The Wilderness

7

He is late. He scurries from the bed and dresses fitfully. Sometimes there is this urgency to get out. Get out, deconstruct this big sleepy being that dwells in bed, and get up. Eat, get out. What if he could get up at this point before the dream of Joy began so that he did not have to dream it for thirty-five years? What if the moment packed itself into a gunshot and died with the sound? Before he leaves the bedroom he glances at Eleanor, who sleeps on, the cumbersome shadow of himself that he has left behind, as if he must sever himself from her to form a new day.

Today at least there is a reason for this urgency, and as he descends to the kitchen he wonders if his hair is acceptable this morning, if Alice will approve of the way he has gone thin and grey on top and of this funny round-shouldered thing that has happened to him. Well, she will not approve, but she may accept. She may smile, put her fingers through the grey strands, and say, “There is still a little black underneath, Jake.”

It has been so long since he saw Alice; when he pictures her he always tries to put her in the context of a place and to imagine the objects that surround her, but in fact all he usually gets is the image of her stepping off a bus or train that has come from a place he has never visited, and then stepping back on it, to the place he will never visit, and her separation from him becomes so apparent that he would rather not picture her at all.

He forces his book into his coat pocket, a book by a man named Seth Hansen about restoring old architecture; he notes the name because Hansen sounds like handsome and the words intertwine until he can no longer tell them apart, and until the author is imagined as a striking, knowledgeable, middle-aged man despite his photograph that suggests otherwise. Hansen, handsome. Different words, same words.

In the garden Lucky dozes comfortably on the grass in a triangle of brand-new morning light, her injured leg heavy on the grass. The corrugation of her ribs catches the sun in bars. He must feed her, he thinks, before she gets any thinner. Feed her, and then walk her, that's what you do for dogs. He mustn't forget.

“Lucky,” he calls through the open door.

She is still. Dead? He panics.

“Lucky!”

The sleeper wakes, possessed of an instant wit, and trots inside. She sinks to the floor at his feet and rolls over, a flash of white streaking up her belly by way of invitation for him to stroke her, which he does. She closes her eyes. He stops. She half opens her eyes and shoots him a look of betrayal. He strokes her again. Whole days have passed like this, he is sure. Whole lifetimes.

In the glass of the cupboard door he runs his fingers through his hair. It is always a test of nerves to see Alice after a long absence. Daily she grows more beautiful; monthly the acceleration of beauty is so marked it makes him laugh with pleasure; yearly the phenomenon becomes indigestible. It makes his heart ache. It sends a dull pain down his left arm that he long mistook for heart disease, thinking he had inherited what his father had. His heart is fat in his chest and his fingers tingle with the wasted energy of a love that has never found proper expression.

He retrieves a piece of meat from the fridge and takes it from its wrappings. It is a breast of lamb, clean and unbloodied. He hurls it into the garden and Lucky saunters out, circles it, sniffs, begins licking suspiciously, looks to him for approval and only settles to it when he nods, yes, yes it's yours, it's safe, eat it.

The dog's eyes close, her tail twitches on the grass, and, utterly consumed, she rips at the shreds of meat so precisely that it looks like she is sewing them together.

The bus station is empty but for a couple of men in uniforms eating bacon sandwiches, the fat yellow in the bread. He realises he is hungry. Both excited and nervous at the prospect of seeing Alice, he buys a coffee and paces, trying without success to get an overview of himself in the glass of the waiting room. For passing moments his reflection is there, but is promptly broken up by blocks of daylight or a loss of focus. Slightly underfed, is all he manages to glean at first; or, if it can be counted, if it is not too obvious, old. Old, and yet well, as if there is nothing wrong with him at all.

The uniformed men stand and one comes to him. “Waiting for a bus?” the man asks.

“I suppose it could be construed that way,” he replies good-naturedly.

“Which one?”

“It gets in at eleven.”

The man scrubs at his chin briefly with the back of his hand. “Well, it's — not even, let's see, not even eight.” The poor man makes a pretence of looking at his watch.

