He Wants

15. He wants a time machine

THE 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.