He Wants

by Alison Moore

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Lawrence again, and Lewis waited for his father to say, ‘but that won’t be necessary,’ but instead he said, ‘thank you.’

  The couple led the way to their car. ‘You’re welcome to stay for as long as you need,’ said Lilian.

  ‘We’re a bit out of town,’ said John, ‘but I’ll drive you to the train station when you’re ready to go.’

  Lewis and his father were driven through what remained of that June day to a house on the outskirts of the city. As he drove, John talked about the help he could do with in the garden, digging up the vegetables, and about the animals they had, so that Lewis was picturing a big house surrounded by land, a long, dusty driveway with chickens running around, a veranda at the front and a number of dogs. He was surprised to arrive at a small house with a square of tarmac at the front and a cramped garden behind, not a dog or a chicken to be seen.

  They were shown inside, directly into a sitting room. Invited to make themselves comfortable, they sat down on the large sofa, whose brightly coloured fabric was covered in protective plastic that creaked beneath them. A magnificent chandelier hung from the high ceiling, dominating the small room. Beneath it, on a table, was a goldfish in a bowl.

  Lilian went to the kitchen and came back carrying a tray. In order to put it down, she pushed the fish to one end of the table, the water sloshing violently inside the little bowl. She handed out glasses of flat lemonade before sitting down in a plastic-covered armchair. She shut her eyes and for a moment Lewis thought that she had gone to sleep, but then she fanned her face with her short fingers, made an exclamation about the heat, and called for the dog. They talked about the meeting in the stadium. Lewis’s father said, ‘I’m a new man.’

  ‘I’m full of light,’ said Lilian.

  John turned his blue eyes on Lewis. ‘And how about you, Lewis?’ he said.

  Lewis, swallowing his flat lemonade, shrugged and said that nothing had really happened to him in there.

  ‘Don’t you want to give your heart to Jesus?’ said John. ‘Don’t you want to know that you’re going to heaven?’

  ‘It will come,’ said Lilian. ‘Give it time.’ She called again for the dog. ‘It’s as hot as hell in here,’ she said. Catching her husband’s chiding glance, she added, ‘It really is hot.’

  The side window was open and a whirring fan stood near it, facing out, as if to keep the sultry air from getting inside in the first place.

  Lilian poured more lemonade and said, ‘This room gets all the sunshine and gets so hot the dog won’t come in here.’ She called again, more insistently, but there was no sign or sound of the dog.

  John said to Lawrence, ‘So tell me where you come from,’ and Lawrence told him about the house on Small Street, but he was talking about his childhood, his Uncle Ted, a widower, ‘who,’ he said, ‘I loved more than I loved my own father,’ and his handsome cousin Bertie who was like the brother Lawrence did not have.

  Lawrence asked about baptism. ‘Can it even be done at my age?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s never too late,’ said John.

  Lewis was picturing a font, a dribble of water on the forehead, but, said John, it would not be like that. Lawrence would be immersed. When he came out of the water, it would be as if he were entering the world anew.

  When they had finished the lemonade, Lilian showed them the spare bedrooms. Of the smaller one, the box room, in which Lewis was to sleep, Lilian said, ‘The window sometimes slides open a crack. If it bothers you, just tell John and he’ll come and nail it shut for you. The dog will sometimes sleep in here so just keep your door closed if you don’t want him to.’

  Lewis left the door open. When he woke, wearing no pyjamas, in the middle of the night, he did not know where he was. He thought that he had fallen asleep closer to home. He was remembering the sound of horses’ hooves on the road outside, ringing through the still afternoon, echoing off the houses, sounding like the drum beat of a samba band, as if there were a carnival; he thought that he had heard an ice cream van playing ‘Greensleeves’ in his sleep. When he realised where he was he felt lonely.

  Lying in John and Lilian’s spare bed somewhere near Manchester, Lewis listened for the sounds of the city just outside, but he couldn’t even hear the dog. He wanted the night air to come in, bringing the city with it, but the night air was unmoving and even at dawn the only sounds that came in were birdsong and the milkman doing his rounds. Lewis, who wanted to feel that he was on the brink of the city, and who had wanted the dog to come in and sleep on his bed, was disappointed.

