Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

Rook then takes Sara stiffly in his arms, and she eases herself into them, and he watches the two of them waltz formally around the centrepiece of their coffee cups on the sand. They respond to each other like a muscle responds to the brain. In contrast to everything he sees around him, every relationship and happening, they do not look arbitrary. Each leaf has a pattern, he remembers Sara once saying. And the patterns are repeated, and the patterns of the patterns are repeated. The leaf is a billion numbers that defy chance.

Of course, Sara and Rook had once been all chance, meeting in The Sun Rises, Rook sitting in that dusty rope of sunlight popping mussels into his mouth, Sara the uneasy alien holding a child in her lap and twisting her thick Jewish hair. But they used the years as a filter through which all chance was forced out. Now they are bound like the wooden couple that waltzes in and out of the cuckoo clock every hour. Is it love? Yes. It is not that it might as well be, but that it can't be otherwise.

His mother and Rook waltz wide across the sand, in and out of the snowflakes. They are both skilled dancers. Sara used to go to waltzes as a child when she lived in Vienna; he feels, as he squints against the incoming snow, that he is looking through the muffled haze of time and beyond himself into the past. He is taken by a heat-giving happiness. If Sara and Rook walked straight into the sea now, if they did! This lone man standing on the beach, small in the bigness of it all, watching with a jealous heart as his mother goes to her death in love, and takes her (and his) past with her, this poor rootless man, no wonder he loses his way, he is an effect without a cause; poor man.

But his mother just dances. She seems happy. He isn't a poor man, he is quite a rich man, an architect, a father, his mother is happy. He'll have to make and answer for his own fate after all. He stands and, giving them one last glance, turns back to the dunes and the car park.

Why are you so anxious? Helen read.

If his memory serves him, she pressed her thumb into the cushion of skin between his eyes. Jesus asked his disciples: Why are you so anxious?

She smoothed the creases from his brow with her thumb. Do not be anxious about anything. It will not add a day to your life.

He told her he had just seen his mother at the beach. That was nice, she replied. Did seeing his mother make him anxious?

If only he could have told her then! Helen, a man is anxious because he has too much time and not enough to think about. A man is anxious because he has lost too much time and has ended up thinking about all he should have thought about when he had the time.

With the dog following him he moves through the house, up one staircase and down another, kicking at objects that get in his way, shouting at a fluttering curtain, at the chimes of the church clock, throwing his weight about only to make certain that he does still have weight. He does, and when he feels it he bears it joyously: this, then, this body is not lost. He is disoriented by the memory of the beach and the seeming nearness of it, so close to his thinking that its waters could be at the top of the stairs and its snows filling Henry's chocolate bedroom.

Eleanor is there and then not. He sees her hunched over and he is moved, wants to put her up straight, hold her, talk to her about the past. Then he sees pink nails, makeup, and gets the giddying sense of the stranger emerging and eclipsing her. And then he thinks he must have made a mistake because she is hardly Eleanor at all except for in outline; if he could grab her and hold her still she might remain as he knows her, but she moves, and the movement confuses him.

Things are getting worse, have got worse, suddenly. Everything is quite wrong and the pills make his head ache to the point of sickness. He is possessed by a sudden boredom that greys the colours. If only he were a child, he thinks, but the thought ends there.

He is furious at useless implements that he can no longer name, at Eleanor who is not steady, who is solid and then disintegrates to his mind, at the coffee machine that perpetually boils dry for lack of water, at the shifting world — the days into nights and restlessly back again, the plates in the sink in the cupboard in the sink in the pillbox, the headache in his head and out of his head, the nausea, the rage. To say that all the change is in him is unreasonable and infuriating — that he must be questioned, manoeuvred, and ultimately culpable, that all this is his fault but that despite this there is nothing he can do. Everything must now always be his fault. If only D's letters were opened; if only something were Helen's fault, too, and she could share this burden.

The rage comes so hard, so often — starchy, white rage with no give. Always lately there is a feeling that he must escape, and when he can't he feels hopeless. This morning's rage comes because Eleanor tells him he does not need to wash the windows, he did it yesterday, the day before, the windows are clean. Besides, it is raining, washing windows in the rain is pointless. Pointless as the naked woman and her jars, pointless as the man rolling the rock up the hill (though what man, and what hill, and where did he hear of it?). And yet the icy shine of the glass has pleased him, as has the sight of the windows harnessing the light, as, too, has his reflection appearing through his own labour as if, at last, Helen has answered his question. You did invent yourself, you are always inventing yourself.

In rage at Eleanor's charge of pointlessness he has hurled a bucket of soapy water across the garden; now, guilty and apologetic, he watches her through the gleaming window picking it up and tidying it away, just as she tidies away the fragments of cups and the burnt food and the tins of fish he puts absently in the freezer: the multitude of little arrangements she makes out of his derangements. Eleanor, his external memory, his conscience, his nurse, his cleaner, his cook. She thinks he fails to notice, but he notices. He sees her clearing traces of him from the face of things, and the way her life seems to have become little but an apology and recompense for his actions. Around her all his doings lose substance as if she simply absorbs them. Such broad hips and shoulders on which to rest the weight of his errors.

Sorry, is what he seems to say to her most. Sorry about that. Most of the time he can't even be sure what he is apologising for. Always she ruffles his hair. Never mind, she tells him.

She does not seem to age. Never beautiful, she is still not. Never young, never old, nothing to lose, she has the vigilant indifference of an automatic sprinkler system that floods a room whether or not there is a fire. He does not even remember fully how she came to be living here — what sleight of hand was this that removed Helen and left Eleanor? There is a fog around her. His fog, she will say. Why my fog? he will respond. Why must all the blame be mine? Because (she will attach her hands to her hips) that is the nature of your forgetting. Fog. That is the weather in your head.

He is ashamed of his adolescent moods. The shame is never greater than this, now, as he returns to the garden after his looping, looping like a caged bird up and down the double stairs, to find Eleanor, poor, watchful, vigilant Eleanor sweating hunch-shouldered against the humidity waiting for him. He can do nothing for her; in truth he is growing afraid of her and of what she is beginning to see in him. He sits on the wall around the raised flower bed with the dog laid across his feet; he checks her name tag: Lucky. Unusual name, he can't imagine why he would have named her this, it doesn't seem like a thing he would do. But then his life doesn't seem like a thing he would do either, not at the moment. He lets his fingers dig the soil.