Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

“You stole my money,” he tells her coolly. “It was under the bed.”

Then he is upset — she stole his money! He wrings his hands and frowns at a patch of carpet. And she stole the letters that man had been writing to him, the letters about the… thing — they are not in his pocket, he can't see them, and they were his licence, his goodness, what protected him. She stole his money, his letters!

“You stole everything!” he fumes.

“I didn't steal anything.”

“You stole my money!”

Then doors slam and silence encroaches, then the sound of tears, then a little while later a tray of food comes, which she lays on his lap. Her eyes are red.

“I have to have a break for a few days,” she says. “I can't cope. There's a service I heard about and I'm going to see if I can use it, where you can go somewhere for two days while I stay here and have a bit of time alone and you can have some time alone. Without me. In a nice place where you'll get looked after better than you do here.”

He looks at his hands gripping the edges of the tray, old hands, as if he has been in an accident.

“I don't want it.”

“It'll do us good — two days without each other.”

“I don't want to be without each other.”

“Just for two days. I need a rest, Jake. I think we both need a rest.”

“I don't want a rest without each other.”

“Just for two days.”

He transfers his grip from the tray to her arms and squeezes. A look of pain and anger passes across her face and she shakes her head: no, it means. Let go of me. He squeezes harder and she closes her eyes.

“Just for two days,” she says.

Again, he is faced with his old, frightened hands. I was a child once, he thinks with surprise. How criminal, how sadistic, how preposterous that I am not anymore.

Outside the window, in all this cold weather, the little girl is gone. Snow falls like blossom.

“My father, Arnold, has a scar across each cheek. Here, and here.”

Sara's free hand — the hand that is not holding the gold-rimmed cup — touches one cheek then the other. “Fencing scars, Jacob. From his days at the University of Vienna. Look, let me show you.”

She crouches under the shelter of a tree and dips her hands into her bag, allowing them to waft through the blackness before she pulls out a photograph.

“Here, my father.”

She presents the image to the freezing drizzle of the woods; she shows it to him, to the trees: here is where it all begins, and here you begin.

He takes one hand from the warmth of his pocket and holds the photograph with her. The baked potatoes that she gave him that morning, to keep his hands warm in his pockets, are only just beginning to lose their heat, and the drizzle is turning to snow.

Sara touches her father's cheeks, taps them gently as she taps the list of ingredients in a recipe, as if to say, yes then, that makes sense.

“Do you see them, the scars?”

Yes, he sees them, the silver glints along his cheekbones.

Across the treetops a gunshot rings, a deep pungent sound; he throws a pinecone at a target — a leaf in his path — and hits it square.

“The war is starting,” Sara says. “And things will not be the same again.”

Her ring clinks against the china of the cup, and her spare hand reaches down to his coat and pulls up the hood. Then she tilts her head back.

“Look up, Jake, look up at the branches.”

And so he does, and they walk in this way, looking up at the breaks of light through the bare trees.

“Patterns within patterns within patterns.” She half smiles, half frowns. Their faces are wet with snow and he wipes his cheeks.

“My parents should get out of Austria,” she says. “There's time, and it isn't safe there. All their friends are leaving. I've written to them and asked them to leave. They can come here, we have room.”

Of course, they don't have room, the lie is obvious and harmless, but the way his mother talks (each statement so mathematically assured) causes him to imagine the Junk somehow expanding to fit the need. Or that somehow these exotic tall people will bring their solid walls and high ceilings with them; their airy space, their time.

His mother crouches and pulls him gently to crouch opposite her, her hands holding his arms. “Jacob, at school — or anywhere — don't mention that I'm not English, if anybody asks. Nothing about the candles, huh?”

Though he nods, the words don't seem right from her lips. She has always argued with his father about her right to burn the candles, bake the little sugary triangles, fill their cramped kitchen with the coffee machine that gurgled its foreign language each morning.

“Don't be scared, no harm will come to us.” She kisses his cheek and the scent of lilies swarms him. “It's just better to pretend you don't know anything. Sometimes it is better to be a fool, my dear. Where you are from, what is yours, what is home — sometimes these are not the point. The truth is not everything. You have to know when it is time to get away.”

A second, louder gunshot explodes in the distance and bounces through the branches above them.

“Dreck!” Sara stops and puts her hand to her chest. Coffee spills on the new dust of snow and melts the snow away. It is the gunshot at the start of a race, he thinks, and suddenly the woods are charged with the thought of escape. He and his mother look at each other with a slight excitement, a fever sketched giddily across their faces. The snowflakes are now fat and determined to settle, and he is impressed by how fast they turn the trees white. That letter his mother sent, he supposes, is shuttling across Europe on trains, a beat pulsing along the track like the beat now left in the air after the gunshot.

They fling away the dregs of coffee in their cups and run for no reason but to run. They have a soft fight with the snow as it falls, the flakes so large now he could almost count the sides, and they begin laughing silly shrill giggles — both of them, he thinks (sure that he knows what his mother is thinking; their brains have the same folds and clefts and wiring), are thinking about Sara's parents doing the same, walking and then running across woods and countries with their yellow bands flickering, making a run for the sea. He looks forward to their arrival. He glances up at his mother's bright flushed face as they run and she looks more hopeful than the brilliant snow itself.

The main thing he thinks now is that somehow he must get out.

A man leads him to his seat in the dinner hall and shows him his meal. He objects by shaking his head roughly. They did not used to sit like this at school, each person at their own chair with their own small table in their own world — instead they were in rows along benches, elbow to elbow, forming one long chain of interconnected worlds that nudged at each other, feet that tangled and rationed food that migrated from plate to plate in bouts of fighting and sharing. If it were like that now he would sit, eat, and talk, but the place has the restless quiet of things lost and forgotten and it makes him anxious.

He spends his time getting up to look for his dog, then, after some wandering, sits, forgetting what it was he had got up to do. Then he gets up to look for his dog, and ends up out in a summerhouse in the thawing snow, smoking with a group of elderly people he does not know or care about, then returns inside to look for his dog.

He will not go to bed, he will not piss while being watched, he will not go for a walk, he will not drink his tea, and he will not sing songs or play games. There is a chink in the earth which he will have to head for in order to be funnelled out — a small port of exit — and so he will wait in the corridor for somebody to come for him, eventually to take him home.