“I didn't want to be late,” he explains.

The man laughs. “Yeah, well. You aren't.”

So he waits, and the light shifts. It appears from around the back of the bus depot and begins filling the bays, and now people arrive and do what he can only think of as people-ish things. It is as if their repertoire is limited to a fistful of verbs: arriving, eating, drinking, talking, smoking, standing, sitting, waiting, going.

For a short while he reads; or at least looks at photographs of buildings with a sense of fondness and urgency as if these old ratty-tatty structures were dying people that need his charity. Victorian, Baroque, Edwardian, Georgian: they sound so worthy of life. But before long his concentration gives and the dog enters his thoughts. He wonders what she is doing, and feels guilty about leaving her, after all, he ran her down and got her into this predicament with her leg. What if she's cast, as a horse gets cast in a stable, and can't get to her feet, if she's hungry? Did he leave her food? Water? He finds that the hand in his jacket pocket is clutching two inches of envelopes, inside of which are the letters. Read them? Don't read them? Read them? No need to read them — any fool knows what they say. Helen was a good-looking and intelligent woman, and a marriage is small in a world obsessed with love. Don't read them, but keep them within reach always, in case. Just in case.

A warm day is gathering. He looks at his watch and studies the hands but cannot fathom how a hand here and a hand there — and another edging continually behind them — is supposed to reveal the time of day. While he stares his breath flutters and anxiety rises in his chest until finally he gets up, buys another coffee from the vending machine, and stands and waits.

Alice wants to introduce him to her new partner, who is a poet. Well good, in a way; he was always worried that he and Alice's partners would tread on each other's toes or compete in man talk. With a poet, though, it will be obvious from the outset that they will have nothing in common and that they may as well not even try. And sometimes friendships grow in this way. Yes, he is hoping for friendship, and he is pleased with himself for becoming gentler with age. Where before he might have objected and worried about the logistics of a poet supporting a wife and child, he now only hopes there will be a child, and is prepared to let the logistics go.

With the bus station filling with people he feels he is in the way and makes again for the bench. The coffee is now cold. Hot, then cold. Full, then empty. Dark, then light. These are becoming markers of time — often, without them, his brain would not know how much time had passed, or even ifit had passed. They are proofs of time. He cradles the cup and taps at its beige plastic. His nails are bitten. The pads of flesh at his fingertips are as pink and new as the day he was born.

Alice has warned him: don't expect too much, she is on her way somewhere, she can't stay, she would love to, she can't. Well, he is used to this en route — ish style of fatherhood; his children have never been his children, not in the way this watch on his wrist is, or the hair that has begun absenting his head, not even in the way the food or the bourbon in the cupboard is his. One's children are too huge, too much, one loves them too much, kills them with too much love. Impossible to possess a thing that possesses you. He opens out his hands. It is such a small thing now, this constant, wholesale relinquishing of his children, so routine that it feels prosaic. They have simply been on a lifelong passing through. Now they are — what? He does some quick, slovenly calculations. Thirty, or thereabouts. They are truly passed; there should have been some sort of ceremony for it. Anyhow, a bus comes in. He waits with interest, but it is not Alice's bus. Another comes, and then another.

Here she is suddenly, squinting from the bus's interior gloom. He has woken up without knowing he had slept. He must have heard her voice somewhere at the rear of his consciousness, that quiet singsong of it behind the one-way glass.

Observing her step off the bus with a tall blond man who limps (limps? Limps! He must admit to a small surge of triumph), he notes that her hair is longer and darker than he had remembered it. His memory had logged it as blond and fine like the hair of a child. She is more adult than he had remembered and her face more serious. More angular and exceptional, but otherwise, in all the core detail, she is just as he has always known her. Just the same.

She hugs him and stands back. “Meet Seth.”

“Seth. How are you? I'm Jake.” He extends a hand which the poet clasps.

“I see you're Jake. Didn't take a lot of deducing, right?”

