The Wilderness (42 page)

Maybe his hands unscrew the lid or maybe the spiralling wind does—in any case he drops the lid to the stones where it falls with an insolent clang as if announcing a song it will never again sing. He kicks it aside. Step by step, and holding the urn, he walks into the sea, up to his knees at first, stopping to see one lone leaf blow past and push its way out onto the horizon, then pressing his thighs into the water until he is up to his waist. He raises the urn, tips it, and shakes the ashes to the wind. As they leave the urn the ashes appear to stop momentarily and study their reflection in the silver, and then, without a second thought, they become smoke. Might as well have had her cremated after all, he thinks lightly. The smoke leaps out and up and disperses. Goodbye, Mother, he says. Mother, he thinks over and over as if it is the only word left to him. Up and down the shore the stones tremble the word back.

Waist-deep in water, he looks once more up the beach and finds that where it was empty it is now populated by a handful of people who he can almost claim to recognise; they are all the original people. But as soon as he attempts to speak their names he feels fraudulent. It is more that he knows
of
them than knows them. On he goes into the sea, chest-deep, neck-deep, the salt slipping into his mouth through the absurd smile on his lips.

As he wades the last few inches he feels his hand getting wet and a voice fighting through the wind.

“Come on, Jake, we haven't got all day.”

The moment falls into view: the dog licking his hand, the woman taking the other, the flat bemused smile he offers, the one she offers back. Does he not have all day? What else does one have, he wonders, if not all day? He has no idea where he is, but he gets to his feet anyhow. Everywhere is perfectly dry all of a sudden. How strange, when it was all wet. Perhaps he is dead. Alive, dead, wet, dry, what difference? What reason to be anxious?

“What day is it, Jake?”

His hands come together; he is surprised to feel his fingers touch his face. He considers the words. They are foreign words. He offers a genuine smile, pleased to be here and to see her.

“Can you tell me the year?”

“Is that, by that do you mean, in the years before?”

“No, by that I mean, what is the year we're in now?”

“Ah. Yes, yes, yes, yes. The year is, and the years is, let me see, what was that? It must be about 1935 by now.”

“Do you know why you're here today, Jake?”

He raises his eyes to her and squeezes his hands tightly. “I believe it has something to do with my hair.”

She nods. “Your hair?”

“It falls out. What must we do to keep it?”

“I suppose we must let it go. What do you think?”

“I suppose that's the law.”

She closes the folder on her desk and pushes a glass of water his way.

“A kind of law,” she says. “Yes.”

The train cuts through a thickening suburbia. At points it congeals and the train, unable to press through, stops to unload. More people get on. He worries that it will not be able to progress with this new burden, tries, without even the expectation of success, to calculate the lost weight against the gained. Where the balance? Is balance to be hoped for? Is it not better that things gradually thin out?

Once off the train they get into a car; someone unknown drives them through part-known streets, and once in a while, rising from the slump of inexplicable stone, places spark with a dim, distant familiarity. He seeks out the bombed areas but can find none. Shifting within him, from limb to limb, is the sensation that he ought to
do
something, but as the buildings drift past he sees that there is nothing left to do.

Now there are other people, it feels like crowds, and a shabby brightness bearing the stench of animals. The metal arms frighten him as they turn, so he stands back and stares at them despite the woman's best efforts at encouraging him.
Come on, Jake, it's me, Ellie.
Finally she takes his hand and goes through with him. His breath is short from walking these few paces and from the close air, which seems too much for his lungs, but even with these irritations his mood is peaceful where it wasn't, and hasn't been for longer than he can say.

There is a man with them, who, he thinks, has just arrived, or maybe he has been here all day—has he? Has he seen him before?

“At some point I'd like to see the aquarium,” the man says. “It has water from the Bay of Biscay—”

The woman says something in reply. He hears his name being said. Slowly he turns his head and blinks.

“Anywhere you want to go first, Jake?”

The ears are full of background noise, not unpleasant but rather as though the air itself is made of something knitted. Here has existed before, or no, perhaps here always existed, this moment has been long, or possibly short, but here is thick on his ears and eyes. Ahead of him is a patch of scrubbed dry grass and on it are the large, obvious creatures, they look like old men who have lost their jobs and taken to drink, the way they hang and loll and scratch. Macaques, he thinks, out of the blue. Just a word without meaning, a word he made up. He progresses along the fence, amused and intrigued. One sits in the hook of a tree and eyes him wearily, its arms folded. Dog? he wonders. No, it has arms, hands, look at the pale affectionate hands that it wraps around the thing.

He squints at them and creases his face in thought, the way
they do. “Interesting that they have the—fingernails,” he tries. “For getting into it all.”

“It's a gorilla,” the woman says.

He frowns. He pushes his own nails into the palms of his hands and then smiles. The creatures' observation of him suggests that they doubt he exists but that, if they observed for long enough, they could make him exist just by looking, they could will him.

“Monkey,” she says.

