He Wants

3. When he was a child, he wanted to go to the moon

IN A PHOTOGRAPH on his living room mantelpiece, Lewis is four years old and riding his mother’s tea tray down an icy slope with an almighty grin on his face. He imagines his nose and cheeks pinked by the cold air, although the camera has made them grey. It makes Ruth anxious, this picture; it worries her to see him hurtling down, as if he might still come to harm at the end of the slope, as if he could still break his bones.

Ruth was always a nervous girl, scared of many things — climbing a climbing frame in a playpark, climbing the ladder of a bunk bed, riding a bicycle or being on roller skates, being alone in the dark. Lewis could not stand it, that she did not have guts. He wanted a fearless child. Instead he had a girl who always wanted her mother. He wanted a boy, but he and Edie had left it too late and only had the one child. Perhaps nowadays it would be different, there would be things they could do; they store embryos in freezers, although some fail to survive the freezing, or they explode when thawed. He thinks of Walt Disney, cryonically frozen, to be thawed out in a distant future, although apparently this never happened.

When Lewis was a child, he liked to climb. He got up trees. He imagined being able to jump from up there, to spread his arms and will himself to fly. Instead, up in the branches, he read his comics and books: The Brave Book for Boys and The Schoolboy’s Annual: Tales of Sport and Adventure — hard-covered hand-me-downs, one bright yellow and one with bombers on the front. Lewis, whose name meant ‘famous warrior’, wanted to be the boys in these stories, to have their adventures at sea and up mountains, their encounters with smugglers and bears, their golden age of boyhood; he wanted to at least have their dogs. Above all, the character he most wanted to be was Flash Gordon. He wanted to have Flash Gordon’s bravado and Flash Gordon’s torso, to travel in a rocket ship, to travel in a starship that was faster than light.

His mother did not like him being up in trees. She worried that he would get stuck up there in a storm and then he might get hit by lightning. He never was up a tree, though, during a storm. Once or twice, he was outside when he heard thunder, and he stood still, holding his breath, but he never did get struck by a bolt of high-voltage electricity.

They lived in a different part of the village then. They lived on Small Street, near the secondary school. He can see the very spot from the back bedroom of the house he lives in now. For a time, in this house on Small Street, they lived next door to relatives — his father’s uncle, who moved away when Lewis was young, and his father’s cousin, whom Lewis does not even remember.

Lewis’s back bedroom window is also where he and Edie had stood watching for the Perseid meteor shower. He had thrown the window open to let the night air in, imagining explosions like fireworks. The trails of light were infrequent, though, and hard, in fact, to see at all, and silent. Edie referred to them later, to Ruth, as shooting stars, but they were not stars, as Lewis had been disappointed to discover; they were particles like dust, burning up in Earth’s atmosphere. The comet from which the particles came was long gone and would not be back for something like a hundred and fifteen years. Lewis wonders if Ruth’s boy will live to see it. Probably not, he thinks.

Lewis has always lived near the countryside. Even when he went away to university and might have gone to a city, he went instead to a plate glass university on the edge of a town, surrounded by countryside. Decades later, hearing stories about this university’s liberalism and radicalism, Lewis’s father eyed him suspiciously, wondering what he’d been doing down there — he used the word ‘hotbed’ — and Lewis had to say, ‘It wasn’t like that when I was there.’ It’s a city now, apparently, although he hasn’t been back.

The best countryside around here is out near the smaller villages, the smallest of which is known by its prefix, ‘Nether’. His father took him rambling, looking for ‘God’s wonders’, warning him about adders and hemlock. They picked great bunches of wild flowers and captured insects and small mammals in jars with tiny holes punched through the lid.

Lewis took eggs, once, from a bird’s nest, from the nest of the handsome yellow bunting, the yellowhammer. He loved the brightness of the yellow on the throat and belly of the male; the female was duller. The yellow was brightest of all in the older males. He had one of the eggs in his pocket and one in each hand when his father saw what he was up to and told him to put them back. And Lewis did put them back, even the one he had in his pocket, but as they walked on, his father said to him, ‘The mother will probably reject them now.’ Lewis, lying in bed that night, worried about these eggs and whether they really would be rejected by the mother bird, even though he had only touched them.

At school, there was an art teacher who walked around the dinner hall saying to one pupil, ‘Your mother loves you,’ and to another, ‘Your mother doesn’t love you,’ as if he alone knew, or as if, by saying it, he made it so. Either way, if he came to a stop behind you, leaned over your red-jumpered shoulder and said, ‘Your mother doesn’t love you,’ as he did one day to Lewis, who had until that moment been loved, you knew suddenly, certainly, with disappointment, in silent agony with your mouth still full of tomato-damp sandwich, that it was true, that something you had done, or something about you, had negated that vital love.

