He Wants (11 page)

13

He wants the impossible

T
HERE ARE FOUR
mugs in the office. The two that are Ruth's say, ‘
TEA
' and, ‘
COFFEE
'. She does not drink coffee – the ‘
COFFEE
' mug is her soup mug, although this bothers her a bit. Norman's number one mug says, ‘
WORLD'S BEST BOSS
'. The other one says, ‘
I
♥
MY COMPUTER
'.

Norman brings his favourite mug to his mouth, his lips reaching for the rim. The coffee – made from a big, cheap jar of brown dust that he is working his way through – is too hot. He sucks at the surface of it, at the coffee-scented steam, and then puts the mug down. ‘So how was your morning off?' he says.

‘All right, thank you,' says Ruth, without looking up from her work.

‘So what's with the face?' When Ruth doesn't answer, Norman asks, ‘What were you doing anyway?'

‘Waiting in for a washing machine,' she says. The window is open and she can hear the children in the school playground, the blur of a few hundred shrieking voices. Standing up to close the window, she adds, ‘It didn't come.'

‘They never do,' says Norman. ‘Have you rung them?'

‘No,' says Ruth.

‘Ring them. Tell them it was supposed to arrive this morning and you bloody well want it this morning.'

‘But it's not this morning any more.'

‘Ring them anyway.'

‘I will.' She won't though, because there is no new washing machine. She invented the new washing machine because she did not want to have to say to Norman that she was going to meet a man, a stranger, an ex-con.

Sydney is not a total stranger – Ruth and he have exchanged many letters – but they have never met. She does not know what he looks like; she is not sure how old he is. He once mentioned that he liked the Rolling Stones.

And it is so much easier to say to Norman that her new washing machine was not delivered than that this man never showed.

‘Are you wearing lipstick?' asks Norman. ‘You don't usually wear lipstick.' When she does not answer, he adds, as he picks up his mug, ready to try the coffee again, ‘The colour suits you.'

She wasn't late. She left her dad's house with more than enough time to spare. She did not take the direct route between the villages; she went a long way round, going through town, driving away from her destination before circling back. She drove past a car showroom, eyeing the shiny, family cars parked outside with large numbers in their windscreens. She drove past the horse that lives at the edge of the industrial estate in a triangle of field too small for galloping in. She drove past the train station, from where trains go all the way to London St Pancras, and from there the Eurostar takes you under the sea to Paris, and then a fast train will take you to the south of France, or elsewhere. She always meant to take a trip on the Orient Express, to go from Paris to Istanbul, although apparently they stopped doing that route before she was born and the Orient Express no longer runs at all. There is a modern substitute, though. You can ride in the same old carriages along the same old routes and she thinks that would be wonderfully exciting.

Despite the detour, the killing of a surplus half hour, she still had a little bit of time in hand when she arrived at the strange little café that stood alone on a slope in Nether. Nervous in her new red coat, she pushed open the door and a bell rang over her head. These bells they have above the doors of cafés and sweet shops always make her feel like one of Pavlov's dogs.

Inside, there was only one customer, a woman with a baby held to her bare breast, a coffee cup on the table in front of her. Ruth watched the baby feeding, his fat hands clawing at his mother's breast, his fat legs kicking. When she caught the mother's eye, Ruth looked away.

At the counter, Ruth asked for decaffeinated tea and was told by the man (who was wearing a floral apron and a badge that said, ‘How Can I Help You?') that there was none. She accepted normal tea instead (‘but not too strong') and took it to a table near the woman. She observed the woman drinking her coffee whilst feeding her baby and said to her, ‘Is that decaffeinated?'

The woman looked up. ‘No,' she said.

‘You shouldn't have caffeine when you're breastfeeding,' said Ruth. ‘Stimulants are bad for the baby. He won't be able to sleep.'

The mother, ignoring her, finished off her coffee and ordered a refill.

After a while, Ruth went back to the counter to ask the man for another cup of tea. The mother left with her baby, and Ruth sat there alone, glancing up at the door from time to time, even though it did not open and the bell did not ring. After two cups of tea and a bowl of soup, she paid and went back out onto the street. Over the road, on a well-tended green, a man was sitting on a bench – he had been there throughout, she thought. He was smoking a cigarette, or so she supposed, but when she crossed the road to speak to him, to ask if he was Sydney, she discovered that the white stick he kept putting to and taking from between his lips was not a cigarette but the stick of a lollipop. She stood in front of him and he crunched what was left.

