He Wants (5 page)

She has left the posters. Where Ruth lives now, she has magnolia walls hung with monochrome studio portraits of her family. These men in their unbuttoned lumberjack shirts, these men with whom she was briefly in love when she was young, grin down at Lewis now.

A dreamcatcher dangles from the ceiling.

He looks at his watch, and at the same time removes it from his wrist. It aggravates the skin where his arm got burned and increasingly he finds himself leaving it off.

It is almost opening time. Not much more than a year ago, he might have been going to The Golden Fleece now, but not any longer. These days he goes to another pub in the opposite direction. It is not as popular with the locals but Miranda is friendly. He thinks that he would like to be able to say to Ruth, when she comes round in the morning, that he did go out of the house, and not just to the bin.

Leaving his watch next to the computer, he gets up out of the uncomfortable chair and heads downstairs.

6

He does not want the sausages

A
T THE BOTTOM
of the stairs, Lewis stops to take his coat down from the peg. The buttons are coming off – they are hanging by threads, and one is missing altogether. His gloves are in the pockets. Holding on to the banister, he lowers himself onto the second stair, where he takes off his slippers and puts on his outdoor shoes. Standing again, he pauses to check that he has his key and to put on his hat, and then he heads outside, stopping to slam the door behind him. He sometimes has to slam it three times before it closes properly. If he does not, he might come home and find his door standing wide open.

He goes carefully down the front steps and onto the path of concrete slabs. He laid the slabs himself when he and Edie first came to this house, along with the garden walls at the front and back. Eyeing the grass on either side, passing the stone lion at the gate, he looks up the road. A hundred yards away are the public toilets. A sign on the wall of the toilet block says, ‘
THESE FACILITIES ARE FOR ALL TO USE
', and, beneath a picture of a family of four rounded stick people, ‘
IS YOUR CONDUCT APPROPRIATE
?' Beyond the toilets is The Golden Fleece. He turns in the opposite direction and wanders down the road towards the other pub. He goes slowly, scanning the pavement for his missing button.

Everything is quiet. There is a spit of rain in the air. It reminds him of the seaside, the salt spray when the tide comes in and the sea pounds against the wall as if it cannot accept that this is as far as it goes.

His grandparents lived on the coast. They had a beach hut until it was lost in a storm. Lewis had imagined a whirlwind lifting it neatly out of the row, whisking it intact into the sky, like the little wooden house in
The Wizard of Oz
.

He always imagined living by the sea, perhaps in his retirement. But he is now seventy years old, retired years ago, and is still living in this village in the Midlands, less than a mile from the house in which he grew up and around the corner from the school in which he has spent the best part of his life.

His parents' house on Small Street is gone now, knocked down to build the supermarket car park, which has signs around the perimeter that say, ‘Motorists! Your car is at risk from thieves' and, ‘Leave it on show expect it to go'. The pub is half a mile ahead, but Lewis turns right, towards the school. When he reaches the school railings, he stops, gazing into the deserted playground. When the double doors open, he flinches in anticipation of the headmistress striding out, coming towards him. His instinct is to run, as if he were not a grown-up, a previous employee of this establishment, but a truant, a runaway, an absentee who might be dragged by the ear to the headmistress's office. It is not the headmistress, though; it is a boy, going from one building to another, perhaps with a message for a teacher or a wound for the school nurse. Lewis thinks for a moment that it is a boy he knows, but then he realises that it is not, that it can't be, because all the children he knew will have gone by now.

Lewis turns away, walking on in the direction of the pub. Passing a bus shelter, he thinks about Ruth and her saying to him, ‘You can travel for free all over the country – what are you waiting for?' He could go to the seaside; he could go all the way to Dover. He will do it, he thinks, one of these days. Not right now. He would want to wait for warmer weather. He would need to apply for a bus pass. He would have to go into town to get a passport photo taken.

You are not allowed to smile in your photo any more.

He stops to watch a yellow car go by, turning to meet the gaze of the dog that is staring at him through the rear window, its mouth open and fixed in a smile. The car, a Saab, stops at the pedestrian crossing a little further along the road, letting across a woman with hair that is grey at the roots and dyed red at the ends. Lewis starts walking back towards it, but the yellow car is already moving again. Turning the corner, it goes out of sight.

