Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

The air is soupy. A van pulls up at the gates and Eleanor goes to it, he cannot hear what she says to the driver but she walls her body off by hugging her arms across her chest. She is always this way with strangers; they talk — about him? Are they discussing his behaviour? He has done nothing; whatever they think, he has done nothing. He digs in the soil and collects, digs and collects. After a time Eleanor comes away from the gates and relaxes her arms.

“He wanted directions,” she says, and returns to her gardening.

He takes a new pocketful of stones upstairs to the bedroom and rests them with the others at the foot of the French windows. The dog pursues, his canine shadow, the shadow of the part of himself that is still noble, he thinks. Her sheer blackness is brave and her thinness willing. In whatever tight and unlikely spot she lies she makes it home. She settles here by the heap of stones and he sits on the floor next to her, pushing the heap taller until it holds its shape. Perhaps that man did not just want directions. Perhaps they are planning to take him away. He must get more stones. Needs more. Build it up here, build it back here, make it higher, yes, and get some of those stones that have fallen out of Eleanor's armfuls of weeds around the compost. Get some of those off the grass; get things in order.

That night he makes some advances on Eleanor in the bed, biologies born of habit: she is warm and unfathomable under cover so that he is reminded of a time he cannot place, in which he once discovered her body and was surprised by how he liked it. When was this? Which episode of the past? How long has Eleanor been here? He remembers being relieved by how she opened her arms to him in complete trust and how he entered, dumbfounded by her huge, undutiful breasts (Helen's were egg-like in comparison, and obedient and firm, biology-textbook perfect; Joy had no breasts, only ribs and nipples): here suddenly was a world of breast! A universe of breast! Unshielded and staring at him adoringly. And behind that adoration all he could hear, and all he can hear now, is the deep long moan of failure. I should not be here, I do not belong here.

Finally the two of them settle for just holding each other. He is without energy, she is always afraid of doing something to make him unhappy or agitated. They just hold each other with locked limbs.

“Will we be getting something for my headaches?” he asks.

She wraps her arms tighter around his neck. “Tomorrow we're going to the clinic again, we'll ask about the headaches.”

He separates himself from her and settles on his back. If they are going to the clinic tomorrow he ought to see to his timeline, in case the woman there asks. He tries to remember what that woman looks like and gets a picture of a teacher he had at school, Mrs. Webster, her image flashing in front of his eyes after half a century of absence. What musty corner of the brain keeps these images? What nudges them out?

As they lie there he can feel Eleanor's lack of sleep, like Helen's in the last few months. Helen had always been able to sleep so easily, and then suddenly, as if she knew that her time was short, she would lie there and breathe in loud circles to alleviate what she had begun to call the imps in her chest. Pain, no, not pain. Worry? Was she beginning to get old? Look at her hands — were they an old woman's hands?

There used to be a painting on the wall opposite, he suddenly recollects. Now that he goes to define it, he cannot, except that it was dark, and perhaps of a woman slumped along a dirty mattress. Very often Helen and this woman would look at each other as if they were one and the same person, but born into different rooms at different times in different light conditions. And very often she would sigh, and say, There is not very much that separates one human from another.

And towards the end of her life she said this more and more frequently. Instead of sleeping soundly when the light was switched off she began to turn from one side to the other, and then, as she was falling asleep, gnash her teeth a handful of times, and make disoriented comments about a “poor woman,” a “fine line,” and a “ruined bed.” Perhaps she even muttered the word D. Yes, and he would not have known to listen for it. Yes, the more thought he gives it now, the more certain he is that she must have mentioned that name.

He gets up and dresses.

“Where are you going?” Eleanor asks.

“To make coffee.”

“Come back soon.”

He sees her white fleshy arms and disk of face in the darkness, nods and goes downstairs. He turns on the coffee machine. On the timeline he makes a mark, November 1961, Rook and Sara at the sea. At 1967 he blackens the mark he has put next to the Six-Day War, and he wants to write there: Alice dies. Yet — yet he cannot. It doesn't seem that it can possibly be true. Now more than ever it seems to be the most absurd outcome, something he has made the case through his very fear of it. He doesn't want to approach the memory. Maybe it is not true. And if it is true, maybe the disease will make him forget it before he can be sure of it. Like cycling off a cliff on fire. If he bides his time — if he winds slowly towards the edge, he will lose consciousness before the ground disappears.

He makes another mark: 1980, painting goes missing from bedroom wall. Nothing in him can vouch for this claim; in all honesty he can remember nothing at all of the last twenty or so years of his life. The gap on the timeline is ominous and looks better with this careful little detail, inevitably Mrs. Webster will be pleased. Then he puts on his coat and pushes D's letters into a pocket, summons the dog and leaves the house, thinking he will go and visit Henry. The prison seems suddenly safe and homely, everybody tucked in their T-shaped wings and forced into communities. There are not these loose times, and Henry is probably waiting for him.

He cuts across the main road and past the church, and, gripping D's letters, delves into the heavy darkness of the lane opposite. Beneath the letters is something else, smooth and hard; he cannot identify it. At first, when he takes it out and holds it on his palm, he is puzzled. A snow thing? Crystal snowball thing. He shakes it. Slowly he remembers where it came from, that Henry gave it to him for his birthday some years ago, and as he remembers that day (snowy, and they were walking in the woods) warm nausea breaches his stomach.

The crystal snowball tells the story they all know, he, Henry, and Alice, the story of their beginnings: it is the end of the 1800s, a shoemaker and his daughter venture out into the Austrian woods in the snow to find mushrooms, and discover in their path a child wearing a lace hat and yellow shoes with a bullet hole in her head, the mother with a yellow hat, yellow shoes, yellow foam in her mouth, and a revolver by her side. She has shot her daughter and then herself, for what reason nobody knows. Gory photographs and speculation make the papers every day for a week.

A man called Arnold is sitting in his chair, feet on a stack of books, a Siamese cat in his lap, a coffee in a chipped gold-rimmed cup in one hand and the corner of the newspaper in the other: he is trembling as he reads. It is Vienna, Strauss is dead and the century is closing. He touches his silver fencing scars. How could a mother kill her own child? Closing the shop he rushes home through the snow to his wife, finding her twirling a praise ring with a twinkle in her eye. He takes her to bed. Must replace a life for a life, he thinks. Life is fragile, even when times are good, life is fragile enough to leave a child in yellow shoes dead in a wood. They call their lovemaking Conception Events. She, Minna, thinks of love and life, her belly full of fried fish. He, Arnold, thinks of the dead child. Somewhere in the clash of these opposite thoughts Sara is conceived.