He Wants

by Alison Moore

  ‘The house has been sold,’ says Sydney. ‘I’m going to go abroad.’

  ‘Again?’ says Lewis.

  Sydney says nothing for a moment and then he says, ‘I’ve never really seen another country.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ says Lewis. ‘You were born in India.’

  ‘I was little when we left. I don’t remember it at all.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Lewis, recalling how Sydney, with his pins in his map, used to talk about going back there. ‘Did you never go?’ he says. ‘You never visited the gold mines?’

  ‘No,’ says Sydney, going to a window and peering out. ‘I don’t think there’s much left of them now. They were used as nuclear testing sites in the 1980s.’ He draws the curtains.

  ‘You’ve been to other countries though. You spent your whole childhood on army bases.’

  ‘In England.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Lewis. ‘But you’ve travelled. You’ve been to Tokyo and Thailand. You’ve been to Germany and Scandinavia.’

  Sydney shakes his head. ‘I’ve had a lot of time to read,’ he says.

  Lewis stares at Sydney, with the same look on his face that Lawrence had when he discovered that Lewis was not on the Sunday school trip that he ought to have been on and was instead up a tree behind the house. Looking out of an upstairs window, it had become clear to Lawrence that Lewis had not got on the coach to the seaside after all but had been on a branch all day long, reading books. Lewis remembers his father standing at the foot of the tree, calling up to him, ‘You’ve got to come down sometime.’ When Lewis finally descended, his father said to him, ‘You live in books,’ and then he took the books out of Lewis’s hands and hid them somewhere.

  Sydney goes around the room, drawing the rest of the curtains and putting on lamps.

  ‘You wanted to see the Wonders of the World,’ says Lewis.

  ‘I haven’t even seen one.’

  ‘I think there’s only one left, apart from ruins.’

  ‘That’s the old ones,’ says Sydney. ‘They add new ones all the time. I plan to see them all.’

  He moves towards Lewis, raising his hand towards Lewis’s cheek. ‘What are these?’ he says, tugging at Lewis’s sideburns as if they might come off. ‘Come upstairs,’ he says. ‘I’m going to take my clippers to these.’

  Lewis reaches up and feels his own sideburns. ‘I don’t know,’ he says, but even as he says this he is following Sydney into the hallway and up the stairs. They go past the open door of Sydney’s bedroom and into the bathroom, where Sydney sits Lewis down on the toilet seat lid. He opens the bathroom cabinet and takes out some clippers, which he plugs into a ‘SHAVERS ONLY’ socket. Lewis wonders about this, about why such sockets should be for shavers only, and what would happen if he tried to plug in some other electrical item, something he shouldn’t. The worst that could happen is that the appliance would not work, or the fuse might blow. He pictures electricity fizzing dangerously inside the ancient cables in the walls.

  Sydney comes over to Lewis again, standing close to press the vibrating device against his skin, his jaw. Neither speaks. Lewis listens to the clippers’ buzz, the sound both soft and loud like a lawnmower, like insects on a windowsill. The wiry hairs succumb with a crackling sound like static. Sydney moves around him, touching the head of the clippers to Lewis’s cheekbones, brushing at Lewis’s face with his free hand.

  It does not take long. After no time at all, Sydney switches the clippers off, steps away and says, ‘You’re all done.’

  Lewis stands and looks around for a mirror, but there isn’t one.

  ‘There’s a mirror in my bedroom,’ says Sydney, and he leads the way, although Lewis knows where it is, and he follows even though he won’t be able to see himself clearly anyway.

  He stands in front of the bedroom mirror, into whose frame Sydney has stuck postcards from around the world, pictures of places he wanted – or still wants – to visit. In the remaining space, Lewis can see his face in soft focus. He sits down on the edge of the bed, where he sat before, when the horses’ hooves were drumming on the road outside and an ice cream van played ‘Greensleeves’, stopping halfway through, leaving a high note hanging in the air. Sydney sat next to him, his nearest leg pulled up onto the bed, his trousered knee pointing at Lewis, who suggested jiu-jitsu before being interrupted.

  ‘Whose ear did you bite?’ says Lewis.

  ‘What?’ says Sydney, frowning at him.

  ‘You bit a boy’s ear in the playground – whose was it?’

  ‘Did I?’ says Sydney. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘You made me think of Dracula.’

  Sydney shows his weathered teeth as he sits down next to Lewis. ‘Tonight is mine,’ says Sydney, and Lewis wonders what time it is. He looks around the room for a clock, not seeing one on the wall or on Sydney’s bedside table or on his desk. He remembers Sydney’s sheaf of stories, held together by a rubber band. He remembers someone – a scientist – talking about rubber bands that spend their life stretched around a package, the molecules in them pulled out straight, and the whole time they’re straining to contract, trying desperately, year after year, to kink.