  In the morning, he expected to leave, but instead, after breakfast, his father offered to help John in the back garden. What they harvested was cooked by Lilian for the evening meal, and then it was bedtime again. When Lewis woke from those dreams of his, he found on the floor a pair of underpants and a T-shirt that did not belong to him.

  ‘Did you find them?’ asked Lilian, when he got downstairs. ‘I put some of John’s things on the end of your bed. You can wear them while yours are in the laundry.’ And so they stayed another day and another night, and again Lewis slept with both the window and the door slightly open, but he did not see the dog. It seemed to feed at night when the house was cooler. Lilian went from the sweltering kitchen where she laboured to the stifling front room to rest. John spent all day in the small garden, stripped to the waist in the sunshine. He should have been a pioneer farmer, thought Lewis, seeing him resting with one foot on the edge of his spade. He could imagine John standing in the middle of a cornfield in Canada or Australia in the 1800s, holding a scythe or the reins of a horse.

  In his garden, John dug up small potatoes and skinny carrots. He picked fruit from the dwarf apple tree and the gooseberry bush, and Lilian turned the fruit into pies with not quite enough sugar in. Lawrence helped him, and Lewis would have helped too but he found it too hot and avoided doing anything much during the day. Instead, he sat on the shady front steps, gazing in the direction of the city or watching the birds flying overhead, watching them land. He thought about migration, about birds that were programmed to fly south to France, and he wondered if they ever wanted to fly further than they should, whether any bird had ever tried to cross the Atlantic and found that it could not get that far in one go.

  He hung around in the kitchen, doing small jobs for Lilian, slowly, standing at the sink.

  ‘How old are you?’ asked Lilian.

  ‘I’m eighteen,’ said Lewis.

  ‘He’s already drinking,’ said Lawrence, coming into the kitchen with John, and the three of them stood there looking at Lewis until he had to turn away and still he felt the burn of their gaze on the back of his neck; he thought he could hear their heads shaking.

  Lilian made her own lemonade and jam, and John pickled his own beetroot. Lewis had rather expected to discover that they made their own home-brew, but none ever appeared. In fact, Lewis discovered that John was a man who poured gifts of alcohol down the sink, leaving the kitchen rich with the scent of the wasted wine. Lewis had never had wine. He had not yet found anything he liked to drink, unless he mixed lemonade in with lager. He would have liked a cold shandy while he sat out on the steps, like the man of the house, like a rancher, watching the sun set. Instead, Lilian brought out tumblers of juice, saying to him, ‘Take these to the men, would you?’ Lewis took two tumblers around the side of the house, towards the back garden where the men were working. As he approached the corner, he heard their voices, his father and John talking. ‘He’s got this friend,’ his father was saying. ‘He’s a bad influence. He’s got Lewis drinking and I don’t know what else they get up to.’

  ‘Are they going with girls?’ said John.

  ‘No,’ said his father. ‘Not girls.’

  There was a pause in which nothing was said, and then John said, ‘Ah.’

  Later, Lewis ran a deep bath and lay in the water with his s
houlders and knees sticking out. He thought about baptism and how one could access a bright new world. Could it happen when you were naked, he wondered, or only when you had your clothes on, a clean pair of pants? Could it happen when you were alone or did someone else have to be there, immersing you? There probably had to be a reading from the Bible; what came to mind were the Thou Shalt Nots, the rules of behaviour: Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet (anything? he wondered), and, Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.

  In the morning, they said their goodbyes to Lilian at the door before going with John into Manchester. Lilian called for the dog to come and see them off too, but when they left she was still calling.

  Lewis sat in the back of the car, wearing his own underpants and his own shirt. It was early and there was not much sign of life in the streets through which John drove them. He brought them into the city centre just as it began to get lively, delivering them to the bustling station just in time for them to leave.

