Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

In amongst a sea of events and names that have been forgotten, there are a number of episodes that float with striking buoyancy to the surface. There is no sensible order to them, nor connection between them. He keeps his eye on the ground below him, strange since once he would have turned his attention to the horizon or the sky above, relishing the sheer size of it all. Now he seeks out miniatures with the hope of finding comfort in them: the buildings three thousand feet below, the moors so black and flat that they defy perspective, the prison and grounds, men running in ellipses around a track, the stain of suburbia.

The pilot shouts something and points to the right. In the distance a wood is being felled and they can see a tree lean and crash, then another, like matches.

“Surreal from here!” the pilot shouts.

“Yes,” he replies. “Quail Woods. Falling.”

He leans forward and touches the shoulder of the pilot without knowing what he means by the gesture. A sense of grounding perhaps — he wishes to be back on the ground, and feels nauseous, and a little afraid. In any case the pilot must mistake his hand for a flapping neck scarf or even a bird gone off course, because he doesn't turn.

“My son!” he shouts. “Down there, in the prison!”

The pilot nods and puts his thumb up; maybe he has not understood.

“I built that prison, the new part, back in the sixties,” he calls into the wind.

“Yes,” the pilot returns. “It's awful, I agree. Blight on the landscape.”

He leans as far out as he dare. Can he see his son? Can they see each other? He eyes with dim envy the mechanical, antlike grace of the men running round and round. That one is Henry. No, he is mistaken. That one, perhaps. That one? Impossible to tell, he decides. They are all thin from here, and besides, the wind blurs his vision. The prison is sliding behind them now as the pilot turns east and a limb of shoreline comes into view.

“My son went mad,” he shouts to the pilot. He wants to clear up this point straight away, given that the world has more sympathy with the madman than it does with the criminal. “For a while, after his mother died,” he qualifies. After all, the world has a short attention span even for madmen.

The pilot's word of reply is whipped away by the wind. It sounded a little like “No,” as if the wind itself, the very atmo sphere, has simply disagreed with him.

To steady his lilting mind, he focusses on the pilot's thick neck and the roll of collar, wondering what that material is called. It isn't leather, but something like leather, and quite a common thing, the sort of thing he should know. The sort of thing he used to know. Gingerly he touches it and then pulls away, clasps his hands together and brings them to his chin. He closes his eyes and feels a slight churning in his stomach; if only they could go slower, or down.

Now he casts his thoughts out for Henry and all he gets is the usual clamour of data. Henry, after Helen's death, running across the field behind the coach house with a carving knife, following the wing lights of a plane, shouting, “There is God, you holy bastard, come back!” Some might say this is not a happy memory, but he would object that it is not the happiness of a memory that he is looking for, it is the memory itself; the taste and touch of it, and the proof it brings of himself. He reaches forward again in an attempt to attract the pilot's attention.

“Down soon?” he manages.

Another thumbs-up from the pilot, and a turn deeper into that mass of sky that seams with the sea, where everything is unmanageably large and wonderful, everything is excessive, he thinks. He consoles himself with confining thoughts of the prison, its four T-shaped wings and cramped cells.

They sail on; if he had more choice he would panic. As it is, where the engine's roar deafens him and the wind whips his limbs neatly into his body, he finds himself compressed into an involuntary composure, pinned back and down into his thoughts. At this moment there is just the image of Henry running manically across the field after that plane — the memory as vivid and isolated as a night landscape brought up sharply by a bolt of lightning — and then a converse image of Henry, sometime later after a period in hospital and drugs that made his hair fall out, tying on the apron Helen had once bought him and beginning a long, sleepy bout of baking: his specialities were hamantaschen and almond cakes from his grandmother's handwritten Jewish cookery book. The house smelt of hot sugar for weeks.

There is something about this utter deflation of his son that irks him more deeply than any other run of events, so that he can see him in ever decreasing magnitudes, like an object receding.

The prison comes briefly into view again over the edge of the plane, then disappears. He closes his eyes. Some time ago, after the madness, Henry broke into three houses along his own street in the middle of the day trying to find either alcohol, or money to spend on alcohol, or something to sell to make money to spend on alcohol. It was such an inept attempt at crime — in one of the houses the occupiers were sitting having lunch — that Henry was caught and sentenced to community service, which he didn't do because he was always too drunk to turn up.

He told the courts that he was likely to repeat his crime, not because he thought it was the right thing to do but because he liked drinking and drink made him irresponsible. So then he was sentenced to prison and enforced sobriety; Henry accepted this with good grace and what looked almost like relief. Yes, he remembers the expression on his son's face — a short smile, a heavenward look as if to Helen, and then a comment: My dad built that prison, it'll be just like going home.

The crime was trivial, hapless, and alcoholic, the downward spiral of it mapped loosely in his son's appearance. All his life Henry had been blessed with a plume of hair around his face, a plump — but not fat — figure, soft mollusc features, a gentle height like that of a large leaf-munching animal, long eyelashes. He was pretty, his mother often said. But now he is hairless, thin. His eyes are still dark and bright, and he is still attractive if only one can get past the luckless look, but there it is — lucklessness is a kind of leprosy. You can't get past it.

Perhaps he does not want to see his son after all. The way the plane hangs and lolls on the air unanchored only seems to shake the giddied mind more, jumbling two names in his thoughts: Henry, Helen, Helen, Henry. Similar names — he sometimes confuses them. What if he one day forgets them completely? Then what?

Below them a bird flies, two or three birds. Far below that cars pass lazily along a road. The precariousness of his position is not lost on him, and the fear will not shake. He forces his mind down into the steep cleft of memory that always provides such comfort: him and Helen sailing along the beautiful flow of an American road on their honeymoon. A brown car, one shallow cloud in a deep sky.

But then very crudely and inexpertly the footage cuts to what he recognises as the beginning of a cruel montage of his wife's life, selected for tantamount pain and anguish. At first she appears in a languid sort of flash (persisting long enough to make the point without allowing the point to be explored); she is slumped at the kitchen table. It is that very particular slump strange with silence, the conspicuous lack of breathing. Oh yes, and the ring finger extended on the melamine table-top as if severed from the hand, just, one must understand, for dramatic effect.