by Alison Moore
Lawrence’s letters are never printed anyway.
After Lawrence’s third and final missive about the medium, the nursing home staff decided to take the residents along to this event, this evening of communication with the spirits of the dead, as a treat. The craft lady expressed an interest in joining them, which left Lawrence conflicted. He pictured the two of them strolling up the road arm in arm, the craft lady’s vanilla scent on the night air. But, he said, he would not be going, because that sort of thing – summoning the dead – was just not right. At worst it was toying with the devil and at best it was a con.
‘But have you ever been to one of these evenings?’ the craft lady said. ‘It might not be like you’re thinking it will be.’ She’d been to one, she told him. She’d expected the room to be dark, ‘like how you’d turn off the lights to do a Ouija board. But they kept the lights on,’ she said, and more than anything else, it made her believe in heaven; it made her believe that we go to heaven when we die and that our loved ones are waiting there for us.
And so, on the evening of the event, the craft lady helped Lawrence out of the minibus and into the pub, and then up to the function room whose plastic chairs were set out in rows. She sat beside him and held his hand. ‘See?’ she said. ‘They keep the lights on.’
When everyone was seated, the house lights were lowered. ‘Oh,’ said Lawrence, and the craft lady squeezed his hand. A young man in a plain shirt walked onto the stage. He was going to point out the exit, thought Lawrence; he was going to tell them about the fire assembly point and the happy hour deal at the bar. But this, it turned out, was the medium. Lawrence had been expecting a woman, robes, a bit of shimmer. The audience, sitting in the dim half of the room, gazed expectantly towards the spotlight, towards this man who was preparing to bring messages through from the other side. Lawrence looked around at the rest of his party. Even the ones who had said that they did not believe in this sort of thing were waiting, he reckoned, to hear their name called out or the name of someone they had lost.
‘I have a Mary,’ said the man. ‘Can anyone claim Mary?’
And he said, ‘I’m getting the scent of roses. Who liked roses?’
He strode across the room with his fingers pressed to his temples as if his head ached. ‘There’s a lady here,’ he said, ‘who wants to say she’s sorry. Who’s David?’
It was all such nonsense, thought Lawrence.
‘I’m seeing bluebells.’
The craft lady had let go of Lawrence’s hand so that she could eat the crisps she had got from the bar. He couldn’t smell her perfume; he could just smell smoky bacon.
Much later, Lawrence wondered about the bluebells, but by then he was back at the nursing home, alone in his bedroom, and the medium was long gone.
He writes, as well, to his Uncle Ted. Dear Uncle Ted, he writes, even though Ted did not like Lawrence to call him ‘Uncle’ once Lawrence was no longer a child. ‘Call me Ted,’ he had said, before the accident, after which he did not say it again.
Lawrence writes every month. Each letter says much the same thing as the last one. His Uncle Ted has never written back. Lawrence worries that if his Uncle Ted is not receiving these letters, then should his Uncle Ted want to contact him, he would not know how. He would not know that the houses on Small Street are gone. Lawrence imagines letters from his Uncle Ted delivered to the supermarket car park, blown against windscreens and binned, or blown into puddles, ground beneath tyres.
I am still in the village, he writes, although where we lived on Small Street is a car park now. He does not mention his children, both of them retired now, with children of their own, and even grandchildren.
I want you to know, he writes, that I am sincerely sorry about what happened in the woods. I hope you know that I loved Bertie like a brother. I wish I had woken up that morning and found that it was raining or foggy so that we could not go out hunting, or that we had finished hunting half an hour earlier, when Bertie suggested stopping and coming home for tea, or that I had not taken that final shot at what I thought was something else, an animal in the bushes, or at least that I had missed his heart.
He does not say, He bled so much. I was kneeling beside him, trying to stop the blood coming out. When I finally stood up, I was like Lady Macbeth.