You don’t see yellow buntings these days. What he remembers of the yellow bunting, aside from its yellow underparts and the abandoned eggs, are his father’s demonstrations of the bird’s song. ‘Tit, tit, tit, tit, tit, tit, tee,’ he chanted as they walked along, ‘tit, tit, tit, tit, tit, tit, tee.’ Lewis, staring at the ground, concentrating on snakes, found it alarming. Years later, when Lewis was eighteen or nineteen, he saw his father with The Trial of Lady Chatterley in his hands, breaking the book open and reading aloud, ‘The word “fuck” or “fucking” occurs no less than thirty times. I have added them up… “Cunt” fourteen times; “balls” thirteen times; “shit” and “arse” six times apiece.’ The unsettling effect of witnessing this language coming from his father’s mouth was much the same as hearing his attempt at the yellow bunting’s song.

They would come home from their rambles and cover the kitchen table with fistfuls of wilting wild flowers and jars containing creatures that Lewis always hoped — when they looked through his father’s books — would prove to be something rare, but he was always disappointed. They once caught a snake but it was only a grass snake. He wanted to go to the jungle. He wanted to travel to the North Pole. He wanted to fly to the moon. (He wanted, really, to visit the sun but that was further away, and if you made it that far you’d get burnt and you’d never come back.)

Lewis grew up to become an RE teacher at the local secondary school, the same school he had attended as a boy and at which his father taught English. (The art teacher was still there, and Lewis saw him in the dinner hall saying to the pupils who had brown-bread sandwiches, ‘Your mother loves you,’ and to those with white-bread sandwiches, ‘Your mother doesn’t love you.’) Lewis and his father, each a Mr Sullivan, were often confused in paperwork, ‘Mr Sullivan’ being taken to mean his father, Lawrence. In later decades, when Lawrence was no longer teaching there, Lewis ceased to be a Mr Sullivan at all and instead the children called him by his first name as if he were one of them. He had never liked being Lewis Sullivan because of the way the consonants ran together in the middle so that his edges disappeared.

As a young man, Lewis, daydreaming about his future, had pictured himself visiting his elderly mother in a bungalow. He imagined doing her shopping for her, putting up shelves, fetching things down from her loft. Instead, as it turned out, it was his father who remained in old age, whose shopping Lewis did and whose shelves Lewis put up, whose roof Lewis still lived under. On a few occasions, Lewis brought a male colleague — the art teacher, the chemistry teacher, a physical fitness instructor — round for dinner, but Lawrence was not the best host. ‘Don’t they have wives?’ he would say of these men. ‘Don’t any of them have wives to get home to?’

When the school recruited a new librarian who was a single lady of Lewis’s age, Lewis became a big reader of whatever classics the library carried. As he returned each of these books at the end of the loan period, he attempted to discuss them with her, but each time, Edie, eyeing the Austen, the Eliot, the Woolf, would say, ‘I haven’t read it. It’s not my sort of thing.’

On their first date, they did not talk about books; they talked about food, what they had or had not eaten in their lives. ‘I’ve never had beef Wellington,’ said Edie. ‘I’ve never had black pudding,’ said Lewis.

When Lewis and Edie had been courting for a year, Lewis’s father asked if he planned to marry Edie. He asked again, many times, over the years, saying to Lewis, ‘What are you waiting for?’ They had been a couple for seven years before Lewis finally got around to proposing. After a three-year engagement, they married in the summer of 1977.

On his wedding day, Lewis was driven to the church by Edie’s brother, who was his best man. En route, in a quiet side road still hung with decorations from the silver jubilee, they came across an old, yellow car that had come to a stop, its hazard lights flashing. ‘We’d better go around it,’ said Lewis. As they drew alongside it, Lewis noticed the hula girl on the dashboard, ready to dance but still for now. The driver was sitting on the bonnet, reclining against the windscreen, sunbathing with his long legs out in front of him, one knee raised up. He had his shirt off. There was music coming from the car’s stereo and the man was drumming his hands against the bonnet while the bunting fluttered above him, like someone on a float at a parade. They paused at the junction, and Edie’s brother, glancing in the rearview mirror, said that they ought to go back and see if they could help. Lewis was looking in his wing mirror. ‘We haven’t got time to go back,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get my suit dirty. He looks like he’s waiting for someone.’ He opened his mouth to say something else, to say, ‘I don’t know,’ but Edie’s brother was already pulling out of the junction, pressing on in the direction of the church.

