He Wants

5. He wants to feel an earthquake

LEWIS HANGS HIS dressing gown on the back of his bedroom door. He puts on clean underwear (You never know, his mother would say, who’s going to see it) and a clean shirt. Buckling the belt of his trousers, he sits down on the end of the double bed and appraises himself in the dressing table mirror. He wears sideburns and keeps his hair long. Edie sometimes tried to persuade him to have a trim, to shave off his sideburns. ‘You’d look so much younger,’ she said. ‘You look like a mountain man.’ (Lewis liked this idea, and tried to see it in his reflection — a mountain man, but with spectacles, and soft hands.) He calls his eye colour ‘hazel’ because he thought he saw a little green in the irises once, perhaps when he had a suntan, but he can’t see it now. He hasn’t had a decent tan for years. Perhaps he ought to just call his eyes ‘brown’, as others do. His spectacles have thick rims that make him look as if he is wearing a disguise, as if his large nose might be attached to the bridge of the spectacles, as if it might be just as removable. Ruth discovered contact lenses and said that he should try them too. Lewis, though, picturing his short-haired, clean-faced, clear-eyed self, thought that he would look like a grown man trying to pass himself off as a schoolboy, like Frédéric Bourdin.

He combs his hair and goes to check his emails. He has his computer in Ruth’s old room, on the desk she used to use for her schoolwork. There is an uncomfortable wooden chair on which he sits. He turns the computer on and waits.

All over Ruth’s bedroom walls, there are posters of young men who were famous when Lewis was a boy. One of them is wearing a lumberjack shirt and has his thumbs hooked into the belt of his denim trousers. He is smiling, showing his neat, white teeth. Lewis’s sister used to have posters of Cliff Richard on her bedroom walls. Every night, she went to sleep listening to his records. Lewis once went with her to a concert and saw grown women fainting when Cliff Richard came on stage in his shiny suit. She would have married Cliff Richard if she could. On her wedding day, she walked down the aisle to ‘Bachelor Boy’.

Lewis has been looking through old albums recently, unearthing photos that he has not looked at in decades — himself and Edie with Ruth as a baby, and before Ruth, in bright honeymoon Polaroids, and prior to that a decade of snaps of Edie in her early thirties, her late twenties, her early twenties when they first met in the library. And in the last album he looked in, he discovered himself as a single young man, and as a boy at school. He studied a photo of his sixth form class, finding his adolescent self standing at the right-hand end of the front row with his eyes closed. Mostly, he struggled to put names to faces, but when he scanned the back row and saw the boy who stood at the left-hand end, he knew that boy’s name instantly. For years, probably decades, Lewis believed that Sydney was the capital of Australia.

Sydney Flynn had not arrived at Lewis’s school until the sixth form. Born abroad, Sydney had moved around a lot with his family, his father being an army man, an older father who had then taken early retirement. Lewis had been struck by Sydney’s height, his bone structure, his blond hair, which came together to give him the look, thought Lewis, of Flash Gordon.

Lewis wanted to have been born abroad, or at least in a city, anywhere but Small Street.

Sydney sat at the back of the class, behind Lewis. Sydney called him Lewie, or Louise. Lewis sometimes felt the nib of Sydney’s pen poking into the back of his neck. He did not know whether Sydney was trying to be friendly or to hurt him. Turning around, he did not know whether to smile or glare.

At home, Lewis would stand in front of the bathroom mirror holding his mother’s hand mirror behind his head, and he would look at these dots of dark ink on the back of his neck, studying them as if they were some kind of message.

Sometimes, in class, when Lewis felt that pen nib touching the back of his neck, and he turned, he found Sydney looking not at him but at his own sums, his head bent low over his work, and when he got home and looked for ink marks on the back of his neck, he would see that nothing was there.

Sydney had a younger brother whom he adored and terrorised. Sydney boasted about waking his brother in horrible ways, setting alarm clocks to go off in the early hours and hiding them around his brother’s bedroom and under the floorboards. His brother came to school with a moustache inked onto his upper lip, or with one eyebrow missing. Lewis imagined what it would be like to be Sydney’s brother, always knowing that when you opened your eyes in the morning, Sydney might be there by your bed, with a pen or a razor in his hand, and you would know that something had happened, or was about to happen.

