He Wants

13. He wants the impossible

THERE 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.