He Wants (12 page)

15

He wants a time machine

T
HE DRIVE IS
excruciating. In constant anticipation of someone or something unseen in the darkness running into the road, with his foot ready to jump on the brake and his knee throbbing, Lewis heads out of the village. There is someone on the pavement near the postbox, and someone else strolling alone with an empty dog lead, but when Lewis slows down beside them, he sees that they are not Sydney, and he drives on again.

He gets onto the main road, which will take him from one village to another, or into town if he were to take a different turning. He considers doing it, driving into town, something he has not done for years. He could buy a new coat; he could buy a new suit, or something more fashionable, for going out in. He could find Sydney and take him to the pictures.

There is a cinema in town that shows 3D films. If you wear the correct spectacles, the images come right out of the screen towards you and it seems as if you could touch them or that they might touch you. He has never seen one of these films. Ruth's boy has seen one. There were birds, said the boy, that flew out of the screen, and shooting stars that fell towards you, and it was like you could reach out and catch them. ‘And could you?' said Lewis. ‘Could you catch them?' ‘Well, no,' said the boy, ‘you couldn't
actually
catch them,' and he looked at his granddad as if he were a fool for thinking it. ‘And there were bubbles,' said the boy, ‘that popped right in front of your face.'

Another day
, Lewis tells himself; he'll do all that another day, when he has not come out wearing his pyjamas and slippers, when he has not come out without his spectacles and his wallet. Anyone finding him wandering around town like this would only want to send him back to whatever institution he'd come from.

There is a man walking along the verge, wading through the long grass in between the road and the hedge. Lewis slows down beside him and when the man turns towards him, Lewis sees the yellow top beneath the open coat.

Sydney, seeing the Saab and expecting Barry Bolton, runs, hopping awkwardly between the uneven verge and the gutter. Lewis has to drive along beside him with the window down, saying, ‘It's me, Sydney, it's Lewis,' so that Sydney will stop running.

‘What are you doing in my car?' says Sydney. He is leaning over with one hand on his knee, out of breath, and one hand on his heart. ‘How did you get the car?'

‘I saw it parked outside the public toilet,' says Lewis, ‘while Barry Bolton was using the facilities. I took it.'

‘Where are you going?'

‘I was looking for you,' says Lewis. ‘I figured you might be staying at your parents' house.'

‘You figured right,' says Sydney.

Lewis moves into the passenger seat so that Sydney can get in behind the wheel. Sydney greets his dog, and at the same time pushes her eager face away from him. They drive on, and Sydney tells Lewis all about Barry Bolton, who lives in Nether, the village towards which they are now heading.

‘Does he know where you live?' asks Lewis.

‘Yes,' says Sydney.

‘He knows where I live too.'

They drive through the countryside in darkness, the kind of darkness that is not found in cities but is found in the countryside, in between villages. When they pass a sign that says, ‘Concealed entrance', Sydney, slowing just enough, takes the turning. The dog, staggering, starts to whine.

‘Do you remember,' says Sydney, ‘the last time you were in this car? I picked you up from Small Street.'

‘It was my first time as well as my last,' says Lewis. It was early in the summer of 1961, the day Sydney brought round the puppy, Old Yeller. They drove around for a while and then Sydney took Lewis to his parents' house in Nether, where they sat talking in Sydney's bedroom. Lewis remembers looking at Sydney's teeth while he was speaking, at the spike of his canines and the sharp incisors that he had once seen biting into another boy's ear, Sydney bearing down on the boy like Dracula. Sitting on the edge of Sydney's bed, looking at Sydney's teeth and thinking about Sydney fighting in the playground, Lewis said, ‘Have you ever tried jiu-jitsu?' He had to look away before adding, ‘I'll show you what I can, if you like.' At that moment, though, Sydney's mother had come in with a plate of home-made biscuits and when she had gone neither of them mentioned the jiu-jitsu again. They ate some of the biscuits and then Lewis said, ‘Perhaps I should be going.'

‘Don't go yet,' said Sydney. For a little while, neither spoke. They finished the biscuits and then Sydney said, ‘So what do you want to do?'

‘What?' said Lewis.

‘What do you want to do with your life?'

‘Oh,' said Lewis. ‘I don't really know. What about you?'

‘I want to be a writer,' said Sydney. ‘I'll read you a story I've written.' He reached over to his desk and pulled a few paper-clipped pages from a sheaf bound by an elastic band. Lewis remembers thinking that if he had written a story, he would not have left it lying out on his desk like that, where anyone might pick it up and read it; he would have put it away in a drawer or hidden it under his mattress.

