Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

Another few minutes of moving forward, because moving forward is the instinct, and now there is a police place. He goes inside.

“I'm lost,” he says. “I need to get home.”

Some activity and showing driving licences and identity, establishing addresses, raised brows — he must have walked some fifteen miles before he got on the first bus, is he okay? Yes, but hungry, and the dog is thirsty. Both are given water, and then put into a car and driven across a now deeply dark flat landscape. Shame descends. He has done a bad thing. The police are involved.

Gradually the motion of the car relaxes him, his legs relax, his head is heavy on the back of the seat, his hand a hot weight on the dog's head. So grateful for the police car that is taking him home, so very thankful. Though the dog sleeps soundly next to him on the seat, he is awake for the journey. The police drop them off outside the house, coming to the door to make sure this is where he lives, and to explain to the woman what has happened. She nods at the door in her dressing gown while he shuffles past to sit at the kitchen table; from here he has a view of her back. Wide back, short hair coerced into a band. He fidgets. Already the last few hours are hazy. If she asks, what will he say?

When the police go she sits heavily opposite him with her head propped on her hand, just looking at him — in anger? In dismay?

“You wrote me a love letter once,” he says.

“I did.”

“I don't know what I did with it.”

“You burnt it. I found a corner of it in your grate.”

She stands and wraps her dressing gown around her. “If you want to escape from me save yourself the effort. Any time you ask, I'll go.”

As she leaves the kitchen he sees bottles floating on the sea. Hundreds of bottles with messages inside. Today, or sometime this week, he went to see the fox-haired woman and talked about cells. In his brain are countless cells — countless, but not infinite. To say infinite would be reckless. Inside each cell a little piece of him is packed, and every time a cell dies a piece of him dies. His past is just an electric impulse. Static flashes on a petticoat. Gradually he is being scattered and lost — hundreds of unread messages floating out across the sea.

He crouched on the bedroom floor, spread out the paper, and drew plans. A large cube of glass here and another smaller one here, joined by a corridor. The low elevation, the seamless joints of glass, the lights embedded in the ceiling. An Irving Berlin record played through and began rotating silently as he worked. He glanced towards the money under the bed and set his thoughts back to the evening after they had decorated The Sun Rises.

He replayed it: Rook and Eleanor had gone to stay at Sara's house; Eleanor often did this because she hated to be alone on the moors, and that night she was paranoid and spooked because of all they had smoked, and because of Joy's odd appearance at the door, and the likeness of her to the sign. She couldn't get it from her head that Joy was a ghost. The two women had not taken to each other at all. Joy had expressed— with her lazy feline lack of expression — huge enthusiasm for staying at The Sun Rises alone in all that darkness that was so lacking in London, where she lived, from which she was escaping for a few days. And so it was settled, and it was just him and Joy left there with a storm coming in and the rain beginning to fall.

After Eleanor and Rook had gone, then, Joy had set foot on the white garden, realised that the concrete was still setting, and drew her foot back. She hopped onto the wall instead and walked around it to meet him. It was windy and getting dark, and in the distance Rook and Eleanor were making their way on bikes along the road. She sat on the low wall and, with long young fingers, folded her ear in half.

“I've run away from home,” Joy yawned. “I can't decide whether to go back or go to America.”

He looked up to the heavy sky. “America.”

“Oh?” She arched a brow. “Have you been?”

“On my honeymoon. I recommend getting a car and just driving and driving until you reach the sea.”

“And then?”

“Driving back again.”

She inspected the fine layer of concrete on the bottom of her silk shoe but seemed unbothered by it. “You don't have to stay and look after me by the way.”

He laughed at that, at the idea of looking after this woman. Then the rain had begun to fall, fluttering at first on the wind and then coming sudden and heavy; his thoughts were still muffled from the cigarettes they had smoked, and by contrast the rain was cold and soothing. He had no urge to go indoors.

“Let's go for a walk,” Joy said, jumping from the wall. “You know the way animals huddle from the rain — well I can't bear that, huddling. The rain has to be faced.”

She grinned and stalked out of the garden, across the concrete, and he followed, leaving their two sets of prints across it. As they walked he told her about the glass house he wanted to build and they linked hands — some solidarity against the rain perhaps, or some instinct to play their parts without unnecessary loss of time. They trudged half a soaked hour to a place from which they could see the Junk, a sunken house like a forgetful old man making his way somewhere, and behind it, in the dusk, the line of birch scrub like thin white limbs. And behind that, the great chimneys of the steelworks and the gas flame aglow in the rain, purple and unextinguishable.

“Yes, here,” she had said. “Build your house here, so that the house is framed by the factory, d'you see?”

She cut a rectangle in the air with her long arms. There was a coarseness about her, an enthusiasm that overlooked the mud on her hem and shoes; her dyed red hair was the rebel in a massive flat conformist landscape. He both liked and disliked the crude words she used to describe the house that she envisaged there, he liked and disliked it that she so easily shared his vision — excavate some land, the water table is so high here (look at the rain pooling already underfoot) — build a floating glass house like a lantern, hang silk in its windows so it glows against the black, green silk, purple silk, yellow silk. He liked and disliked her, and where the like and dislike met and cancelled out there was him, himself, some lost person found.

“Green silk, purple silk, yellow silk,” she said, and turned amber eyes to him. Two molten castoffs from the sun, he thought. Two coins. Planets.

“You're immortalised,” he said without thinking.

She wiped rain from the end of her nose and flicked the drops into the torrent around them. “At last!”

He smiled. “The woman on the new sign of The Sun Rises is you.”

What was he saying? What nonsense. What a dishonour it was to his wife, from whose imagination the painting had come.

“Apt then, Jameson.” (It was not the first time she had called him by his surname, as if they were partners in crime.) “Because I fully intend to be an alcoholic when I grow up.”

“A good ambition.”

“May as well have ambitions you can achieve. My family is full of not-quite-but-almosts.”

He stared out across to the Junk, felt rain run down the back of his neck. Joy wrapped an arm around him. “I don't think you're like that, Jameson. You'll make it.”

“We're huddling,” he said, and moved away.

With Helen he would never be so abrupt, too protective over her, too concerned with keeping her happy. Joy just smiled, shook the affection from her hands, and laughed one single ha! as if she had caught him out.

They made their way back to The Sun Rises. Reminded of it by the mud that was caking their legs he began talking about the myth of the golem, how the golem, in Jewish mythology, was a creation of the holiest of holies. The holy man would make himself a golem out of mud to prove that he, like God, was capable of creation. Then he would bring the creature to life with spells; the golem, brainless, without its own agenda or heart, would serve the holy man as a slave serves a master.