The Wilderness (40 page)

Henry points out onto the horizon through the trees and asks why the horizon is so straight. When Helen embarks on an elaborate explanation of God's aligned and unswerving nature, he steps in to tell his son it isn't straight, it just appears
that way; but at that point Alice whispers in his ear
Jape, I want to pick them,
and he loses interest in arguing about horizons.

Pick the cherries?
he asks, and his daughter nods.

He kisses her cheek, of course, of course, whatever she wants she can have.

The only ripe cherries will be on the highest branches,
Helen says tersely.

He stands in the middle of the path and closes his eyes to the next stream of gunshots. Helen turns her face up to the sound and shivers as though she wants to run from it all, that beat of darkness that seems to follow them around. When she looks back at him she eyes him curiously and tells him he looks just like a soldier, so serious, dressed in that military light.

He says he is trying to work out what's on the other side of that sound.

Peace, she answers. There's nothing quieter than the quiet after noise.

Jape,
Alice whispers again to his ear.
I want to pick them.

And then the next day, there is no Alice, and the cherry tree droops its branches in sympathy, or is it guilt.

The woman comes into the room, waving her arms: Jake, you have put your clothes in the oven. Jake, you have fed Lucky five times today, she'll die if you don't stop it. Jake, you are wearing one shoe, one slipper; always wearing your coat, like you're about to escape at any minute, take it off. Jake, you are jostling about, do you need the loo? She looks like a mad
woman, in and out like this with smoking clothes and dog bowls, getting red in the face as her voice rises.

“You stole my money,” he tells her coolly. “It was under the bed.”

Then he is upset—she stole his money! He wrings his hands and frowns at a patch of carpet. And she stole the letters that man had been writing to him, the letters about the… thing—they are not in his pocket, he can't see them, and they were his licence, his goodness, what protected him. She stole his money, his letters!

“You stole everything!” he fumes.

“I didn't steal anything.”

“You stole my money!”

Then doors slam and silence encroaches, then the sound of tears, then a little while later a tray of food comes, which she lays on his lap. Her eyes are red.

“I have to have a break for a few days,” she says. “I can't cope. There's a service I heard about and I'm going to see if I can use it, where you can go somewhere for two days while I stay here and have a bit of time alone and you can have some time alone. Without me. In a nice place where you'll get looked after better than you do here.”

He looks at his hands gripping the edges of the tray, old hands, as if he has been in an accident.

“I don't want it.”

“It'll do us good—two days without each other.”

“I don't want to be without each other.”

“Just for two days. I need a rest, Jake. I think we both need a rest.”

“I don't want a rest without each other.”

“Just for two days.”

He transfers his grip from the tray to her arms and squeezes. A look of pain and anger passes across her face and she shakes her head: no, it means. Let go of me. He squeezes harder and she closes her eyes.

“Just for two days,” she says.

Again, he is faced with his old, frightened hands. I was a child once, he thinks with surprise. How criminal, how sadistic, how preposterous that I am not anymore.

Outside the window, in all this cold weather, the little girl is gone. Snow falls like blossom.

“My father, Arnold, has a scar across each cheek. Here, and here.”

Sara's free hand—the hand that is not holding the gold-rimmed cup—touches one cheek then the other. “Fencing scars, Jacob. From his days at the University of Vienna. Look, let me show you.”

She crouches under the shelter of a tree and dips her hands into her bag, allowing them to waft through the blackness before she pulls out a photograph.

“Here, my father.”

She presents the image to the freezing drizzle of the woods; she shows it to him, to the trees: here is where it all begins, and here you begin.

He takes one hand from the warmth of his pocket and
holds the photograph with her. The baked potatoes that she gave him that morning, to keep his hands warm in his pockets, are only just beginning to lose their heat, and the drizzle is turning to snow.

Sara touches her father's cheeks, taps them gently as she taps the list of ingredients in a recipe, as if to say, yes then, that makes sense.

“Do you see them, the scars?”

Yes, he sees them, the silver glints along his cheekbones.

Across the treetops a gunshot rings, a deep pungent sound; he throws a pinecone at a target—a leaf in his path—and hits it square.

“The war is starting,” Sara says. “And things will not be the same again.”

Her ring clinks against the china of the cup, and her spare hand reaches down to his coat and pulls up the hood. Then she tilts her head back.

“Look up, Jake, look up at the branches.”

And so he does, and they walk in this way, looking up at the breaks of light through the bare trees.

“Patterns within patterns within patterns.” She half smiles, half frowns. Their faces are wet with snow and he wipes his cheeks.

“My parents should get out of Austria,” she says. “There's time, and it isn't safe there. All their friends are leaving. I've written to them and asked them to leave. They can come here, we have room.”

Of course, they don't have room, the lie is obvious and harmless, but the way his mother talks (each statement so mathematically assured) causes him to imagine the Junk
somehow expanding to fit the need. Or that somehow these exotic tall people will bring their solid walls and high ceilings with them; their airy space, their time.

