The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey Read Free Book Online

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 hisprison 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 victoryagainst 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