I hope you are well, he says, and I look forward to your reply. He ensures that his postal address is on the letter, and then he signs it, folds it, puts it in an envelope and sends it to Australia. He does not know his Uncle Ted’s address but sends his letters care of the post office. He does not know which city or town his Uncle Ted might be in, so he spreads the letters around. He has sent them to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth; to Adelaide, Wollongong, Townsville and Cairns; to Darwin, Toowoomba, Ballarat and Bendigo; to Canberra, Orange, Coffs Harbour and Broken Hill; to Albany and Albury and Bunbury; to Shepparton, Whyalla, Mount Isa and Mackay; to Rockhampton, Bundaberg, Port Hedland and Port Lincoln; to Maryborough and Alice Springs; to Tamworth and Wagga Wagga. ‘Where are we sending it this time?’ asks the nurse. ‘Outer Mongolia? Timbuktu?’
Lewis says – every month, when Lawrence mentions that he has written his letter – that he very much doubts that Ted is still alive, but Lawrence cites people who have lived to be a hundred and fifteen, a hundred and sixteen. ‘A woman in France,’ says Lawrence, ‘lived to be a hundred and twenty-two.’
Ruth brought him some airmail stationery, the sort where one sheet is both paper and envelope, the blue page thin and delicate like the pressed petals of the bluebells that grow in the woods. Lawrence prefers to use the proper, heavier writing paper, the good, heavy envelopes. It costs him more.
He watches the nurse walk away with his letter. It is possible, he thinks, that his Uncle Ted receives them all, that every letter Lawrence sends him finds him in the end. He imagines them dropping through his Uncle Ted’s letterbox, one after another, wherever he is. He puts away his writing pad, puts the lid back on the bottle of ink and looks again at his pen. He wonders whether his Uncle Ted, if he saw the handwriting on the front of the envelope, would recognise the shade of the ink, the thickness of the line, the characteristics of his old pen, and he thinks, then, of a Stephen King novel that Edie once read, in which a man is bludgeoned to death with his own severed arm.
11
He wants to be seen
BEFORE LEAVING THE house for his appointment at the surgery, Lewis takes his broken spectacles out of his coat pocket and puts them down on the table in the hallway, to remind himself to get them mended. Also on the table is an ill-fitting dental plate that he needs to show to his dentist. The table resembles a small shrine to an old man, or an altar bearing sacrificial offerings so that the gods will look upon him kindly.
Lewis walks with Sydney to the yellow car that is parked by the kerb, in the same space Ruth was occupying earlier. Patting the roof, he says to Sydney, ‘It’s lasted well.’
‘It’s still going,’ agrees Sydney, holding the passenger door open for Lewis, who lowers himself into the front seat, the leather upholstery creaking.
Sydney, getting into the driver’s seat, says, ‘So you read Bliss Tempest?’
‘No,’ says Lewis. ‘It’s not my sort of thing.’
‘How do you know,’ says Sydney, ‘if you’ve never read it?’ It is the sort of thing they say to the boy when he is looking dubiously at a vegetable: How do you know, if you’ve never tried it?
Sydney starts the engine and the hula girl on the dashboard starts to shake. Pulling away from the kerb without looking, Sydney forces an oncoming Ford to swerve into the far lane, the driver leaning on the horn. ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ says Sydney. The blasphemy stabs into Lewis like the sharpened tip of a pencil into bared skin. He can feel himself blushing. Sydney doesn’t even tap the brake but keeps on going, the long, reproachful honk of the Ford’s horn still echoing off the fronts of the houses.
L
ewis is sitting uncomfortably. There is a big box of tapes in the footwell on the passenger side, forcing his legs towards Sydney, and the springs have gone in his seat. The dog is standing on the back seat, panting into Lewis’s ear. There is hot dog breath on Lewis’s neck, and something dribbling down inside his collar, saliva from the tip of the dog’s huge tongue.