  5

  He wants to feel an earthquake

  LEWIS HANGS HIS dressing gown on the back of his bedroom door. He puts on clean underwear (You never know, his mother would say, who’s going to see it) and a clean shirt. Buckling the belt of his trousers, he sits down on the end of the double bed and appraises himself in the dressing table mirror. He wears sideburns and keeps his hair long. Edie sometimes tried to persuade him to have a trim, to shave off his sideburns. ‘You’d look so much younger,’ she said. ‘You look like a mountain man.’ (Lewis liked this idea, and tried to see it in his reflection – a mountain man, but with spectacles, and soft hands.) He calls his eye colour ‘hazel’ because he thought he saw a little green in the irises once, perhaps when he had a suntan, but he can’t see it now. He hasn’t had a decent tan for years. Perhaps he ought to just call his eyes ‘brown’, as others do. His spectacles have thick rims that make him look as if he is wearing a disguise, as if his large nose might be attached to the bridge of the spectacles, as if it might be just as removable. Ruth discovered contact lenses and said that he should try them too. Lewis, though, picturing his short-haired, clean-faced, clear-eyed self, thought that he would look like a grown man trying to pass himself off as a schoolboy, like Frédéric Bourdin.

  He combs his hair and goes to check his emails. He has his computer in Ruth’s old room, on the desk she used to use for her schoolwork. There is an uncomfortable wooden chair on which he sits. He turns the computer on and waits.

  All over Ruth’s bedroom walls, there are posters of young men who were famous when Lewis was a boy. One of them is wearing a lumberjack shirt and has his thumbs hooked into the belt of his denim trousers. He is smiling, showing his neat, white teeth. Lewis’s sister used to have posters of Cliff Richard on her bedroom walls. Every night, she went to sleep listening to his records. Lewis once went with her to a concert and saw grown women fainting when Cliff Richard came on stage in his shiny suit. She would have married Cliff Richard if she could. On her wedding day, she walked down the aisle to ‘Bachelor Boy’.

  Lewis has been looking through old albums recently, unearthing photos that he has not looked at in decades – himself and Edie with Ruth as a baby, and before Ruth, in bright honeymoon Polaroids, and prior to that a decade of snaps of Edie in her early thirties, her late twenties, her early twenties when they first met in the library. And in the last album he looked in, he discovered himself as a single young man, and as a boy at school. He studied a photo of his sixth form class, finding his adolescent self standing at the right-hand end of the front row with his eyes closed. Mostly, he struggled to put names to faces, but when he scanned the back row and saw the boy who stood at the left-hand end, he knew that boy’s name instantly. For years, probably decades, Lewis believed that Sydney was the capital of Australia.

  Sydney Flynn had not arrived at Lewis’s school until the sixth form. Born abroad, Sydney had moved around a lot with his family, his father being an army man, an older father who had then taken early retirement. Lewis had been struck by Sydney’s height, his bone structure, his blond hair, which came together to give him the look, thought Lewis, of Flash Gordon.

  Lewis wanted to have been born abroad, or at least in a city, anywhere but Small Street.

  Sydney sat at the back of the class, behind Lewis. Sydney called him Lewie, or Louise. Lewis sometimes felt the nib of Sydney’s pen poking into the back of his neck. He did not know whether Sydney was trying to be friendly or to hurt him. Turning around, he did not know whether to smile or glare.

  At home, Lewis would stand in front of the bathroom mirror holding his mother’s hand mirror behind his head, and he would look at these dots of dark ink on the back of his neck, studying them as if they were some kind of message.

  Sometimes, in class, when Lewis felt that pen nib touching the back of his neck, and he turned, he found Sydney looking not at him but at his own sums, his head bent low over his work, and when he got home and looked for ink marks on the back of his neck, he would see that nothing was there.

  Sydney had a younger brother whom he adored and terrorised. Sydney boasted about waking his brother in horrible ways, setting alarm clocks to go off in the early hours and hiding them around his brother’s bedroom and under the floorboards. His brother came to school with a moustache inked onto his upper lip, or with one eyebrow missing. Lewis imagined what it would be like to be Sydney’s brother, always knowing that when you opened your eyes in the morning, Sydney might be there by your bed, with a pen or a razor in his hand, and you would know that something had happened, or was about to happen.

