by Alison Moore
His father used to worry about burglars. As soon as Lawrence left the house, he’d be imagining men, rough men, approaching his back door with crowbars and swag bags, looking to break in. This was after Lawrence had stopped teaching at the secondary school, when he had taken to getting a bus into town on market days so as to stand in the town centre, on the corner by the key-cutter, preaching. Lewis remembers the first time he saw him doing it, when, walking through town with a bunch of flowers in his hand, Lewis came across his father standing on the corner, speaking, at a mild volume, about the obscenity he had found in his books, his classics. He said it, thinks Lewis, as if it were something that had not been there before, as if something infectious had suddenly spread, like Dutch elm disease or ash dieback, through the volumes on his shelves. It was like when a boy at school had told everyone that he had walked in on his parents ‘doing it’ on the kitchen table, and it made Lewis, who had never seen or heard his parents doing anything in the least bit sexual, regard his own kitchen differently, warily. After this, when Lewis ate his breakfast cereal, he made sure that his spoon did not touch the tabletop, just in case.
He cannot remember now whether the flowers were for his mother or for Edie. Whenever he gave flowers to Edie, she would narrow her eyes and say to him, ‘What have you done?’ and he would say, ‘Nothing.’ She was only joking though; she knew, really, that he had never done anything.
After that first time, Lewis often saw his father standing outside the key-cutter, preaching about morality and decency. The Lord would come, his father said, and the world would end. ‘We that are alive, that are left,’ he said, rather quietly, to the people who walked past, ‘shall be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. Then we will be with the Lord forever.’ Those going by tried not to look at him. They did not even seem sure whether he was talking to them or just to himself.
Lawrence could not understand their lack of interest, when he, in the years after seeing Billy Graham and since being baptised, had come to long for the Rapture; he desired Christ’s kingdom. He spoke to Lewis about the Great Disappointment of 1844, when thousands of people gave away their possessions in anticipation of a Rapture that never came. It seemed to Lewis that his father was sorry not to have been there, not to have been amongst them, as if that wealth of wanting was something desirable in itself, even though it all came to nothing in the end.
From time to time, there was a new prediction; the date of one Rapture after another was set, but then the day always came and went with the Rapture never materialising. When Lawrence watches the news, he is looking for earthquakes and floods; they are coming more frequently now, these signs that the Rapture is approaching. He has been looking forward to it not as the end but as the beginning of something. For years he has believed that it would come soon, but 2011 has been and gone and 2012 has been and gone and nothing has happened. He is surprised, in the New Year of 2013, to find that he is still here. He has begun to wonder if it is possible that he has just missed it, if it happened while he was sleeping, if he is just one of the many left behind. He is aware of further predictions of the date on which Jesus will return, predictions that the Rapture will take place within the next few years, by 2021 at the latest. In the meantime, he is desperate to hear from his Uncle Ted. There is still time. Lives are getting longer and longer. The nursing home has a computer that is mainly used for emailing and Skyping, but Lawrence googles, trying to find out if he might live to be a hundred, a hundred and one. He needs to start eating oily fish and avocados; he needs to start doing crossword puzzles, to drink more tea.
Lewis does believe in God. (‘Or at least something,’ he says, when having such conversations with people who do not. ‘Don’t you think there has to be something?’ And he likes the idea of Jesus coming back, although he cannot envisage it, how it would happen. If he pictures it, he imagines a Byzantine Jesus, a figure from an ancient painting or a mosaic, with a golden glow all around him, not a real man who might belong to the twenty-first century.) He has never felt, though, what his father felt at Maine Road football stadium. He has never had that sort of world-shattering experience. He once wondered about going back there, if only to see a football match, but when he looked it up on the computer he found that it had been demolished years ago – like his father’s house, which never was burgled, just bulldozed.
Lewis looks around his kitchen for things that might be missing. His Christmas fund is still in its jar on the shelf by the sink. He has not got much in there anyway; Christmas is a long way off. His wind-up radio, newly purchased with coupons he’s been saving from the boxes his tea bags come in, is still on the windowsill, next to a vase of birthday flowers. Ruth has put something into the water to extend the life of the blooms. Vinegar, perhaps, or aspirin or sugar, all of which cut flowers apparently like.