Lewis is still gazing at that empty corner when he realises that the woman for whom the car stopped, the woman who crossed the road, is now very near. She comes, in her dogtooth coat, to a stop just in front of him. Lewis is lifting the hat off his head when the woman raises her hand and strikes him sufficiently hard that his spectacles fly off his face. He is still holding his hat in the air; his mouth is still slightly open, ready to speak. He saw, before he lost his spectacles, the scarring on her face, the damage to her skin. She starts shouting, jabbing at his chest with her index finger, and he realises who she is, and he, apologising, replaces his hat and reaches down to the ground for his spectacles. While the woman is standing there telling him off, Lewis returns his spectacles to his face but finds that the lenses are smashed and takes them off again. He puts them in his pocket and walks away as quickly as his poorly knee will allow.

Just outside the pub, he sees what he thinks for a moment might be his button lying on the ground, but then he remembers that it is a pound coin; it has been there for months. The first time he saw it, he stopped to reach down and pick it up and found that it was glued to the pavement. He remembers his confusion, his scrabbling fingertips. He remembers when Ruth's boy was a baby and would try to get hold of things that could not be grasped, that could not be picked up – a biscuit pictured on the lid of a tin, a dot of light on the living room carpet. Lewis, scratching at the pavement, had to straighten up again and walk on without it.

The pub always looks closed from the outside, but when he pushes open the heavy door there is light and sound and Miranda smiling at him as the door settles behind him. The interior reminds him of somebody's living room. The wallpaper shows quaint farming scenes, a man with a scythe surveying his land, the pattern repeating around the four walls. There is a busy carpet, a threadbare sofa, sport on a small television in the corner and a handful of classic board games on a table underneath. There are floral curtains, vases of plastic daffodils on the windowsills, ornaments on the mantelpiece above the fireplace in which logs are arranged as if ready to be lit, although they never are. There are shelves containing ancient hardback books that no one reads:
Todhunter's Differential Calculus
, three volumes of Harmsworth's
Home Doctor
:
BRU–DUC
,
DUL–JEA
and
POW–SYS
, and Carter's
Outlines of History
in which history stops in 1918. Lewis wonders if there are later editions in which history instead comes to an end in 1945 or 1961 or 2013. There are two copies of
Les Misérables
and faded children's classics, a beautiful old edition of a little book of nursery rhymes that he had when he was a boy.
Topsy-turvy, upside down, the sea is on the moon.
He doesn't know where his copy has gone. Sydney would just take this one.

There is no clock. Sometimes the pub has lock-ins. With the door bolted and the curtains closed, you can lose your sense of time. Each time he enters, he half expects to smell Woodbines, to see, through a smoky haze, an old man sucking on a cigarette, the ash dropping off, the end of the cigarette smouldering. There is no smoking in the pubs, though, these days.

When Lewis has made his way across the room, Miranda says to him, ‘What do you want, love?'

Yes
, he wants to say to her,
yes, please
.

Taking his hat off and putting it down on the bar, he asks for a shandy. While she is pulling his half, she says to him, ‘I didn't win.' She means the lottery. Lewis has seen the advert, the giant hand in the sky, a formation of stars, the finger pointing, ‘It could be you'. He hasn't seen it for a while though. He has a feeling all of that's long gone now; there'll be a new slogan. Miranda plays every Saturday but has won nothing yet. ‘The minute I do,' she says, ‘I'm out of here.' Edie used to play at work, in a syndicate. At least once, maybe twice, they won ten pounds and shared it between them.

Lewis asks about the sausages.

‘We've only got vegetarian,' she says.

He makes a face.

‘Pork and black pudding next week.'

‘I've never had black pudding.'

Miranda puts his drink down on the bar and turns to another customer who has come in, who is asking for Goldschläger. ‘We don't have that,' says Miranda. They watch the man turn away and then Miranda says to Lewis, ‘Have you ever had Goldschläger?'

‘No,' he says.

‘It's a Swiss liqueur,' she says, ‘with bits of gold in it, flakes of gold leaf.' As she says this, she is touching the flimsy gold necklace that she wears around her neck, tapping the tiny crucifix against her throat.

‘Have you ever had it?' asks Lewis, taking a sip of his shandy.

‘No,' she says.

Lewis shakes his head. What kind of a man, he thinks, walks around asking for Swiss liqueurs with bits of gold in? He stands at the bar with his drink, thinking about the things he's never had and never will.