  He says to Sydney, ‘Do you still write?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Sydney, ‘I still write.’

  ‘Have you had anything published?’

  ‘You’re familiar with Bliss Tempest.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Lewis.

  ‘I’m Bliss Tempest,’ says Sydney.

  It takes Lewis a moment to make sense of this. ‘You’re Bliss Tempest? You write the Bliss Tempest books? My wife read every single one.’

  ‘Now I write stories in which everyone gets what they want,’ says Sydney.

  Lewis thinks about Edie’s Bliss Tempest novels, the characters that Edie likened to him, the men to whom Sydney has given all kinds of adventures. He feels a touch of envy towards them.

  Sydney reaches out and touches the back of Lewis’s neck. The palm of his hand is rough. Lewis worries about the dirt on Sydney’s fingers touching the neatly sewn-up wound near his hairline. He does not say anything though; he does not ask Sydney to take his hand away. Sydney gives the back of his neck a squeeze.

  Lewis has just opened his mouth to say something else – ‘Oh,’ he says – when Sydney reaches for the elasticated waist of Lewis’s pyjama trousers. He leans in and Lewis feels Sydney’s teeth on the soft lobe of his ear, and then his own fingers are touching Sydney’s torso, feeling his ribs and the chest hairs that will be grey or white beneath the yellow T-shirt whose logo means ‘Just Do It’; he is dressed like a boy. And Lewis, too, wearing pyjamas with a vest underneath, feels like a boy on a sleepover, or an OAP.

  He has some trouble with the button on Sydney’s trousers, due to a touch of stiffness in his joints; it is worse in the winter. Then the button falls off and Lewis picks it up off the bedding and puts it somewhere safe – on the bedside table – for sewing on again later.

  He turns back to Sydney, who is lying down now, with his grey hair against the primrose yellow of his pillowcase. Lewis lies down next to him. Comfortable between Sydney and the wall, he could almost close his eyes and sleep.

  He does not though. Instead, they make so much noise that the dog, downstairs somewhere, starts barking, and she is still barking when they are lying, later, exhausted on the floor, each feeling the weight of the other – an arm across a chest, a thigh across a thigh – and Sydney with his hand on his own heart.

  17

  He wants to always be here

  LEWIS IS SLOWER than Sydney to get dressed again, slower to get himself up off the floor and leave the bedroom. By the time he gets down to the living room, Sydney is standing smoking his electronic cigarette, scowling at it. Lewis moves towards the sofa, not quite sure what to say.

  ‘Don’t forget your book,’ says Sydney.

  Lewis,
who has reached the coffee table, comes to a stop and picks up his book. He looks at the cover, as a browser in a bookshop might, although it is all just a blur. He looks as if he is about to say something, perhaps about the book, or about the last time he was here.

  ‘Come on, then,’ says Sydney. ‘I’ll drive you home.’

  They go into the kitchen where Sydney puts on his coat and shoes and picks up his rucksack. Lewis wishes he had his winter coat with him, or his favourite jumper, something more substantial to go outside in. He does not even have his gloves. He tightens the belt of his dressing gown.

  Someone, thinks Lewis, is going to come into this house and pull out all the units, tear up the tiles, strip the crazy wallpaper. They will put this old kitchen into a rusting yellow skip. They will want everything new. They will have to have the electrics done, he thinks.

  Sydney opens the door, letting the dog out first.

  Lewis, the last down the path, looks for broken windows or a bottle smashed on the ground, but there is nothing to see. He looks for a ticket on the windscreen of the car, a clamp on the wheel, but there is nothing there, nothing to say that they have done anything wrong. There is no warden walking away from the car with the registration number in a notebook.

  Lewis pauses before getting in. Putting his book down on the roof of the car, he checks his slippers, as if he might have mud on them, or horse shit, evidence that he has been here, closer to the heart of the countryside, closer to nature, than he has been in years. His slippers, though, illuminated beneath a streetlamp, are very clean.

  As they set off, Lewis says, ‘Barry knows where I live.’

  ‘Lock your door,’ says Sydney. ‘You’ll be fine.’

  Lewis imagines Barry sitting on his doorstep, waiting for him to come home, or rattling the front door in the middle of the night, and then the back door, trying the windows. He will have to remember to bolt the back door, to keep his windows locked. He will lie awake, listening.