He looks for a bag in which the man might have stashed the carriage clock that is kept in the living room. There is a full rucksack down on the floor by the man’s feet. Perhaps he had almost finished and was on the brink of leaving when he was interrupted by a disturbance in his heart.
There is surely not that much to take, though, thinks Lewis. His computer is the sort that no one wants these days. It is big and old and grey; there is mostly empty space inside. His television would not be worth much. Perhaps the man expected to find Lewis’s life savings hidden under the mattress. He came, supposes Lewis, thinking that there might be a safe full of valuable heirlooms at the back of the wardrobe. He wants the family silver. What he will find, in the top kitchen drawer, is a Post Office book for an account requiring thirty days’ notice for withdrawals, and in the drawer below that, a decent set of stainless steel cutlery from Wilko.
There is, in fact, family silver but Lewis does not have it in his house. His sister boxed it up when they moved their father out of the house on Small Street and into his room at the nursing home. ‘You can’t take it with you,’ she said to Lawrence, putting the cutlery canteen into the boot of her car, along with the fine bone china and the crystal – wine glasses on long, thin stems, glasses for sherry and brandy – the wedding set that had always lived in the cabinet and had never been used for fear of breakage. ‘You ought to wrap the glasses,’ said Lawrence. ‘You need to put sheets of newspaper in between the plates.’ ‘It will be fine,’ said Lewis’s sister, slamming the boot, the breakables rattling. And then she drove this jangling kitchenware four hundred miles north to Aberdeen and then oversea, by ferry, to Shetland, where she has a house that none of them has ever visited. Lewis would find it hard to live where she does, what with the cold, and no supermarket, no bookshop, no HMV.
In a deep drawer in a spare room in the house on Small Street, there were hundreds of used envelopes with the top right-hand corner torn off, and, loose in a different drawer, hundreds of used stamps. Meaning to bag them up so as to gift them to Lewis, Lawrence reached into a plastic bag full of plastic bags that lived on a hook in the kitchen. Lewis came into the room and found his father staring at his hands as if he were Lady Macbeth. His hands were covered in what looked like small shards of broken glass, but there was no blood. And then Lewis realised that these were shards of transparent plastic, from the plastic bag full of plastic bags that must have disintegrated. Lawrence said, ‘I thought plastic bags were supposed to last for hundreds of years.’
‘Not when exposed to the light,’ said Lewis.
The shards were dreadful to get off. They clung.
Lawrence could not take his radiogram, which was more than a metre wide, to the nursing home either, so Lewis bought him a CD player for his room. He needs some CDs. The only CDs the nursing home has are those ambient sounds they play on loop. They could do with a bit of Rachmaninoff, thinks Lewis; they could do with a bit of AC/DC, a blast of noise slipped in amongst the dolphin song.
Lawrence could not take all his books with him and so Lewis has them, along with the stripy deckchairs.
It was soo
n after the bulldozing of the vacated house on Small Street that John came to stay. (Lewis missed the moment of demolition. When he looked, one morning, through the double glazing that muted the noise of the wrecking ball and the bulldozer, the house was just gone.)
A widower now, John came alone. Lewis had not seen him since that second and last visit to Manchester nearly fifteen years before. He was glad to see John but anxious to impress him or at least not to displease him. Before John arrived, Lewis put away the wine that had been visible in the kitchen – Edie’s (youthful, seductive) New Zealand Merlot, her (smooth, full-bodied) Australian Shiraz. He weeded his garden and repotted his azalea. Lewis offered John his spare room, Ruth’s old bedroom. It was only when John had settled in, when his shirts were hanging up in the wardrobe and his pyjamas were underneath the pillow, that Lewis wondered whether he ought to have taken down the posters of the dead pop stars and dead films stars. Then John surprised him by doing an impressive pelvic gyration in front of the Elvis Presley poster, and later, over dinner, saying, ‘I’ve always rather liked Cary Grant.’