‘What are you going to have, then?' asks Miranda.

‘I don't want the vegetarian ones,' he says. He reaches for a menu and Miranda moves down the bar to serve someone else. Without his spectacles, though, he cannot read it. When Miranda comes back, Lewis says to her, ‘I haven't got my spectacles. What else have you got?'

‘Home-made steak and kidney pudding,' she says, and Lewis brightens up. ‘But I just sold the last one.'

Lewis turns to look at the man who is moving away from the bar, who is scanning the room for a table he wants, and Lewis sees, with a rush of indignation, that it is him, the Goldschläger man, who has decided to eat instead and is settling down now at a corner table, waiting for his suet pudding to arrive.

The pub uses a local butcher. They know exactly, they say, what is in their meat products. Lewis remembers when Ruth went on a school trip to France and was given sausages that were – she discovered after eating them – made of horsemeat. She was furious, and Edie was furious, and Lewis pretended to be furious too. But when, more recently, the news broke that horsemeat had been found in frozen meat products, Lewis went to the supermarket, wondering about buying some. He was disappointed to find that they had already been removed from the freezers.

Lewis, for his lunch, has a pickled egg. When Miranda is not busy, she comes and stands near him. ‘Let me cut your hair,' she says.

‘I haven't had my hair short since I was in my teens,' says Lewis.

‘I'll take years off you.'

‘It was halfway down my back when I got married.'

‘Let me take the ends off,' she says, walking away and returning with a pair of heavy scissors, snipping at the air as she approaches.

It was touching his shoulders when he met Edie.

‘Cut it to my shoulders,' he says.

She pulls out a chair, sits him down, and gives him a haircut right there in the bar. Long hanks of grey fall onto the carpet, and he has the sense that she is chopping the grey off, that when she has finished what will be left will be brown.

‘Cut it short,' he says.

She is cutting it to the nape of his neck when she says, ‘Have you had this mole looked at?' Standing aside, she touches it with the tip of her long scissors, like a weather girl pointing out a weather front, and Lewis remembers his three o'clock appointment and what it is for.

‘I'm having it cut out,' he says, ‘this afternoon.'

‘That's good,' she says.

He notices that she completes his haircut without touching the back of his neck.

When she has finished, when his hair is lying in a circle around him like a nest, he peers into the pickled-egg jar, trying to see his reflection, but it is unclear. Staring into the depths of the jar, he says to Miranda, ‘Byron consumed vinegar on a daily basis. He believed in its health benefits. He ate potatoes soaked in vinegar.'

Miranda looks at the slightly cloudy, pale-yellow liquid inside the jar that holds the eggs. ‘I know someone who drinks his own wee for the same reason,' she says.

Lewis does not have his watch on but he feels that time is pressing. Leaving the last half inch of his shandy, he prepares to leave. ‘Thanks for the cut,' he says to Miranda, reaching up to touch the surprising softness of his crop, the neat bristle around his ears. In the doorway, as he exits, he passes a young man who is on his way in. For a moment, they are holding the same bit of the door; the young man's hand is on top of Lewis's. The way he is dressed reminds Lewis of the Teddy Boys of his youth. He never saw a real one but he has seen pictures. Once, when Ruth was in her teens and interested in youth culture, Lewis told her that he had been in Manchester in the sixties, and she was impressed. When she questioned him about it, he was oblique.

He went back, once, to see Lilian and John, taking Edie and Ruth along. He drove up to Manchester, to the outskirts, trying to remember the route, to recognise where he was. ‘What are you looking for?' asked Edie, and Lewis could hardly tell her. When, finally, he stood on the steps on which he had spent so many hours just sitting, and when he knocked on the front door, he did not know what he would say. He was expecting Lilian to come to the door, but it was John who answered. Eighteen years old when he had first met John, Lewis was then in his early fifties and realised with surprise that John was not much older than him; he was no more than sixty. He had seemed so much older when Lewis was young. Ruth, at seventeen, did not want to be there – ‘I've got things to do, places to be,' she said, although there did not seem to be anything ­specific – but John turned his bright blue eyes on her and said, ‘Please come in,' and they all went inside.

Without making eye contact, the young man who is dressed like a Teddy Boy moves his hand and squeezes by, disappearing into the pub.