The Wilderness (5 page)

At night, occasionally, he would go through the photograph album once again and then try to feel the ghost or the delusion. He lay with his teeth gritted as his night vision, still sharp, interrogated each pixel of darkness in the bedroom. Each pixel gathered with others in a crouch of wardrobe or flow of jacket or a heft of beam; the handbasin and the chrome arm of the record player caught a splinter of moonlight. In there, between there, from there, he calculated, Helen will appear.

There is a story his mother once told him about the murderer
Luigi Lucheni. In 1898 Lucheni stabbed the Austrian empress in the heart with a shoemaker's file and killed her. When he went to prison he began raving and went mad, and he spent twelve years this way, in euphoric insanity, until he finally killed himself. In this time his only comfort was the regular visitations,
manifestations,
of the ghost of the beautiful empress. She came wrapped in fur, crouching at his side at dog level; she gave him dog vision. You can call me Elisabeth, she offered generously. She gave him access to the brilliance of sights, smells, and sounds that humans perpetually overlook; she stroked him, he her. In whispers she explained how she had come back to the source of the sin that killed her in order to forgive it, to forgive him, and she told him that this close encounter with one's demise was the only way to heal the pain of being dead. The hole in her heart—a concise puncture that barely blemished the white skin of her breast—had begun to glow a little, and cool breezes passed through it. For the first time, she was happy. And he was happy, at last, he was happy.

(As an aside to this story, Sara also mentioned that Lucheni indirectly started the First World War by setting a precedent for the assassination of Austrian royals, which is what spawned the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand sixteen years later, which is what flared the conflict between the empire and the Serbian assassins, which is when Russia stepped up to defend their Serbian allies, which is when Austria mobilised its army, and Germany theirs in support, and France theirs in opposition, and Britain theirs in support of France's opposition, and so: a war. Sara dipped a wedge of cold potato in her milky coffee and said,
Hey presto
—a phrase she had just learned—
hey presto, Jacob, Elisabeth had a lot to forgive.
And
she remained impassive, inexpressive, as if the war had no personal dimension for her.)

He believed, then, that if Lucheni—who had been ugly and craven by all accounts—got Elisabeth, a ghost of Helen would not be unreasonable in the least. One bereavement leaflet seemed to feel so certain of apparitions that it listed them, as a compensatory effort, against the other possible symptoms of grief: physical pain (in the chest, as if one's heart is cleaved), a sense of injustice, a broiling anger, notions of hopelessness, an intermittent or abnormal appetite, sporadic loss of function in the limbs, extreme fear of, or else longing for, one's own death. And in return, one may see or get the distinct feeling that the loved one is there, at the foot of the bed, or in the bed, or at one's shoulder, a smoky presence. One may put their fingers through it and feel the soul of the deceased, like moist remnants of dawn in the morning air.

Apart from that short-lived banishment of milk, he has never been a superstitious man; he awaited the presence as anyone would await the next step in a process. The chest pain came, the abnormal appetite, some anger promptly controlled. Confusion. In fact, it was more than this—it was clotting of thoughts, disorientation. A presence was the least a man in his position should now expect; it was not his privilege after all, it was his right.

He bartered with his solitude. The ghost did not have to be an apparition, nor strictly ephemeral, it did not have to bring lasting peace and hope, it could be real and logical, obvious almost, the outcome of a simple sum. It didn't have to creep in the dark, it could be felt in the day if Helen, who was not a night creature, so preferred.

He was open to possibility. After more than thirty years of marriage to a woman whose beliefs fired her every breath he had at least learned, for the sake of good-natured compromise, to be anything but agnostic, agreeing to believe anything in principle. And the more he lived by this compromise the more he found it served his natural attitudes. He would always favour something over nothing. He would always hedge his religious bets, preserving this something as just that,
some
thing, not this specific thing nor that particular thing. Helen would draw him into religious debate and he would, he always felt, evade it deftly by saying, “Helen, take it up with somebody else—in principle, I don't disagree with you. Maybe there is a god, in principle you're absolutely right, anything is possible.” He meant it, and the integrity was part of what made the argument deft, that for once he was not trying to quell her constant musing by outwitting her but was doing so by being simple and honest.

