He Wants (10 page)

11

He wants to be seen

B
EFORE 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.

Lewis 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.

12

He wants the Messiah

L
EWIS WALKS BACK
through the Strepsil-yellow waiting room, exiting through the automatic doors. He half expects to find Sydney gone and his knee aches at the thought of the walk home.

But the Saab is parked right where it was. Sydney is out of the car, sitting on the bonnet, just as he once sat under the jubilee bunting except that then he had his shirt off in the sunshine and now he is wearing a gabardine coat and his hands look a little bit blue in the last of the winter daylight.

‘Does it hurt?' says Sydney, putting away his electronic cigarette and lowering himself off the bonnet.

‘I can hardly feel it,' says Lewis. He opens the door on the passenger side and gets in.

Sydney climbs into the driver's seat and leans over, ­inspecting the back of Lewis's neck. ‘Nice job,' he says.

‘Are there stitches?' asks Lewis.

‘There's a stitch,' says Sydney.

Holding on to the back of Lewis's seat with one hand, Sydney leans forward, reaching into the box of tapes in the footwell, rummaging through the contents. Lewis turns his head to the window. He can sense the approach of spring. In the coming months, the country air will fill with pollen. His eyes will redden and start to water; his nose will run. He never got hay fever when he was a boy; it came on later. If he was ever going to run through a meadow, knee deep in grasses and wild flowers, he ought to have done it while he was young, when he had the chance.

He can feel Sydney's cold fingers touching the back of his neck, but when he turns his head he sees that Sydney has both his hands in the box of tapes now and it is not Sydney but the dog that is touching him, her wet nose against the back of his neck, and then a wet tongue right where the wound is.

Sydney, sitting up again, puts a tape into Lewis's hands. ‘That's for your dad,' he says. When Lewis looks at it blankly, Sydney says, ‘That's the recording he wants, the
Messiah
he asked you to get for him.'

‘Ah,' says Lewis. ‘Thank you. I'll give it to him on Sunday.'

‘Let's go and see him now,' says Sydney, choosing another tape to put into the car's tape deck.

‘He won't be expecting visitors today,' says Lewis, but Sydney is already heading for the exit with his indicator flashing. When he turns in the direction of the nursing home, it is with the Rolling Stones blasting from his speakers so loudly that, despite the windows being up, people turn and stare.

The nursing home has an unnecessarily large car park at the front. All this empty tarmac, thinks Lewis, and no garden. Sydney parks the Saab in the middle of a vacant row of marked-out spaces. They get out and go to the front door, where Lewis enters the four-digit code that keeps the residents safe.

There is a woman standing just inside the entrance hall. She reaches for them as they enter. ‘I want to go home,' she says, holding on to their sleeves, their wrists. She has her hair in two long plaits and Lewis thinks of Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz
, grown old, and then he thinks of his grandparents' beach hut even though it was not, of course, lifted into the heavens and flown to Oz but was smashed to bits right there on the beach. Lewis did not see it happen; he only saw the space where it had stood.

Sydney pulls away from the woman but she holds Lewis back. ‘You don't regret what you've done,' she says. ‘You'll regret what you haven't done.' Lewis looks at her, not knowing what to say, and then he too pulls away, pursuing Sydney.

Lewis is used to coming here on a Sunday to escort his father to church. Entering the lounge now, Lewis half expects to be going to church next. He notices his unpolished shoes. He pats absentmindedly at his pocket, checking for change that he does not have on him, looking for something for the collection plate.

His father is sitting very upright in his chair. He is preaching. ‘Cunt,' he says. Gripping his knees, he says, ‘Balls.' There is an untouched cup of tea at his elbow. ‘Shit and arse,' he says.

Lewis pulls up a couple of visitors' chairs, taking one from near Doris whose son will not arrive until teatime. He places the chairs in front of his father, who looks up and greets Lewis pleasantly enough but not by name, so that Lewis cannot tell whether his father knows who he is. His father also turns to Sydney and, frowning, narrowing his eyes, stares hard at him.

‘We've brought you that
Messiah
you wanted,' says Sydney, looking at Lewis, who holds out the tape.

