Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

Observing her step off the bus with a tall blond man who limps (limps? Limps! He must admit to a small surge of triumph), he notes that her hair is longer and darker than he had remembered it. His memory had logged it as blond and fine like the hair of a child. She is more adult than he had remembered and her face more serious. More angular and exceptional, but otherwise, in all the core detail, she is just as he has always known her. Just the same.

She hugs him and stands back. “Meet Seth.”

“Seth. How are you? I'm Jake.” He extends a hand which the poet clasps.

“I see you're Jake. Didn't take a lot of deducing, right?”

“Seth and I only have a few hours,” Alice tells him with a slight southern accent that makes her sound aloof. “So we could have lunch — and Seth wants to see some of the projects you've worked on.”

“Very well. Whatever you want. A restaurant for lunch, or home?”

Alice brushes an imaginary thing from her eye. “I don't feel like going home somehow. Maybe when I'm not in such a rush, when I can do it more justice. Dwell a bit.”

A little relieved — the place is scattered with a thousand slipshod thoughts, a hundred forgotten tasks — he nods. “Yes, dwelling would be — better.”

It is a bright and decent day, warm enough away from the breeze that has picked up. On Alice's impulse they buy sandwiches and two flasks of coffee — there is a bakery which lends out flasks and cups for a pound a day, a service there is no real call for in this area. They use the service out of pure nostalgia. It used to seem the epitome of adventure when Alice and Henry were children, to walk into the town, buy sandwiches and cake, rent a flask of coffee, and camp down on a piece of green, lie back, talk about the shapes of the clouds.

“Constructing a building is similar to constructing verse,” the poet says, rolling a cigarette.

This irritates him immediately; similar how? One you do with a crunch of numbers and a pile of materials, the other with a pen and an edgy relationship with reality. He says nothing, and eats.

They have a spot on the bank behind the Edwardian building he had been campaigning to save: St. Hilda's, formerly a school, shut down in the 1960s, used for the last two decades as a place to run classes for the deaf, which have now been moved to the new community centre — a building he also had a hand in and is not especially proud of.

“I've been trying to secure its future,” he tells Alice and the poet — Saul, Seth. The name will not rest in his mind. He gestures with his sandwich towards the building.

“Its future as what?” the poet asks.

“A school, preferably. But most likely it will just become flats, in which case we'll — they'll — sell it to a developer. At least it would still survive that way. But a school would be better.”

“And are they succeeding?” Alice asks, pouring coffee. “In saving it?”

“Yes, maybe they are. Maybe they are.” He eats the sandwich, enjoying his hunger. “I want to see it secured, the demolition plans binned, all that rubbish cleared out.”

“Why?” the poet asks. “Why not let it go?”

“Because I don't want to.” He hopes a debate isn't on the horizon; he just wants to eat his sandwich and drink his coffee, to sit here with his knees drawn up to his body, unchallenged.

“But if it doesn't make sense, right, to spend all that money when you could make something new and better for a little less, then why don't you want that?”

“Because my career was to make buildings, not keep knocking them down.”

“And part of creating is destroying—”

Yes, yes. He knows this. The man could be dictating from his own soul. Create, destroy, destroy, create. A seesaw, a tide, life, death, poetically tilting from one pole to the other. And yet this so-called poetry has created nothing, or little, he can now put his name to. The creation of some high-rises in London, now mostly, yes, poetically, destroyed. Some concrete leisure centres still standing. Some uninspiring schools packed to twice their capacity and annexed by Portakabins. A prison, his son inside. But in general, above what stands, there is all that no longer stands. The poet wants to see some of his buildings? There are no buildings to see. They are gone. A faint programmed guilt at the shamefulness of what he built, and a mounting amnesia over them (did they ever actually exist?) are what he has left of his career. If he wants to be stubborn at this thirteenth hour, and stop washing along with the current, if he chooses to fight even if his cause is pointless or misguided, then he will.

Alice offers him half of her sandwich and he accepts gladly.

“How do you feel about retirement, Jake?”

“It's fine,” he tells her. He has no idea if it's fine. The poet has put him in a bad mood. After a pause he flattens his hair to his head, hoping it does not look too ridiculous. He finds his fingers are digging, digging away at the grass, soil in his nails. “Every day I feel — things become thinner,” he says. “The world becomes thinner.”

Alice frowns. He watches the butterfly-wing dip of her brows. “Thinner? More”—she gestures an I-don't-know with her slender hands—“more — temporary?”

Silently he blesses her. Like her mother, she is always keen to understand. She does not, ever, belittle with triteness and scorn. The poet throws the cucumber from his sandwich and, without drama, grasps the air with a fist.

“There is a thinness to things,” he says. “I think jobs distract us from it. As soon as that distraction is gone the days look— flimsy. We look at ourselves and feel flimsy. Who are we, what are we meant to be, all this shit. This is the shit we spend our lives running from.”

With this declaration the poet stands and wanders off towards the building, casual even with his limp.

He wants to shout after the poet now and tell him about the CND and the Israel group he ran from the table in The Sun Rises, the group whose name he can't bring to mind. They did things. They were effective. When he thinks of those meetings he can remember nothing except for a couple of faces that may or may not have belonged to that table at that time. He remembers how, years later, he organised blood donations for the Israeli soldiers going into the Six-Day War, and he and those people around the oak table all gave theirs. Henry's school announced that Israel would be destroyed, so Henry emptied his money box and gave its contents to the cause. He knows that what they all did was idealisti-cally extreme, for a greater good, and he knows he was respected for it. He knows the poet would respect him for it, and he would call after him now, but the poet seems otherwise absorbed.

“How did he get that?” he asks, watching after the man. He clutches the stone in his palm.

Alice inclines her head. “The limp?”

“Yes.”

“We had a bet. I bet that you would ask about the limp when Seth wasn't listening, and he bet you'd come out and say it in front of him. I think he had this idea of you as a brash, formidable man who would have no qualms about pointing out his faults. Anyhow,” she shrugs lightly, “it looks like I won.”

The dug-up earth in his hand comforts a slow, drunk feeling that is beginning to occupy him. “I see,” he says. “And did you have a lot of money on it?”

Again she smiles. “It was a sportsman's thing. We try to keep money out of everything.”

“Next time you bet on me maybe it would pay you to bring money into it. You know me, after all. He has no idea.”

He pats her leg and she passes him his coffee. The wind becomes restless and blows their hair. Full of DNA, hair, a single strand can tell a child who their father is. Alice's flickers out long and fine. Just one strand of that hair knows about him, can testify to him. He is in every part of her.