His mother crouches and pulls him gently to crouch opposite her, her hands holding his arms. “Jacob, at school—or anywhere—don't mention that I'm not English, if anybody asks. Nothing about the candles, huh?”

Though he nods, the words don't seem right from her lips. She has always argued with his father about her right to burn the candles, bake the little sugary triangles, fill their cramped kitchen with the coffee machine that gurgled its foreign language each morning.

“Don't be scared, no harm will come to us.” She kisses his cheek and the scent of lilies swarms him. “It's just better to pretend you don't know anything. Sometimes it is better to be a fool, my dear. Where you are from, what is yours, what is home—sometimes these are not the point. The truth is not everything. You have to know when it is time to get away.”

A second, louder gunshot explodes in the distance and bounces through the branches above them.

“Dreck!” Sara stops and puts her hand to her chest. Coffee spills on the new dust of snow and melts the snow away. It is the gunshot at the start of a race, he thinks, and suddenly the woods are charged with the thought of escape. He and his mother look at each other with a slight excitement, a fever sketched giddily across their faces. The snowflakes are now fat and determined to settle, and he is impressed by how fast they turn the trees white. That letter his mother sent, he supposes, is shuttling across Europe on trains, a beat pulsing along the track like the beat now left in the air after the gunshot.

They fling away the dregs of coffee in their cups and run for no reason but to run. They have a soft fight with the snow as it falls, the flakes so large now he could almost count the sides, and they begin laughing silly shrill giggles—both of them, he thinks (sure that he knows what his mother is thinking; their brains have the same folds and clefts and wiring), are thinking about Sara's parents doing the same, walking and then running across woods and countries with their yellow bands flickering, making a run for the sea. He looks forward to their arrival. He glances up at his mother's bright flushed face as they run and she looks more hopeful than the brilliant snow itself.

The main thing he thinks now is that somehow he must get out.

A man leads him to his seat in the dinner hall and shows him his meal. He objects by shaking his head roughly. They did not used to sit like this at school, each person at their own chair with their own small table in their own world—instead they were in rows along benches, elbow to elbow, forming one long chain of interconnected worlds that nudged at each other, feet that tangled and rationed food that migrated from plate to plate in bouts of fighting and sharing. If it were like that now he would sit, eat, and talk, but the place has the restless quiet of things lost and forgotten and it makes him anxious.

He spends his time getting up to look for his dog, then, after some wandering, sits, forgetting what it was he had got up to do. Then he gets up to look for his dog, and ends up out in
a summerhouse in the thawing snow, smoking with a group of elderly people he does not know or care about, then returns inside to look for his dog.

He will not go to bed, he will not piss while being watched, he will not go for a walk, he will not drink his tea, and he will not sing songs or play games. There is a chink in the earth which he will have to head for in order to be funnelled out—a small port of exit—and so he will wait in the corridor for somebody to come for him, eventually to take him home.

“But you're going home in two days,” he is told by somebody who has no right to know more about him than he does. “You're just here for a break, try to enjoy it.”

Not true, he has been here for weeks or months already, and can feel every one of the days dragging behind him, a load too heavy to pull. Abandoned! His wife has left him to rot, his mother too, his son. As a woman scrubs at his back in the bath he covers his crotch with his hand and bends his head downwards to hide his face from her. He tightens his body and refuses to move his arms from his body. If he had the words he would tell her what he thinks, but as it is he has a throat closed rigid with sentiments that have lost form. Eventually he is dragged from the bath by several hands, dried off, and shovelled into a pair of pyjamas that he objects are not his. He is given a cup of tea that he refuses to drink, and then put into bed when not in any mind for sleep, and lies with an aching stomach and a need for the toilet. He is anxious that if he sleeps he will miss his lift home. The light goes out; he puzzles over where he is, where his mother is. He calls her name quietly in the dark—
Mama?

When he finally sleeps he dreams that he is in the car with his wife on the moors and there are planes flying overhead;
when the planes reach the steelworks they begin twirling and diving in spectacular formation, doing so for minutes until the twirling loses control and they pirouette down into the huge factory chimneys in yellow flames. He jumps out of the car and tries to catch the planes as they fall, one in this hand and one in that, and though he beseeches his wife to help she sits in the passenger seat nursing a child at her breast, her smile milky and cool and a song on her lips, and watches while the planes crash around him.

He dreams afterwards—or is it all the same dream?—that a woman with glossy black hair is in the back of the car whispering sharply to him with a polished Austrian accent: Wake up, I have left the man in the prison and he is dying there, wake up.

He does wake up, dumbfounded with fatigue and disorien-tation. A woman is at the side of his bed and gives him a glass of water and a tablet. The sheets are wet and cold. Ashamed of himself and too tired to fight he takes the tablet down with a gulp, sits blindly in a chair while she changes the bed, and feels a tiredness well in him as if he is clotting. She takes his hand and puts him back in bed, pulling the blankets up around his chin, and the next thing he knows they are still at his chin and his body has not moved, and it is morning.

Here, a perfect memory afloat in nothing. A blue peg with an elastic band wrapped tightly around it. Wait, it links back.