He Wants (9 page)

He is missing his spectacles, clarity of vision. He stands and wanders over to the units, opening a drawer and rummaging through unused gadgets, looking for his spare pair. He finds the case but there are no spectacles inside.

‘Pop the kettle on while you're up,' says Sydney.

Lewis puts it on, takes a couple of teacups from the cupboard and gets out the cake tin. Inside, he discovers a walnut cake that he has not yet cut into but which is starting to go stale. ‘Shall we have some cake?' he asks.

‘Go for it,' says Sydney.

Lewis delivers the cups of tea to the table, and then two small plates of cake. He has put little forks on the plates but Sydney eats with his fingers, not waiting to swallow one bite before taking another, making sounds of pleasure all the while. Lewis finds himself doing the same, grunting happily with each mouthful of cake, each sip of tea.

Sydney, finishing his slice, licks his fingers and tastes his tea. Pulling a face, he gets up and goes over the counter, opens up the sugar caddy and dips in his spoon.

As Sydney comes back to the table, he touches the back of Lewis's neck. ‘Have you had that looked at?' he asks. Lewis brings his hand up to the soft, brown lump newly exposed at the nape, between his hairline and his collar. He cannot tell if the lump is getting bigger.

‘I'm having it cut out,' says Lewis. ‘I've got an appointment at the surgery this afternoon.'

‘I'd offer to give you a lift,' says Sydney, ‘but I was planning on waiting for Ruth.'

Lewis feels a jolt, much like when Ruth says ‘Jesus' or ‘Christ' under her breath.

‘Ruth?' he says. ‘My Ruth?'

Sydney takes a loose cigarette out of his pocket. He does not ask Lewis whether he may smoke in the house, in the kitchen; he does not ask for an ashtray. He puts the cigarette between his lips. Just as Lewis is realising that something is not quite right, Sydney holds the cigarette out for him to see. ‘It's an electronic one,' says Sydney. He looks at it in a way that makes Lewis think of a spoonful of cold soup. Sydney puts the electronic cigarette in his mouth again and draws, making the end light up. He sighs and puts it away. ‘She's not expecting me.'

‘Ruth doesn't live here,' says Lewis. ‘She hasn't lived here for years.' For a fleeting moment, Sydney looks sufficiently confused that Lewis almost reaches out to cover Sydney's trembling hand with his own.

‘She comes here, though,' says Sydney.

‘She won't come today,' says Lewis. He touches the back of his neck again, his growth, and looks at his bare wrist. ‘What time is it?' he asks. When Sydney tells him, Lewis says, ‘Time's marching on.' He will have to go soon. ‘How do you know my Ruth?' he asks.

‘We've never met,' says Sydney. ‘We've been communicating.'

‘She gave you this address?'

‘No.'

‘Well then, why did you come here?'

‘You've got my book,' says Sydney. He is looking at the work surface, at a Bliss Tempest book that Ruth must have left out on the side.

‘What?' says Lewis, following his gaze. ‘No, that's
my
book.'

When Lewis turns back, he sees Sydney slumped, as if he has fainted, or, he thinks, it is his heart. Sydney's head is hanging down near the corner of the table. Lewis reaches out and is just about to touch him when he sees that Sydney is only bending down, fetching something out of his rucksack. Taking out a tall carton with a colourful Oriental design on a gold background, Sydney says, ‘I brought some sake for Ruth.'

‘I've never had sake,' says Lewis.

‘What you really want,' says Sydney, ‘is to have it in Tokyo, in a bar, with snacks – pickles and fish.' Putting the carton down on the kitchen table, he mentions the pickled herring eaten with beer in Germany and Scandinavia, and Thailand's painfully hot and moreish bar snacks, and Lewis thinks enviously of all those flights.

‘I've never flown,' he says.

‘It's safer than driving,' says Sydney. ‘It's safer than crossing the road.'

‘I'm not afraid of flying,' says Lewis. ‘It's just something I've never done.' He has no idea why. He has been inside his nearest airport; he has been in the departure hall, where the first thing you see is a sign for the prayer room, and a picture of a little man down on his knees. He has seen the destinations on the information screens, the queues of people in front of the desks where passports are checked, boarding cards are issued and luggage is weighed. He just hasn't ever been the one going anywhere.

‘You're most likely to be injured at home,' says Sydney. ‘You're most likely to be harmed or killed by someone you know. You're safest of all in the air.'

‘I believe you,' says Lewis, ‘although at some point you would have to come down.'

Lewis reaches into the pocket of his coat and takes out a small paper bag. Opening it up, he holds it out to Sydney, who looks inside and extracts a jelly baby. The dog comes to the table, and Lewis gives her a sweetie too. ‘You're getting fat,' says Sydney, and Lewis can't tell if Sydney is talking to him or to the dog.

When Lewis saw the ‘screaming jelly baby' experiment executed in the chemistry laboratory, he had been teaching for more than forty years and was approaching retirement, but as he watched the demonstration – his colleague, in a white coat and safety goggles, melting potassium chlorate in a boiling tube over a Bunsen burner, dropping in a jelly baby that burst into flames and began to howl – he wondered for the first time whether he ought to have chosen something other than RE, something more dramatic. In truth, though, Lewis could not have handled a career as a high school chemistry teacher. He found the potential for accidents unnerving – the regular shattering of glass slides and test tubes, the explosions caused by adolescents not reading instructions, the constant smell of gas.

