The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey

Author:Samantha Harvey [Harvey, Samantha]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780385529488
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-02-16T23:00:00+00:00

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.

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