At the wedding, Edie’s brother made a joke in his best man’s speech about this half-naked man atop a broken-down car, and Lewis and Edie slow-danced to ‘Everything I Own’, a song that was forever afterwards on the radio, someone new recording it every few years. Lewis never mentioned to Edie that it was not really the romantic song she thought it was but a tribute to the songwriter’s dead father, a love song for an old man.

When their baby came along, she was a biter. Edie bit the baby right back to teach her not to do it, but when the baby bit Lewis he just looked pained and that made Ruth laugh, displaying her sharp little teeth. ‘You must bite her,’ said Edie, but he could not bring himself to do it, and soon the moment had passed, it seemed to him, although Edie came over and bit her anyway. The baby screamed, and she screamed in the night, wanting Edie, who sometimes went to her and sometimes did not. (Lewis, conversely, had become quiet in bed. Every Friday, he put a pillow in between their headboard and the partition wall, and came without making a sound.)

When Ruth reached the age at which some little girls want to marry their fathers, she chose her grandfather, although he did not like the game. When she told Lawrence that she wanted to marry him, he ignored her, or he found some reason to leave the room.

In her teens, Ruth seemed interested only in pop stars and film stars who were either very old or dead. She never seemed to have a real boyfriend. One summer, during a family holiday at Butlins, she developed a crush on the ageing cabaret star. When they got home, she ran away, heading back to Bognor Regis to be with him. She was home again a week later and never mentioned him again. When, in her thirties, she married John, Lewis thought it might be a similar whim and has been waiting for it to pass, even though she was pregnant not long afterwards and that was years ago. Lewis does not find it easy to accept their dinner invitations but he adores the child. He had been expecting another girl, but it turned out to be a boy, the boy that he and Edie never had.

Lewis has tried to give the boy what his own father gave to him. He has attempted rambles. The boy walks along holding on to his toy binoculars through which one can look and see everything far less clearly than before. Like Ruth, though, the boy is anxious. Hoping to toughen him up, Lewis has instead given the boy a fear of bulls. Trying to capture a newt in a jar, Lewis trod on the creature, bursting its bright yellow belly, while the boy stood watching. To teach him how to climb a tree, Lewis helped the boy into the lower branches of one, and then got them both up onto the next branch and then the next, lifting and climbing, lifting and climbing, branch by branch without stopping to look down, until they were just about as high as they could go and they perched there, feeling proud of themselves, watching the insects that crawled along the ridges and valleys of the bark. It was only when the boy said that he wanted to get down again and Lewis had to contemplate the descent, that he realised the difficulty of it, of getting both himself and the boy safely down to the ground. He kept them up there for as long as he could before painstakingly bringing the boy down, scraping the skin from his limbs and afraid, the whole time, of plummeting. Like Ruth, the boy has a poor sense of balance. ‘Did you not think,’ said Ruth, later, inspecting the boy’s wounds, his sprained ankle, ‘about what you would do when you got up there? Did you think you could just stay there, the two of you, all night, or for ever?’ When the boy hurts himself, he cries as if he might never stop. On another occasion, when Lewis returned the boy to his mother with a toenail split down the middle, Ruth said to Lewis, as if he knew nothing about children, as if he had none of his own, ‘Children his age have a fear of being damaged.’

‘He’s only three,’ said Lewis. ‘He won’t remember this.’

The shortness of the boy’s memory is astonishing. His mother asks him if he wants to go to Pizza Hut for tea, and he says yes, so she tells him they will all go to Pizza Hut for tea. She puts on the boy’s coat so that, she says, he will be warm on the way to Pizza Hut. They leave the house and get into the car so that, she tells him, they can drive to Pizza Hut. When they have been driving for a minute or two, he turns to his mother and asks her, ‘Where are we going?’

When the broken toenail lifted after a few weeks, the skin underneath looked unsettlingly vulnerable. The new nail grew back a long time ago but the boy still mentions it.

The boy is now almost the same age as Lewis is in the photograph on the mantelpiece. ‘I’ll take him sledging,’ thinks Lewis. ‘When it snows I’ll take him sledging on a tea tray.’

Also on the mantelpiece are a handful of birthday cards — one from Miranda, one from his father that says ‘Joy’, one from Ruth that says, ‘You’re 70!’ It reminds him of Danny DeVito in Throw Momma from the Train shouting to his mother, ‘You’re alive!’ It reminds him of those messages that are placed by the bedsides of people with memory loss: ‘It’s Tuesday. Your name is Lewis.’ He has always been a Lewis. There has only ever been one person who called him Lewie, or Louie, as this person wrote it, filling him with vowels.