‘Excuse me,' she said to this man, who was perhaps in his fifties, ‘are you Sydney?'

He looked at her with interest. ‘Who's asking?' he said.

Something about the look of him, the glint in his eye, made her walk away, regardless of whether or not he was Sydney. She got into her car, put her Susan Boyle CD back to track two and drove away.

‘I've got a meeting,' says Norman, getting up from behind his desk. He puts on his jacket and is walking away when, turning his head, he says, ‘Those flyers need to go out this afternoon.'

‘They won't be ready till Friday,' says Ruth.

‘They need to go out this afternoon,' he says again, leaving the room.

Ruth, glancing at the clock, picks up the phone and calls the printers. She lets it ring for a while but there is no answer and she hangs up. She leans down to look inside the bag she has under her desk. As well as the Tupperware tub that she picked up from her dad's house this morning, there is an apple that needs eating. She will wash the tub at home this evening before refilling it with the soup she will make for dinner. She thinks she must smell of soup, of vegetables, of waning fruit, most of the time. She looks at the clock again but only minutes have passed and home time is still a long way off.

She doesn't really know why she started corresponding with Sydney. She wasn't looking for a relationship, although she was single, not yet married to John – this was years ago. She wouldn't have said she was lonely; she was busy at work. Amongst her responsibilities was the administration of the writing competition into which Sydney had entered a very long love poem. She noticed from the address on his entry form that he was in prison. A couple of months later, she had to write to say that he had been unsuccessful, and he had written back to say that she seemed like a beautiful person. She put his letter into the recycling bin before taking it out again. She kept it in her ‘pending' tray for three weeks before replying to him.

When he sent another letter, she recognised the stationery and his handwriting straight away. Norman was at his desk, looking at her without seeing her while he talked on the phone. Using a pair of scissors as a letter opener (thinking of her granddad and the real and rather fine letter opener that lived on a small table inches from his letterbox in the house on Small Street) she sliced open the envelope. ‘What have you got there?' said Norman, whose phone call had finished and who was watching her, and she wondered if it was just the care she had taken with the envelope that made him ask, or perhaps she had been smiling. ‘Just junk,' she said, and when he wasn't looking she stole it into the soup bag at her feet.

Sydney told her, in the letters he sent, that he had grown up not far at all from where she was; that he had gone to school in the village in which she worked (
the village in which you work – and live?
, he wrote). He worked, he said, in the prison library and spent a lot of time reading, and writing; he was a published writer, he said, and Ruth imagined a poem published in a village newsletter, as one of hers had once been. He said that when he got out, when he was a free man, he wanted to travel all over the world. She is not sure he'll be able to, with a criminal record. She expects that many countries will turn him away.

When, some months later, she began a relationship with John, she stopped writing to Sydney, and eventually heard nothing from him until he wrote to say that he was coming out of prison (
the first thing I'll do is go and get my dog
) and would like to meet up. By then, Ruth was married, and she'd had a son. (Full of pethidine, she'd been split in two without feeling the pain.) At first, she thought she wouldn't go, that she wouldn't meet him, but this morning she set off in her car, in a new red coat, and she knew that she would go to the café after all.

She picks up the phone again, dials the printers and listens to the ringing for a while before replacing the receiver.

Sydney picked the venue, suggested the date and time. She wonders why he changed his mind. That might have been him sitting on the bench, getting a good look at her first. She feels rather foolish.

She is eating her apple when she suddenly thinks, ‘It was a scam. He was just getting me out of the house so that he could burgle me.' And then she thinks, ‘But he wasn't getting me out of the house, he was getting me out of work. He doesn't know where I live.' Frowning, she finishes the apple. There were girls at school who would eat the whole thing, the core, the pips, the calyx. She found it astonishing. She throws her core away.

Norman, returning from his meeting, settling himself at his desk, says, ‘Did your friend show up?'

‘What?' says Ruth, looking up quickly.

‘A friend of yours was here, asking for you. I thought it was your dad at first, because of his age. Is he a family friend?'

‘What was his name?'

‘Stanley or Sidney, something like that. I told him you were at home waiting in for something. I asked if he knew where you lived and he said he did. He didn't come and see you?'