They are speeding when they pass the church that Lewis attends with his father every Sunday. (It is not the sort of church that has grotesques, cold stone walls, stone pillars and pews and that is older than anyone alive. It looks like a house with a double-glazed porch. It has padded chairs that can be rearranged or stacked and put away so that the room can be used for other things.) ‘This is a thirty,’ says Lewis, even though they are going too fast for Sydney to have mistaken the zone for a forty. They are bearing down on the Ford. Lewis can see a sign in the rear window. He can’t make out the words but it is the sort that says ‘BABY ON BOARD’. Sydney’s eyes are narrowed. ‘Sydney,’ says Lewis. He is bracing for impact when the Ford takes a turn without indicating, pulling off the main road so suddenly that its back wheels skid, leaving black tyre tracks at the junction. Sydney glares at the back of the Ford as he shoots by. His hands are tight around the steering wheel, like hands rigid from a bike ride in cold weather. That’s something Lewis has not experienced since he was a boy.
Sydney slows the car down. Lewis is worried that Sydney will turn the car around and go back to the junction in pursuit of the Ford. But instead, doing no more than thirty past a travel agency, Sydney turns his head to look at the posters in the window, the adverts for distant places. He says to Lewis, ‘Have you been to the Caribbean?’
‘No,’ says Lewis.
‘Barbados is sinking.’ He mentions islands that Lewis has never been to that are already long gone.
They pass a new block of flats hung with a huge banner that says, in capital letters three feet high, ‘LIVE WITH FRIENDS OR ON YOUR OWN’. It sounds to Lewis like a threat, an ultimatum.
Lewis says to Sydney, ‘Do you live on your own?’
‘Yes,’ says Sydney.
When Sydney offers nothing more, Lewis says, ‘Me too. Ruth’s nearby though, and Dad’s in the nursing home. I see him on Sundays. They do activities and he has a nice room. He’s got a CD player so he can play his own music. He wants a copy of Handel’s Messiah – he asked me months ago but I haven’t been into town to get it.’ He has been meaning to go to the HMV that he’s seen where What Everyone Wants used to be before that went into administration. ‘I need to go to HMV,’ he says.
‘The HMV’s gone,’ says Sydney. ‘The sign’s still up but the shop’s been gutted.’
They drive past the old Hovis advert painted on the side of a building, at the end of a terrace. The paint is flaky and faded now but the message that has been there since he was a boy – HOVIS FOR TEA – is still faintly visible.
‘You could order it online,’ says Sydney. Lewis is anxious, though, about buying things online. He is worried that when he has typed in the numbers from his debit card, he will find all the money drained from his account; he will wake up in the morning and his savings will be gone, into the pockets of strangers.
Sydney pulls into the surgery car park and finds a free space. ‘I’ll wait in the car,’ he says.
Lewis climbs out of the passenger seat and heads for the entrance, the automatic doors. Inside, he registers his arrival on the touch screen and takes a seat in the waiting room. He reaches for a magazine before remembering that he does not have his spectacles. The magazine print is too small for him to make out without them. He expects, anyway, that he will soon be called. He looks around at the other waiting patients, and then up at the digital information screen above the reception desk. It says, in huge letters, ‘YOU WILL NOT BE SEEN!!’
They are playing ‘Greensleeves’ on loop, an instrumental version, the same music you hear when you are on hold. The information screen emits a beep from time to time and all heads turn to look, and then someone stands and leaves the waiting area. He finds himself looking expectantly at the screen even when there is no beep.
It says, ‘DO YOU WANT TO STOP?’
He does not like waiting rooms. He does not like these shiny, plastic chairs, the rows of failing bodies, the big, slow clock. He does not like waiting at the dentist’s either, wondering if he is about to lose another tooth. They don’t put you to sleep; they pull them out while you are wide awake.
The walls here are the colour of honey-and- lemon Strepsils. He once became addicted to Strepsils. He could get through a strip of twelve in an hour when the maximum dosage was one lozenge, dissolved slowly in the mouth, every two to three hours, and no more than twelve in a day. He’d had to hide the empty packaging from Edie – she’d have seen it, the unusual amount of it, in the kitchen bin. Sharing it out between the various household waste baskets would have been equally risky. She would have come to him, holding the recently discarded packets, asking him if his cough had not yet gone. Instead, he put the blister packs and little cardboard boxes in his coat pocket and dropped them into a public bin on his way to work. He tried to wean himself off them, these lozenges that were like sweets but with a little kick, that were yellow with an S on the front, slightly raised so that he could feel it with his tongue. He cut down to half a strip a day and then only a few lozenges and then just one in the morning, but he always went back onto them, especially after a lunchtime shandy. In the end, he bought a tin of lemon drops and whenever he wants a Strepsil he has a lemon drop or a lemon sherbet or a jelly baby instead, although it is not really the same.
