The Wilderness Page 4

  Being so busy waiting for ghosts, he failed to notice then that the confusion, clotting of thoughts, disorientation were burrowing deeper than the grief.

  He lived by the leaflets. The leaflets said there was the chance of a presence, and on balance and in view of all he had been and was, he felt it was his due. But it did not come.

  Entropy: this is the word his brain has been trying to hunt down for days, and suddenly it has arrived in a little whoosh of eureka.

  Entropy is singularly the most interesting theory that exists, he mumbles to himself, propped in front of his drawing board at the angle, he thinks, of somebody who is always about to do something significant, but never quite does. The office is silent except for a rustling of papers in the other room, and is lit by a spill of light coming from there and outside, and a few desk lights people must have left on before they went home; the darkness stacked into the other areas is surprisingly deep and quiet.

  Entropy—the theory that says everything loses, rather than gains, order. A cup of coffee will, with enough time, get cold, but no amount of time will cause it to get hot again. A house can become a mere pile of bricks of its own accord, but a mere pile of bricks will never become a house of its own accord. Everywhere nature's fingers unpick as if trying to leave things as they would be if humans never existed.

  He stares at the drawing; it is not his, it was done by one of the junior architects and he has been asked to check it. Thorn-ley Library, front elevation. A simple two-storey building whose only design hurdle is, as ever, the budget; but even so he has been gazing at it all afternoon, his pencil in hand, a stream of coffees getting cold as he tries to remember what it is one is supposed to do. Should he change the lines somehow (but how?)? Should he put a tick in the corner? Now it is well into the evening and everybody—save for that mystery rustler in the next room—has gone, and he aches with inactivity.

  Something makes him look up, and he sees a girl in the doorway to his left.

  “Jake, would you like another drink?”

  She is tall and familiar, brown cropped hair and a simple, kind face.

  “A coffee, please.”

  “Are you going to be here all night?”

  “I have to deal with this.” He taps the drawing with his pencil.

  “Well, I'm going in a few minutes, so you'll be left in peace.” She purses her lips into a smile and puts her hands in the pockets of her trousers.

  “I won't be alone, there's somebody in the other room,” he says.

  “What? This room?” She gestures behind her with a nod.

  “Yes, I heard papers shuffling.”

  With a tilt of the head she whispers, “That was me.”

  “Oh, really?”

  Confusion passes across him, across his skin. He can feel it these days as a bodily sensation not unlike a rash. He wants to itch at it.

  “So, coffee,” she says lightly, and turns.

  He leans closer into the drawing board and hovers the pencil. Entropy. A house can become a pile of bricks of its own accord, but a pile of bricks will never become a house. Entropy. The arrow of time, time can only move one way. He taps, taps the pencil on the paper.

  When the girl comes back with the coffee he shoves the pencil into his pocket with the accomplished efficiency of a man who is used to having something to hide.

  “Here.” She pushes papers aside and puts the mug on his desk. “What are you working on? Is there a deadline coming up?”

  “Yes, yes. It's—” he sweeps the drawing with the palm of his hand and smiles. “It's not interesting.”

  “I'm interested.” She buries her hands in her pockets again as if she too is hiding something. “I'm an interested secretary. Is that rare?”

  “Is it very busy, being a secretary?”

  “At times.” She shrugs gently and leaves the subject there.

  “And what are you going to do, when you, when you're older?”

  She laughs. “I am older.”

  “Of course, I'm sorry.”

  “I always wanted to be a vet, actually.” She sits on the edge of the desk. “When I was a child I thought I'd be a vet in a monkey rescue centre, because I always had a fascination with monkeys, and I kept sticker books of them to help me learn the different types: chimps, orangutans, gorillas, baboons, macaques, spider monkeys.” She tucks her hair behind her ear in a way that reminds him of Helen. “There are more than a hundred different types. I used to know them all.”

  The words peal against the silence of the office, exotic, forgotten; he thinks momentarily of the time in America when the old word monkey came strangely into the new brown car. And he grasps the last of her list: macaques, spider monkeys. He feels himself stash them away as if they belong to a world he does not want to lose, and to things which were once important and will be important again.

  The girl passes his coffee from the desk. “But I'm not sure what happened to that plan.”

  “Maybe it wasn't ever a real plan, maybe it was just a fancy, an illusion.”

  She nods. “I think you're probably right.”

  In the comfortable silence that falls between them he looks back at the drawing and, on an impulse, reaches for a pen on the desk and places a large, firm tick in the bottom right.

  The girl glances at her watch and stands. “Nearly nine o'clock. I'm going to get home. Don't stay too much longer, Jake.”

  “In fact I'm going to stop now,” he says.

  While he gathers things into his bag (takes them out again, puts them back in, wondering what stays and what goes), the girl turns the lights out around the office. A faint orange glow comes through the windows from the street.

  “I'm sorry if I offended you just then,” he says. They leave the office and she locks the door, then they proceed down the corridor. In front of him her narrow shoulders, long back, green bag, stand slightly proud of the darkness, slightly vulnerable, and maybe it is this that makes him feel he has done her an injustice of some kind.

  “Offended me in what way?”

  “For—” He doesn't know what for. “For the things I said.”

  “About when I'm older?”

  He nods hurriedly and makes a sound of assent; maybe this; he has no memory of it, but maybe.

  She laughs again as they take the door out to the car park. Security lights come on and he sees a toothy smile, the bag now grass green, her hair behind her ears. “I forgive you.”

  “Thank you. I'm always—saying the wrong thing.”

  Is he? He has never thought of himself that way before, but now he says it a sentiment rises to meet the statement and he feels clumsy, unlucky, very slightly sorry for himself.

  She pauses and frowns a little in thought. “I read an article recently about a man who set his girlfriend on fire. And then, in prison, the man decided he wouldn't eat anything except muesli, and it had to be a certain type. So his girlfriend visited every week and brought it to him in Tupperware boxes.” She looks keenly at him. “He set her on fire and she brought him muesli.”

  As she takes keys from her bag she smiles as if they are sharing a joke.

  “So I think you shouldn't worry about anything. People can be very forgiving.”

  Touching his elbow, she says good night and goes to her car. He goes to his—the only one left thankfully, or else he may have struggled to know which to choose. Can people be very forgiving, he wonders. Or did she say women?. Women can be very forgiving. A man wouldn't have done that, with the muesli. A man would have walked away and not come back.

  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 va
st 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.