Monkey goes. Monkey went.
Mankind's existence is utterly justified by this gift it will give to earth—the gift of sight—do you understand? Yes, understand. Yes. Do you? Yes.
The number of eyes staring at him is incalculable. Their scrawny arms and legs would appear to be strange servants of such large bodies. They are hairy old men, they are full of stories and little lies! He pushes against the fence to see if he might get to where they are, but the woman takes his hand and shuffles him on.

Past patches of dirt and low trees, along walkways lined with litter bins; sometimes, when he shifts his gaze from the ground, he is surprised to see animals behind wire, and feels that he wants to reach through to touch them. There are the black-and-white birds stiff in a ring of blue, some very still water that they cock their heads at as if to question its motives. There is a huge spinning wheel with the painted animals easing up and down to music.

Inside they sit at a table and the man brings drinks. It is a hot day of white sweating skies, and being in the shade is a relief. The
man bends to a bag and takes out a thin book, which he opens on the table, pivoting it so that everybody can see what it says.

“This is the album we made when Helen died, just a few shots of her life. You spent hours looking at it, months, do you remember it?”

His eyes water with staring, but no recollection comes.

The man runs his finger over the first picture.

“Helen with her Bible group. Don't remember all their names—Hazel, somebody, somebody, is it Cathryn or Caroline or—” He shrugs and laughs fondly. “All the women under the cherry tree praising God. And Helen with her blessed blanket.”

Helen. Does he know her? His mother perhaps? She looks like a mother in her kind curled pose, her dress and blue-and-white shoes and socks that give her the appearance of somebody who has stepped from a children's story, and her hands tender on the book. She looks like somebody he has met, but people tend to become too small eventually and slip through the fingers. Every person too slippery to keep. And it is a shame because she has the trusting face of somebody who could make him better, but with the slipping, with the slipping she can do nothing for him.

The next image, a familiar path arched with trees and a woman with two children—one she is holding, the other is standing at her side. The one in her arms draws his attention, she has a terrible, almost frightening vacancy to her stare as if she is in pain, or not even that, as if she simply doesn't know what is what. Not confused. Blank.

“Me, Alice, and Helen,” the man says.

The woman leans forward. “I forgot all about Helen's miniskirt. That famous miniskirt.”

The man and woman laugh quietly at something and turn the page. Here is his mother, in that brown dress, standing in silhouette in front of the wraparound window of her living room. The four gold buttons at the neck beat back the darkness. Something of him remembers something of this. He gives the stubble on his cheek a lethargic rub and stares, just stares.

“Can't think why this one of Sara is here,” the man muses. He looks closer at the picture. “Oh yes, it's the first colour picture Helen took—with the Polaroid—that's why.”

They move their attention to the facing page. A black-and-white picture of a tree. Pale mallow colour across the sky. A picture of a white house. The next, a colour picture of that same tree and a woman amongst its leaves, wearing a dress and nothing on the feet except a crosshatch of branch shadows and patterns. The next picture: the edge place, the place with the water and rocks. At the front of the scene there is a man and child watching an animal, the wet animals that never move, and the child is in that animal's eye.

“And this one,” the man says, pulling a photograph from the book. “This one is here. Me, you, and Helen by the aviary.”

He nods but does not understand what connection there is between those people and him, or that place and the place they now sit, or even what this place is where they now sit, or why they sit here, or when it will be time to go home—except that he does at last feel sure that when it is time to go home they will. The restlessness of recent times has abated. They bend deeper to the photographs, pages of forms and colours like debris from a car crash, like litter, or otherwise secrets found in demolished walls.

In this one there is a child in a white bed, and he recognises
the open, empty features on their way somewhere, but perhaps lost. The child is grinning, but the grin still gives the impression of a journey not finished, or a lack of emotion, or something. Something. He cannot pinpoint what it is except to say his heart reaches to it. He wants to touch that smile, as he wanted to touch the animals, and he wants to take the series of tubes and machines from the bed so that she can be comfortable.

“Oh, dear Alice,” the woman says. “She had been in hospital for such a long time, look how tiny she is.”

“This was just a few days before she died.”

The two people are silent. They pick up their cups and drink without taking their eyes from the photograph.

Eventually, turning the page, the man straightens and puts his cup down. “And these last two are just two I added.”

One shows a woman stepping off a bus, blond and tall with a face that is all sunlight and no definition. Even in the vagueness of the shot she is beautiful, he sees it now, the kind of woman one would want to be associated with. The man tilts his face up from the picture, then he looks down again.

“Look, there's me.”

He points to an indefinable shadow on the bus behind the woman.

“It's the day I came back from university and Helen wanted a picture of me to see if it showed up my new
distinguished
intelligence. She got excited and took it a bit early and missed. So we got a picture of this random woman instead. I said it summed things up exactly. Put it in here anyway as a joke.”

He watches the man chase the memory down with a tripping laughter, as if needing something from it.

“And the others are of you, Jake. This is a newspaper clipping of you presenting your money to the council, to be sent to support the troops in the Six-Day War. A thousand pounds, your inheritance money from under the bed. Do you remember?” The man looks up. “You became a local hero. And when everybody said it was God who helped win that war you used to object that it wasn't God who gave all his inheritance away, and that he always got too much credit for everything.”