Sydney once bit a boy’s ear in the playground, in a brutal play fight that Lewis watched, along with at least fifty others who cheered the boys on. Afterwards, Sydney shook the boy’s hand. On another occasion, Lewis saw Sydney take a tin soldier from a younger boy, put it in his own pocket and take it home. The boy made only the slightest protest and looked, thought Lewis, quite proud. Alone at home, Lewis thought about this sinking of teeth into flesh. He thought about this stealing of other boys’ valuables, kept warm inside Sydney’s pockets. Lewis had valuables too but Sydney never stole anything from him; Lewis always had to take them home again.

Sometimes, Sydney cycled past him, singing out, ‘Louie Louie’. Lewis, at that time, had not heard the song. A few years later, he heard the Kingsmen’s version, and at the same time heard the rumour that the song was obscenely sexual, although apparently the only way to make out the words was by playing the single at 331⁄3 rpm. He did this, but he still could not fathom what was sung. It was so dirty, it was said, that the lyrics were investigated by the FBI. It turned out that there was nothing improper secreted in the song, whose lyrics were not filthy but sweet, all about a sailor sailing home to the girl he loved. When Lewis discovered this, he was disappointed.

Edie, who only came to the village in her twenties, never met Sydney, who was long gone by then. When Lewis and Edie finally came to arrange their wedding, Lewis, thinking about his best man, thought of Sydney, his poking pen and the brother whom he terrorised. He imagined that Sydney would be the kind of best man to put Lewis on a long-distance train or handcuff him naked to a lamppost or shave off his eyebrows the night before the wedding, who would have him turning up at the church without his trousers, with his buttocks tattooed. He asked Edie’s brother, a reliable man, to fill the role. On his stag night, Lewis kept waiting for the handcuffs to appear, for something unexpected to occur, but nothing did, nothing happened at all. When the wedding was over, Edie’s brother tied to the bumper of Lewis’s car a pair of old slippers that dragged behind them for miles, all the way from the church hall to the Peak District without making a sound.

When the computer is ready, Lewis opens up his email, finding new messages in bold. Someone he knows — a friend of his or someone he’s acquainted with — keeps sending him pictures, but Ruth says he mustn’t open them, he mustn’t look. ‘That’s not a friend,’ she says. One email says he’s due thousands of pounds, but there is a link he must click on to claim the money, and he daren’t. ‘Incompetent in love,’ says another. He does not want cheap Viagra or SuperViagra; he does not want bigger, harder, longer-lasting erections. He does not want a nineteen-year-old Russian girl or an Australian virgin who wants to talk. He does not want a replica Rolex watch or a fake Gucci handbag. He does not want a pair of modestly priced cufflinks (‘a dream come true’). He does not want these dazzling boons. He does not want the Federal Government of Nigeria to transfer fifteen million United States Dollars into his bank account; he does not want three million, five hundred thousand Great British Pounds from the Manager of Gulf International Bank. He moves these emails to the rubbish bin.

He has complained to Ruth about the spam. ‘I don’t want all this,’ he said to her. ‘How do I stop it?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure you can.’

While she watched, he clicked on ‘Get Mail’, downloading a message that said, ‘Feeble in bed’.

He goes onto the internet. It was in his retirement, and after he stopped driving, that he got a computer and learnt to use the World Wide Web, to google. He checks the news and the weather. He tries to keep up. He becomes anxious if he does not see the news for a while; he wonders what he is missing. He once stayed with Edie on a farm in the Lake District. They had a cottage with no radio, no television, no phone. They saw the farmer’s wife on arrival and then did not see her again. They saw the farmer going by in his tractor, the tyres six feet tall. They saw the odd stranger as they hiked beneath the mountains. Crossing a small stone bridge (with moss growing on its walls and fleece clinging to the moss — straggly white strands, slightly kinked like pubic hairs) they passed a man who smiled at them, opened his arms to the warm day, and said as he passed them, ‘Very fucking pleasant.’

