Alison Moore - He Wants

His father used to worry about burglars. As soon as Lawrence left the house, he’d be imagining men, rough men, approaching his back door with crowbars and swag bags, looking to break in. This was after Lawrence had stopped teaching at the secondary school, when he had taken to getting a bus into town on market days so as to stand in the town centre, on the corner by the key-cutter, preaching. Lewis remembers the first time he saw him doing it, when, walking through town with a bunch of flowers in his hand, Lewis came across his father standing on the corner, speaking, at a mild volume, about the obscenity he had found in his books, his classics. He said it, thinks Lewis, as if it were something that had not been there before, as if something infectious had suddenly spread, like Dutch elm disease or ash dieback, through the volumes on his shelves. It was like when a boy at school had told everyone that he had walked in on his parents ‘doing it’ on the kitchen table, and it made Lewis, who had never seen or heard his parents doing anything in the least bit sexual, regard his own kitchen differently, warily. After this, when Lewis ate his breakfast cereal, he made sure that his spoon did not touch the tabletop, just in case.

He cannot remember now whether the flowers were for his mother or for Edie. Whenever he gave flowers to Edie, she would narrow her eyes and say to him, ‘What have you done?’ and he would say, ‘Nothing.’ She was only joking though; she knew, really, that he had never done anything.

After that first time, Lewis often saw his father standing outside the key-cutter, preaching about morality and decency. The Lord would come, his father said, and the world would end. ‘We that are alive, that are left,’ he said, rather quietly, to the people who walked past, ‘shall be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. Then we will be with the Lord forever.’ Those going by tried not to look at him. They did not even seem sure whether he was talking to them or just to himself.

Lawrence could not understand their lack of interest, when he, in the years after seeing Billy Graham and since being baptised, had come to long for the Rapture; he desired Christ’s kingdom. He spoke to Lewis about the Great Disappointment of 1844, when thousands of people gave away their possessions in anticipation of a Rapture that never came. It seemed to Lewis that his father was sorry not to have been there, not to have been amongst them, as if that wealth of wanting was something desirable in itself, even though it all came to nothing in the end.

From time to time, there was a new prediction; the date of one Rapture after another was set, but then the day always came and went with the Rapture never materialising. When Lawrence watches the news, he is looking for earthquakes and floods; they are coming more frequently now, these signs that the Rapture is approaching. He has been looking forward to it not as the end but as the beginning of something. For years he has believed that it would come soon, but 2011 has been and gone and 2012 has been and gone and nothing has happened. He is surprised, in the New Year of 2013, to find that he is still here. He has begun to wonder if it is possible that he has just missed it, if it happened while he was sleeping, if he is just one of the many left behind. He is aware of further predictions of the date on which Jesus will return, predictions that the Rapture will take place within the next few years, by 2021 at the latest. In the meantime, he is desperate to hear from his Uncle Ted. There is still time. Lives are getting longer and longer. The nursing home has a computer that is mainly used for emailing and Skyping, but Lawrence googles, trying to find out if he might live to be a hundred, a hundred and one. He needs to start eating oily fish and avocados; he needs to start doing crossword puzzles, to drink more tea.

Lewis does believe in God. (‘Or at least something ,’ he says, when having such conversations with people who do not. ‘Don’t you think there has to be something?’ And he likes the idea of Jesus coming back, although he cannot envisage it, how it would happen. If he pictures it, he imagines a Byzantine Jesus, a figure from an ancient painting or a mosaic, with a golden glow all around him, not a real man who might belong to the twenty-first century.) He has never felt, though, what his father felt at Maine Road football stadium. He has never had that sort of world-shattering experience. He once wondered about going back there, if only to see a football match, but when he looked it up on the computer he found that it had been demolished years ago — like his father’s house, which never was burgled, just bulldozed.

Lewis looks around his kitchen for things that might be missing. His Christmas fund is still in its jar on the shelf by the sink. He has not got much in there anyway; Christmas is a long way off. His wind-up radio, newly purchased with coupons he’s been saving from the boxes his tea bags come in, is still on the windowsill, next to a vase of birthday flowers. Ruth has put something into the water to extend the life of the blooms. Vinegar, perhaps, or aspirin or sugar, all of which cut flowers apparently like.

He looks for a bag in which the man might have stashed the carriage clock that is kept in the living room. There is a full rucksack down on the floor by the man’s feet. Perhaps he had almost finished and was on the brink of leaving when he was interrupted by a disturbance in his heart.

There is surely not that much to take, though, thinks Lewis. His computer is the sort that no one wants these days. It is big and old and grey; there is mostly empty space inside. His television would not be worth much. Perhaps the man expected to find Lewis’s life savings hidden under the mattress. He came, supposes Lewis, thinking that there might be a safe full of valuable heirlooms at the back of the wardrobe. He wants the family silver. What he will find, in the top kitchen drawer, is a Post Office book for an account requiring thirty days’ notice for withdrawals, and in the drawer below that, a decent set of stainless steel cutlery from Wilko.

There is, in fact, family silver but Lewis does not have it in his house. His sister boxed it up when they moved their father out of the house on Small Street and into his room at the nursing home. ‘You can’t take it with you,’ she said to Lawrence, putting the cutlery canteen into the boot of her car, along with the fine bone china and the crystal — wine glasses on long, thin stems, glasses for sherry and brandy — the wedding set that had always lived in the cabinet and had never been used for fear of breakage. ‘You ought to wrap the glasses,’ said Lawrence. ‘You need to put sheets of newspaper in between the plates.’ ‘It will be fine,’ said Lewis’s sister, slamming the boot, the breakables rattling. And then she drove this jangling kitchenware four hundred miles north to Aberdeen and then oversea, by ferry, to Shetland, where she has a house that none of them has ever visited. Lewis would find it hard to live where she does, what with the cold, and no supermarket, no bookshop, no HMV.

In a deep drawer in a spare room in the house on Small Street, there were hundreds of used envelopes with the top right-hand corner torn off, and, loose in a different drawer, hundreds of used stamps. Meaning to bag them up so as to gift them to Lewis, Lawrence reached into a plastic bag full of plastic bags that lived on a hook in the kitchen. Lewis came into the room and found his father staring at his hands as if he were Lady Macbeth. His hands were covered in what looked like small shards of broken glass, but there was no blood. And then Lewis realised that these were shards of transparent plastic, from the plastic bag full of plastic bags that must have disintegrated. Lawrence said, ‘I thought plastic bags were supposed to last for hundreds of years.’