  Sydney once bit a boy’s ear in the playground, in a brutal play fight that Lewis watched, along with at least fifty others who cheered the boys on. Afterwards, Sydney shook the boy’s hand. On another occasion, Lewis saw Sydney take a tin soldier from a younger boy, put it in his own pocket and take it home. The boy made only the slightest protest and looked, thought Lewis, quite proud. Alone at home, Lewis thought about this sinking of teeth into flesh. He thought about this stealing of other boys’ valuables, kept warm inside Sydney’s pockets. Lewis had valuables too but Sydney never stole anything from him; Lewis always had to take them home again.

  Sometimes, Sydney cycled past him, singing out, ‘Louie Louie’. Lewis, at that time, had not heard the song. A few years later, he heard the Kingsmen’s version, and at the same time heard the rumour that the song was obscenely sexual, although apparently the only way to make out the words was by playing the single at 331⁄3 rpm. He did this, but he still could not fathom what was sung. It was so dirty, it was said, that the lyrics were investigated by the FBI. It turned out that there was nothing improper secreted in the song, whose lyrics were not filthy but sweet, all about a sailor sailing home to the girl he loved. When Lewis discovered this, he was disappointed.

  Edie, who only came to the village in her twenties, never met Sydney, who was long gone by then. When Lewis and Edie finally came to arrange their wedding, Lewis, thinking about his best man, thought of Sydney, his poking pen and the brother whom he terrorised. He imagined that Sydney would be the kind of best man to put Lewis on a long-distance train or handcuff him naked to a lamppost or shave off his eyebrows the night before the wedding, who would have him turning up at the church without his trousers, with his buttocks tattooed. He asked Edie’s brother, a reliable man, to fill the role. On his stag night, Lewis kept waiting for the handcuffs to appear, for something unexpected to occur, but nothing did, nothing happened at all. When the wedding was over, Edie’s brother tied to the bumper of Lewis’s car a pair of old slippers that dragged behind them for miles, all the way from the church hall to the Peak District without making a sound.

  When the computer is ready, Lewis opens up his email, finding new messages in bold. Someone he knows – a friend of his or someone he’s acquainted with – keeps sending him pi
ctures, but Ruth says he mustn’t open them, he mustn’t look. ‘That’s not a friend,’ she says. One email says he’s due thousands of pounds, but there is a link he must click on to claim the money, and he daren’t. ‘Incompetent in love,’ says another. He does not want cheap Viagra or SuperViagra; he does not want bigger, harder, longer-lasting erections. He does not want a nineteen-year-old Russian girl or an Australian virgin who wants to talk. He does not want a replica Rolex watch or a fake Gucci handbag. He does not want a pair of modestly priced cufflinks (‘a dream come true’). He does not want these dazzling boons. He does not want the Federal Government of Nigeria to transfer fifteen million United States Dollars into his bank account; he does not want three million, five hundred thousand Great British Pounds from the Manager of Gulf International Bank. He moves these emails to the rubbish bin.

  He has complained to Ruth about the spam. ‘I don’t want all this,’ he said to her. ‘How do I stop it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure you can.’

  While she watched, he clicked on ‘Get Mail’, downloading a message that said, ‘Feeble in bed’.

  He goes onto the internet. It was in his retirement, and after he stopped driving, that he got a computer and learnt to use the World Wide Web, to google. He checks the news and the weather. He tries to keep up. He becomes anxious if he does not see the news for a while; he wonders what he is missing. He once stayed with Edie on a farm in the Lake District. They had a cottage with no radio, no television, no phone. They saw the farmer’s wife on arrival and then did not see her again. They saw the farmer going by in his tractor, the tyres six feet tall. They saw the odd stranger as they hiked beneath the mountains. Crossing a small stone bridge (with moss growing on its walls and fleece clinging to the moss – straggly white strands, slightly kinked like pubic hairs) they passed a man who smiled at them, opened his arms to the warm day, and said as he passed them, ‘Very fucking pleasant.’