“Seth and I only have a few hours,” Alice tells him with a slight southern accent that makes her sound aloof. “So we could have lunch — and Seth wants to see some of the projects you've worked on.”

“Very well. Whatever you want. A restaurant for lunch, or home?”

Alice brushes an imaginary thing from her eye. “I don't feel like going home somehow. Maybe when I'm not in such a rush, when I can do it more justice. Dwell a bit.”

A little relieved — the place is scattered with a thousand slipshod thoughts, a hundred forgotten tasks — he nods. “Yes, dwelling would be — better.”

It is a bright and decent day, warm enough away from the breeze that has picked up. On Alice's impulse they buy sandwiches and two flasks of coffee — there is a bakery which lends out flasks and cups for a pound a day, a service there is no real call for in this area. They use the service out of pure nostalgia. It used to seem the epitome of adventure when Alice and Henry were children, to walk into the town, buy sandwiches and cake, rent a flask of coffee, and camp down on a piece of green, lie back, talk about the shapes of the clouds.

“Constructing a building is similar to constructing verse,” the poet says, rolling a cigarette.

This irritates him immediately; similar how? One you do with a crunch of numbers and a pile of materials, the other with a pen and an edgy relationship with reality. He says nothing, and eats.

They have a spot on the bank behind the Edwardian building he had been campaigning to save: St. Hilda's, formerly a school, shut down in the 1960s, used for the last two decades as a place to run classes for the deaf, which have now been moved to the new community centre — a building he also had a hand in and is not especially proud of.

“I've been trying to secure its future,” he tells Alice and the poet — Saul, Seth. The name will not rest in his mind. He gestures with his sandwich towards the building.

“Its future as what?” the poet asks.

“A school, preferably. But most likely it will just become flats, in which case we'll — they'll — sell it to a developer. At least it would still survive that way. But a school would be better.”

“And are they succeeding?” Alice asks, pouring coffee. “In saving it?”

“Yes, maybe they are. Maybe they are.” He eats the sandwich, enjoying his hunger. “I want to see it secured, the demolition plans binned, all that rubbish cleared out.”

“Why?” the poet asks. “Why not let it go?”

“Because I don't want to.” He hopes a debate isn't on the horizon; he just wants to eat his sandwich and drink his coffee, to sit here with his knees drawn up to his body, unchallenged.

“But if it doesn't make sense, right, to spend all that money when you could make something new and better for a little less, then why don't you want that?”

“Because my career was to make buildings, not keep knocking them down.”

“And part of creating is destroying—”

Yes, yes. He knows this. The man could be dictating from his own soul. Create, destroy, destroy, create. A seesaw, a tide, life, death, poetically tilting from one pole to the other. And yet this so-called poetry has created nothing, or little, he can now put his name to. The creation of some high-rises in London, now mostly, yes, poetically, destroyed. Some concrete leisure centres still standing. Some uninspiring schools packed to twice their capacity and annexed by Portakabins. A prison, his son inside. But in general, above what stands, there is all that no longer stands. The poet wants to see some of his buildings? There are no buildings to see. They are gone. A faint programmed guilt at the shamefulness of what he built, and a mounting amnesia over them (did they ever actually exist?) are what he has left of his career. If he wants to be stubborn at this thirteenth hour, and stop washing along with the current, if he chooses to fight even if his cause is pointless or misguided, then he will.

Alice offers him half of her sandwich and he accepts gladly.

“How do you feel about retirement, Jake?”

“It's fine,” he tells her. He has no idea if it's fine. The poet has put him in a bad mood. After a pause he flattens his hair to his head, hoping it does not look too ridiculous. He finds his fingers are digging, digging away at the grass, soil in his nails. “Every day I feel — things become thinner,” he says. “The world becomes thinner.”

Alice frowns. He watches the butterfly-wing dip of her brows. “Thinner? More”—she gestures an I-don't-know with her slender hands—“more — temporary?”

Silently he blesses her. Like her mother, she is always keen to understand. She does not, ever, belittle with triteness and scorn. The poet throws the cucumber from his sandwich and, without drama, grasps the air with a fist.

