Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

“It's a really charming suggestion. I mean, what's property anyway? Why not just take what you want and then just settle it afterwards if needs be. No harm has ever come from people taking land from each other.” He shrugged in jest. “It's just land. The Palestinians, they don't mind. And that footpath we got rid of when we built those houses in Bromley, the local community didn't mind that at all, that's why they campaigned for two days in the rain to get it back. Pedestrians shouldn't be walked all over!”

Helen glanced at him and tucked her hair behind her ear. “It's just a forgotten little piece of land, Jake.”

“And with those words a thousand wars have begun.”

They drove past the NO ENTRY signs and parked by the manor house in bays marked NO PARKING, where the first foundations were being dug up against the manor. Land for the grounds was being levelled, the topiary uprooted, a small fountain removed, the security fencing marked out by stakes and tape in a wide circle as far as the eye could see. As they walked around Helen became sullen and hugged Henry who, always deferential to her, was sullen, too. She was upset by the idea of imprisonment, she was upset by her inability to conceive straight away, she was tearful with pride at her husband's work, even if she could not condone it, she said the flatness no longer scared her but made her melancholy. She said she was sorry for being such a terrible wimp, and she smacked a kiss on Henry's cheek.

And then a month later a letter arrived from America. In it Joy said that she had got his address from Eleanor and that she hoped he didn't mind her writing, but in the two months since she had left England she could not stop thinking of him. She even recalled a bruise he had had on his leg. She had met a man in California, a rich man who owned vines, and she was wondering whether to marry him — what did he think? If she did she would have to become a Jew, have a proper Jewish wedding (what if, she joked, she became his golem?). Did he think that was too big a step? Should she?

The letter caught him off guard. He had not expected Joy to think of him and his bruises, or at least to think of them only in hate. He put the letter in a satchel and stuck it under the bed with the piles of money, as if under-the-bed had become a mythical place for all expectant things, as if Mrs. Crest herself would turn up there. As he drove out to get fish-and-chips that evening he mulled the letter over in his mind, his heart reeled despite his head knowing better; Joy, he repeated to himself.

He came home and Helen poured him a beer, made herself a cup of tea, got forks, salt, and vinegar for the chips. They ate in front of the fire, and when they had finished eating Helen fed the fire with the newspaper, making the flames spit with fat. Last woman in Britain hanged. Dog goes into space. Fifty thousand jobs lost. Russia tests nuclear device. Monkey goes into space. He watched the news burn with pieces of fish batter. Helen leaned forward and took a triangle of paper that had dropped down through the grate, not that day but some day previous, and she asked what it was, the writing on that corner of paper. He told her it was a letter from Eleanor simply because he couldn't manufacture a lie any faster. Saying what? she asked. Saying that she is in love with me, he replied. Poor Eleanor, he had not meant to make her emotions public, it just came out in the rush of things.

Helen frowned. Why are you burning it? she asked. You should never burn love letters. Love letters are okay? he asked. Yes, they are okay — so long as they are one-way. She patted his leg, put the corner of Eleanor's letter back into the grate as if that place of salvation was where it rightfully belonged, and turned the lounge lights off. Except for the firelight they were in darkness.

Look, she said, pulling up her skirt, taking off her petticoat. As the satin rubbed against her stockings the material flashed, green sparks of static. It was such amusement to her. Look at me flashing!

He smiled and watched the flames, drenched in chip fat, glow a similar green. Then she redressed, turned on the lights, sat looking into the fire. She confided that she'd had a love letter — a love note — from a man in her Bible group and she would keep it forever. D? he asked. She was surprised — yes, D, how did he know? Short for devil, short for disaster? Short for David, she said. He raised his glass of beer. Well then here's to David. Helen raised her cup of tea. And here's to Eleanor, poor Eleanor, and to being loved.

The fatty flames snapped, wafting bad news and smells of vinegar into the room.

Yes, they toasted in unison.

Here's to being loved.

Time speeds up, rushing headlong into conclusions, then it stops. There is something teenagery about it. Something uncomfortable and maladroit as if it has not learnt how to pace itself with space.

“No,” she says, and her words are the first indication that he has been saying something out loud. “No, Jake. It's you, not time. Time is just as it was. It's you, we have to help you re-learn, like I've been telling you.”

She sits at the kitchen table beating eggs. Embarrassing, but he cannot remember her name. So desperately embarrassing because he sleeps with her, he knows her, she is not a stranger.

Since he dragged the police into his disease things have changed; suddenly he is a liability, suddenly nothing he says or does can be trusted, as if it used to be quite an informal kind of illness and now it becomes official. The timeline is a mass of crossings out and corrections. He feels to be the supremely unconfident author of his own life. Question marks appear against words, then he deletes the question marks, thinking that if he doesn't question the truth there is no question about it. It is only him, as the woman says, only him who is confusing things.

He bruises mint into the sugar solution with the back of a spoon and leans his senses into the sphere of the crisp sweet smell. Of course, there is no smell. Every day he wakes and thinks, today I will smell again. Some primitive optimism stirs: today I will smell again! And visions come, as if to correct that optimism — Henry as a warring adolescent in tight jeans and black boots, and that constricting shirt he always wore as if he were trying to commit suicide by his clothes alone; in the vision Henry's childhood is breaking from him like rocks from a cliff face, and the boy's adulthood is the result of some avalanche of which he, the father, is the unhappy cause. And of course this has nothing to do with being able to smell and not being able to smell, except for the sense of guilt, that the lack of smell is the punishment for bad parenting, for somehow allowing his son to lose his childhood. Or taking it away.

“It's early for mint juleps,” she says, watching him make the mint syrup.

“We used to drink mint juleps at four in the morning,” he counters.

She smiles and pinches salt into the egg mixture. “Have you taken your tablets today?”

“Yes,” he nods, and sits, allowing Lucky to rest her head on his knee.

“Let me check.” She goes to the cupboard, to the small box in the cupboard, and opens it. “The pills are still here,” she remarks. “Which means you haven't taken them after all.”

“Oh?”

“I'll get some water.” She tips the pills from their bed of— white stuff, white wool — onto her hand and goes to the sink. This is her system, to section off two pills and then go back to check he has had them, as if she is tracking the behaviour of a badger in the garden, the strange snuffling behaviour of some nighttime creature.

“I don't want them,” he says. “They give me a headache.”