‘No,' says Ruth. She wonders why he said he knew where she lived. Just so as not to appear suspicious, she supposes, having come to the office pretending to be a friend, when in fact, no doubt, he was hoping to burgle it in her absence. Presumably, he was in cahoots with the man on the bench whose job it was to let Sydney know that she was safely installed in the café.

‘Where are we with the print? Is it ready?'

‘There's no one there,' says Ruth. ‘No one's picking up the phone.'

‘They must be there,' says Norman. ‘I want that print today. If they're not picking up, you'd better go there in person.'

Ruth puts on her coat (‘New coat?' asks Norman) and picks up her handbag. As she heads through the door, Norman calls out to her, ‘Are you going anywhere near a bakery?'

‘No,' says Ruth.

She steps outside, into the cold, fresh air, and as her feet hit the pavement she recalls an evening the previous week when she got the feeling that she was being followed home from work, although, whenever she turned to look behind her, she could see no one there, and nothing happened.

She gets into her car, and into her mind comes the possibility that it was Sydney that evening, following her home so that he would know where she lived and could break in while she was wasting her time in that strange little café. Except that she was not going home; she was on her way to her dad's to look at his computer. He'd been getting emails he didn't want. ‘They're still sending those emails,' he said, as if they were like nuisance calls, somebody hounding him. She does not usually visit him in the evening, but she had not been surprised to find him right where she had left him that morning, in his armchair. She thought at first that he was praying, the way his head was bowed towards the lamplight, but he was asleep.

She turns around, no longer heading for town, heading instead towards her dad's house, worrying about the possibility of a break-in, and the likelihood – Ruth, in her little car, speeds up – that her dad would have been at home at the time, the burglar giving him a surprise.

14

He wants to see two men wrestling naked on the carpet

L
EWIS STANDS FOR
a minute outside the nursing home, in the darkening car park. He considers going back inside, braving the woman who grabs at his wrist as he goes by, but instead he walks home.

He goes slowly, resting often, leaning on a lamppost, a bin, a low wall, pushing his tongue against a shard of walnut stuck in his tooth. He wonders if Sydney will come back.

He feels his mobile phone – the one Ruth gave to him for emergencies – trembling against his thigh. He puts his hand into his trouser pocket and realises that the phone is still in the kitchen drawer, no doubt with the battery run down. The trembling he felt against his leg was a phantom; it was his body playing tricks on him.

The tune the phone plays when someone is trying to get in touch with him is something Ruth put on there, or else it came with the phone. It is the same tune they play in the doctor's waiting room and down the phone when they have you on hold and when the ice cream van is coming. It is as if it is the only song there is, the only piece of music in the world.

When Lewis opens his front door and finds someone standing in his hallway, it takes him a moment to adjust to the fact that it is not Sydney but Ruth.

‘Where the hell have you been?' she says, and her cursing, her saying ‘hell' like that, makes him flinch. Lewis has never spoken that way. He thinks of Sydney saying
Jesus fucking Christ
. What if he were to talk like that? He imagines saying to her now,
Jesus fucking Christ, Ruth. Chill out.
That's how they talk, the young people:
Chill out. Take a chill pill.

‘I thought something had happened to you,' says Ruth.

Lewis has to wait for her to take a few steps back before he can get inside and close the door behind him. ‘Nothing's happened,' he says.

‘You've had your hair cut,' she says. ‘And you've done something else as well.' She studies his face while Lewis looks over her shoulder into his house. ‘Where are your glasses?'

‘They got broken,' says Lewis, moving past her towards the stairs, where he sits down to take off his shoes.

Ruth stands over him. ‘I've been on the phone to ­everyone,' she says.

‘I went to see Granddad,' says Lewis. ‘Why are you here?'

‘I was worried about you. I tried ringing your mobile but I couldn't get you. Your phone's in the kitchen drawer.'

Pulling on his slippers, Lewis stands again and hangs up his coat. ‘What were you ringing for?' he asks, as he limps down the hallway towards the living room.

‘Have you walked all the way from the home? For God's sake, Dad.' She goes with him and gets him settled into his chair. ‘Where's your spare pair of glasses?' she asks.

‘I don't know,' says Lewis.

Ruth looks in the kitchen but doesn't find them, just the empty case in the drawer. Coming out again, she says, ‘Why have you got sake? Have you been into town? Have you been to the new deli?'