“There is a thinness to things,” he says. “I think jobs distract us from it. As soon as that distraction is gone the days look— flimsy. We look at ourselves and feel flimsy. Who are we, what are we meant to be, all this shit. This is the shit we spend our lives running from.”

With this declaration the poet stands and wanders off towards the building, casual even with his limp.

He wants to shout after the poet now and tell him about the CND and the Israel group he ran from the table in The Sun Rises, the group whose name he can't bring to mind. They did things. They were effective. When he thinks of those meetings he can remember nothing except for a couple of faces that may or may not have belonged to that table at that time. He remembers how, years later, he organised blood donations for the Israeli soldiers going into the Six-Day War, and he and those people around the oak table all gave theirs. Henry's school announced that Israel would be destroyed, so Henry emptied his money box and gave its contents to the cause. He knows that what they all did was idealisti-cally extreme, for a greater good, and he knows he was respected for it. He knows the poet would respect him for it, and he would call after him now, but the poet seems otherwise absorbed.

“How did he get that?” he asks, watching after the man. He clutches the stone in his palm.

Alice inclines her head. “The limp?”

“Yes.”

“We had a bet. I bet that you would ask about the limp when Seth wasn't listening, and he bet you'd come out and say it in front of him. I think he had this idea of you as a brash, formidable man who would have no qualms about pointing out his faults. Anyhow,” she shrugs lightly, “it looks like I won.”

The dug-up earth in his hand comforts a slow, drunk feeling that is beginning to occupy him. “I see,” he says. “And did you have a lot of money on it?”

Again she smiles. “It was a sportsman's thing. We try to keep money out of everything.”

“Next time you bet on me maybe it would pay you to bring money into it. You know me, after all. He has no idea.”

He pats her leg and she passes him his coffee. The wind becomes restless and blows their hair. Full of DNA, hair, a single strand can tell a child who their father is. Alice's flickers out long and fine. Just one strand of that hair knows about him, can testify to him. He is in every part of her.

“I have this dream,” he tells her, or at least tells some invisible vanishing point beyond her. “That there's a woman in a— what do you call it? The place with the food.”

“Kitchen?”

“Tins and jars, things that don't go off. Sara has one. We don't.”

“Pantry? Larder?”

“Yes, quite. She is naked, Alice, and she has labels which she sticks to the jars. She goes up and down the rows of jars. But when she reaches the end of one — line — row — the labels have already fallen off the first jars. It's endless, Alice. Her job is endless.”

“Like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill,” Alice says. She pulls a shawl over her thin shoulders. “Just to watch it roll back down again.”

“I dream it again and again.”

She leans to him and strokes his temple. “Dreams are good for us, Jake. Even bad ones. Ride them. Do you know how? Focus on the jars, say, or the woman, and say, This isn't real, this isn't real. Let one part of you step out of the dream. Remember you're its master, and not the other way round.”

He sees his daughter blink her lilac eyes. When they reopen they are blue. With her head caught just there they are blue-green.

“And the woman gets older,” he says. “She starts young and—” He gestures curves with his hands. “In the end she's old. She looks like a fucking plank of wood.”

Alice smiles, seeming surprised.

“Your mother was afraid of growing old. Your mother was not afraid of anything but growing old. She was—” He frowns and seeks his train of thought. “Was she old?”

Alice is pensive. “ Fifty-three. That's not old.”

She engages his eyes for a moment with a look that is worried, that is sympathetic, that borders on suspicious. He smiles to distract her and, returning the smile, she retrieves her hair from the wind and sets it in place behind her ear.

“Alice, I'm afraid I have a disease. I have Alzheimer's.”

She brings her hand to her mouth; on anybody else the gesture might show gossipy surprise, but on her it seems only to press back any words that haven't had time to be considered.

Eventually she takes her hand away. “I saw something in your eyes, before. You aren't yourself. I knew something wasn't right. I thought you just seemed lost, because of Helen.”

“I am lost.”