‘IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A PRE-BOOKED APPOINTMENT,’ says the digital information screen.
After fifteen minutes, Lewis approaches the reception desk and asks why he has not been called. ‘You’ll be called when it’s your turn,’ says the receptionist.
Lewis tells her how long he has been waiting but he gets no reply. She is holding a phone to her ear although she does not seem to be having a conversation with anyone on the other end. He returns to his seat.
There is a woman sitting opposite him. She is eating Golden Wonder crisps from a family pack and reading a self-help book, one of half a dozen, a pile from the library. Another woman, eyeing these books, says to her, ‘Those should keep you busy!’
‘I love my books,’ says the Golden Wonder woman, as, with a greasy, salted finger, she folds down a corner of her borrowed book.
Lewis looks up at the information screen (‘DO YOU SMOKE?’ it says) and then at the clock. He wonders whether Sydney is still outside in his car, whether he has waited for him. Lewis has been waiting in here for twenty minutes. He thinks he has waited long enough. He wants someone to call his name. They don’t do that any more though. They put the names up on the screen. Lewis wants it to be his turn; he wants to be seen.
There is a beep, and when Lewis looks up he sees his name and a room number displayed. He leaves his uncomfortable, slippery chair and goes off to find the right room.
A nurse is standing at a steel trolley, arranging surgical tools on a steel tray. She tells Lewis where to sit and he sits. He thinks of the school nurse, to whom boys went with trophies of their daring, their derring-do – their sprained ankles, their fractured wrists, their gashes that might require stitches. Lewis never had cause to see the school nurse. He never needed to be taken to Accident and Emergency. He was never the centre of any drama. He has never broken anything or even had a sprain. He has never had stitches. His temperature has never been especially high. Now, though, he is sitting in a chair in the middle of the treatment room, waiting to be seen to. He is going to have an operation, and when he leaves, he will have stitches.
The nurse tucks a paper towel into the collar of Lewis’s shirt. ‘Hopefully there won’t be too much blood,’ she says, tucking in a second sheet as well.
The doctor breezes in. ‘How’s your father?’ he says.
>
Lewis, thrown by the question, hesitates. He has opened his mouth and is on the verge of replying when the nurse interrupts.
‘He’s getting worse,’ she says.
The doctor, standing behind Lewis, inspects the questionable mole, picks up a syringe and pokes the needle into the site, injecting the anaesthetic.
‘He can’t cope with the stairs any more.’
Lewis is aware of the doctor selecting a scalpel, and that a hole is being made in him, although he can’t feel a thing.
‘He can’t manage the dog.’
He can feel the doctor’s rounded stomach pressing against him, the slight shift and rise and fall of it against his back. He can hear the doctor breathing.
‘It’s too big for him, it’s huge. He expects me to have it but I don’t want it. I’d have it put down.’
‘We always send these things off, just to make sure they’re normal,’ says the doctor, putting the growth, this little bit of Lewis, into a plastic pot for sending away. He looks at Lewis over his spectacles. ‘I trust it will be, but we’ll send it anyway, just to make sure. You’ll only hear from us if there’s anything wrong.’
The nurse cleans some blood from Lewis’s neck and removes the protective paper towels. It seems to be time for him to stand up and leave. At the door, he turns to thank the doctor, who has already left through another door. Lewis says to the nurse, ‘I’ll take your father’s dog,’ and the nurse laughs and turns away to attend to the instruments and the pots.
It is only when Lewis has let himself out, when the door has closed behind him, that he wonders whether the doctor, having removed the growth, remembered the stitches. He did not feel the needle going in to sew him up. He did not feel the tug of brightly coloured thread closing the wound. And even imagining that happening, he feels not so much like one of the more daring boys at school on a trip to A&E, but instead like a teddy that needs to be darned where he has worn thin.