It was indeed pleasant. Their cottage, though, was in the middle of nowhere and they had none of the things they needed for self-catering — no washing-up liquid, no tea towel, no dustpan and brush. (It was only on the day they left that they found a cupboard containing all the things they had needed during the week.) There was no newsagent selling newspapers. Arriving home, they discovered that there had been riots up and down the country, starting in London and spreading like a forest fire to the Midlands and then to the north. On hearing the news, Lewis felt a flush of excitement, and at the same time a touch of disappointment at not having realised it was happening until it was already over.

When Lewis woke up one morning not long after that and realised that Edie had died in her sleep, he felt as if he had come home to find his front door kicked open, his windows smashed, everything gone. He felt as if he had slept through an earthquake.

He does sleep through earthquakes. There was one very recently, with a magnitude of three, right where he lives but he was unaware of it until he read about it in the paper in due course. He would like to experience an earthquake, to feel the ground shaking beneath him, to feel the bed trembling, all the ornaments rattling like something out of an exorcism.

He opens up Google and, with one finger, types in ‘Sydney Flynn’. He clicks ‘search’, and Google returns more than seven million results. He looks through the first few pages but they are not the Sydney Flynn he is after. ‘Sydney Flynn’ is on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Pinterest, YouTube and Google+, but they all seem to be women. He tries some variations on his search criteria, finding an obituary that makes his heart seem to stop, but it is not his Sydney Flynn and he feels his heart start beating again. The only other link that looks promising takes him to a site that says ‘Page Not Found’ and no matter how many times he clicks on the link, he cannot access the page he wants.

He has not spoken to Sydney since the summer of 1961. On New Year’s Eve in the year of the riots, the year Edie died, the school hosted a reunion for pupils who had left fifty years before. Lewis went along, although not in the fancy dress that some people wore for the occasion — wigs, also chest wigs beneath wide-collared shirts, flared trousers and platform shoes. They’d worn nothing like this at the time, or ever in their lives, so why do it now, wondered Lewis, when they were old men, when it just made them look foolish? Lewis wore his normal clothes. He wore a clean shirt (whose collar was nearly as wide as some of the men’s joke shirts). He combed his hair (which was almost as long as some of the men’s centre-parted ‘hippy’ wigs). He thought he might see Sydney there. The few familiar faces, though, were those he already knew from the pub, the old boys with whom he drank in The Golden Fleece — because back then he could still go there. They were the ones who had stayed in the village, and some of their children had stayed, and some of them had grandchildren at the school. Lewis wandered into the school hall. The houselights were down. Up on the stage, a DJ was just getting started. A disco ball had been hung from the ceiling and as it spun, spots of light crossed the empty dance floor and it was like a sky full of shooting stars. (This was the dinner hall really, transformed for the evening. Lewis could almost smell — through the illusion of the music and lights — the food and the mop bucket. He imagined stray chips and peas on the floor, being trodden on by dancing couples and adhering to the soles of their shoes.) He kept thinking, as he walked around the room, that he heard people saying Sydney’s name, but he did not see him anywhere. Towards the end of the evening, when Sydney had not shown up and the DJ had come to the end of the 1960s tunes and was playing ‘The Final Countdown’, Lewis left the school hall. He walked away from the couples who were slow-dancing beneath the spinning disco ball, and headed down the corridor towards the classrooms, in which his father had taught English Literature until he could no longer bear to, and in which Lewis had taught RE for more than forty years, and into which Sydney had arrived more than half a century before. It was almost midnight. There would be a pantomime flash and a BOOM! and a cloud of smoke and glitter and, like a golden coach that was really a pumpkin, the dance hall — with the houselights turned on and the disco ball turned off (Pack up the stars, thought Lewis, dismantle the sun) — would become, once more, the place where school dinners were eaten.

After shutting down the computer, Lewis sits for a while looking around Ruth’s room. Her shelves are empty of the classics that belong there, the stories he read as a boy, stories in which you can walk through a mirror or through the back of a wardrobe or climb to the top of a tree and find an unlikely and magical land. He used to try it, half closing his eyes and stepping forward, walking so hopefully, with such desire, into his mirror, into the back of his wardrobe. He could never get in. He read these stories to Ruth when she was little, and he supposes she has taken them to read to her boy. In the children’s television programmes she used to watch, a man passed through a changing room door into another world; and a boy, put to bed by his mother, used his torch to open up a portal in his bedroom floor, sliding with his dog down a helter-skelter into Cuckoo Land.

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.