The relief, to have told her, is so immense that he is heavy and warm with it.

“How long have you had it?”

“Two years,” he says, though he is not at all sure of this. It isn't a lie; it is his best shot at the truth.

“So what does it mean? Can you manage?”

“Yes, for now. I have — that other lady. She helps out.”

“Eleanor?”

“Is that definitely her name? It doesn't seem right somehow—”

Alice takes a careful sip from her drink and puts the cup down.

“I haven't told Henry,” he says. “Just you.”

“Why not Henry?”

“Because I have to look after him.”

She crawls the two or three feet to him and puts her hand on his cheek.

“Then I'll look after you. Don't worry, I'm here. You see? I'll make sure you're all right.”

Her look is all Helen's; capable sympathy. Somebody who knows how it works. He clasps her hand and swallows a grief that has welled in his throat.

“It's my brain, Alice, I feel like all my wires are being unplugged one by one. No, not even in an order, just unplucked. I need to keep it all together. I have to stash all the documents in one place quick before they blow away, do you understand? You could help.”

“I'll take time off work, come for a fortnight or so and we'll go through everything you need, I'll read up on it and we'll go through everything.”

“When will you come?”

“Let me organise it—” She takes her hand from his cheek and sits back on her heels. The poet is wandering towards them in his own world, concentrating, his hands translating some train of thought; he seems to be calculating something. Alice looks across at him and then back, then presses her palms on her thighs.

“Jake, is it bad timing to say this now? Me and Seth are going to have a baby.”

For the moment he is shocked. A flock of birds lifts from nowhere and crowd the sky as if they, too, are shocked. They stain the air with prime colour and beat their wings. He sees, behind the birds, the poet receding again, scanning the brickwork of the derelict building. Alice? His child? Having a child? How extraordinary and miraculous that this could happen. He finds a stone in his palm, wonders where it came from, and pushes its reassuring shape into his coat pocket.

“Everything will be all right,” she nods. “I'm going to look after you.”

“You are really having a child?”

“Yes, Jake, really.”

“Buddy Holly,” he grins, gripping her knee. He is — yes, he recognises this feeling — he is exulted.

“Eureka,” Alice breathes. She tips her head back in gentle laughter and draws her hands into a prayer.

Waking confused, he turns to the woman, to Eleanor. Quite dislodged, she seems lying there — plucked from old time and put into new. She doesn't belong; he doesn't belong. Vertigo, he feels like he has vertigo. Is he still at the bus station? Has Alice's bus not come yet?

No, he is somewhere familiar. The room is half lit through the single curtain drawn across the French windows and he hears birdsong. He sits up and frowns into the pixellated light, gripped now by elation, and now by a morbid disappointment that quickly becomes anger. By the bed is his book he has so struggled to read these last weeks. He fails to remember what it is about, but picking it up it falls open at pages on the restoration of an Edwardian school, and a photograph of a small — what is the word. People with signs refusing to allow the bulldozers in.

Was all of it a dream? Is the dog real? Did he feed her the lamb, and has he ever fed her lamb, and has he ever even fed her at all? I bet I have killed her, he thinks. In the dream he was fighting for a building and it felt so good to have a cause, a corner. Where is his corner? He searches out the shapes and objects of the bedroom and finds them momentarily unfamiliar. Where is Alice? Where is his corner? Which is his war, which side is he on?

As he lifts himself from the bed he realises that the illusions of his sleep have spread to every edge. There was no such time on the grass with Alice, with the poet. He may have been to the bus station or he may not have, it may have been today or five years ago, because time is not considerate enough anymore to make itself clear.

There is no poet. There is no grandchild coming. No Alice. There is only now. Now! Like a punch in the face. And now again. Now is so endlessly small and inadequate. Now there is the urgency to get up, get out, get away from Eleanor, shoo away the heartbreak of the dream with a coffee, some water— he is so thirsty — maybe a mint julep. Drown it. He is breathless with trapped tears. He has never dreamt so vividly. He wishes never to do so again.