The Wilderness Page 22

  He shakes the snow thing again. Thinks of his son, his history, the birth of his children. In the snow the woman and child dig in their heels, hold their yellow hats, and stride on.

  ANOTHER THING ABOUT THE MUFFLING SNOW

  “And Jesus said to his disciples: Why are you so anxious? Do not be anxious about anything.”

  Helen was wrapped in a blanket by the fire. He took her a cup of coffee, sat by her side, and watched the page as she read aloud.

  She reiterated, as though to herself. “Do not be anxious about anything.”

  He pushed her back gently onto the rag rug she had made from old towelling sheets. Now they had new cream sheets from her mother, sent in parcels with sachets of detergents she recommended and soft toys for Henry, and little paperback guides on housekeeping. He lifted Helen's nightdress and took the Bible from her hand.

  “The house is so cold,” she said.

  “I know, I'm sorry,” he replied, putting her hair behind her ears before she had a chance to. “I'll get more wood so we have plenty—some ash, it smells good when it burns.”

  The snow from the sea was just beginning, three days later, to come inland, and the moors were locked rigid inside white-grey skies. He took his clothes off and pulled the blanket around them both. Alice had to be made; an urgency began to invade the situation, one that neither could rightly explain, except that they were waiting for her as one waits for a dinner guest who is running six months late.

  Two days later and the snow came in earnest, bleaching all description from the moors so that he squinted out at them and struggled to find perspective. After digging out the snow around the coach house he managed to get the car to The Sun Rises and help Eleanor. The journey of two miles took him more than an hour, the wheels grinding and slipping. He had to stop occasionally to dig the road free of drifts. When he pulled up Eleanor was there shovelling snow from the pathway, heaving, her hair was soaked and her bare legs screaming white in the gap between skirt and boots.

  “Wear trousers, Eleanor,” he said, getting out of the car.

  “Why?”

  “Because it's three degrees below, that's why.”

  “I never wear trousers.” She handed him her shovel. “Here, have this, I'll get us a drink.”

  As he dug he looked out across the moors at the white desolation.

  After he and Helen had separated from each other and the blanket that night and she had gone to bed, he had looked at a passage from the Bible that she had gone on to read aloud. It was alien and senseless to him, and it annoyed him. Upstairs he silently retrieved the human-skin Bible and opened it at this passage, surprised almost to find the same words there. It did not feel like a Bible to him, nor like anything God had been near. He relished the wrongness of it and that it dared to be wrong. Reading through the verse he saw the words anew, his words, his Bible, his own religion.

  And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal.

  Digging now, and starting to sweat inside his jumpers and suede coat, he saw the moors through the steam of his breath milkier and vaguer than ever. Eleanor brought out two cups of strong tea and a bottle of whiskey. And the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass, the human-skin Bible had said, and he had caught on that phrase, coupling gold and glass into an irrevocable mental image of Joy inside his house, simply standing as if not to disturb what he had made. He dropped some whiskey into Eleanor's mug and then his own.

  “You'll die of the cold,” he said, rubbing her back briskly.

  “Won't,” she smiled. Her hair was stuck to her face, her nose and cheeks red.

  “Seems arrogant doesn't it,” he said, picking up his shovel again. “To think that we, with these bits of metal, can fight back all that snow.”

  Eleanor leaned forward heavily on the shovel and scrunched her nose. “Not really.” She gazed at him as if preparing to go on, but then looked away and scratched inside her nostril.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “when it snowed like this, me and Rook used to fight in it. We were always play fighting. Or at least I think it was playing.”

  “I remember.”

  “We sometimes came away with nosebleeds.” He shrugged. “Difficult to know the line isn't it, between play and violence.”

  Eleanor gulped her tea and banged the snow from the shovel on the cleared ground around her feet. The sound was stolen by the muffling snow.

  “It's about power,” he said. “Us with our shovels against the snow, and those fights with Rook—it's about who's more powerful, Ellie.”

  She sniffed and smiled at him. “Ellie,” she whispered, shaking her head as if grateful to discover it was her name.

  “I could beat Rook to a pulp now.” He arched an eyebrow. “Not that I want to. Just knowing I could though, just knowing that means something.”

  “I hate power. Dangerous thing.” She shrugged.

  He nodded.

  “The things you can do to a person when you have power over them—it's shocking.”

  “And the things you can do for them, Ellie.”

  She shook her head vehemently. “No. That's not power, to do something for someone. Power's always against.”

  She scraped the shovel across the ground. He put his tea on a patch cleared of snow, took the shovel from Eleanor, and went to the sign that hung outside the pub. He bashed it with the back of the shovel until the snow began falling in clumps, and continued to do so until the image appeared—the woman with Joy's catlike eyes beckoning the yellow from the sun with her long arms, her long hair, her naked defiance.

  “There,” he said, and hit the shovel against the iron arm of the sign to make a sharp, metallic sound that the snow couldn't take.

