The Wilderness (30 page)

Finally the two of them settle for just holding each other. He is without energy, she is always afraid of doing something to make him unhappy or agitated. They just hold each other with locked limbs.

“Will we be getting something for my headaches?” he asks.

She wraps her arms tighter around his neck. “Tomorrow we're going to the clinic again, we'll ask about the headaches.”

He separates himself from her and settles on his back. If they are going to the clinic tomorrow he ought to see to his timeline, in case the woman there asks. He tries to remember what that woman looks like and gets a picture of a teacher he had at school, Mrs. Webster, her image flashing in front of his
eyes after half a century of absence. What musty corner of the brain keeps these images? What nudges them out?

As they lie there he can feel Eleanor's lack of sleep, like Helen's in the last few months. Helen had always been able to sleep so easily, and then suddenly, as if she knew that her time was short, she would lie there and breathe in loud circles to alleviate what she had begun to call the imps in her chest. Pain, no, not pain. Worry? Was she beginning to get old? Look at her hands—were they an old woman's hands?

There used to be a painting on the wall opposite, he suddenly recollects. Now that he goes to define it, he cannot, except that it was dark, and perhaps of a woman slumped along a dirty mattress. Very often Helen and this woman would look at each other as if they were one and the same person, but born into different rooms at different times in different light conditions. And very often she would sigh, and say, There is not very much that separates one human from another.

And towards the end of her life she said this more and more frequently. Instead of sleeping soundly when the light was switched off she began to turn from one side to the other, and then, as she was falling asleep, gnash her teeth a handful of times, and make disoriented comments about a “poor woman,” a “fine line,” and a “ruined bed.” Perhaps she even muttered the word D. Yes, and he would not have known to listen for it. Yes, the more thought he gives it now, the more certain he is that she must have mentioned that name.

He gets up and dresses.

“Where are you going?” Eleanor asks.

“To make coffee.”

“Come back soon.”

He sees her white fleshy arms and disk of face in the darkness, nods and goes downstairs. He turns on the coffee machine. On the timeline he makes a mark, November 1961, Rook and Sara at the sea. At 1967 he blackens the mark he has put next to the Six-Day War, and he wants to write there: Alice dies. Yet—yet he cannot. It doesn't seem that it can possibly be true. Now more than ever it seems to be the most absurd outcome, something he has made the case through his very fear of it. He doesn't want to approach the memory. Maybe it is not true. And if it is true, maybe the disease will make him forget it before he can be sure of it. Like cycling off a cliff on fire. If he bides his time—if he winds slowly towards the edge, he will lose consciousness before the ground disappears.

He makes another mark: 1980, painting goes missing from bedroom wall. Nothing in him can vouch for this claim; in all honesty he can remember nothing at all of the last twenty or so years of his life. The gap on the timeline is ominous and looks better with this careful little detail, inevitably Mrs. Webster will be pleased. Then he puts on his coat and pushes D's letters into a pocket, summons the dog and leaves the house, thinking he will go and visit Henry. The prison seems suddenly safe and homely, everybody tucked in their T-shaped wings and forced into communities. There are not these loose times, and Henry is probably waiting for him.

He cuts across the main road and past the church, and, gripping D's letters, delves into the heavy darkness of the lane opposite. Beneath the letters is something else, smooth and hard; he cannot identify it. At first, when he takes it out and holds it on his palm, he is puzzled. A snow thing? Crystal snowball thing. He shakes it. Slowly he remembers where it
came from, that Henry gave it to him for his birthday some years ago, and as he remembers that day (snowy, and they were walking in the woods) warm nausea breaches his stomach.

The crystal snowball tells the story they all know, he, Henry, and Alice, the story of their beginnings: it is the end of the 1800s, a shoemaker and his daughter venture out into the Austrian woods in the snow to find mushrooms, and discover in their path a child wearing a lace hat and yellow shoes with a bullet hole in her head, the mother with a yellow hat, yellow shoes, yellow foam in her mouth, and a revolver by her side. She has shot her daughter and then herself, for what reason nobody knows. Gory photographs and speculation make the papers every day for a week.

A man called Arnold is sitting in his chair, feet on a stack of books, a Siamese cat in his lap, a coffee in a chipped gold-rimmed cup in one hand and the corner of the newspaper in the other: he is trembling as he reads. It is Vienna, Strauss is dead and the century is closing. He touches his silver fencing scars. How could a mother kill her own child? Closing the shop he rushes home through the snow to his wife, finding her twirling a praise ring with a twinkle in her eye. He takes her to bed. Must replace a life for a life, he thinks. Life is fragile, even when times are good, life is fragile enough to leave a child in yellow shoes dead in a wood. They call their lovemaking Conception Events. She, Minna, thinks of love and life, her belly full of fried fish. He, Arnold, thinks of the dead child. Somewhere in the clash of these opposite thoughts Sara is conceived.

Twenty-eight years later Sara fights back the death in her,
thinks not of the bullet hole but of the yellow, and her son, Jacob, is conceived. Thirty years after that Jacob takes the hand of a slight freckled woman in the bombed relics of Stepney and invites her home. The woman looks at the church of St. George opposite and nods her consent. She is thinking of Jesus, he of bombs, London bombed and bombed, London rebuilt. In the midst of their uncertain hopes Henry is conceived. Two years later she is thinking of the cherry tree, of fate. He knows little but yellow, a yellow dress, the sun glinting off the glass of his extraordinary would-be house. In the midst of yellow autumn Alice is conceived. Out of the story a family grows: here they are, one, two, three, four.

