Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

“And what is your dream building, Mr. Jameson?” he asked.

“We got this building up within twelve weeks and a small budget,” he replied. “I'm more interested in reality than dreams.”

“Of course you're not in the dream business, we all understand your constraints — but if you were, hypothetically?”

“My dream building is one that exists, as opposed to one that doesn't.”

The journalist nodded. That conversation, too, was printed. He felt himself become an accidental working-class hero, a five-minute burst of undeserved fame. The day after completion he took Helen there to see the prison, and they walked thickly through snow around what had once been the landscaped grounds of the manor house. Helen became quiet when she saw it. The concrete looked ashen against the shrill white flakes — ashen and dead.

“Jake, it's awful,” she whispered.

“It's utilitarian. You can see the way we've created these annexes with the idea of allowing people to congregate—”

“But it's awful, and what you said in the paper about godlessness was awful.”

“I didn't mean it, I just said it. You know that.”

“Why say what you don't mean?”

“Why not respect me, my job?”

She sighed. “I do, I do respect you.” She handed him the baby and fastened the button of her coat collar. “Those towers you built in London, they were terrific. I mean, so impressive and new. But this—” Her gloved hands struggled to push her hair behind her ears, and she sighed again. “Maybe I just don't understand it. That's all it is, it's me. Yes, it's me.”

They walked around to the other side of the grounds where the view of the manor house was still unspoilt. They stood for a long time gazing up at the windows of the house. Despite how he had come across in his interview, he did believe in beauty, and he did believe that his building would do these men a service, otherwise he would not have built it. When he saw the grey-white flow of concrete he saw protection for them as much as he saw imprisonment. It was his own take on godliness, and he wanted to explain this to Helen but thought it would not be enough for her somehow. He took his coat off and wrapped Henry inside it against the cold, kissed his cheek.

“One day we should go back to America again,” he said. “California, where it isn't cold.”

“California, where all the dreamers go, where there is fruit and gold and grapes and sunshine!”

He looked hard at her. “Well don't you have any dreams?”

“Jake, we live by my dreams!” she said with an incredulous smile.

“No, I mean aspirations. Your dreams are more like instruction manuals — I mean aspirations .”

“Something I want to do or create?”

“Yes.”

“I create all the time, I created Henry—”

“We.”

“We created Henry. And let me tell you something.” She pulled her woollen hat down over her ears. “I think creatively. If you even think loving thoughts about God, that love becomes instantly real in the world. Each thought is an act of creation, a — little birth.”

He shook his head and let Buddy Holly rotate around his thoughts. An act of creation? Creation of what? He didn't understand what she meant when she said these things, and he was tired of feeling stupid for it. He was tired of feeling that their inability to have another child lay in his misunderstanding of some religious equation that was just too abstract for his simple mind.

Later that night they went to their Conception Event with a weary anger. Helen was angry because the baby would not cry anymore and she never knew what he needed or when. The crying, she said, made the milk rush up her body ready for feeding, but now without that cue she often had to make the child wait; she felt angry with herself and the uselessness of her body, which refused to conceive. His anger was at her, or at her ridiculous arcane God that he did not understand, or at the piece of land that he could not get his hands on, or at her dreams that had predicted Alice but never delivered her.

They tried night after night, week after week. The winter became intolerable except for the glorious smell of burning ash wood in the grate. Damp began creeping up the walls of the prison annexes and the builders were called back to assess; they blamed it on the architects who pushed the project through too quickly and with too tight a budget. The architects pointed out that they had been given both time limit and budget and were just doing their job; they blamed it on the council, the council blamed it on the government and Harold Macmillan, who was shrouded from the accusation by greater political distractions and rafts of snow.

“Meanwhile,” Helen said, “the prisoners shiver.”

“Yes,” he replied, removing her nightdress, wondering why she couldn't for once come to bed naked and let him warm her, “but don't think about it. Think about what is far away. The stars, the monkeys in space. Concentrate on what is far away.”

Outside the snow continued to fall. As they made tired love Helen tightened and asked, What if one of the prisoners dies from the cold, I feel like something aw ful will happen. He ignored the untimely question, they were supposed to be thinking about life; he had the sensation that the snowflakes were blossom, and that the blossom was eating away at substance. And Mrs. Crest was buried under a mound of muffling snow, calling out with a silent snow-filled mouth. And then that the money under the bed was torn into flakes; he imagined handing it over to get his house and being laughed at, and that the man laughing at him looked like Rook, with the same crooked attitude.

Eventually he thought of the unparalleled form of Alice, and he forced his attention back to his wife.

“Do you know why you're here today, Jake?”

“Why?”

“Yes. Why do you have to come here?”

“Because I get headaches.”

She purses her lips and nods. “Yes — but do you know why you're getting headaches?”

“Because I have brain damage.”

“In a sense, yes. You have Alzheimer's. And the tablets we give you for that are giving you headaches.”

He squeezes his hands together. “I know that.”

Nodding, she pushes an orange file away from her as if it has displeased her somehow.

“So I'm going to go through the usual with you, and then we'll discuss what to do about your tablets, okay?”

“That will be fine.”

“So, tell me, Jake, what day is it?”

He has practised this, but hesitates now under the pressure. “Thursday, or thereabouts.”

“And what year are we in?”

“That's,” he nods repeatedly. He has practised this too. “That's — quite difficult.”

“Roughly?”

“I think — I would guess — I don't know.”

“And could you say what the time is?”

He brings his palms together and exhales, closes his eyes. “Well, it's certainly recent times.” He opens his eyes again and looks appreciatively at her fox hair, the way it bronzes today in the light. “Ask somebody else, they'll know.”

She puts her hands in her lap.

“I'm going to name three objects and I want you to repeat them after me. I want you to listen carefully, Jake, because in a few minutes I'm going to ask you again. Okay?”

“Right.”

“House, shoelace, picture.”

“So, then—” He squeezes the skin between his nose, rubs beneath his eye. Thinks. Thinks with all the pointlessness of a tiger thrashing about a cage. “Piston. No, not piston. House. No, no I'm afraid it's gone.”

She writes something. The way she writes with unconcerned purpose makes him think he is doing not so badly, perhaps.