It turned out that John no longer poured wine down the sink; he drank it, and enjoyed it. He accompanied Lewis to The Golden Fleece, this being a few years before Lewis’s banishment. John proved to be popular and was quickly accepted by the locals. Sometimes, Ruth, who lived alone nearby, was invited along too. She occasionally talked about wanting children, but, at thirty (‘and none of us getting any younger,’ said Lewis) she was single, although Lewis understood that she had some sort of relationship going, something along the lines of a male pen pal.
John did not seem to be in any hurry to return to Manchester. He no longer had the animals to look after, he said, and what potatoes there were would grow just fine without him. Lewis enjoyed John’s company. They were two old men in their retirement. In the daytime, they went for drives, parking up somewhere and trying to identify the birds and the aeroplanes that flew overhead. They went to vintage car shows, and airshows; they saw the Red Arrows looping the loop, leaving a vast, smoky O dispersing in the white sky. In the evening, they watched Cary Grant in old films or strolled to the pub for a nightcap.
It was on one such evening, as they were wandering home again and Lewis was looking up at the stars – ‘There’s Venus,’ he was about to say – that John asked Lewis for his blessing to marry Ruth. Lewis was entirely unprepared for this. Caught off guard, he walked along with his mouth open, no words coming out. Later, speaking privately to Ruth, he said, ‘He’s old enough to be your father. He’s older than me. He’s old enough to be your grandfather.’ But Ruth just shrugged, as if age were nothing. Lewis does not recall ever actually giving them his blessing, but they married anyway, and Lewis tries not to think too much about it, about this eighty-year-old man in his daughter’s life. John still goes to The Golden Fleece; he goes there with Ruth, while Lewis looks after the boy, or John goes on his own and talks to his new friends, Lewis’s old friends, the old boys. He is always sure to put in a good word for Lewis, who might, one day, find that he is able to go back.
9
He wanted to live in Australia
‘I KNOW WHAT you want,’ says the man, getting up and going over to Lewis’s cupboards. The dog watches him with her tongue hanging out. The man opens and closes the cupboard doors, discovering sets of cups and saucers, some tinned and dried food, baking trays that have not been used for years, and a glass dish that he takes out and fills from the cold tap before putting it down too heavily on the stone-tiled floor. Lewis watches, the thought of breakage briefly raising his pulse.
‘That’s better, isn’t it?’ says the man as the dog sticks her nose into Edie’s best pie dish and starts lapping. The dog has a barrel hanging from her collar, like a Saint Bernard’s brandy barrel but smaller and plastic. It bangs rhythmically against the dish.
It comes to him suddenly. ‘Sydney,’ says Lewis (with a ‘y’, like the capital of Australia), and it is as if, by typing the name into Google, he has summoned Sydney, like a genie, like Candyman.
When he was a child, Lewis wanted to live in Australia. He wanted his family to move there so that he could live upside down. Everyone seems to know someone who has emigrated to the Antipodes. Lewis’s great uncle went out there and never came home. They have lost touch with him; Ted does not answer – or does not receive – the letters that Lawrence sends, in which he always mentions his cousin Bertie. Lawrence and Bertie, born in the same year and raised together on Small Street, were drafted into the war at the same time. Returning home, both miraculously unscathed, they enjoyed rambling, hill-walking and hunting in the local countryside.
(‘Australia,’ says Ruth’s boy, ‘is a million miles away.’ No, says Lewis, not a million miles, that’s further than the moon. But the boy is quite sure. ‘It’s a million miles away. It’s further away than the moon.’ Mill-ee-on, he says, making the number as big as he can, stretching it out. Or, as if that were not already far enough, ‘A million and a hundred.’)
It occurs to Lewis that Sydney’s surprise when Lewis said to him, ‘You are in my house,’ suggests that Sydney cannot be here to see him. Sydney might not even have recognised him, might not have realised who he is.
‘It’s Lewis,’ he says, touching his own chest, his own heart. ‘Lewis Sullivan. We were at school together.’
‘I know who you are, Lewie,’ says Sydney.
