Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

The strangeness of seeing this again; he remembers it now that he has it before him. Stretched across yellowing paper the design is elegant, and he enjoys the way the man's long finger scores the lines. In all of his memories, details about the house itself are absent. He smoothes his hand over the drawing and the man continues.

“At the end here you were going to put a playroom for the children — see this small room? The idea being that, with the house at right angles”—again he traces the shape—“you would be able to see the playroom from the rest of the house. So you could be sure the children were safe.”

The woman shifts suddenly. “I didn't bring sugar. Do you want sugar?”

“No, no. Without is fine.” The man nods, smiles, and goes back to the drawing. “And this is an idea we want to adopt for the visitor centre — put a play area here which can be easily seen from everywhere in the building, because the council wants to attract families to the area. Get the idea of conservation going in young minds and have this idea,” he spreads his long nervous hands as if he is weighing something, “that humans can live more see-through lives, and that our buildings don't need to interrupt nature. That's the theme.”

The man stops and takes a mouthful of coffee.

“Just one question, Jake.” He swallows loudly and taps the paper. “What's this? This boat?”

The boat the man indicates is a small fine drawing in the empty area overlooked by the house, what would have been the garden. What is it? He has no recollection of drawing those careful besotted lines. They resemble a rack of ribs, a perfect skeleton.

The woman taps the paper. “That's the boat we found in the peat when we were children. Do you remember, Jake?”

He nods; yes, or no, maybe.

“It lived for years rotting away up against the side of the Junk, and you wanted to get it preserved and have it sailing through the garden.”

“What happened to it?” the man asks.

Her face shrugs. “I don't know.”

The three of them stare at the drawing, in hope that it might answer.

“That was good of Fergus to come and see you, Jake,” the woman says.

He pivots to see her at the door, her face flushed. Fergus?

“Do you remember Fergus being here?”

He regards her blankly and shakes his head. “Was there a man here?”

“Yes.”

Her nod is tired and undecided as she gives herself up to the sofa.

“When?” he asks.

“Just now. He left two minutes ago.”

“He brought the map?”

“The drawings, yes. These are architectural drawings, Jake, not maps.”

Frowning, she looks around the room. Done something wrong, he thinks. Won't know what. Definitely done something.

“Did you clear away the coffee things?” she asks.

Relieved, he shakes his head. No, he did not clear anything away, he hasn't moved. For some time he has been sitting, staring at this paper, aware, more aware than he can remember being for a long time. He does remember the time they found the boat. And his body knows all those straight-backed hours in the study, and the smell of cooking pushing through from one end of the house to another, and the pleasure of complete absorption in the lines on the page.

“I haven't moved from this spot,” he says.

She leaves the room and returns quickly. “The coffee cups aren't in the kitchen. Have you put them away?”

With some irritation she scrapes the hair from her face, and he thinks she looks like one of those frazzled housewives. Perhaps she should rest; he pats the floor as a gesture for her to join him.

“When we found the boat,” he says, “me and Ellie, we had no idea what it was at first.” He looks up at the woman and steeples his hands. “We used to dig graves in the peat and lie in them, and we were digging that day, that's why we found it. We used to lie there in those graves with the entire sky above. That sky. Have you ever seen anything so big?”

The woman kneels down beside him and rests her arms on the spread of her belly. “We used to play golems ,” she nods. “One of us would cover ourselves in mud, to become a golem, and pretend the other was the king whose orders had to be obeyed. Like, do a headstand! Run anticlockwise five times with no clothes on! And we had to write the word emet in mud on the golem's forehead.”

He swallows at the memory. He sees it; he and Eleanor running around into the setting sun, and in the window of the Junk the flames of the menorah flicking up their first light.

“Emet meant truth,” the woman says, “so if you had emet on your forehead you had to tell the truth. About anything. You used to tell me that Sara had been queen of Austria and that she would have to go back there soon, with you. I used to tell you that my uncle was saving up rations to sell on the black market. And that I sometimes weed myself still even though I was fourteen. Cry for help. And that one day, even though I was four years older than you, we were going to get married.”

She puts a hand on his leg. “And you always said you wouldn't marry me. So I told you I would settle for just living together instead, as if we were married.”

They sit in silence for a moment. He remembers scraping the earth from the boat bone by bone, finding the point of its hull, each strut of wood almost perfectly preserved.

“And then, when the game was over we used to scrub out the letter e on the golem's forehead to make the word met, which was Hebrew for death. And we would dig a grave, the golem had to get in it, and we shovelled peat back on top of them and counted how long they could stay dead. We'd leave a foot or a hand uncovered, to give the signal. We used to call it the game of the missing e. That's how we found the boat.”

A long silence unravels between them that is saved by her standing and going to the other side of the room.

He absorbs himself in looking at the maps in front of him. Everything takes on a lucid sense: Ellie, the peat, the boat, childhood. Something in him rests. One day he would love to see Ellie again and sit at that piano while she sang and while Sara played the — thing, thing on the shoulder, and Rook the mouth organ.

He looks out of the window to see if the child is still there, and she is. There is suddenly the dense comfort of waiting— that if they wait, he and the child, probably somebody will come and collect them soon. He stands and goes to the window to where, on the other side, she plays quite heedless, and he pushes his hand against the pane and bangs, hoping to ask her who they are waiting for, and when it is likely to come, just roughly, just so that he might plan.

When the woman comes to his shoulder she makes him jump. He turns to see she is holding a tray of drinking things and spoons, wearing a sorry look on her face which does not in the least match his own peaceful mood.

“You put the coffee cups in the writing bureau, Jake. I knew I would find them somewhere.”

He goes back to the floor and the yellowed paper, sits, wonders why she can't share his peace.

“Who are you anyway?” he asks, irritated.

He spreads the paper flat and pushes down its dog-eared corners. The paper was once white, and now it is yellow, he thinks. Once flat, now creased. And there is the truth about life: once this, then that.

“You're gone, Jake. Gone,” the woman announces at length.

He pulls his legs crossed, grips his ankles, and looks up at her.

“Going,” he corrects, and rubs fiercely at his leg, a patch of sore skin where all irritation and outrage now centres.

“To think I've waited for you for thirty years. I haven't even bothered to try to love anyone else. And now I've got you, and you're gone.”