Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

He misses Joy, suddenly. Then he simply misses everything. He puts the literature and the letter back into the box file, puts his coat on, calls the dog, and leaves the house.

After an hour of walking he realises he has no idea where he is going, except that with all the talk of Phoenix he wants to travel. Yes, travel! But where to? The dog trots silently at his side, and every now and again he bends to look at her collar and rediscover her name. Lucky. Of course. Stupid of him to forget. So then, if he wants to travel he will go to one of those travel offices and tell them, and they will find somewhere for him to go, so long as dogs are allowed.

He finds himself now on a main road with the rushing cars tipping his balance. It doesn't feel safe; he wraps his hand around the letters to Helen in his pocket and finds his mind tripping from one thing to another. Henry, the felt strawberry stitched into Alice's blue dress when she was a child, Helen's feet smashing a bottle, the royal-blue nylon trousers he used to wear, the smell of Makassar oil. As a child, sitting in the back garden of The Sun Rises with Sara, his father, Eleanor, Rook, some others now faceless, singing while Sara played a little old violin and Rook a harmonica. There were always money spiders, he suddenly remembers, in the long grass, up and down their arms, in their hair. What a strange warm memory to come from nowhere!

The main road comes to a roundabout and he recognises where he is. From here he may as well go on to Lincoln since there will be travel offices there, he is sure he has seen them in the past. But where to travel to, he wonders. Maybe he doesn't want somebody to decide for him, maybe he will choose a place now and tell them that's what he wants, and take the cash from his wallet and seal the deal in a moment. And then go, tonight. If dogs are allowed.

What about Rome? It sounds closer than Phoenix; by all accounts he doesn't recall any grass there, but then maybe he hasn't been. He imagines Luigi Lucheni setting out with his sharpened shoe file on his search for somebody to murder. Hot streets and high walls. Amphora pots and crucibles built into the walls; water running through tufa stone. Architecture he has studied and used to know in depth, because one had to, because they were told everything derived from it. Architrave, pediment, pole thing, porch.

The light seems to be failing and he ought to press on, so he walks faster. The dog begins to lag behind. On the horizon the sunset is long and red; he loves this, these elongated sunsets, he loves how flat they make the land. He sees the cathedral perched on its hill in the distance, a sight he hasn't seen for months or years. He used to come here sometimes with Helen to the pictures to see Quatermass and the Pit, and The Hustler, and that film, that film whose name he doesn't remember but which had no beginning or end. You could walk in at any time and begin the story and it would make sense — and they did this, they watched it several times from different starting points.

The idea of the eternal story delighted Helen and perturbed him. If a thing went on forever, how could one ever know its centre point, where its weight settled? It seemed to him to not be a story at all. It seems to him now far too resonant of the way he is beginning to think, the motifs that repeat in his mind like subliminal messages, someone hypnotising or doping him. Birds flying, the missing e. That little key chain; Star of David. Suddenly, now, the word plutonium from nowhere: plutonium; what a funny word to spring to mind, and an image (that surely doesn't go with it?) of a blue peg with an elastic band wrapped around it. And now Joy's yellow dress. Cherry blossom adrift and homeless across the air, almost invisible against grey sky.

He turns to see a bus approaching from behind and waves it down. He lays some coins in front of the driver, takes the ticket, and finds a seat. The driver calls him back to say he has forgotten his change. (Forgotten more than my change, he wants to say, but takes the money and sits again.) As the bus makes its way through the town he struggles to recognise the streets he is in. Somewhere around here was some office space he built in the mid-1960s, since knocked down. Somewhere a community centre, since replaced.

He belongs to a period of architectural amnesia, he thinks, holding the dog's head to his knee to steady her. Most of what he built has disappeared as if it never existed. The prison building is the exception, he still counts that as a success and spares a thought for Henry cooped inside there, until the thought becomes envious: to be inside there too, to be safe, to be with his son. To be there playing chess with his son, to know which side you are on. His breath forms on the window.

Out of the bus, he and the dog begin searching the quiet streets. No travel offices to be seen, and his legs are beginning to ache now that they have had a chance to rest. Finally, as he is beginning to fret that he is lost, he finds one of the travel places. The front is all window with pictures of beaches and mountains. He tries the door but it won't open. With his head to the glass he sees that there is nobody inside, and when he looks around him, up and down the street, the story is the same, everything closed. It is quite dark.

I want to go to Rome, he thinks sulkily. He and the dog scour each street hoping to find something open. He starts to feel hungry and the hunger addles his thoughts. What was it his mother wanted him to do with that money? It always felt like a test: Did she want him to spend it and rid the family once and for all of its European past, or did she want him to spend it on something that would prolong that past?

And then there is the letter from Eleanor which he realises now he had quite forgotten about — just as he forgets about Eleanor he supposes. And he shouldn't do this; Eleanor is all he has. Did he drop it at his mother's house? It got somewhat lost in all the drama of the money. It had seemed so heavy with portent there in his pocket while he tried to play Debussy, and then it slipped from the picture. And then there are the letters he clutches now from Helen's lover, which he knows (and is happy for the absolute certainty of the knowledge) must not be opened. And Joy's letters, strange, intoxicating Joy, a surge of yellow in his mind. He is hungry and thirsty and can't think anymore.

The streets become a jail; he is lost. One street just looks like another, and he finds himself climbing a hill steeper than his legs can manage, so that he sits halfway up catching his breath, stroking the poor dog's head and wondering at what point he became an old man.

Hours must be passing. At the top he buys an ice cream just before the man packs up for the day and drives off. The cathedral is at his feet, the square empty but for a couple treading their way across with a packet of crisps, and darkness is falling fast. There is nothing he can do to get home, or get to Rome, there is nothing he can do for himself or for his dog to make this better. Once he would have been able to solve any problem or navigate through any city, and now he doesn't know which way is home, or how far it might be — only that he is exhausted.

Another hour of walking around and he finds a bus; he came on a bus, so he must be able to go on a bus. Another half an hour and he is somewhere unfamiliar. A few questions to passersby to find out where he is, a blast of panic in the middle of a narrow street in a narrow town on what feels like the edge of nowhere, or worse still the edge of everywhere, as though another step will scatter him far and wide beyond himself. A slow, aching trail through the small town, past the fish-and-chip shop, blinded by a memory of Helen by the fire: monkey goes into space, Egypt, Israel. Freckles on her eyelids that she could never see. The static crackle of her petticoat as she took it off, little green flashes in the dark that made her gasp — my petticoat's flashing! Maybe he could get some chips, but he has lost the confidence even to do this, wondering what he would say to the person behind the counter. Maybe he will cry. Here. Sit here and cry?