Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

She sits and pushes the glass towards him. “Is that why you didn't take them?”

“I thought I had taken them.”

“Yesterday, Jake, I found pills in the bin.”

He shakes his head. “I didn't put them there.”

“You mustn't lie. Honesty is everything.”

“I'm not lying. I didn't put them there.”

“Well, anyway. Have these.” She taps the table. “It's important, they're keeping you well.”

“I didn't put them there. I just thought — I wasn't sure. I didn't put them there.”

Already he cannot think what they are, where there is, nor what exactly they are talking about. He repeats the line, it comforts, it seems to have meaning even without his understanding it.

She smiles faintly, her scrutiny deep with good intentions. She is wearing wide-awake and all-seeing makeup around her eyes.

“You just wanted to get rid of them. I understand. They give you a headache, darling, I understand, but you must take them, they're doing you good.”

He rises and pushes his chair away roughly. “I didn't put them there!”

Fuming, lost, he wishes for a beach of stones and solitude, and him in a long coat facing the ocean, him coddled in a coat and miles of windless isolation.

“This is insane behaviour from you, testing me,” he says. “I am not obliged to put up with it, I have a busy day.” He begins clearing plates and cups from the table and piling them in the sink. Stoically, she takes them out.

“These are clean,” she says. “We haven't had breakfast yet.”

He eyes this woman — this stranger, friend, those pearl-pink nails resting assured on wide hips, that firm regard, the silver thing hanging around her neck, the small cough that raises her chest. How dare she presume to be half known to him and half unknown. Darling, she calls him, and the word breaks his heart. Struggling from her gaze he takes a cup and smashes it against the wall, then stares with clenched fists at the mess.

“I didn't put them there,” he says.

“Your grandfather had a scar here and here,” he tells Henry. “Across both cheeks. At university the Jews would be challenged to fencing matches, and if they lost they ended up with a scar where the other man had made his mark — to show he owned the Jew. To—”

“Stake out his territory.”

“If you like. Territory. Yes, territory.” He straightens himself tall in the chair. “Of course the Jews learned to fence. They turned out to be better at it than the others. Success is the Jewish disease”'

“All success is a disease, Jake.”

Within moments the pause in the conversation becomes insufferable; the noise of chatter around them and a child babbling encroach on them. He used to love silences. Now they are just floodplains for questions and doubts, in which the seep of continual panic makes itself known.

Henry has a bruise on his cheek, blue and rude. Neither has mentioned it yet except obliquely but it looks, he thinks, painful and has started to spread beneath his eye. He wonders what happened to the photograph of his grandparents. The fencing scars on his grandfather's cheeks had appeared silver and symmetrical, like tribal scars. Next to him his wife, holding her praise ring with a crooked smile that suggested she might, at any moment, throw the praise ring in the air, twirl around, and catch it. Henry has that look, too, that mischief.

“What is your surname?” he asks Henry suddenly.

“Jameson,” Henry says, and interlocks his hands at the end of outstretched arms, peering and serious.

“Yes, Jameson, that's right. The same as me, of course.”

He smiles and stirs the tea with his finger. It's hot; he withdraws his finger in surprise. It is gratifying and logical for him and Henry to share names — he can see himself in his son's face, in the dark eyes, black almost, and the long lashes, the straight line of the lips.

“How did you get it?” he asks, waving a finger in the rough direction of his son's cheek.

“Just a fight, nothing important.”

“You shouldn't fight,” he hears himself saying. “You really shouldn't fight.”

Henry scratches at his stubbled hair and frowns. “Sometimes you have to. Like you just said my grandfather had to— he'd have been cut to pieces otherwise. It clears the air, it establishes order.”

“Yes but you shouldn't fight.”

The conversation echoes in his ears as one he and Helen would have had, with the roles played by different actors— now he is Helen, and Henry him. But Helen would have said it with such force, giving anecdotal evidence and quoting from the Bible. The Reasonable Book she called it. The Reasonable Book favours peace amongst men, tolerance, gentility, turning the other cheek. He, on the other hand, says it merely as a lazy platitude because he is unable to think. You shouldn't fight, you shouldn't fight. It sounds right, after all — broadly acceptable, harmless enough, a wisdom given by a parade of faceless ghosts moving through his brain. He rests on his elbows, places his chin on entwined fingers. “How did you get the bruise?”

Henry laughs. “I told you, it's not important.”

Rage again, rage from nowhere — just looking at Henry's shorn head heats his blood, and seeing the shallow hills and wells of the skull that used to be covered by dark silk curls, and the lost beauty of the face, and the new beauty of age and fear, and the bruise. My child, he thinks. Straightening his shoulders again, winging them back, he pushes the bag he has brought across to Henry. Provisions, as they used to say. The things one provides.

“You don't like my hair,” Henry smiles. After a pause he adds, “You were staring at it as if you wanted to put it in a bag and drown it.”

He shrugs as he so often does now — a large vacant shrug. “I think it's quite difficult.”

“I'd grow it,” Henry says, “but they like you to keep your hair the way it was when you came in, so they can identify you easily. I'd like to grow it.”

“They don't want you to reinvent yourself,” he says, remembering this word, how Helen had said it to him on their second or third date while sitting on bomb ruins in Stepney, running her hands through his newly cut, oiled hair. You've reinvented yourself. For me? She is hopeful and happy. Can you reinvent yourself, he asks her, if you didn't invent yourself in the first place?

“Exactly,” Henry responds. “We're supposed to stay as we are, to prove we're useless, to prove to society we're useless so society can feel useful in comparison.”

And what did Helen say in return? He trawls his knowledge of her for an answer, feeling that he must end her sentences now that she can no longer end them herself, and that he will lose her if these memories fail him, lose her completely.

“Henry, I tell you about your grandparents because it's important for you to know who you are and where you come from.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. There was a lot of money — there was very much money given to us when you were a baby, and it was from your grandparents, and their parents, and theirs. And it should have been yours and Alice's but I have failed you. In failing you, you won't ever know about them.” He reaches forward. “None of that will belong to you.”

Henry gathers in the top of the canvas bag and holds it to himself.

“It would have made no difference.”

“It would have helped you—”

“Be Jewish you mean? I'm not Jewish. I know about it all, my grandparents, Sara — all those weeks and months I spent with Sara cooking, we talked a lot. She always told me I was going to be amazing, some brilliant achiever.” His hand alights on his head briefly and then sails down, slaps a thigh lazily. “I know about it, and you're right, none of it belongs to me. I haven't worked out yet what belongs to me. This place, I suppose.” He looks around almost affectionately. “This place.”