Alison Moore - He Wants

‘Not when exposed to the light,’ said Lewis.

The shards were dreadful to get off. They clung.

Lawrence could not take his radiogram, which was more than a metre wide, to the nursing home either, so Lewis bought him a CD player for his room. He needs some CDs. The only CDs the nursing home has are those ambient sounds they play on loop. They could do with a bit of Rachmaninoff, thinks Lewis; they could do with a bit of AC/DC, a blast of noise slipped in amongst the dolphin song.

Lawrence could not take all his books with him and so Lewis has them, along with the stripy deckchairs.

It was soon after the bulldozing of the vacated house on Small Street that John came to stay. (Lewis missed the moment of demolition. When he looked, one morning, through the double glazing that muted the noise of the wrecking ball and the bulldozer, the house was just gone.)

A widower now, John came alone. Lewis had not seen him since that second and last visit to Manchester nearly fifteen years before. He was glad to see John but anxious to impress him or at least not to displease him. Before John arrived, Lewis put away the wine that had been visible in the kitchen — Edie’s ( youthful, seductive ) New Zealand Merlot, her ( smooth, full-bodied ) Australian Shiraz. He weeded his garden and repotted his azalea. Lewis offered John his spare room, Ruth’s old bedroom. It was only when John had settled in, when his shirts were hanging up in the wardrobe and his pyjamas were underneath the pillow, that Lewis wondered whether he ought to have taken down the posters of the dead pop stars and dead films stars. Then John surprised him by doing an impressive pelvic gyration in front of the Elvis Presley poster, and later, over dinner, saying, ‘I’ve always rather liked Cary Grant.’

It turned out that John no longer poured wine down the sink; he drank it, and enjoyed it. He accompanied Lewis to The Golden Fleece, this being a few years before Lewis’s banishment. John proved to be popular and was quickly accepted by the locals. Sometimes, Ruth, who lived alone nearby, was invited along too. She occasionally talked about wanting children, but, at thirty (‘and none of us getting any younger,’ said Lewis) she was single, although Lewis understood that she had some sort of relationship going, something along the lines of a male pen pal.

John did not seem to be in any hurry to return to Manchester. He no longer had the animals to look after, he said, and what potatoes there were would grow just fine without him. Lewis enjoyed John’s company. They were two old men in their retirement. In the daytime, they went for drives, parking up somewhere and trying to identify the birds and the aeroplanes that flew overhead. They went to vintage car shows, and airshows; they saw the Red Arrows looping the loop, leaving a vast, smoky O dispersing in the white sky. In the evening, they watched Cary Grant in old films or strolled to the pub for a nightcap.

It was on one such evening, as they were wandering home again and Lewis was looking up at the stars — ‘There’s Venus,’ he was about to say — that John asked Lewis for his blessing to marry Ruth. Lewis was entirely unprepared for this. Caught off guard, he walked along with his mouth open, no words coming out. Later, speaking privately to Ruth, he said, ‘He’s old enough to be your father. He’s older than me. He’s old enough to be your grand father.’ But Ruth just shrugged, as if age were nothing. Lewis does not recall ever actually giving them his blessing, but they married anyway, and Lewis tries not to think too much about it, about this eighty-year-old man in his daughter’s life. John still goes to The Golden Fleece; he goes there with Ruth, while Lewis looks after the boy, or John goes on his own and talks to his new friends, Lewis’s old friends, the old boys. He is always sure to put in a good word for Lewis, who might, one day, find that he is able to go back.

‘I KNOW WHAT you want,’ says the man, getting up and going over to Lewis’s cupboards. The dog watches him with her tongue hanging out. The man opens and closes the cupboard doors, discovering sets of cups and saucers, some tinned and dried food, baking trays that have not been used for years, and a glass dish that he takes out and fills from the cold tap before putting it down too heavily on the stone-tiled floor. Lewis watches, the thought of breakage briefly raising his pulse.

‘That’s better, isn’t it?’ says the man as the dog sticks her nose into Edie’s best pie dish and starts lapping. The dog has a barrel hanging from her collar, like a Saint Bernard’s brandy barrel but smaller and plastic. It bangs rhythmically against the dish.

It comes to him suddenly. ‘Sydney,’ says Lewis ( with a ‘y’, like the capital of Australia ), and it is as if, by typing the name into Google, he has summoned Sydney, like a genie, like Candyman.

When he was a child, Lewis wanted to live in Australia. He wanted his family to move there so that he could live upside down. Everyone seems to know someone who has emigrated to the Antipodes. Lewis’s great uncle went out there and never came home. They have lost touch with him; Ted does not answer — or does not receive — the letters that Lawrence sends, in which he always mentions his cousin Bertie. Lawrence and Bertie, born in the same year and raised together on Small Street, were drafted into the war at the same time. Returning home, both miraculously unscathed, they enjoyed rambling, hill-walking and hunting in the local countryside.

(‘Australia,’ says Ruth’s boy, ‘is a million miles away.’ No, says Lewis, not a million miles, that’s further than the moon. But the boy is quite sure. ‘It’s a million miles away. It’s further away than the moon.’ Mill-ee-on , he says, making the number as big as he can, stretching it out. Or, as if that were not already far enough, ‘A million and a hundred.’)

It occurs to Lewis that Sydney’s surprise when Lewis said to him, ‘You are in my house,’ suggests that Sydney cannot be here to see him. Sydney might not even have recognised him, might not have realised who he is.

‘It’s Lewis,’ he says, touching his own chest, his own heart. ‘Lewis Sullivan. We were at school together.’

‘I know who you are, Lewie,’ says Sydney.

Lewis has not been called Lewie since he was eighteen. He remembers that summer, when he and Sydney had finished school all except for their exams. Lewis spent much of his free time cycling around the village, where, one afternoon, he encountered Sydney, who was also out exploring on his bike. They rode along together for a while, without saying much, and then Sydney said, ‘My dog had puppies. Do you want to come and see them?’

‘Sure,’ said Lewis, shrugging, as if he did not really mind one way or the other. He followed Sydney the half dozen miles to the nearby village that the locals call Nether, the pair of them freewheeling between fields of ripening winter barley, and acres of green grass that had not yet been built on, and the sky was so blue and so empty.

Sydney threw his bike down outside the only unclad house in the terrace and greeted a girl coming by on a horse. She halted, pulling in the reins, and Sydney idly stroked the nose of her shifting, snorting mare while he spoke to this girl, who was their own age but who Lewis did not know. Lewis hung back, still straddling his bike, eating sweets from a bag he had on him, into which Sydney — reaching towards him but not quite enough so that Lewis was forced to come closer — stuck his hand, offering a sweetie to the horse. The horse brought its nose forward, seeking out this treat with its flaring nostrils and its huge lips, and Lewis saw the enormous teeth in the whiskery mouth that nuzzled into the palm of Sydney’s cupped hand.