He sat and watched while Sydney read from the handwritten pages, and when he stopped reading, Lewis said, ‘Is that it? Have you not written the ending yet?'

‘That is the ending,' said Sydney.

‘Oh,' said Lewis. ‘So the guy doesn't get what he wants?'

‘No,' said Sydney. ‘He doesn't get what he wants. You didn't like it?'

Lewis shrugged. He wanted there to be another page. ‘I thought he would get what he wanted in the end.'

‘Oh,' said Sydney. ‘No.'

Sydney sat looking at the pages in his hands, and Lewis, recalling the moment, is reminded also of the look on Ruth's boy's face when the yellow-bellied newt he'd been aiming to catch was inadvertently crushed under Lewis's foot.

Now, as he drives down the narrow country lane, Sydney says, ‘I didn't half get a bollocking from my old man when he realised I'd been driving his car.'

‘It's lasted well,' says Lewis.

‘I've been reading a book about the physics of the future,' says Sydney. ‘In the future, we'll have driverless cars. Didn't you used to think we'd all have hovercars by now? Didn't you think we'd have time machines by the twenty-first century?'

Lewis – being driven down an unmarked lane lined with overgrown hedges, with trees arching above them so that it is like speeding through a tunnel, the road lit only by their own headlights, with Sydney's fist, on the gear stick, changing gear, bumping against his thigh – thinks that he would like a time machine.

‘By the end of the century,' continues Sydney, ‘there'll be astronauts on Mars.'

‘I keep hearing about pills,' says Lewis, ‘that can reverse the ageing process.'

‘We'll be able to video our dreams.'

Lewis is not so sure he would want that. He is quiet for a moment and then Sydney interrupts the silence, saying, ‘How many senses have you got?'

Lewis, suspecting that he is being tricked, says, anyway, ‘Five.'

‘You've got more than twenty,' says Sydney. ‘You know when you've got an itch, and you have a sense of time, and pain, and hunger . . .'

Lewis looks at him, astonished to find that he has gone through life thinking that he only had five, the basic five senses, when all along he had more than twenty. Aware now of his embarrassment of senses, Lewis pictures himself like the sensory homunculus, a man with grossly enlarged lips and tongue and genitals, and the most enormous hands. Thinking about whether he's got an itch makes him feel that he has.

At the end of the lane, they come to what was once countryside but is now all built up, housing estates extending over what used to be fields. Lewis is on the point of saying to Sydney, ‘Do you remember when this was all fields?' but he doesn't want to sound like an old man, he doesn't want to sound like his own father, so he doesn't say anything.

And then, coasting down the final hill, the figure on the dashboard performing a wild hula on the rough track, they emerge into Nether, into the village square. Sydney starts to slow down. They approach the café and Lewis peers towards it. Despite all that bread he ate, all that fibre, he thinks he might be peckish. He has never been into that café, whose door, the frame, is the yellow of a sunny-side-up egg, the same shade as a sign he's seen, strapped to a lamppost on the main road, that says, ‘Better late than never'. He thinks about all the things they might sell in there, imagining all sorts of goodies he has never had: ­cappuccinos, espressos, carrot cake. Sydney is not stopping at the café though, and, besides, it looks as if it is on the point of closing.

They skirt the green, the bench standing empty in the middle, and Lewis looks at the blossom on the winter-flowering trees and, on the other side of the road, the rows of little stone cottages with neat, square gardens and window boxes. It is a nice village, he thinks; it would be a pleasant place to live, were it not for Barry Bolton.

Sydney pulls up outside the house that is still bare-bricked between its clad neighbours. Lewis half expects to see Sydney's father in the front garden or at the front window, shooing him away.

‘There's no one here,' says Sydney, and Lewis is not sure whether he means his parents or Barry Bolton.

They get out and let the dog out too.

There are all sorts of parking restrictions in town and even in Lewis's village now – bays that you are not allowed to park in, entire streets that are for permit holders only. He does not know about here. Lewis has never parked somewhere he shouldn't; he has never had a parking ticket tucked under his windscreen wiper. He has never had a speeding ticket or been stopped by the police and given a verbal warning. When he was at school, other boys were given warnings and final warnings by police officers and park keepers, but such things never happened to Lewis. He did get that letter though, recently, about spending too long in the car park of the supermarket on Small Street. He would like to go back to the playground, to say to the boys, when they boast about the trouble they've been in, that he has had a letter threatening him with court. He ought to have kept the letter as proof that he parked for much longer than was allowed.

