Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

“Me, Alice, and Helen,” the man says.

The woman leans forward. “I forgot all about Helen's miniskirt. That famous miniskirt.”

The man and woman laugh quietly at something and turn the page. Here is his mother, in that brown dress, standing in silhouette in front of the wraparound window of her living room. The four gold buttons at the neck beat back the darkness. Something of him remembers something of this. He gives the stubble on his cheek a lethargic rub and stares, just stares.

“Can't think why this one of Sara is here,” the man muses. He looks closer at the picture. “Oh yes, it's the first colour picture Helen took — with the Polaroid — that's why.”

They move their attention to the facing page. A black-and-white picture of a tree. Pale mallow colour across the sky. A picture of a white house. The next, a colour picture of that same tree and a woman amongst its leaves, wearing a dress and nothing on the feet except a crosshatch of branch shadows and patterns. The next picture: the edge place, the place with the water and rocks. At the front of the scene there is a man and child watching an animal, the wet animals that never move, and the child is in that animal's eye.

“And this one,” the man says, pulling a photograph from the book. “This one is here. Me, you, and Helen by the aviary.”

He nods but does not understand what connection there is between those people and him, or that place and the place they now sit, or even what this place is where they now sit, or why they sit here, or when it will be time to go home — except that he does at last feel sure that when it is time to go home they will. The restlessness of recent times has abated. They bend deeper to the photographs, pages of forms and colours like debris from a car crash, like litter, or otherwise secrets found in demolished walls.

In this one there is a child in a white bed, and he recognises the open, empty features on their way somewhere, but perhaps lost. The child is grinning, but the grin still gives the impression of a journey not finished, or a lack of emotion, or something. Something. He cannot pinpoint what it is except to say his heart reaches to it. He wants to touch that smile, as he wanted to touch the animals, and he wants to take the series of tubes and machines from the bed so that she can be comfortable.

“Oh, dear Alice,” the woman says. “She had been in hospital for such a long time, look how tiny she is.”

“This was just a few days before she died.”

The two people are silent. They pick up their cups and drink without taking their eyes from the photograph.

Eventually, turning the page, the man straightens and puts his cup down. “And these last two are just two I added.”

One shows a woman stepping off a bus, blond and tall with a face that is all sunlight and no definition. Even in the vagueness of the shot she is beautiful, he sees it now, the kind of woman one would want to be associated with. The man tilts his face up from the picture, then he looks down again.

“Look, there's me.”

He points to an indefinable shadow on the bus behind the woman.

“It's the day I came back from university and Helen wanted a picture of me to see if it showed up my new distinguished intelligence. She got excited and took it a bit early and missed. So we got a picture of this random woman instead. I said it summed things up exactly. Put it in here anyway as a joke.”

He watches the man chase the memory down with a tripping laughter, as if needing something from it.

“And the others are of you, Jake. This is a newspaper clipping of you presenting your money to the council, to be sent to support the troops in the Six-Day War. A thousand pounds, your inheritance money from under the bed. Do you remember?” The man looks up. “You became a local hero. And when everybody said it was God who helped win that war you used to object that it wasn't God who gave all his inheritance away, and that he always got too much credit for everything.”

The man smiles, then is serious. “And it's true. He does.”

He picks up the last photograph and holds it to the light.

“And this one — this is you too, Jake. This is the day you took that flight over Quail Woods. That was only four years ago.”

The man in the photograph is wearing a thick coat and head thing with the ear pieces. He looks weathered, nervous, and excited in a calm, slow way. His eyes seem deep and black beneath the hat, stubble shadows the chin, the hand making a thumbs-up is reluctant, but still rather young and strong-looking.

I remember this man, he thinks. I have seen him. It is the first thing he has been sure about for as long as he can recall. An unrefuted fact of life is packed away in that face, behind the expression of a man who looks like he has been winded. He doesn't remember the time itself of meeting the man, not even remotely, but he remembers the man. The eyes. The shifting gaze, looking out to what is far away.

This animal here, at a distance on a dry bank, tears into meat, an activity from which it flicks its eyes now and again while holding the meat in place. What is this? Is this a dog? His dog? Its colours warn. That space between the ears and the prick of the fur that is oilier and coarser than he had expected. He takes the mother's hand.

A sea of mesh. They walk inside the structure along a wooden path, surrounded by birds, the birds rising rare and frantic. It should be glass, he thinks, not mesh. This should be a sea of glass, a mountain of it, a fake glittering sky of it. It occurs to him: people build things. It comes as something of a revelation.

The man walks beside him and rubs his shoulder.

“You brought me here when I was a baby,” the man says. “I almost remember it, or maybe it's just from the things Helen said. I don't know. I don't know if it really makes a difference. Did you ever bring Alice here?”

He turns slowly to face the man, awash, watered down. Alice? he means to say. Who is that? Vague memory of someone — but — but no, and he cannot ask because there are not the words.

The man turns away and rotates his thumbs around each other, then threads his fingers through the mesh. Something in that gesture of dejection reminds him of somebody. It is always this: something, somebody. Everything unspecific and free-floating.

One day he would like to build a thing like this for birds, but he would like to do it with glass. He wonders how it is done, and searches through an archive of other one-day thoughts and decides whether to guard them or dispose of them: at some point in his life, for example, he would like to marry, he would like to build something, he would like to have children. There is a clean slate and a run of events to be chosen or not. For the finest shard of time he believes that he has had his life and that it is over, and a panic grips him because he cannot remember it, not a thing, he has had it and lost it, or it has lost him. The fear isolates in a flash of yellow tearing up to the top of the glass mountain. Loss. But he must not consider it.

Nothing is lost, those choices are yet to be made. As they walk on he looks up at the mesh that knits paths above him and searches out the pattern, and the patterns in the patterns, and the patterns inside those, until he has to close his eyes to the logic and settle for the yellow on the inside of his vision, which sparks, then rapidly fades. He grips the hand that has found his, opens his eyes, and walks on.

Thanks to Anna and Lorna, to all who helped with the research for this book, to my writing friends Anthea, Becky, Ian, Jason, Jenni, Karen, and Pam, to my family, to the kitchen bin, which happily turned out to be too small to fit my laptop during a crisis of confidence, and lastly, mostly, to Rick, Terri, and Dana.