Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

It has been so long since he saw Alice; when he pictures her he always tries to put her in the context of a place and to imagine the objects that surround her, but in fact all he usually gets is the image of her stepping off a bus or train that has come from a place he has never visited, and then stepping back on it, to the place he will never visit, and her separation from him becomes so apparent that he would rather not picture her at all.

He forces his book into his coat pocket, a book by a man named Seth Hansen about restoring old architecture; he notes the name because Hansen sounds like handsome and the words intertwine until he can no longer tell them apart, and until the author is imagined as a striking, knowledgeable, middle-aged man despite his photograph that suggests otherwise. Hansen, handsome. Different words, same words.

In the garden Lucky dozes comfortably on the grass in a triangle of brand-new morning light, her injured leg heavy on the grass. The corrugation of her ribs catches the sun in bars. He must feed her, he thinks, before she gets any thinner. Feed her, and then walk her, that's what you do for dogs. He mustn't forget.

“Lucky,” he calls through the open door.

She is still. Dead? He panics.

“Lucky!”

The sleeper wakes, possessed of an instant wit, and trots inside. She sinks to the floor at his feet and rolls over, a flash of white streaking up her belly by way of invitation for him to stroke her, which he does. She closes her eyes. He stops. She half opens her eyes and shoots him a look of betrayal. He strokes her again. Whole days have passed like this, he is sure. Whole lifetimes.

In the glass of the cupboard door he runs his fingers through his hair. It is always a test of nerves to see Alice after a long absence. Daily she grows more beautiful; monthly the acceleration of beauty is so marked it makes him laugh with pleasure; yearly the phenomenon becomes indigestible. It makes his heart ache. It sends a dull pain down his left arm that he long mistook for heart disease, thinking he had inherited what his father had. His heart is fat in his chest and his fingers tingle with the wasted energy of a love that has never found proper expression.

He retrieves a piece of meat from the fridge and takes it from its wrappings. It is a breast of lamb, clean and unbloodied. He hurls it into the garden and Lucky saunters out, circles it, sniffs, begins licking suspiciously, looks to him for approval and only settles to it when he nods, yes, yes it's yours, it's safe, eat it.

The dog's eyes close, her tail twitches on the grass, and, utterly consumed, she rips at the shreds of meat so precisely that it looks like she is sewing them together.

The bus station is empty but for a couple of men in uniforms eating bacon sandwiches, the fat yellow in the bread. He realises he is hungry. Both excited and nervous at the prospect of seeing Alice, he buys a coffee and paces, trying without success to get an overview of himself in the glass of the waiting room. For passing moments his reflection is there, but is promptly broken up by blocks of daylight or a loss of focus. Slightly underfed, is all he manages to glean at first; or, if it can be counted, if it is not too obvious, old. Old, and yet well, as if there is nothing wrong with him at all.

The uniformed men stand and one comes to him. “Waiting for a bus?” the man asks.

“I suppose it could be construed that way,” he replies good-naturedly.

“Which one?”

“It gets in at eleven.”

The man scrubs at his chin briefly with the back of his hand. “Well, it's — not even, let's see, not even eight.” The poor man makes a pretence of looking at his watch.

“I didn't want to be late,” he explains.

The man laughs. “Yeah, well. You aren't.”

So he waits, and the light shifts. It appears from around the back of the bus depot and begins filling the bays, and now people arrive and do what he can only think of as people-ish things. It is as if their repertoire is limited to a fistful of verbs: arriving, eating, drinking, talking, smoking, standing, sitting, waiting, going.

For a short while he reads; or at least looks at photographs of buildings with a sense of fondness and urgency as if these old ratty-tatty structures were dying people that need his charity. Victorian, Baroque, Edwardian, Georgian: they sound so worthy of life. But before long his concentration gives and the dog enters his thoughts. He wonders what she is doing, and feels guilty about leaving her, after all, he ran her down and got her into this predicament with her leg. What if she's cast, as a horse gets cast in a stable, and can't get to her feet, if she's hungry? Did he leave her food? Water? He finds that the hand in his jacket pocket is clutching two inches of envelopes, inside of which are the letters. Read them? Don't read them? Read them? No need to read them — any fool knows what they say. Helen was a good-looking and intelligent woman, and a marriage is small in a world obsessed with love. Don't read them, but keep them within reach always, in case. Just in case.

A warm day is gathering. He looks at his watch and studies the hands but cannot fathom how a hand here and a hand there — and another edging continually behind them — is supposed to reveal the time of day. While he stares his breath flutters and anxiety rises in his chest until finally he gets up, buys another coffee from the vending machine, and stands and waits.

Alice wants to introduce him to her new partner, who is a poet. Well good, in a way; he was always worried that he and Alice's partners would tread on each other's toes or compete in man talk. With a poet, though, it will be obvious from the outset that they will have nothing in common and that they may as well not even try. And sometimes friendships grow in this way. Yes, he is hoping for friendship, and he is pleased with himself for becoming gentler with age. Where before he might have objected and worried about the logistics of a poet supporting a wife and child, he now only hopes there will be a child, and is prepared to let the logistics go.

With the bus station filling with people he feels he is in the way and makes again for the bench. The coffee is now cold. Hot, then cold. Full, then empty. Dark, then light. These are becoming markers of time — often, without them, his brain would not know how much time had passed, or even if it had passed. They are proofs of time. He cradles the cup and taps at its beige plastic. His nails are bitten. The pads of flesh at his fingertips are as pink and new as the day he was born.

Alice has warned him: don't expect too much, she is on her way somewhere, she can't stay, she would love to, she can't. Well, he is used to this en route — ish style of fatherhood; his children have never been his children, not in the way this watch on his wrist is, or the hair that has begun absenting his head, not even in the way the food or the bourbon in the cupboard is his. One's children are too huge, too much, one loves them too much, kills them with too much love. Impossible to possess a thing that possesses you. He opens out his hands. It is such a small thing now, this constant, wholesale relinquishing of his children, so routine that it feels prosaic. They have simply been on a lifelong passing through. Now they are — what? He does some quick, slovenly calculations. Thirty, or thereabouts. They are truly passed; there should have been some sort of ceremony for it. Anyhow, a bus comes in. He waits with interest, but it is not Alice's bus. Another comes, and then another.

Here she is suddenly, squinting from the bus's interior gloom. He has woken up without knowing he had slept. He must have heard her voice somewhere at the rear of his consciousness, that quiet singsong of it behind the one-way glass.