The story has not ended then. By virtue of their existence Alice and Henry are fighting for its happy ending. He and the dog wind on at random, he now realises, along the dark street; he has no idea where the prison is. The lip of the moors opens out just ahead in an expanse of no-building, nothing. There is a choice, to go out into this wilderness or to go back home. Ambition and fear rub up in his bones; he looks back and sees a figure running towards him, a woman; large, cumbersome, running, and a breathless voice that calls,
Jake?

He shakes the snow thing again. Thinks of his son, his history, the birth of his children. In the snow the woman and child dig in their heels, hold their yellow hats, and stride on.

“And Jesus said to his disciples: Why are you so anxious? Do not be anxious about anything.”

Helen was wrapped in a blanket by the fire. He took her a cup of coffee, sat by her side, and watched the page as she read aloud.

She reiterated, as though to herself.
“Do not be anxious about anything
.”

He pushed her back gently onto the rag rug she had made from old towelling sheets. Now they had new cream sheets from her mother, sent in parcels with sachets of detergents she recommended and soft toys for Henry, and little paperback guides on housekeeping. He lifted Helen's nightdress and took the Bible from her hand.

“The house is so cold,” she said.

“I know, I'm sorry,” he replied, putting her hair behind her ears before she had a chance to. “I'll get more wood so we have plenty—some ash, it smells good when it burns.”

The snow from the sea was just beginning, three days later, to come inland, and the moors were locked rigid inside white-grey skies. He took his clothes off and pulled the blanket around them both. Alice had to be made; an urgency began to invade the situation, one that neither could rightly explain, except that they were waiting for her as one waits for a dinner guest who is running six months late.

Two days later and the snow came in earnest, bleaching all description from the moors so that he squinted out at them and struggled to find perspective. After digging out the snow around the coach house he managed to get the car to The Sun Rises and help Eleanor. The journey of two miles took him more than an hour, the wheels grinding and slipping. He had to stop occasionally to dig the road free of drifts. When he pulled up Eleanor was there shovelling snow from the pathway, heaving, her hair was soaked and her bare legs screaming white in the gap between skirt and boots.

“Wear trousers, Eleanor,” he said, getting out of the car.

“Why?”

“Because it's three degrees below, that's why.”

“I never wear trousers.” She handed him her shovel. “Here, have this, I'll get us a drink.”

As he dug he looked out across the moors at the white desolation.

After he and Helen had separated from each other and the blanket that night and she had gone to bed, he had looked at a passage from the Bible that she had gone on to read aloud. It
was alien and senseless to him, and it annoyed him. Upstairs he silently retrieved the human-skin Bible and opened it at this passage, surprised almost to find the same words there. It did not feel like a Bible to him, nor like anything God had been near. He relished the wrongness of it and that it dared to be wrong. Reading through the verse he saw the words anew,
his
words,
his
Bible, his own religion.

And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal.

Digging now, and starting to sweat inside his jumpers and suede coat, he saw the moors through the steam of his breath milkier and vaguer than ever. Eleanor brought out two cups of strong tea and a bottle of whiskey.
And the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass,
the human-skin Bible had said, and he had caught on that phrase, coupling
gold
and
glass
into an irrevocable mental image of Joy inside his house, simply standing as if not to disturb what he had made. He dropped some whiskey into Eleanor's mug and then his own.

“You'll die of the cold,” he said, rubbing her back briskly.

“Won't,” she smiled. Her hair was stuck to her face, her nose and cheeks red.

“Seems arrogant doesn't it,” he said, picking up his shovel again. “To think that we, with these bits of metal, can fight back all that snow.”

Eleanor leaned forward heavily on the shovel and scrunched her nose. “Not really.” She gazed at him as if preparing to go on, but then looked away and scratched inside her nostril.

“Sometimes,” he said, “when it snowed like this, me and
Rook used to fight in it. We were always play fighting. Or at least I think it was playing.”

“I remember.”

“We sometimes came away with nosebleeds.” He shrugged. “Difficult to know the line isn't it, between play and violence.”

Eleanor gulped her tea and banged the snow from the shovel on the cleared ground around her feet. The sound was stolen by the muffling snow.

“It's about power,” he said. “Us with our shovels against the snow, and those fights with Rook—it's about who's more powerful, Ellie.”

She sniffed and smiled at him. “Ellie,” she whispered, shaking her head as if grateful to discover it was her name.

“I could beat Rook to a pulp now.” He arched an eyebrow. “Not that I want to. Just knowing I could though, just knowing that means something.”

“I hate power. Dangerous thing.” She shrugged.

He nodded.

“The things you can do to a person when you have power over them—it's shocking.”

“And the things you can do
for
them, Ellie.”

She shook her head vehemently. “No. That's not power, to do something for someone. Power's always against.”

She scraped the shovel across the ground. He put his tea on a patch cleared of snow, took the shovel from Eleanor, and went to the sign that hung outside the pub. He bashed it with the back of the shovel until the snow began falling in clumps, and continued to do so until the image appeared—the woman
with Joy's catlike eyes beckoning the yellow from the sun with her long arms, her long hair, her naked defiance.

“There,” he said, and hit the shovel against the iron arm of the sign to make a sharp, metallic sound that the snow couldn't take.

Three days later, and even despite the weather, the concrete walls of the prison were up, the T-shaped annexes slotted onto the sides. It had been twelve weeks from drawing board to realisation—twelve weeks. A triumph.

The public's resistance to the building was short-lived and limp. The people who resisted were the ones who would never go to prison nor have sons who went to prison, and it was easy to persuade them that the prisoners themselves deserved nothing more than these buildings, and that it was a subtle part of the punishment. Architecture affected the mind, he told a journalist. It was an external consciousness; if you put a man in a godless building he would feel godless, when he woke, when he shit, when he slept. The journalist omitted the part about shitting but kept the godlessness.