Lawrence, looking at it, says, ‘I don't have a cassette player.'

‘Oh,' says Lewis, ‘that's right.'

Lawrence turns and looks again at his other visitor.

‘Do you remember Sydney?' asks Lewis.

‘You were telling me about your uncle,' says Sydney. ‘The one who went to Australia.'

‘Oh yes,' says Lawrence, brightening up. ‘There were opportunities there. They were advertising for men. You could make a good living. I've never been.'

Lewis is about to change the subject, to ask his father what he had for his lunch, but Sydney begins to speak about Australia, describing for Lawrence the Australian birdlife: the yellow figbird, the golden whistler. It is the males, he says, that have the yellow throats, the golden underparts; the females are drab, grey and brown. And while he speaks, Lawrence, with his feet amongst the enormous flowers on the carpet, is as rapt as if he were actually there, at the edge of the rainforest, gazing up into the trees, towards the sky.

‘You've got a cup of tea here, Dad,' says Lewis. ‘Shall I pass it to you?'

‘Yes, please,' says Lawrence.

Lewis picks it up by the saucer and hands it to Lawrence, who places it on his lap but does not drink it. He looks at the coconut macaroon that is in his saucer but he does not eat it.

‘Oh,' he says, and Sydney looks at Lawrence as if expecting something important to follow, but nothing does.

A nurse arrives beside them with a tea trolley. ‘Cup of tea, Lawrence?' he says.

‘Yes, please,' says Lawrence.

The nurse is handing one over when he sees the cup of tea that Lawrence has on his lap. He rolls his eyes and offers the cup to Lewis instead. Lewis hesitates. He does want a cup of tea but there are alternatives on the trolley, at which he looks. They have camomile,
calming
. He does not want calming. There is a bottle of Edie's bubble bath at home in the bathroom, and that is lavender,
calming
, but he does not use it. He considers again the normal tea, but the nurse has already turned away and is offering it to Sydney, who asks for a cup of milk. The nurse is thrown by this request but provides the milk anyway. Lewis watches Sydney gulping it down. He thinks now that he would like milk too, but the nurse with the tea trolley has already moved on.

Sydney, wiping off his milk moustache, says to Lawrence, ‘How was Billy Graham?'

Lawrence, who has picked up his coconut macaroon, puts it down again, a fond look coming over his face, his eyes lighting up, a shy smile lifting the corners of his mouth. ‘Billy Graham?' he says, wearing an expression such as one might have when recalling a long-ago lover and finding oneself unexpectedly saying their name. ‘Yes, we saw Billy Graham.'

‘I saw him again,' says Lewis, ‘the last time he came here, in 1989. I took Ruth.' He had been expecting Billy Graham in person, like the first time. Even as he entered the tent that had been erected in a field at the edge of the nearby town, he thought he was going to see the man himself. He was disappointed to realise that he was only going to see Billy Graham on a screen, that he was appearing by satellite, beamed from London. Someone fainted, though, nonetheless. People left their plastic chairs and walked down the aisle of sun-warmed grass, disappearing behind the screens as if, thought Lewis, they had gone to take a peek at the Wizard of Oz.

‘That's right,' says Lawrence. ‘I couldn't go because your mother had booked a cruise. I thought I'd get another chance to see him. She'd always wanted to go on a cruise. She said it would be a dream come true. Oh, it was dreadful.' He talks about the violent diarrhoea they and everyone else on board went down with – they suspected the salad. And then he talks about a British cruise ship recently turned away from Argentina. And he talks about the
Khian Sea
incident that was taking place the year before their cruise – the cargo ship carrying thousands of tons of nonhazardous waste, unable to dock. ‘For more than two years they went from port to port, from country to country, unable to stop anywhere. Imagine being stuck on a ship, at sea and wanting to get home, all that time.'

‘Yes,' says Lewis.

Sydney is watching him. ‘You think you might like it,' he says.

Lewis does not say anything. He looks at the coconut macaroon that is going to waste in the saucer of his ­father's teacup.

‘It was a ship carrying thousands of tons of ash,' says Sydney. ‘It wasn't a cruise ship. It wasn't the Love Boat. You'd go stir crazy after a while.'