‘No. Do they sell it there?'

‘You won't like it. You only like shandy.'

Before she leaves, she makes Lewis a cup of milky tea, and as she hands it to him, he says, ‘Have you ever had Goldschläger?'

‘
Goldschläger
?' she says. ‘What's got into you? Yes,' she adds, going into the hallway to get her coat, ‘I have.' She comes back into the living room with his broken spectacles in her hand. ‘I'll take these for mending,' she says, leaning over him and kissing him near the corner of his eye.

When Ruth has gone, Lewis goes into the kitchen. Edie's best pie dish is still on the floor. The sake is still on the table. Ruth was right – he does not like anything strong. He is not like John used to be, passionately opposed to alcohol and pouring away gifts of wine; Lewis just does not much like the taste.

He opens the sake and puts the carton to his nose. He does not like the smell. He takes a glass down from the cupboard and pours out a measure. He looks at it, this exotic drink from the golden carton. He lifts the glass to his lips and takes a sip. It makes him grimace; it is like drinking vinegar. He tries to bring it close to his mouth again but he can't bring himself to do it. He wants to like it, but he does not.

He puts the glass down by the sink. He ought to give the sake to Ruth but he isn't sure that he will. He screws the top back onto the carton and puts it away in the fridge.

The soup is there, on the middle shelf. He takes it out and cuts some brown bread to eat with it, as much brown bread as he can swallow, so much brown bread that when he finally stands up, his belly is hard.

He goes upstairs, tonguing that shard of walnut still stuck in his teeth. It has survived the milky tea, the soup and brown bread, and might even survive the brushing of his teeth, the Sensodyne.

It is early but he gets undressed and puts on his pyjamas, leaving his underwear on underneath and wearing his dressing gown on top because he is cold. He slides his feet into his slippers and ties the belt of his dressing gown, feeling something hard in the pocket. Dipping his hand in, he retrieves his spare spectacles. When he puts them on, he sees his world again, everything just as it was.

He goes through to Ruth's bedroom, switches on his computer and checks his emails. ‘Joy,' says one, giving him a price for Viagra. ‘Live the life you've always wanted to lead,' says another, which might be selling watches although it is unclear. The one under that says, ‘Make your Asian dreams come true,' and Lewis thinks of Sydney gazing through the window of the travel agency. ‘We miss you,' says an email from a furniture company that Lewis has never used. ‘Get it while you can!' He clicks ‘Get Mail' again but there is nothing in the ether waiting to come through.

Leaving the computer, he goes to the foot of the stairs to fetch the little book of nursery rhymes out of his coat pocket, but when he looks at it with his glasses on he sees that it is not the book of nursery rhymes after all; it is some other book of similar size and appearance. Instead of taking it up to bed, he finds a space for it on the bookshelves, alongside his father's spurned Lawrences, his
Lady Chatterley's Lover
and the coverage of its trial, and
The Rainbow
, all copies of which were at one time seized and burnt, the book banned, and not that long ago, he thinks; less than a lifetime ago. He ought to have
Women in Love
somewhere as well but he doesn't know where that's got to. Lewis has never seen the film. He wants to. He meant to look for it in HMV.

A few of the books, he sees, are out of order.
Another Time,
Another Place,
Another Man
, which ought to be in with his father's theology books, has instead been put on Edie's shelf, while one of Edie's, with ‘Rapture' in the title, is next to his father's Bibles. He puts the theology book back in its place and takes down the Bliss Tempest, on whose cover there is a naked male torso, brown and hard and gleaming like the furniture in the nursing home after it's been buffed with Mr Sheen. Lewis, who has never shown much interest in Edie's books, takes another one off the shelf. Reading what is written on the back, he wonders for the first time whether this is the romance he's always assumed it to be, whether this is not in fact erotica, pornography. The font on the cracked spines and on the covers is like handwriting, as if these were not books but very long letters.

