The Wilderness (6 page)

Later he wakes up hungry and goes downstairs in darkness, the word
entropy
loud in his head. There were times—there are still—when he would face the darkness of three a.m. and be terrified by the idea of entropy: nature dismantling every human object, and eventually every human being, until there was just an unfettered, cold chaos. Other people had God to protect them from such an outcome, but he had nothing— nothing except himself.

The kitchen is littered with aide memoirs: Keys on hook behind door. Turn oven on at wall first. Tea bags in teapot, not kettle! In his tiredness he imagines his son weak and safe in his
prison cell, wrapped in furs. He looks in the fridge for something to eat and takes out a box of eggs. He finds a saucepan.

If nature was so insistent on making a house a pile of bricks, he had once decided, he would become insistent on making a pile of bricks a house. One must always fight back, not in the hope of winning but just to delay the moment of losing.

If it was bricks-to-houses that he wanted to achieve, it would have been much more honest to become a builder. But there was something frightening in the vision of it—one solitary man battling against the tidal wave of a mammoth physical process, like that man and Goliath, like Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill just to have it roll back down. (Always he has this image of Sisyphus, and the older he gets the easier it is to relate to that particular kind of penance: the acceptance of the pointless.) No, to become an architect and fight the process behind a drawing board in an office seemed less doomed than the builder's thankless task, more strategic and long term.

So he went to London to university and then to work. He converted bombed ruins into high-rises, scrapyards into precincts, thistle-choked fields into schools; he met his wife in the ruins of a blitzed Victorian terrace and proceeded to carve an orderly life with her. She was young, sleek, and suburban. All around them London was powerful with human endeavour. Entropy seemed to be a lame old process after all; it seemed never to encroach.

Now, when he looks back, he wonders: has he succeeded in holding back the tide? The prison is his creation; its codes and systems, its sequenced, numbered rooms, all of which act as a dam against the mess of the world. That in itself was a victory
against chaos. He breaks eggs into the pan and throws the shells away. He then takes the shells from the bin and stands with them in his hand with the idea that he needs them for the omelet—he can't remember if shells are like packets that you throw away or apple skins that you eat. Packet or skin, skin or packet? Or box? Or wrapper, or case? There are so many words, and so many actions that depend on the words, that it becomes impossible, when one begins to think it through, to ever know what to do.

He puts the eggshells in the bread bin instead. Think about it later, he resolves, mumbling to himself.

That evening—that Tuesday or Monday or Friday—he had watched Helen out on the ladder in the pinafore she always wore, and the socks and shoes; she looks like Alice in Wonderland, he had thought, and he took a picture. She was picking cherries from the tree with the familiar ineluctable energy that seemed never to leave her. So many times in the past she had come down from that tree, her fingers stained red, beaming— absolutely beaming at the bounty of it all.

He had told her, many years before when they first moved to the coach house, about the Jewish laws of kashrut that dictated how the fruit of a tree could not be harvested until the third year—that before its cycles can be interfered with the tree must know about ripeness and withering, until it becomes so adamant in its growth and so voluptuous with fruit that no amount of picking will disturb it. And for the harvester's
part, the virtue of patience must be learned. The virtue of waiting for one's pleasure until the waiting itself doubles or triples the joy.

“Joy,” she had said smiling, “is something I enjoy.” She had put the bowl of cherries on the grass and taken Henry from his arms. “And waiting is my favourite pastime. Waiting for my little boy to grow up, hmm, waiting for him to climb the ladder with me and pick the cherries, what do you say, Hen, what do you say?”

She began to shower Henry's head with kisses, then sat at the bench beneath the tree and unbuttoned her shirt down the front. “Are you hungry, Henry, are you a hungry boy?” It had begun to rain, large plump raindrops landing in discreet crystals on the leaves, but she had stayed there nevertheless and laid bare her right breast in the same way she laid bare packets of fish or cheese, with the same tender efficiency.

Whether she did, in fact, breast-feed there and then, whether this was, in fact, the exact occasion on which he had told her about kashrut, whether the rain had belonged to that occasion or to another, or many others, or none (for a thing that never happened can be remembered exquisitely, he knows) is beside the point. Kashrut and cherries were beside the point. As he watched her that evening in the pinafore, a much older woman, up the ladder, panic welled behind his eyes and he had what he now regards as his first true blankness. For a moment he forgot everything he had ever known, not just facts but the art of how to get facts. The utter blankness amounted to one solitary, stammering thought: What is it I'm supposed to do now?

It was a moment, that was all, of extreme disorientation, but though it passed it did not, he felt, pass fully. He reached
under the bed for the human-skin Bible and, kneeling over it on the bedroom floor, opened it at Psalms; perhaps he did not open it at Psalms at all, perhaps he scanned through page after page looking for something that might speak to him. He has remembered this evening so often that he has muddied it with his mind—but there it was in any case and however it came to be. There in Psalms it said,
Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? And thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?

One cannot be expected to remember everything, and in fact remembering everything is a hindrance to living; if an event comes as a thousand details the brain needs to forget nine hundred of them in order derive any meaning from that event. So a woman with dyed red hair, coarse skin, and a pen in her hand has explained. But, she has also explained, too much forgetting is bad. He had wanted to take her to task over this: Define
too much,
define
bad,
who do you think you are, do you think I am a child?

I'm going to say three words and I'd like you to repeat them after me: house, shoelace, picture.
He does not remember what answer he gave, only that he wished for the woman to look away as he strove to meet her ludicrous demands; and he knows that he must, despite an effort, have failed to please her.

