He Wants

14. He wants to see two men wrestling naked on the carpet

LEWIS 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.