  He would rather not go home, but where else would he go? He cannot stay here – Sydney’s house is also known to Barry Bolton, and, besides, it has been sold. At Ruth’s house, he would have to sleep a partition wall away from Ruth and John’s room. The house on Small Street no longer exists and he cannot sleep at the nursing home.

  They drive back up the lane, the ground rough beneath their wheels, their lights shining through the darkness ahead, and Lewis thinks of the cargo ship that could not dock. He wants to always be here, in the yellow car, with Sydney.

  ‘You’re not the one who’s got what Barry wants,’ says Sydney. ‘And when he comes looking for me, I’ll be long gone.’

  It is not much use, anyway, locking his doors and windows, when he will see Barry in the nursing home at teatime on Sunday. He pictures a showdown in the lavender-coloured living room, a heated confrontation with dolphin song in the background. Lewis will say that he does not have the car, that Sydney has it. Barry, standing a touch too close, will ask where Sydney is, and Lewis will say, quite honestly, that he does not know.

  ‘You must have some money, though,’ says Lewis. ‘You must have made some money from your books. Why can’t you just give Barry what you owe him?’ If I had the money, thinks Lewis, I would buy a new suit and two shirts and a new coat, a new hat, new gloves, the lot.

  ‘The money I’ve got,’ says Sydney, ‘is going to take me far away from here.’

  Lewis is sitting on something hard. Reaching under his bottom, he extracts his spare pair of glasses. They are a bit bent but not broken. He puts them on, twisting round the rearview mirror to look at his face, clean-shaven but no longer smooth-skinned; at his shorn hair, his schoolboy cut, all the colour and thickness gone. He looks nothing like a schoolboy; he looks like the old man he is.

  Even though he cannot see the back of his neck, the site of the mole’s removal, he is aware of the growth having gone, and of feeling strangely bare. It feels sore. He thinks about Sydney’s hand being there, about his dirty fingers, his being a bit rough. He feels as if the stitches – the stitch – might have been pulled through the edge of the wound, opening it up again. He imagines a small hole in his body, his insides showing. He will have to walk back to the surgery and it will make his knee hurt. When he gets home, he will go to the bathroom and inspect the wound using Edie’s hand mirror. Perhaps he will find that the wound is fine and looks just as it did before.

  He does not, he suddenly realises, have his book. He feels like Mr Benn going home without a souvenir in his pocket. He has no sea shell, no wooden spoon.

  ‘What will you do with the dog,’ asks Lewis, ‘while you’re away?’ He twists around to look at the elderly golden retriever smiling on the back seat of the car. ‘I could have her,’ he says. ‘I could look after her.’

  They speed down the long, dark country lane with their headlights on full beam and it makes Lewis think of flying, of what flying might be like, and of how you would be fine, you would be safe, up there in the air.

  Acknowledgements

  THANKS AS EVER to my first readers and trusted advisers: my supportive and eagle-eyed husband Dan and my furiously hardworking agent and editor Nick Royle. Thanks also to Arthur for being on my team. (The children in this story are fictional; Arthur is the best climber and explorer I know.) Thanks to John Oakey for another beautiful cover, and to Jen and Chris at Salt for their enthusiasm. Thanks to my late father for responding to my enquiries about Billy Graham’s visit to Manchester in 1961, to Annette for memories of seeing Billy Graham in London in the 1950s, and to Penny for proposing going to see Billy Graham in a tent in Loughborough in 1989. Thanks to the café at Manor Farm in East Leake – where a good deal of this novel was written while my son was at pre-school – for the coffee and a seat by the radiator in the New Year and the cold spring of 2013, and thanks to The Windmill in Wymeswold for having such a fine collection of curious old books.

  The book about the physics of the future that Sydney mentions is Physics of the Future: The Inventions That Will Transform Our Lives by Michio Kaku, and the scientist ‘talking about rubber bands’ is Richard Feynman. ‘We that are alive, that are left, shall . . . be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. Then we will be with the Lord forever’ is from the New Testament (I. Thessalonians). ‘The sky-lark and thrush, / The birds of the bush’ is from ‘The Ecchoing Green’ by William Blake, and ‘breathing English air, / Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home’ is from ‘The Soldier’ by Rupert Brooke. ‘Pack up the stars, dismantle the sun’ is a misquotation of WH Auden’s ‘Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun’. ‘Have you ever tried jiu-­jitsu?. . . I’ll show you what I can, if you like’ is from DH Lawrence’s Women in Love, and ‘great tufts of primroses under the hazels’, ‘dandelions making suns, the first daisies’ and ‘columbines and campions, and new-mown hay, and oak-tufts and honeysuckle’ are from Lady Chatterley’s Lover. ‘Tonight is mine’ is from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.