‘Did you join the RAF?' asks Lewis.

Sydney looks puzzled. ‘No,' he says.

‘You wanted to be a writer too.'

‘I did,' says Sydney.

Lewis glances at Sydney's watch, which he cannot read.
‘I'll have to go in a minute,' he says. ‘It's a bit of a walk to the surgery.'

‘I'll take you,' says Sydney. ‘I've got the car outside.'

Lewis, whose knee hurts when he walks, is quick to accept Sydney's offer.

Sydney stands, putting on his coat and shouldering his rucksack. Lewis is still wearing his coat and shoes from before. As he follows Sydney and his dog out of the kitchen, Lewis feels strangely as if he has only been visiting, as if he does not really belong here at all.

10

He wants a second chance

L
AWRENCE WRITES HIS
letters with a dip pen that once belonged to his Uncle Ted. He still has the original ink bottle, with a little purple ink left inside it. The ink, when it dries on the page, is the same shade as the interior walls of the nursing home. Lawrence thinks he could write all over the walls with this pen and no one would even know. He could say the things he would rather not say to anyone's face.
Your dog
, he would write,
is too small
. And:
I'm not all that fond of the processed meat
. And:
You don't always come when I call
. He could write these messages in big capital letters, like shouting that no one would hear. He would write to the craft lady:
I've always liked the way you smell.
It would be like using invisible ink.

He once sent a girl a Valentine's Day card. He put it boldly through her letterbox with his name inside, written in lemon juice. She never mentioned it. On some occasion after that, Lawrence did something he shouldn't have done (he does not remember now what it was; perhaps he had taken someone's sweets) and it occurred to him that he could make his confession in that same way, in writing, with his home-made invisible ink. That way, he reckoned, if he died in the night, he would get into heaven but without the grown-ups ever needing to know what he had done. (Perhaps it was that time he took some jam without asking, getting into the pantry and sticking his fingers right into the jar.) His mother, though, lit a match and held it close to the surface of his white sheet of paper, revealing his secret writing with the flame, and sent him to his father to be punished as his father saw fit. (What crime had he committed? He might have cut off his sister's dolls' hair. It would be something like this, something small and quick but irreversible.)

His handwriting is good; he is careful with the pen. He dots his ‘i's and crosses his ‘t's and the loops beneath his ‘g's and ‘j's and ‘y's are small and neat. At school, he was naturally inclined to write with his left hand but that was soon forced out of him and instead he learnt to manage with his right. A poem he transcribed using his best calligraphy won him a certificate, presented in assembly, after which his Uncle Ted gave him the pen. He sat Lawrence down at his kitchen table and asked him to demonstrate his fine penmanship. He winced to see how Lawrence pressed the nib of this lovely pen against the paper, bearing down on it so hard that it splayed, and splayed to such an extent that the inked line split. The solid white line of bare paper left down the middle was like the line on the road that means you must not cross it. ‘Don't press so hard,' said his Uncle Ted. ‘You'll damage the nib.' The forcefulness of Lawrence's full stops made him gasp as if he himself had been stabbed with the nib. Lawrence wondered whether his Uncle Ted regretted, even then, saying that he could take the pen. Perhaps he would have liked to say, ‘I'm afraid I've changed my mind. This pen is very valuable to me and I do not think you are exhibiting sufficient care. I do not want to give it to you after all. I do not want to put it into your hands.' But he did not say that. He did query the granting of the certificate, as if it were like a qualification, a licence, paperwork for a skill that Lawrence did not yet seem to have mastered. He still gave Lawrence the precious pen though, and Lawrence tried to press more lightly on the paper, striving to write well with his Uncle Ted's pen in his right hand, always hoping for another certificate. Even when his Uncle Ted went away, he did not ask for his pen back; he did not speak to Lawrence at all.

Even now, in his nineties, in the twenty-first century, when no one would care or especially notice if Lawrence wrote with his left hand, he still uses his right. No one would bother if he pressed down too hard, but if anything he does not press hard enough – the marks he makes are light, and shaky, his hand unable to hold the pen quite as steady as he would like. He uses a proper writing pad, containing forty sheets of nice, watermarked paper, and a guiding sheet that he puts underneath, the thick black lines keeping him straight.

He sends his opinions to the local newspaper, in letters alerting people to the dangers facing society, threats to the community, vandalism and graffiti in the streets, the damage to the bus shelter and the amendment of street signs.
SMELL STREET
. His most recent letters were intended to discourage people from visiting the medium who was coming – according to the nurses, according to the notices on the telegraph poles and the gossip at the church – to the function room of the nearby pub, to commune with the dead. Lawrence signs his letters ‘Mr L. Sullivan'. Lewis wishes he would not. ‘What if people think it's me?' he asks. ‘What if people think I'm the one complaining and saying these things?'

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.