Removing his spectacles again, he goes upstairs and into his bedroom. He will say a prayer and climb into bed. He will lie on his side, either turned towards Edie's half of the bed or turned away, or he will lie on his back, looking up at the ceiling, thinking about the boy who is afraid of the dark, afraid when he wakes in the middle of the night, wanting something. It is not easy to get comfortable these days. It is always in bed at night that he feels new twinges in his teeth. It is when he is lying there in the dark that he finds himself thinking about people fainting for Billy Graham, about what it would be like to be immersed by the Reverend, about frozen embryos that, removed from the freezer, pop. It is when he closes his eyes that he thinks about the night of the school reunion, when he walked away from the school hall, the spinning disco ball and ‘The Final Countdown', coming to a stop at the far end of the corridor, outside the chemistry laboratory. As he stood there, recalling the screaming jelly baby experiment that his colleague had performed, the astonishing flare, he tried the door and found it unlocked.

Closing the door behind him, he went to the front of the classroom and stood behind the long bench on which the teacher's demonstrations took place. Behind him were the cupboards in which the equipment was stored. He opened the cupboard doors. He knew where everything was kept. He knew how to put it together.

He had it all set up when the door opened. ‘This is where I do chemistry, Gran,' said a boy, walking in, followed by a woman with dyed-red hair and a dogtooth coat over her arm.

Seeing Lewis, she said to him, ‘Ah! Are you going to do a demonstration for us?'

Lewis, smiling, put his hand in his pocket and brought out a bag of jelly babies. ‘I am indeed,' he said. The woman and the boy sat down on the pupils' stools, the woman behind the desk and the boy in front. Lewis waited until they were settled and then he said, ‘Watch this.' He lit his Bunsen burner, heated the chemical compound in a beaker and dropped in a handful of jelly babies. What followed was so bright that Lewis did not see at first that the boy was holding his face, that he had his hands to his eyes; it took him a moment to realise that the howling was coming not from the jelly babies but from the boy's grandmother.

He does not yet know if the boy will see again. John brings occasional news from The Golden Fleece, which is run by the boy's father.

Looking out of his bedroom window before closing the curtains, Lewis finds himself staring at a car that is parked a little way up the road. It is outside the men's toilet, whose light is on. The darkness and the streetlights make it hard to tell the colour of the car, but he thinks it is a Saab, and he can see a shape that might be a dog on the back seat. He can't see anyone else, a driver.

He goes back downstairs. He does not stop to put on his shoes but goes outside in his slippers, pulling the door to behind him. He can feel, through his slippers' thin soles, the cold, hard ground. He is aware of the inadequacy of his dressing gown against the night's chill, compared to his warm winter coat. He is missing the familiar warmth of his hair against his neck. His sideburns are keeping his cheeks warm though, and he at least has his underwear on.

Lewis walks – his bad knee aching – up his side of the street. Crossing over the road, he approaches the car. He is sure, now, as he draws closer, that it is Sydney's car, Sydney's dog. She is watching him and looks happy to see him. If the car is unlocked, he will fetch her out.

Lewis tries the driver's door, and it opens. He takes a look at the ignition but the key is not there. He is reaching for the dog when he pauses, looking at her, looking at the brandy barrel around her neck. Instead of leading her out, he gets hold of the brandy barrel, opens it up and finds the spare key inside.

As quietly as he can, he gets into the driver's seat and closes the door. He is aware of the deterioration in his eyesight since he last sat behind a steering wheel. He slips his hand into his dressing gown pocket for his spare pair of spectacles, but he has lost them again. He will have to drive slowly.

Starting the car, he pulls away from the kerb. He had assumed that a left-hand drive would feel stranger than it does. The Saab might be old but it handles nicely.

He has barely gone any distance when he sees that the front door of his house is standing wide open. Pulling up outside his gate, he gets out, going as quickly as he can up the garden path, with a shooting pain in his knee. He closes the door properly, slamming it. It strikes him that he does not have his door key but there isn't time to think about that now. The back door is probably still unlocked. He ought not to dash off in that case, knowing that the house might not be secure, but he has to get going. He has turned around and is coming back down his path when he sees Barry Bolton standing outside the toilets, looking down the road at him. ‘You!' he shouts. ‘Sullivan!' Lewis gets himself back to the car, climbs in behind the wheel and drives off again, going faster than Barry can run, his adrenalin soaring as he tops twenty miles per hour in the Saab.

His first thought is to turn around and drive up to the nursing home; to take the dog inside to show to his father, who would like to see a golden retriever. But then he realises that Barry might follow him there, and it also occurs to him that visiting hours are over so he would not be allowed in anyway. His father will be in bed; they will all be in bed or on their way. He cannot linger around here though. Instead, he drives out of the village towards the only place he thinks he might find Sydney.