Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

Twenty-eight years later Sara fights back the death in her, thinks not of the bullet hole but of the yellow, and her son, Jacob, is conceived. Thirty years after that Jacob takes the hand of a slight freckled woman in the bombed relics of Stepney and invites her home. The woman looks at the church of St. George opposite and nods her consent. She is thinking of Jesus, he of bombs, London bombed and bombed, London rebuilt. In the midst of their uncertain hopes Henry is conceived. Two years later she is thinking of the cherry tree, of fate. He knows little but yellow, a yellow dress, the sun glinting off the glass of his extraordinary would-be house. In the midst of yellow autumn Alice is conceived. Out of the story a family grows: here they are, one, two, three, four.

The story has not ended then. By virtue of their existence Alice and Henry are fighting for its happy ending. He and the dog wind on at random, he now realises, along the dark street; he has no idea where the prison is. The lip of the moors opens out just ahead in an expanse of no-building, nothing. There is a choice, to go out into this wilderness or to go back home. Ambition and fear rub up in his bones; he looks back and sees a figure running towards him, a woman; large, cumbersome, running, and a breathless voice that calls, Jake?

He shakes the snow thing again. Thinks of his son, his history, the birth of his children. In the snow the woman and child dig in their heels, hold their yellow hats, and stride on.

“And Jesus said to his disciples: Why are you so anxious? Do not be anxious about anything.”

Helen was wrapped in a blanket by the fire. He took her a cup of coffee, sat by her side, and watched the page as she read aloud.

She reiterated, as though to herself. “Do not be anxious about anything .”

He pushed her back gently onto the rag rug she had made from old towelling sheets. Now they had new cream sheets from her mother, sent in parcels with sachets of detergents she recommended and soft toys for Henry, and little paperback guides on housekeeping. He lifted Helen's nightdress and took the Bible from her hand.

“The house is so cold,” she said.

“I know, I'm sorry,” he replied, putting her hair behind her ears before she had a chance to. “I'll get more wood so we have plenty — some ash, it smells good when it burns.”

The snow from the sea was just beginning, three days later, to come inland, and the moors were locked rigid inside white-grey skies. He took his clothes off and pulled the blanket around them both. Alice had to be made; an urgency began to invade the situation, one that neither could rightly explain, except that they were waiting for her as one waits for a dinner guest who is running six months late.

Two days later and the snow came in earnest, bleaching all description from the moors so that he squinted out at them and struggled to find perspective. After digging out the snow around the coach house he managed to get the car to The Sun Rises and help Eleanor. The journey of two miles took him more than an hour, the wheels grinding and slipping. He had to stop occasionally to dig the road free of drifts. When he pulled up Eleanor was there shovelling snow from the pathway, heaving, her hair was soaked and her bare legs screaming white in the gap between skirt and boots.

“Wear trousers, Eleanor,” he said, getting out of the car.

“Why?”

“Because it's three degrees below, that's why.”

“I never wear trousers.” She handed him her shovel. “Here, have this, I'll get us a drink.”

As he dug he looked out across the moors at the white desolation.

After he and Helen had separated from each other and the blanket that night and she had gone to bed, he had looked at a passage from the Bible that she had gone on to read aloud. It was alien and senseless to him, and it annoyed him. Upstairs he silently retrieved the human-skin Bible and opened it at this passage, surprised almost to find the same words there. It did not feel like a Bible to him, nor like anything God had been near. He relished the wrongness of it and that it dared to be wrong. Reading through the verse he saw the words anew, his words, his Bible, his own religion.

And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal.

Digging now, and starting to sweat inside his jumpers and suede coat, he saw the moors through the steam of his breath milkier and vaguer than ever. Eleanor brought out two cups of strong tea and a bottle of whiskey. And the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass, the human-skin Bible had said, and he had caught on that phrase, coupling gold and glass into an irrevocable mental image of Joy inside his house, simply standing as if not to disturb what he had made. He dropped some whiskey into Eleanor's mug and then his own.

“You'll die of the cold,” he said, rubbing her back briskly.

“Won't,” she smiled. Her hair was stuck to her face, her nose and cheeks red.

“Seems arrogant doesn't it,” he said, picking up his shovel again. “To think that we, with these bits of metal, can fight back all that snow.”

Eleanor leaned forward heavily on the shovel and scrunched her nose. “Not really.” She gazed at him as if preparing to go on, but then looked away and scratched inside her nostril.

“Sometimes,” he said, “when it snowed like this, me and Rook used to fight in it. We were always play fighting. Or at least I think it was playing.”

“I remember.”

“We sometimes came away with nosebleeds.” He shrugged. “Difficult to know the line isn't it, between play and violence.”

Eleanor gulped her tea and banged the snow from the shovel on the cleared ground around her feet. The sound was stolen by the muffling snow.

“It's about power,” he said. “Us with our shovels against the snow, and those fights with Rook — it's about who's more powerful, Ellie.”

She sniffed and smiled at him. “Ellie,” she whispered, shaking her head as if grateful to discover it was her name.

“I could beat Rook to a pulp now.” He arched an eyebrow. “Not that I want to. Just knowing I could though, just knowing that means something.”

“I hate power. Dangerous thing.” She shrugged.

He nodded.

“The things you can do to a person when you have power over them — it's shocking.”

“And the things you can do for them, Ellie.”

She shook her head vehemently. “No. That's not power, to do something for someone. Power's always against.”

She scraped the shovel across the ground. He put his tea on a patch cleared of snow, took the shovel from Eleanor, and went to the sign that hung outside the pub. He bashed it with the back of the shovel until the snow began falling in clumps, and continued to do so until the image appeared — the woman with Joy's catlike eyes beckoning the yellow from the sun with her long arms, her long hair, her naked defiance.

“There,” he said, and hit the shovel against the iron arm of the sign to make a sharp, metallic sound that the snow couldn't take.

Three days later, and even despite the weather, the concrete walls of the prison were up, the T-shaped annexes slotted onto the sides. It had been twelve weeks from drawing board to realisation — twelve weeks. A triumph.

The public's resistance to the building was short-lived and limp. The people who resisted were the ones who would never go to prison nor have sons who went to prison, and it was easy to persuade them that the prisoners themselves deserved nothing more than these buildings, and that it was a subtle part of the punishment. Architecture affected the mind, he told a journalist. It was an external consciousness; if you put a man in a godless building he would feel godless, when he woke, when he shit, when he slept. The journalist omitted the part about shitting but kept the godlessness.