Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

He smiled, then stood. “But if I buy this land I can build the least ratty-tatty house you've ever seen, something completely new and fresh.”

She gave out one unamused laugh, again, not unkind, not kind. “As you wish,” she said.

With his coffee cup cradled in his hand he knelt at her feet.

“If you hate the idea I can do something else with the money. Invest it for Henry's future, say, or take Helen around the world. She's always wanted to fly.”

“She would be afraid to fly when it came to it, and the rest of the world is not so interesting, Jacob, only different people doing the same things in a foreign language. Build your house. Do well, make it comfortable, make sure you succeed.”

He stared up at her face with his hand on her knee. He had a faint sense of humiliation, that she should now be telling him to do the very thing he had already decided to do. It was a constant choice, a battle. Hysteria or composure.

He straightened and sat back on his heels.

“Where did the money come from?”

Sara shrugged and pursed her lips. “The bank paid out far more money than I expected. Lucky, yes?”

“The bank that Father worked in?”

“That's right.”

“That was very generous of them.”

“You say generous, I say fortunate. I always think if you have had bad fortune in your life then you will have an equal amount of good fortune. So here is mine, and I'm giving it to you because I'm too old for fortune. At my age everything is already decided.”

“It isn't Father's money, is it?”

She put the coffee cup on the floor near his knees and rested her large hands on her lap. “Jacob,” was all she said.

“It belongs to your aunt in Austria — what was her name? Schorske? Aunt Schorske. I remember you telling me about her once, she was the only one surviving wasn't she? So now has she died, Sara?”

“As a matter of fact yes.”

“This is decades of family inheritance in one lump sum that's now sitting on my bed.”

Her eyes dipped, her shoulders fell a fraction, her hands sagged in her lap. The change was by parts of degrees but he saw it nevertheless and it startled him.

“When did she die?”

Sara shook her head.

“And you didn't go to the funeral?”

He ought to stop, of course, what with his mother diminishing visibly before him, and Eleanor's letter in his pocket leaving him no moral footing at all, but he could not stop.

“It's a transaction, isn't it. You exchange your past, with all the difficult feelings you can't bring yourself to feel, for some money, and then you give the money away and wipe your hands of it. Simple.”

Rich coming from him, he knew. He relied himself on the very idea that emotions were disposable, just as Sara had taught; emotions were asphalt roads, the more extreme the emotion the straighter the road. The straighter the road the faster one could travel, shuttle, shuttle one's way into a sort of charmed oblivion. He had no rights, no grounds, to be pushing her into a sentimentality he dare not feel. But his voice looped back to him thick and calm and it convinced even himself. Sara stood lightly and went to the window, closed the curtains.

“Everybody wants to know about money, where it came from, where it's going. Money money.”

“Yes,” he said, feeling more together now in his small triumph. “We make too much of it. I'm sorry.”

She could not look at him. “You shouldn't keep it on your bed,” she murmured.

“You're right. I'll put it in the bank.” He paused. “The one Father worked for.”

“Sums like that get stolen, if you tell people you have it, you lose it. In a small place like this.”

Still with her back to him, a brown-and-yellow figure against brown-and-yellow curtains, a gracefully whittled figure blending increasingly with its surroundings, she began humming. He remained on his knees, twisted so that he could see her better. Then from the humming a chant broke almost inaudibly — a signal of her distress, as a chicken will pull at its own claws.

“I'll go, Sara.” He rose to his feet.

The chanting stopped. She turned, smiled, and nodded.

“I'll let you know how I get on with buying the house. Maybe you can help me plan the building—”

She flung her hand up, but flung it slowly in a way nobody but she could. “I know nothing about architecture,” she said. “It's all the same to me. You go ahead.”

He dug his hands in his pockets. “Fine. I'll — go ahead.”

He thought to carry the cups and plates back to the kitchen but decided against this one subservient gesture, not at this stage when he had established some command. He must leave while he could, before he felt so desperately diminished or guilty that he would have to stay and lie awake in the spare room and worry for her well-being.

He hugged and dwarfed her.

“Good night, Jake,” she said, fighting gently free.

“Good night, Sara. And thank you. Helen thanks you, too.”

Sara nodded. “She thanked me herself. Will you be all right to let yourself out?”

“Yes, quite all right.”

Despite this, Sara followed him to the hallway.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She nodded. “Of course.”

“Is there something you want to say?”

“Not at all.”

But for a moment she had the look of a stray dog, lost between these walls, not shielded by them. He recalled her suddenly as a young woman sitting with him on the dyke bank, their bare feet numb in the water and in her hand a marsh frog. Little invader, she called it, and let its green head ooze from her hands; its whole body, like a great drop of oil, slid into the dyke. It laughed into brown water. He had been able to smell his father's Makassar oil that she had rubbed into the ends of her long dark hair, each strand thick and strong as violin strings. Her stern brows had butterflied at some moment of pleasure in the frog's freedom.

She seemed, standing before him now, to carry an outline around her like that of the cutout soldiers he had played with as a child. Everywhere she went an invader. Little invader, getting littler. He stooped one last time to kiss her. They were never happy, either of them, unless they left the other a little bit less alive.

The fox-haired woman runs her finger over a diagram of the brain.

“Many things are happening here,” she says. “Do you see these tangles? These are fibres that twist together and choke the neurons.”

“And what is a neuron?” he asks, adjusting his glasses lower on the nose.

“A cell. It transmits messages to the next neuron, and the next. There are billions of them. Without neurons we can't think, Jake.”

“Very well. Go on.”

“These shadows here are called plaques, they're another common sign of Alzheimer's. They are a kind of rash that develops between the neurons. Between them, the tangles and the plaques, it becomes very hard for the neurons to transmit any messages at all. It's like trying to kick a ball through a bramble hedge.”

“I see.” He folds his hands together, thankful that somebody is taking the trouble to explain. “And is this my brain?”

“No, this is a diagram. From a textbook.” She shows the cover of the book to demonstrate. “We don't know what your brain looks like, we can't know, but we can predict that it will be beginning to look like this.”

“I see. Well then.”

She stands and pours him a glass of water from a jug on the shelf behind her. He watches carefully.

“My mother used only ever to rely on the things she could count,” he tells her. “She always said we were made up of cells, just so many of them, we are just a lot of them. But we look like so much more. But we in fact aren't.”