Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

She nods. “I think you're probably right.”

In the comfortable silence that falls between them he looks back at the drawing and, on an impulse, reaches for a pen on the desk and places a large, firm tick in the bottom right.

The girl glances at her watch and stands. “Nearly nine o'clock. I'm going to get home. Don't stay too much longer, Jake.”

“In fact I'm going to stop now,” he says.

While he gathers things into his bag (takes them out again, puts them back in, wondering what stays and what goes), the girl turns the lights out around the office. A faint orange glow comes through the windows from the street.

“I'm sorry if I offended you just then,” he says. They leave the office and she locks the door, then they proceed down the corridor. In front of him her narrow shoulders, long back, green bag, stand slightly proud of the darkness, slightly vulnerable, and maybe it is this that makes him feel he has done her an injustice of some kind.

“Offended me in what way?”

“For—” He doesn't know what for. “For the things I said.”

“About when I'm older?”

He nods hurriedly and makes a sound of assent; maybe this; he has no memory of it, but maybe.

She laughs again as they take the door out to the car park. Security lights come on and he sees a toothy smile, the bag now grass green, her hair behind her ears. “I forgive you.”

“Thank you. I'm always — saying the wrong thing.”

Is he? He has never thought of himself that way before, but now he says it a sentiment rises to meet the statement and he feels clumsy, unlucky, very slightly sorry for himself.

She pauses and frowns a little in thought. “I read an article recently about a man who set his girlfriend on fire. And then, in prison, the man decided he wouldn't eat anything except muesli, and it had to be a certain type. So his girlfriend visited every week and brought it to him in Tupperware boxes.” She looks keenly at him. “He set her on fire and she brought him muesli.”

As she takes keys from her bag she smiles as if they are sharing a joke.

“So I think you shouldn't worry about anything. People can be very forgiving.”

Touching his elbow, she says good night and goes to her car. He goes to his — the only one left thankfully, or else he may have struggled to know which to choose. Can people be very forgiving, he wonders. Or did she say women?. Women can be very forgiving. A man wouldn't have done that, with the muesli. A man would have walked away and not come back.

Later he wakes up hungry and goes downstairs in darkness, the word entropy loud in his head. There were times — there are still — when he would face the darkness of three a.m. and be terrified by the idea of entropy: nature dismantling every human object, and eventually every human being, until there was just an unfettered, cold chaos. Other people had God to protect them from such an outcome, but he had nothing— nothing except himself.

The kitchen is littered with aide memoirs: Keys on hook behind door. Turn oven on at wall first. Tea bags in teapot, not kettle! In his tiredness he imagines his son weak and safe in his prison cell, wrapped in furs. He looks in the fridge for something to eat and takes out a box of eggs. He finds a saucepan.

If nature was so insistent on making a house a pile of bricks, he had once decided, he would become insistent on making a pile of bricks a house. One must always fight back, not in the hope of winning but just to delay the moment of losing.

If it was bricks-to-houses that he wanted to achieve, it would have been much more honest to become a builder. But there was something frightening in the vision of it — one solitary man battling against the tidal wave of a mammoth physical process, like that man and Goliath, like Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill just to have it roll back down. (Always he has this image of Sisyphus, and the older he gets the easier it is to relate to that particular kind of penance: the acceptance of the pointless.) No, to become an architect and fight the process behind a drawing board in an office seemed less doomed than the builder's thankless task, more strategic and long term.

So he went to London to university and then to work. He converted bombed ruins into high-rises, scrapyards into precincts, thistle-choked fields into schools; he met his wife in the ruins of a blitzed Victorian terrace and proceeded to carve an orderly life with her. She was young, sleek, and suburban. All around them London was powerful with human endeavour. Entropy seemed to be a lame old process after all; it seemed never to encroach.

Now, when he looks back, he wonders: has he succeeded in holding back the tide? The prison is his creation; its codes and systems, its sequenced, numbered rooms, all of which act as a dam against the mess of the world. That in itself was a victory against chaos. He breaks eggs into the pan and throws the shells away. He then takes the shells from the bin and stands with them in his hand with the idea that he needs them for the omelet — he can't remember if shells are like packets that you throw away or apple skins that you eat. Packet or skin, skin or packet? Or box? Or wrapper, or case? There are so many words, and so many actions that depend on the words, that it becomes impossible, when one begins to think it through, to ever know what to do.

He puts the eggshells in the bread bin instead. Think about it later, he resolves, mumbling to himself.

That evening — that Tuesday or Monday or Friday — he had watched Helen out on the ladder in the pinafore she always wore, and the socks and shoes; she looks like Alice in Wonderland, he had thought, and he took a picture. She was picking cherries from the tree with the familiar ineluctable energy that seemed never to leave her. So many times in the past she had come down from that tree, her fingers stained red, beaming— absolutely beaming at the bounty of it all.

He had told her, many years before when they first moved to the coach house, about the Jewish laws of kashrut that dictated how the fruit of a tree could not be harvested until the third year — that before its cycles can be interfered with the tree must know about ripeness and withering, until it becomes so adamant in its growth and so voluptuous with fruit that no amount of picking will disturb it. And for the harvester's part, the virtue of patience must be learned. The virtue of waiting for one's pleasure until the waiting itself doubles or triples the joy.

“Joy,” she had said smiling, “is something I enjoy.” She had put the bowl of cherries on the grass and taken Henry from his arms. “And waiting is my favourite pastime. Waiting for my little boy to grow up, hmm, waiting for him to climb the ladder with me and pick the cherries, what do you say, Hen, what do you say?”

She began to shower Henry's head with kisses, then sat at the bench beneath the tree and unbuttoned her shirt down the front. “Are you hungry, Henry, are you a hungry boy?” It had begun to rain, large plump raindrops landing in discreet crystals on the leaves, but she had stayed there nevertheless and laid bare her right breast in the same way she laid bare packets of fish or cheese, with the same tender efficiency.

Whether she did, in fact, breast-feed there and then, whether this was, in fact, the exact occasion on which he had told her about kashrut, whether the rain had belonged to that occasion or to another, or many others, or none (for a thing that never happened can be remembered exquisitely, he knows) is beside the point. Kashrut and cherries were beside the point. As he watched her that evening in the pinafore, a much older woman, up the ladder, panic welled behind his eyes and he had what he now regards as his first true blankness. For a moment he forgot everything he had ever known, not just facts but the art of how to get facts. The utter blankness amounted to one solitary, stammering thought: What is it I'm supposed to do now?