“Please draw a clock face on this piece of paper for me,” she had said.

“Analogue or digital?” he asked, looking her acutely in the eye.

“Analogue.”

He had drawn carefully; despite this the outcome had been unusual. He could see that what he had drawn was not a good clock face and that there was something wrong, but he could
not see what, nor why. One day, he supposes, he will not even remember that he does not know or remember, and the ageless face of that woman taking his drawing and saying, “Right, Mr. Jameson, thank you,” will constitute for him neither hope nor fear, it will just be an unknown face.

Once he asked the woman with the fox hair what was meant by the missing
e.
It was just that he kept remembering it, and she seemed to have all the answers. She told him if he remembered something and he couldn't think why, he should let it go; it didn't matter. He was edgy and restless. He did not want to let it go. Then there is the cherry tree, he told her: they had once had a cherry tree in their garden, come to think of it they still might. And there was the human-skin Bible. There was 1960. The year his father died, also the year Henry was born. She just nodded and offered a sympathetic smile, and rubbed her hand across her belly. He remembers that now, wonders if she had a stomachache, or if she wanted to go home.

What if he did not remember that? He feels desperately unreliable. The bed creaks as he shifts his weight towards the centre, and instinctively he folds his arms around the body lying there. He decides not to be afraid. When he looks in the mirror he does not see an old man, nor does he see a brain that lacks logic. He sees himself, greatly changed, but undeniably himself, and he is grateful to this self for persisting this long. For years he saw in others what he thought was anger or hostility and he wondered why, then, mankind should be so incalculably reclusive, so intent on making life worse than it need be. Now he sees that this is not anger but rather a simple
refusal
to be worn down or away. The old man who looks in the mirror and sees an old man beholds also a man who has given up. This is not him.
There are vast tracts of his life which he believes unassailable by disease, and strings of days in which he is no less coherent and lucid than he was as a twenty-or thirty-year-old. He is amazed, thus far, at the banality of this
land of forgetfulness.

It is dark and late, although he is unsure how late. He moves his arm from under the other body's weight and puts his hand on her hip.
Eleanor,
he mumbles, as if expecting her to wake up and make things right. Still uncomfortable he rolls to his other side so that he can see some night sky through the French windows. Out of sight are the branches of the cherry tree, perhaps heavy with cherries, or perhaps bare—he cannot think precisely, with his arm numbed like this and his brain half asleep, where in the year they are. The last clear recollection he has of today was looking at the map in the car, and even this, even this might have happened a different day.

That evening Helen had stood so firmly at the blade of the knife, her hands on her hips, that he had been sure she would not be physically capable of dying. She had thought she was getting old, and yet her hands were oddly young and childish. He had asked this anxious question—What is it I'm supposed to do now?—as if she might step down from the ladder and guide him neatly back to himself. It was not meant to be the last time he would see her alive. On the contrary, it was the sight of her so solid and gallant on the ladder, her pinafore blowing in a new wind, cherries falling into her bowl, that propelled him into blankness, timidity, and confusion. For the first time he did not find himself the better of the two, and for the first time he realised he might need her. He saw the wind pick up. He stood for a long time in a reverie, his hands to his chin, thinking he might go out and help her.

Their lives were in three suitcases, a suitcase per life. On their last full day in London he woke Helen up and suggested one final act before leaving.

“A last adventure,” he said. “You choose, it's for you.”

“The zoo?” Helen said sleepily, hoisting herself up in bed and blinking at the window. A chilly, grey light struggled into the room.

“The zoo?”

“I had a dream I was at the zoo.”

“Is that where we should go then?”

Gathering her senses, she tied her hair back and sipped water. “Yes. We must go there, Jake. Could we?”

Generally they obeyed Helen's dreams. Her dreams tended to be practical and prescriptive, the kind that come clearly and
vividly and settle arbitrary dilemmas without fuss. Her dreams had directed them to the cinema on several occasions—they saw
Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Hustler, West Side Story.
It had directed them to buy the Mini before anybody else they knew had one. To stock up on Gentleman's Relish.

So they took the Underground, stepping out of a city that was still tired from the night before, into the open gaze of macaques and spider monkeys. It was early on a cold Wednesday morning and humans were outnumbered by primates— outnumbered and also scrutinised with a gnomic scepticism, a pointed finger slightly bent, or a deep frown that reached across the forehead, some scratching, some distracted eating.

“It's as I dreamed,” she said. “Like a hallucination, to find all this here in the middle of London.”

Helen wanted to show Henry the aquarium, the hallucinogenic flashes of neon fish in water imported from the Bay of Biscay—everything borrowed and other as in a dream. She wanted to see all this one last time before they left the city and plunged themselves into a life of—what?

“What?” she had said one evening, quite suddenly. “What will be there for us?”

“We can save money and buy land, we can build a house. It's cheap there.”

“Why do we need to build a house? We can buy a house, can't we? There's one just along the road for sale, that couple who are moving to Hackney. Our savings could help us buy that—”

“Our savings aren't for houses in Hackney,” he said. “Houses in Hackney already exist. They're for new houses. They're for making new things exist.”

She dropped her shoulders. “It's not that I'm saying we shouldn't go, Jake. It's just, what will we do there?”

“It's my home, that area. Now that my father is dead Sara needs me. I need her. Please, Helen, bear with me, trust me.”