Read The Wilderness for Free Online Page B

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 looksback 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