In truth, though, he was mortified to receive that letter. The experience was quite unpleasant and he hopes that he has heard the last of it. He paid the fine promptly. The moment the letter came through the door, he wrote a cheque, put a first-class stamp on the envelope and took it straight down to the postbox. He put the threatening letter, with its assertion of video evidence and the scales of justice in the corner, into the recycling, feeling the sweat in his armpits, on his clean shirt. He made a cup of tea to help himself calm down.

‘Cup of tea?' says Sydney, as if, thinks Lewis, briefly alarmed, Sydney can see right into his head, as if he can see what Lewis thinks about.

‘Not for me, thank you,' he says – he does not normally have caffeine this late, so close to bedtime – but Sydney is already walking away with the dog at his heels. Lewis cuts across the front garden. Seeing his own slippered feet nipping across the lawn, he feels like an escapee, like one of the residents getting out of the nursing home in the middle of the night. He follows Sydney down the side of the house and in through the kitchen door.

16

He does not want the boy to be spoiled

E
VEN WITHOUT HIS
glasses on, Lewis can see that the units in Sydney's kitchen are the originals. The fixtures and fittings, the table and chairs and the lino floor tiles must be as old as he is. He wants to say to Edie, ‘Look, this kitchen is older than ours and is just fine.' But it is years since Edie won that argument, years since they had their new units put in, their new floor laid.

‘What do you want?' asks Sydney, opening cupboards, offering cocoa, Horlicks, Ribena, but Lewis says no, no – he does not want any of these things.

Sydney, with hands still dirty from lying on the ground being kicked by Barry Bolton, fills the kettle and opens a cupboard. Looking for teabags, he finds Marmite that is years past its sell-by date and a jar of pickled beetroot gone brown and soft and falling apart. ‘I didn't think these things ever went off,' he says, opening the pedal bin to dispose of these expired products and finding it stuffed full. ‘Empty the bin,' says Sydney. If Sydney were Ruth's boy, Lewis would say, ‘
Please
.
Please
empty the bin.' When he does this, he sounds as if he is begging, pleading with him. ‘
Please
,' he says as he stands there holding the last biscuit just out of the boy's reach, ‘I want it,
please
.'

Lewis reaches down, knots the top of the bin liner and lifts it out. Taking the rubbish to the back door, he steps outside and makes his way to the wheely bin. It is, in that moment, as if he lives here, as if he lives here with Sydney, like the Odd Couple: Lewis puts the rubbish out while Sydney makes the tea.

His daydream is interrupted by the sound of breaking glass. It came from the street. He can't tell how close it was. He can hear children laughing and running.

Lewis lifts the lid of the wheely bin, to put the rubbish safely inside, but he finds the bin full to the brim. He has to leave the lid gaping, the bin bag exposed, balanced; it will be got at by foxes, which will tear it open.

He returns to the kitchen, where Sydney, having found what he needs, is making the tea, making a cup for Lewis as well. Sydney adds three sugars to his, and Lewis thinks of Ruth's boy, who asks for sugar sandwiches and leaves the licked bread on his plate, who wants jelly for breakfast and sweets while his mother is cooking the dinner and pink syrup in his bedtime milk. Lewis imagines the cavities that might already be forming in the boy's baby teeth.

The boy starts sentences with, ‘I want,' before knowing what it is he really wants. ‘I want,' he says, ‘I want, I want, I want . . .' Even at night, in his sleep, the boy calls out, ‘I want it!' and, ‘Give it to me!'

Lewis does not want the boy to be spoiled.

They drink their tea sitting on the doorstep, eyeing the night. The children seem to have disappeared and it is quiet now. Sydney takes out his electronic cigarette and Lewis asks after his parents. ‘My mum's long gone,' says Sydney. ‘My dad died recently, after a fall.'

‘Were you there?' asks Lewis.

Sydney shakes his head. Finishing his tea, he gets to his feet and goes inside. Lewis follows him.

‘Come through,' says Sydney, treading on the heels of his trainers to take them off. He'll ruin them, thinks Lewis, watching him. Lewis leaves his slippers on because his feet are cold.

In the living room, Lewis looks around, taking in a faded version of familiar wallpaper dotted with pastoral scenes. Sydney, standing in front of a bookcase, removes one of the books. ‘You left this here,' he says. Without his glasses on, Lewis can't read the title of the book, but he does not say so. Thanking Sydney, he takes it, putting it down on the coffee table.

‘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.