Lewis has not been called Lewie since he was eighteen. He remembers that summer, when he and Sydney had finished school all except for their exams. Lewis spent much of his free time cycling around the village, where, one afternoon, he encountered Sydney, who was also out exploring on his bike. They rode along together for a while, without saying much, and then Sydney said, ‘My dog had puppies. Do you want to come and see them?’
‘Sure,’ said Lewis, shrugging, as if he did not really mind one way or the other. He followed Sydney the half dozen miles to the nearby village that the locals call Nether, the pair of them freewheeling between fields of ripening winter barley, and acres of green grass that had not yet been built on, and the sky was so blue and so empty.
Sydney threw his bike down outside the only unclad house in the terrace and greeted a girl coming by on a horse. She halted, pulling in the reins, and Sydney idly stroked the nose of her shifting, snorting mare while he spoke to this girl, who was their own age but who Lewis did not know. Lewis hung back, still straddling his bike, eating sweets from a bag he had on him, into which Sydney – reaching towards him but not quite enough so that Lewis was forced to come closer – stuck his hand, offering a sweetie to the horse. The horse brought its nose forward, seeking out this treat with its flaring nostrils and its huge lips, and Lewis saw the enormous teeth in the whiskery mouth that nuzzled into the palm of Sydney’s cupped hand.
‘Do you want to give him one?’ said Sydney, but Lewis could not bring himself to do it. Stepping away, he trod in some horse shit that he had not noticed or that had not been there before. He had to leave his shoes outside the door of Sydney’s house and go inside in his socks.
The dog, a golden retriever, was in the kitchen, smiling at them as they walked through the door. It was wearing this collar with the little plastic barrel dangling from it. And there was a puppy, which Lewis picked up and it licked him on the lips. ‘Do you want a puppy?’ asked Sydney. Lewis laughed and the puppy licked him in the mouth. He put it down again. ‘Seriously,’ said Sydney, ‘we’ve got rid of the rest. This is the last one. If you want it, take it.’
‘I’ll ask at home,’ said Lewis.
Lewis, when he asked his father, was surprised to be told that he could have the puppy. He went over to Sydney’s house again a few days later. Sydney was there, but his parents had taken the dogs out. Sydney took Lewis up to his room. There was a map of the world on Sydney’s bedroom wall, with pins in places he wanted to visit. There was one in India, where he had been born, he said, in a British military hosp
ital while his father was posted there. ‘I’d like to go back,’ he said. He talked about growing up on army bases, where he wasn’t allowed to touch the walls of the houses in which they lived because they were only ever temporary residents and when they left they had to leave the houses just as they had found them. Lewis noticed after that that when Sydney moved around a house, even though these were permanent homes, he never touched the walls.
He did steal, though. He took strange liqueurs from his parents’ drinks cabinet, and continental lagers from the fridge, Lewis mixing his with lemonade. Sydney’s father also brewed his own beer. Some of the bottles exploded in the cupboard, the corks blasting out, and Lewis hoped to witness it happening again, or at least to see the aftermath, but he only saw the site cleaned up, the volatile beers moved out. He was not offered the explosive home-brew.
Sydney stole one of his father’s Woodbines too, lighting it and sharing it with Lewis, who put it to his lips but refrained from really smoking it, afraid of getting the smoke in his throat where it would burn, like loud music damaging the hairs inside your ears, making you deaf in old age.
The following week, Sydney brought the puppy over to Lewis’s house on Small Street. He arrived in his father’s Saab, sitting in the driver’s seat and parking too far from the kerb, watched from the living room window by Lewis. When Lewis got to the door, his father had already opened it and was fussing over the puppy and christening him Old Yeller.
Lawrence invited Sydney into the house, taking him through to the living room. He expressed great interest in the fact that Sydney had been born abroad, that he had lived in so many different places and was keen on travelling. Lawrence had learnt all this from Lewis, who was surprised to discover that he had apparently said so much about Sydney to his father. Lawrence said to Sydney, ‘Have you been to Australia?’ and was disappointed when Sydney said that he had never been there. ‘Are you going to go there someday though?’ said Lawrence.
