Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

“But you're going home in two days,” he is told by somebody who has no right to know more about him than he does. “You're just here for a break, try to enjoy it.”

Not true, he has been here for weeks or months already, and can feel every one of the days dragging behind him, a load too heavy to pull. Abandoned! His wife has left him to rot, his mother too, his son. As a woman scrubs at his back in the bath he covers his crotch with his hand and bends his head downwards to hide his face from her. He tightens his body and refuses to move his arms from his body. If he had the words he would tell her what he thinks, but as it is he has a throat closed rigid with sentiments that have lost form. Eventually he is dragged from the bath by several hands, dried off, and shovelled into a pair of pyjamas that he objects are not his. He is given a cup of tea that he refuses to drink, and then put into bed when not in any mind for sleep, and lies with an aching stomach and a need for the toilet. He is anxious that if he sleeps he will miss his lift home. The light goes out; he puzzles over where he is, where his mother is. He calls her name quietly in the dark— Mama?

When he finally sleeps he dreams that he is in the car with his wife on the moors and there are planes flying overhead; when the planes reach the steelworks they begin twirling and diving in spectacular formation, doing so for minutes until the twirling loses control and they pirouette down into the huge factory chimneys in yellow flames. He jumps out of the car and tries to catch the planes as they fall, one in this hand and one in that, and though he beseeches his wife to help she sits in the passenger seat nursing a child at her breast, her smile milky and cool and a song on her lips, and watches while the planes crash around him.

He dreams afterwards — or is it all the same dream? — that a woman with glossy black hair is in the back of the car whispering sharply to him with a polished Austrian accent: Wake up, I have left the man in the prison and he is dying there, wake up.

He does wake up, dumbfounded with fatigue and disorien-tation. A woman is at the side of his bed and gives him a glass of water and a tablet. The sheets are wet and cold. Ashamed of himself and too tired to fight he takes the tablet down with a gulp, sits blindly in a chair while she changes the bed, and feels a tiredness well in him as if he is clotting. She takes his hand and puts him back in bed, pulling the blankets up around his chin, and the next thing he knows they are still at his chin and his body has not moved, and it is morning.

Here, a perfect memory afloat in nothing. A blue peg with an elastic band wrapped tightly around it. Wait, it links back.

On the chair in the corner of the bathroom he presses his knees together and watches the peg spin past his vision. A woman bends over the bath and oars the water with her hand. This is not a bathroom he recognises, very large, white, and clean, and the bath itself is as wide as a rowing boat and high sided so that, once the confused process of undressing is done and he has stepped into the water, he can barely see over the lip. He brings his long legs up to his body while the woman, humming, begins to lather soap over his back. In the water his skin is as white as a newborn's. The woman flannels up and down his arms, taking his hands one by one and cleaning the palms.

“So pale,” she says, “compared to your lovely brown face. You haven't seen the sun for a while, Mr. Jameson, hmm?”

He turns his face up to the ceiling, peaceful and sleepy. The woman cups her hand under his knee and runs the cloth over his leg, then down under water to the ankle, then between the toes and the soles of his feet. Time moves forward at a stroll, his skin taking time to remember the cloth as it passes on to the next place, as if, patch by patch, it is waking up after a heavy sleep.

“We need to get you nice and clean for going home to night,” she says, wringing the cloth with a quick strong tug. “Can't have your wife thinking we haven't looked after you.”

She hangs the cloth over the taps and takes a bottle of something, pours it into her hand.

“Pop your head back for me, there we go.”

He is sitting cross-legged on the tiger skin, ten years old, and his mama is showing him how to turn the praise ring with the wrist, and she suddenly asks, Do you remember being born, Jacob?

He pushes his fingers through the tiger's fur and nods. They hear the tired creak of the front door opening.

Sara hoists him up from the tiger skin and says, Come on, Jacob, your father's coming home. She tucks the photograph of her parents in her dress and there ends the stories of warring Europe, Lucheni, the Big Death. She shoves the praise ring back in the tea chest. When his father comes into the room to see them standing quite innocently and Englishly, pale and upright, he rants at them anyway, just in case either has done anything. His father blows out the menorah, it clashes with his sense of identity. It is all about identity. All about What You Are, or What You Are Not. All about being something because you were born that way and about being legitimate. His mother lights it again. She uses firm words in a language nobody else in the house understands, dabs her dress to check for the photographs, and puts the kettle on without another word.

When they hear that evening that war has broken out, the three of them watch the scratched sound fizz through the speakers of the wireless, and he and his mother think (he knows what she thinks) that a device so strange, insectile, cannot be trusted with such huge news. She blows out the menorah candles and goes outside, up the ladder, and into her bedroom. His father mutters that if there is going to be a war he needs to get maps, and they need to start storing supplies, and they need to start working their land better. Excited about what will come, he wants to sit with his father and work out a plan, a strategy, but he feels he should check on his mother, so he follows her upstairs.

There, in her small damp room, she is naked, and the smart brown dress she had been wearing is folded on the bed, its row of four buttons picked out bright in the gaslight like four unspent coins. Because he can think of nothing else to do he stands and stares at her, and he weighs up whether he is a child or more than a child, whether they should be embarrassed, whether her surprising hips and small, smooth potbelly are those of a mother or a woman, whether therefore, to hug her or run away.

She doesn't even blink. “Go and start filling your bath,” she says.

He goes back down the ladder, takes the tin bath from the shed, drags it across to the front door and into the kitchen. There is Eleanor, poor Eleanor in the kitchen in her purple-and-turquoise dress, come to say that her uncle has disappeared again and she is scared to be alone. His father is giving a lecture: Your uncle shouldn't leave you like this, it's preposterous, I'll have the police on to him — and Eleanor scuffs her foot at the stone floor in pleasure at his anger, because nobody ever takes the time to be angry on her behalf.

He, meanwhile, is thinking of the birthmark he has just seen on his mother's hip, a faint leaf-shaped mesh of finely patterned sepia, like a scaled-down shadow of crisscrossing branches. His mother was born. She is not his, she is her own. If she is not his, he is not hers. If he is not hers, he is not a child and does not even exist. He doesn't want to simply hear the stories she tells, he wants to live in them, so that he might have been there from the beginning, from her birth, so that he is not left out.