floor where an Indian tiger skin had used to be. His father had been such a fool, a colonial throwback to days gone and better forgotten. They hadn't been allowed to set foot on the tiger skin, even though it had taken up a large part of the room. When Sara had gone into labour, and there was not time to get her from the middle of the moors to the nearest hospital thirty miles away, she gave birth here on this floor. Not on the precious tiger skin, in case of blood. No, not on the tiger skin, on an old blanket.

Babies turn their heads when they emerge. He and Sara agreed that the tiger's mouth, mid-roar, must have been the first thing he saw when he was born. Then she would tell him that the first thing she saw when she was born was the silver of the samovar glinting in a winter morning, and the first thing she heard was the singsong alphabet palindromes of their maid: En, oh, peh, kuh. Kuh, peh, oh, en, chanted for comfort as the birth pains climaxed and Sara's eyes and ears appeared. It was important to know the very first things perceived, she said. They held the secret. They would be the very last things perceived.