  Three days later, and even despite the weather, the concrete walls of the prison were up, the T-shaped annexes slotted onto the sides. It had been twelve weeks from drawing board to realisation—twelve weeks. A triumph.

  The public's resistance to the building was short-lived and limp. The people who resisted were the ones who would never go to prison nor have sons who went to prison, and it was easy to persuade them that the prisoners themselves deserved nothing more than these buildings, and that it was a subtle part of the punishment. Architecture affected the mind, he told a journalist. It was an external consciousness; if you put a man in a godless building he would feel godless, when he woke, when he shit, when he slept. The journalist omitted the part about shitting but kept the godlessness.

  “And what is your dream building, Mr. Jameson?” he asked.

  “We got this building up within twelve weeks and a small budget,” he replied. “I'm more interested in reality than dreams.”

  “Of course you're not in the dream business, we all understand your constraints—but if you were, hypothetically?”

  “My dream building is one that exists, as opposed to one that doesn't.”

  The journalist nodded. That conversation, too, was printed. He felt himself become an accidental working-class hero, a five-minute burst of undeserved fame. The day after completion he took Helen there to see the prison, and they walked thickly through snow around what had once been the landscaped grounds of the manor house. Helen became quiet when she saw it. The concrete looked ashen against the shrill white flakes—ashen and dead.

  “Jake, it's awful,” she whispered.

  “It's utilitarian. You can see the way we've created these annexes with the idea of allowing people to congregate—”

  “But it's awful, and what you said in the paper about godlessness was awful.”

  “I didn't mean it, I just said it. You know that.”

  “Why say what you don't mean?”

  “Why not respect me, my job?”

  She sighed. “I do, I do respect you.” She handed him the baby and fastened the button of her coat collar. “Those towers you built in London, they were terrific. I mean
, so impressive and new. But this—” Her gloved hands struggled to push her hair behind her ears, and she sighed again. “Maybe I just don't understand it. That's all it is, it's me. Yes, it's me.”

  They walked around to the other side of the grounds where the view of the manor house was still unspoilt. They stood for a long time gazing up at the windows of the house. Despite how he had come across in his interview, he did believe in beauty, and he did believe that his building would do these men a service, otherwise he would not have built it. When he saw the grey-white flow of concrete he saw protection for them as much as he saw imprisonment. It was his own take on godliness, and he wanted to explain this to Helen but thought it would not be enough for her somehow. He took his coat off and wrapped Henry inside it against the cold, kissed his cheek.

  “One day we should go back to America again,” he said. “California, where it isn't cold.”

  “California, where all the dreamers go, where there is fruit and gold and grapes and sunshine!”

  He looked hard at her. “Well don't you have any dreams?”

  “Jake, we live by my dreams!” she said with an incredulous smile.

  “No, I mean aspirations. Your dreams are more like instruction manuals—I mean aspirations.”

  “Something I want to do or create?”

  “Yes.”

  “I create all the time, I created Henry—”

  “We.”

  “We created Henry. And let me tell you something.” She pulled her woollen hat down over her ears. “I think creatively. If you even think loving thoughts about God, that love becomes instantly real in the world. Each thought is an act of creation, a—little birth.”

  He shook his head and let Buddy Holly rotate around his thoughts. An act of creation? Creation of what? He didn't understand what she meant when she said these things, and he was tired of feeling stupid for it. He was tired of feeling that their inability to have another child lay in his misunderstanding of some religious equation that was just too abstract for his simple mind.

  Later that night they went to their Conception Event with a weary anger. Helen was angry because the baby would not cry anymore and she never knew what he needed or when. The crying, she said, made the milk rush up her body ready for feeding, but now without that cue she often had to make the child wait; she felt angry with herself and the uselessness of her body, which refused to conceive. His anger was at her, or at her ridiculous arcane God that he did not understand, or at the piece of land that he could not get his hands on, or at her dreams that had predicted Alice but never delivered her.

  They tried night after night, week after week. The winter became intolerable except for the glorious smell of burning ash wood in the grate. Damp began creeping up the walls of the prison annexes and the builders were called back to assess; they blamed it on the architects who pushed the project through too quickly and with too tight a budget. The architects pointed out that they had been given both time limit and budget and were just doing their job; they blamed it on the council, the council blamed it on the government and Harold Macmillan, who was shrouded from the accusation by greater political distractions and rafts of snow.

  “Meanwhile,” Helen said, “the prisoners shiver.”

  “Yes,” he replied, removing her nightdress, wondering why she couldn't for once come to bed naked and let him warm her, “but don't think about it. Think about what is far away. The stars, the monkeys in space. Concentrate on what is far away.”

  Outside the snow continued to fall. As they made tired love Helen tightened and asked, What if one of the prisoners dies from the cold, I feel like something aw ful will happen. He ignored the untimely question, they were supposed to be thinking about life; he had the sensation that the snowflakes were blossom, and that the blossom was eating away at substance. And Mrs. Crest was buried under a mound of muffling snow, calling out with a silent snow-filled mouth. And then that the money under the bed was torn into flakes; he imagined handing it over to get his house and being laughed at, and that the man laughing at him looked like Rook, with the same crooked attitude.

