Alison Moore - He Wants

There is no clock. Sometimes the pub has lock-ins. With the door bolted and the curtains closed, you can lose your sense of time. Each time he enters, he half expects to smell Woodbines, to see, through a smoky haze, an old man sucking on a cigarette, the ash dropping off, the end of the cigarette smouldering. There is no smoking in the pubs, though, these days.

When Lewis has made his way across the room, Miranda says to him, ‘What do you want, love?’

Yes , he wants to say to her, yes, please .

Taking his hat off and putting it down on the bar, he asks for a shandy. While she is pulling his half, she says to him, ‘I didn’t win.’ She means the lottery. Lewis has seen the advert, the giant hand in the sky, a formation of stars, the finger pointing, ‘It could be you’. He hasn’t seen it for a while though. He has a feeling all of that’s long gone now; there’ll be a new slogan. Miranda plays every Saturday but has won nothing yet. ‘The minute I do,’ she says, ‘I’m out of here.’ Edie used to play at work, in a syndicate. At least once, maybe twice, they won ten pounds and shared it between them.

Lewis asks about the sausages.

‘We’ve only got vegetarian,’ she says.

He makes a face.

‘Pork and black pudding next week.’

‘I’ve never had black pudding.’

Miranda puts his drink down on the bar and turns to another customer who has come in, who is asking for Goldschläger. ‘We don’t have that,’ says Miranda. They watch the man turn away and then Miranda says to Lewis, ‘Have you ever had Goldschläger?’

‘No,’ he says.

‘It’s a Swiss liqueur,’ she says, ‘with bits of gold in it, flakes of gold leaf.’ As she says this, she is touching the flimsy gold necklace that she wears around her neck, tapping the tiny crucifix against her throat.

‘Have you ever had it?’ asks Lewis, taking a sip of his shandy.

‘No,’ she says.

Lewis shakes his head. What kind of a man, he thinks, walks around asking for Swiss liqueurs with bits of gold in? He stands at the bar with his drink, thinking about the things he’s never had and never will.

‘What are you going to have, then?’ asks Miranda.

‘I don’t want the vegetarian ones,’ he says. He reaches for a menu and Miranda moves down the bar to serve someone else. Without his spectacles, though, he cannot read it. When Miranda comes back, Lewis says to her, ‘I haven’t got my spectacles. What else have you got?’

‘Home-made steak and kidney pudding,’ she says, and Lewis brightens up. ‘But I just sold the last one.’

Lewis turns to look at the man who is moving away from the bar, who is scanning the room for a table he wants, and Lewis sees, with a rush of indignation, that it is him, the Goldschläger man, who has decided to eat instead and is settling down now at a corner table, waiting for his suet pudding to arrive.

The pub uses a local butcher. They know exactly, they say, what is in their meat products. Lewis remembers when Ruth went on a school trip to France and was given sausages that were — she discovered after eating them — made of horsemeat. She was furious, and Edie was furious, and Lewis pretended to be furious too. But when, more recently, the news broke that horsemeat had been found in frozen meat products, Lewis went to the supermarket, wondering about buying some. He was disappointed to find that they had already been removed from the freezers.

Lewis, for his lunch, has a pickled egg. When Miranda is not busy, she comes and stands near him. ‘Let me cut your hair,’ she says.

‘I haven’t had my hair short since I was in my teens,’ says Lewis.

‘I’ll take years off you.’

‘It was halfway down my back when I got married.’

‘Let me take the ends off,’ she says, walking away and returning with a pair of heavy scissors, snipping at the air as she approaches.

It was touching his shoulders when he met Edie.

‘Cut it to my shoulders,’ he says.

She pulls out a chair, sits him down, and gives him a haircut right there in the bar. Long hanks of grey fall onto the carpet, and he has the sense that she is chopping the grey off, that when she has finished what will be left will be brown.

‘Cut it short,’ he says.

She is cutting it to the nape of his neck when she says, ‘Have you had this mole looked at?’ Standing aside, she touches it with the tip of her long scissors, like a weather girl pointing out a weather front, and Lewis remembers his three o’clock appointment and what it is for.

‘I’m having it cut out,’ he says, ‘this afternoon.’

‘That’s good,’ she says.

He notices that she completes his haircut without touching the back of his neck.

When she has finished, when his hair is lying in a circle around him like a nest, he peers into the pickled-egg jar, trying to see his reflection, but it is unclear. Staring into the depths of the jar, he says to Miranda, ‘Byron consumed vinegar on a daily basis. He believed in its health benefits. He ate potatoes soaked in vinegar.’

Miranda looks at the slightly cloudy, pale-yellow liquid inside the jar that holds the eggs. ‘I know someone who drinks his own wee for the same reason,’ she says.

Lewis does not have his watch on but he feels that time is pressing. Leaving the last half inch of his shandy, he prepares to leave. ‘Thanks for the cut,’ he says to Miranda, reaching up to touch the surprising softness of his crop, the neat bristle around his ears. In the doorway, as he exits, he passes a young man who is on his way in. For a moment, they are holding the same bit of the door; the young man’s hand is on top of Lewis’s. The way he is dressed reminds Lewis of the Teddy Boys of his youth. He never saw a real one but he has seen pictures. Once, when Ruth was in her teens and interested in youth culture, Lewis told her that he had been in Manchester in the sixties, and she was impressed. When she questioned him about it, he was oblique.

He went back, once, to see Lilian and John, taking Edie and Ruth along. He drove up to Manchester, to the outskirts, trying to remember the route, to recognise where he was. ‘What are you looking for?’ asked Edie, and Lewis could hardly tell her. When, finally, he stood on the steps on which he had spent so many hours just sitting, and when he knocked on the front door, he did not know what he would say. He was expecting Lilian to come to the door, but it was John who answered. Eighteen years old when he had first met John, Lewis was then in his early fifties and realised with surprise that John was not much older than him; he was no more than sixty. He had seemed so much older when Lewis was young. Ruth, at seventeen, did not want to be there — ‘I’ve got things to do, places to be,’ she said, although there did not seem to be anything specific — but John turned his bright blue eyes on her and said, ‘Please come in,’ and they all went inside.

Without making eye contact, the young man who is dressed like a Teddy Boy moves his hand and squeezes by, disappearing into the pub.

Outside, the pavement is dry. The spit of rain has come to nothing. Lewis touches his pocket, feeling the shape and weight of the little book of nursery rhymes stowed inside. Arsey-versey, back to front, the past will be here soon.

As he nears his house, he hears the sound of a plane going overhead. Looking up, concentrating on the sky, he does not see the yellow Saab parked by the kerb just in front of his house.

THE WALLS OF the nursing home used to be painted pink, ‘Drunk tank pink,’ said Lewis on one of his first visits. ‘That’s the colour they painted the cells where prisoners are put to cool off.’ You would think, he added, looking around, that everyone in this place had done something wrong and was being given some time to think about it.