‘Seeing Billy Graham,' says Lawrence, ‘encouraged me to take action. I stopped reading DH Lawrence and after a while I gave up teaching literature altogether.' He is back, then, to expounding on the rot that had spoiled his DH Lawrence, his
Lady Chatterley's Lover
. It was no longer possible to enjoy the great tufts of primroses under the hazels, the dandelions making suns, the first daisies, the columbines and campions, and new-mown hay, and oak-tufts and honeysuckle. The novel seemed soiled. Creeping jenny would always now make him think of a penis – ‘a man's penis,' he says. And
Women in Love
, beginning with embroidery and yellow celandines, soon turned to the dangling yellow male catkin and the inseminatory yellow pollen and then came the descent into naked men wrestling and they ‘penetrate into the very quick', they ‘drive their white flesh deeper', they ‘heave', ‘working nearer and nearer', and just thinking about it now, Lawrence is reminded how he felt whenever Lewis was going off to or coming back from Sydney Flynn's house, or when he opened Lewis's bedroom door and saw them there on the bed together, and although he never actually caught them doing anything, everything was suggested. This was the novel that finally forced him to abandon his post at the school. He speaks about it through lips gone small and tight. The book, he says, is all about homosexuals and therefore he could not advocate it. He could not ask his students to study a book like that, a book with ­homoerotic undertones. He could not talk to them about one man feeling that way about another. He is getting agitated. He found that when he ceased to read DH Lawrence, he ceased to read literature at all, favouring theological works.

Lewis has not read
Lady Chatterley's Lover
; he has only read the dry account of its trial. He has read
Women in Love
, in which two men wrestle naked on the carpet.

‘But it's about more than that,' says Sydney. ‘It's about a longing for a new world.'

Lawrence turns to Sydney and stares hard at him, narrowing his eyes again, frowning. ‘I know who you are,' he says.

‘Come on,' says Sydney to Lewis, ‘let's go.' He stands, and as he does so his knee bangs against Lawrence's, upsetting the cup and saucer still balanced on the old man's bony thighs, spilling stone-cold tea into his lap. While Sydney walks away, heading into the entrance hall, passing the woman who cannot get home, making his way out into the car park, Lewis hurries off to find a cloth. When he comes back, his father says, ‘Is Billy Graham still alive?'

Lewis, wiping down his father's trousers and his chair, says that he is.

‘I want to go and see him,' says Lawrence.

‘I don't know, Dad,' says Lewis. ‘He's in his nineties. He doesn't tour any more. He's retired.'

‘I want to see him.'

‘We'll see.'

As he leaves, his father says, ‘God loves you.'

When Lewis was little, his father always said at bedtime and on parting, ‘Your mother loves you.' This was corroborated in junior school, where Lewis received the same message while eating his sandwiches in the dinner hall, until the day when he was instead told otherwise. Some years later, when Lewis began to live away from home, in halls of residence, his father took to saying, on doorsteps and train station platforms and over the telephone, ‘God loves you,' and Lewis always felt that it was surely only a matter of time until someone suddenly said to him, ‘God doesn't love you,' and that would be that.

When Lewis gets outside, he looks for the Saab and instead of seeing Sydney standing beside it he sees another man. Sydney is lying on the ground near the driver's door. The other man is standing above him, talking calmly down at him, with a boot on Sydney's groin. It takes a moment for Lewis to place him, to realise that this is Mrs Bolton's son.

Barry is saying, ‘I want my money.'

‘I haven't got it,' says Sydney.

Barry says again, more slowly, ‘I want my money.'

Lewis does not hear what Sydney says, but he sees Barry's boot move and he hears Sydney yelling out.

‘I'll take the car, then,' says Barry. The driver's door is standing wide open, and Barry gets in. The key must be in the ignition because he sets off so fast that it is the momentum that slams the door shut.

With the car gone and only the fumes lingering in the dusk, Lewis makes his way across the car park to the spot where Sydney is now getting to his feet, but Sydney is in turn setting off after the car, and the dog that is still in the back.