  Eventually he thought of the unparalleled form of Alice, and he forced his attention back to his wife.

  11

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

  “Why?”

  “Yes. Why do you have to come here?”

  “Because I get headaches.”

  She purses her lips and nods. “Yes—but do you know why you're getting headaches?”

  “Because I have brain damage.”

  “In a sense, yes. You have Alzheimer's. And the tablets we give you for that are giving you headaches.”

  He squeezes his hands together. “I know that.”

  Nodding, she pushes an orange file away from her as if it has displeased her somehow.

  “So I'm going to go through the usual with you, and then we'll discuss what to do about your tablets, okay?”

  “That will be fine.”

  “So, tell me, Jake, what day is it?”

  He has practised this, but hesitates now under the pressure. “Thursday, or thereabouts.”

  “And what year are we in?”

  “That's,” he nods repeatedly. He has practised this too. “That's—quite difficult.”

  “Roughly?”

  “I think—I would guess—I don't know.”

  “And could you say what the time is?”

  He brings his palms together and exhales, closes his eyes. “Well, it's certainly recent times.” He opens his eyes again and looks appreciatively at her fox hair, the way it bronzes today in the light. “Ask somebody else, they'll know.”

  She puts her hands in her lap.

  “I'm going to name three objects and I want you to repeat them after me. I want you to listen carefully, Jake, because in a few minutes I'm going to ask you again. Okay?”

  “Right.”

  “House, shoelace, picture.”

  “So, then—” He squeezes the skin between his nose, rubs beneath his eye. Thinks. Thinks with all the pointlessness of a tiger thrashing about a cage. “Piston. No, not piston. House. No, no I'm afraid it's gone.”

  She writes something. The way she writes with unconcerned purpose makes him think he is doing not so badly, perhaps.

  “Now Jake, tell me what this saying means: people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones”'

  “It means,” he stands and begins pacing the room as he analyses the words. “It means that—”

  “Jake, sit down again.”

  She holds the arm of his empty chair—empty as if it had never been occupied, nor could be occupied again. How will he sit there, if it is empty? It is a blind, mole-ish trust that brings him scuffling back to the seat. The fox woman smiles and gives him a moment to get comfortable.

  “People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Tell me what that saying means, Jake.”

  “It means, I would imagine, that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones because the stone will hit the glass and not the person they were aiming for. It might even break it. It depends on the size of the stone.” He finds himself tapping fast on his leg. “Glass can be rich.”

  “Expensive.”

  “Expensive.”

  She pulls back the orange file, opens it, and takes some paper from it which she passes to him.

  “Read the words on this page and then do as it says.”

  He sees the words CLOSE YOUR EYES. He reads them over and over, untangling and understanding them, looks up at her with a smile to indicate to her that he has understood, then hands her the paper. “Thank you,” he says. “I've done as you asked.”

  She makes a mark on her sheet and thanks him in return.

  “So now can you tell me the three objects I asked you to remember?”

  He considers this carefully. “Piston, stones—the other thing.”

  “Can you remember the other thing?”

  “No, not at the moment.”

  “That's fine.”
She writes; he knows what she is doing—writing scores. Rating him. “Now,” she says, “please repeat after me: No ifs, ands, or buts.”

  He sniffs. “No ifs or buts.”

  “Okay, can you tell me, Jake, are you left-or right-handed?”

  “I'm left-handed,” he says promptly, confidently.

  She goes back to her writing. “Good. Good,” she murmurs. When she finishes she crosses her legs and rests her arms on the desk.

  “I'm thinking of taking you off the medication. How do you feel about that?”

  He is surprised. “Am I improved?”

  “No—not exactly. You are fine, but the tablets can only help with so much and after that there's no real need for them.”

  “But I only started on them a week or so ago.”

  “Not quite. You've been on them for two years.”

  He sits in a long silence, conscious of his posture appearing too dejected for her, or too dry, or too shambled.

  “What do the tablets do?” he asks suddenly.

  She runs her hand across her upper lip and frowns. “It's complex.”

  He tips his head to one side and watches her touch her fingertips to her head.

  “The tablets make your brain cells work better—but eventually, Jake, there are not enough cells left, no matter how well you make them work.”

  “Why aren't there enough cells?”

  “Because Alzheimer's kills them. This means there aren't as many, which means there aren't enough messages going back and forth.”

  He nods. She talks slowly, as if picking each word from a tall tree.

  “The tablets can't stop the cells dying. There is nothing we can do to stop that—but—but they make the cells that remain work harder. The problem is, the disease overtakes the tablets after a while, and then, no matter how hard the cells work, there just aren't enough of them anymore for the tablets to make a difference.”

  He circles his hand impatiently. “Tell me in the real terms.”

  “Those are the real terms.”