Being so busy waiting for ghosts, he failed to notice then that the confusion, clotting of thoughts, disorientation were burrowing deeper than the grief.

He lived by the leaflets. The leaflets said there was the chance of a presence, and on balance and in view of all he had been and was, he felt it was his due. But it did not come.

Entropy: this is the word his brain has been trying to hunt down for days, and suddenly it has arrived in a little whoosh of
eureka.

Entropy is singularly the most interesting theory that exists,
he mumbles to himself, propped in front of his drawing board at the angle, he thinks, of somebody who is always about to do something significant, but never quite does. The office is silent except for a rustling of papers in the other room, and is lit by a spill of light coming from there and outside, and a few desk lights people must have left on before they went home; the darkness stacked into the other areas is surprisingly deep and quiet.

Entropy—the theory that says everything loses, rather than gains, order. A cup of coffee will, with enough time, get cold, but no amount of time will cause it to get hot again. A house can become a mere pile of bricks of its own accord, but a mere pile of bricks will never become a house of its own accord. Everywhere nature's fingers unpick as if trying to leave things as they would be if humans never existed.

He stares at the drawing; it is not his, it was done by one of the junior architects and he has been asked to check it. Thorn-ley Library, front elevation. A simple two-storey building whose only design hurdle is, as ever, the budget; but even so he has been gazing at it all afternoon, his pencil in hand, a stream of coffees getting cold as he tries to remember what it is one is supposed to do. Should he change the lines somehow (but how?)? Should he put a tick in the corner? Now it is well into the evening and everybody—save for that mystery rustler in the next room—has gone, and he aches with inactivity.

Something makes him look up, and he sees a girl in the doorway to his left.

“Jake, would you like another drink?”

She is tall and familiar, brown cropped hair and a simple, kind face.

“A coffee, please.”

“Are you going to be here all night?”

“I have to deal with this.” He taps the drawing with his pencil.

“Well, I'm going in a few minutes, so you'll be left in peace.” She purses her lips into a smile and puts her hands in the pockets of her trousers.

“I won't be alone, there's somebody in the other room,” he says.

“What? This room?” She gestures behind her with a nod.

“Yes, I heard papers shuffling.”

With a tilt of the head she whispers, “That was me.”

“Oh, really?”

Confusion passes across him, across his skin. He can feel it these days as a bodily sensation not unlike a rash. He wants to itch at it.

“So, coffee,” she says lightly, and turns.

He leans closer into the drawing board and hovers the pencil. Entropy. A house can become a pile of bricks of its own accord, but a pile of bricks will never become a house. Entropy. The arrow of time, time can only move one way. He taps, taps the pencil on the paper.

When the girl comes back with the coffee he shoves the pencil into his pocket with the accomplished efficiency of a man who is used to having something to hide.

“Here.” She pushes papers aside and puts the mug on his desk. “What are you working on? Is there a deadline coming up?”

“Yes, yes. It's—” he sweeps the drawing with the palm of his hand and smiles. “It's not interesting.”

“I'm interested.” She buries her hands in her pockets again as if she too is hiding something. “I'm an interested secretary. Is that rare?”

“Is it very busy, being a secretary?”

“At times.” She shrugs gently and leaves the subject there.

“And what are you going to do, when you, when you're older?”

She laughs. “I
am
older.”

“Of course, I'm sorry.”

“I always wanted to be a vet, actually.” She sits on the edge of the desk. “When I was a child I thought I'd be a vet in a monkey rescue centre, because I always had a fascination with monkeys, and I kept sticker books of them to help me learn the different types: chimps, orangutans, gorillas, baboons, macaques, spider monkeys.” She tucks her hair behind her ear in a way that reminds him of Helen. “There are more than a hundred different types. I used to know them all.”

The words peal against the silence of the office, exotic, forgotten; he thinks momentarily of the time in America when the old word
monkey
came strangely into the new brown car. And he grasps the last of her list:
macaques, spider monkeys.
He feels himself stash them away as if they belong to a world he does not want to lose, and to things which were once important and will be important again.

The girl passes his coffee from the desk. “But I'm not sure what happened to that plan.”

“Maybe it wasn't ever a real plan, maybe it was just a fancy, an illusion.”

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.