Alison Moore - He Wants

He ate too many ice lollies that summer. He kept hearing the ice cream van coming, and going outside to meet it. He got frozen insides and his father said, ‘No wonder you got stomach cramps.’

Lewis went south to university without knowing what Sydney would end up doing, but every time a plane went overhead, Lewis stopped and looked up, thinking of Sydney.

At Christmas, Lewis came home and cycled straight over to Sydney’s house wearing tinsel as a scarf, but Sydney’s father stood in the doorway and said that Sydney was not there.

Occasionally, in the years that followed, Lewis would hear rumours that Sydney was coming back, but either the rumours were wrong or Lewis kept missing him. The next time Lewis saw him, Sydney was sitting on a car bonnet with his shirt off and Lewis was on his way to get married.

‘Why are you sitting at my kitchen table?’ asks Lewis.

‘I had a pain,’ says Sydney, ‘in my heart. I had to sit down.’

‘But what are you doing in my house?’

‘I didn’t know it was your house.’

Yes, thinks Lewis, who was still living on Small Street when he knew Sydney. And the dog — even if it had come back after all this time, after four or five dog lifetimes — would not have come to this house, it would have gone to Small Street and found itself standing in a car park.

Lewis says to Sydney, ‘How did you get in?’

‘Your back door was unlocked,’ says Sydney, and Lewis, looking, can see that the bolt is not across. He must have forgotten to bolt it after going to the bin. It must have been unlocked all night. Sydney must have let himself in while Lewis was having his lunch at the pub. Perhaps while he was rejecting the sausages, eyeing the Goldschläger man, choosing a pickled egg, Sydney was here.

Lewis says to Sydney now, ‘Have you ever had Goldschläger?’

‘I’ve tried it,’ says Sydney. ‘You’ve got to try these things, haven’t you?’

Lewis nods, but he says, even as he is nodding, ‘I never have.’

He is missing his spectacles, clarity of vision. He stands and wanders over to the units, opening a drawer and rummaging through unused gadgets, looking for his spare pair. He finds the case but there are no spectacles inside.

‘Pop the kettle on while you’re up,’ says Sydney.

Lewis puts it on, takes a couple of teacups from the cupboard and gets out the cake tin. Inside, he discovers a walnut cake that he has not yet cut into but which is starting to go stale. ‘Shall we have some cake?’ he asks.

‘Go for it,’ says Sydney.

Lewis delivers the cups of tea to the table, and then two small plates of cake. He has put little forks on the plates but Sydney eats with his fingers, not waiting to swallow one bite before taking another, making sounds of pleasure all the while. Lewis finds himself doing the same, grunting happily with each mouthful of cake, each sip of tea.

Sydney, finishing his slice, licks his fingers and tastes his tea. Pulling a face, he gets up and goes over the counter, opens up the sugar caddy and dips in his spoon.

As Sydney comes back to the table, he touches the back of Lewis’s neck. ‘Have you had that looked at?’ he asks. Lewis brings his hand up to the soft, brown lump newly exposed at the nape, between his hairline and his collar. He cannot tell if the lump is getting bigger.

‘I’m having it cut out,’ says Lewis. ‘I’ve got an appointment at the surgery this afternoon.’

‘I’d offer to give you a lift,’ says Sydney, ‘but I was planning on waiting for Ruth.’

Lewis feels a jolt, much like when Ruth says ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ’ under her breath.

‘Ruth?’ he says. ‘My Ruth?’

Sydney takes a loose cigarette out of his pocket. He does not ask Lewis whether he may smoke in the house, in the kitchen; he does not ask for an ashtray. He puts the cigarette between his lips. Just as Lewis is realising that something is not quite right, Sydney holds the cigarette out for him to see. ‘It’s an electronic one,’ says Sydney. He looks at it in a way that makes Lewis think of a spoonful of cold soup. Sydney puts the electronic cigarette in his mouth again and draws, making the end light up. He sighs and puts it away. ‘She’s not expecting me.’

‘Ruth doesn’t live here,’ says Lewis. ‘She hasn’t lived here for years.’ For a fleeting moment, Sydney looks sufficiently confused that Lewis almost reaches out to cover Sydney’s trembling hand with his own.

‘She comes here, though,’ says Sydney.

‘She won’t come today,’ says Lewis. He touches the back of his neck again, his growth, and looks at his bare wrist. ‘What time is it?’ he asks. When Sydney tells him, Lewis says, ‘Time’s marching on.’ He will have to go soon. ‘How do you know my Ruth?’ he asks.

‘We’ve never met,’ says Sydney. ‘We’ve been communicating.’

‘She gave you this address?’

‘No.’

‘Well then, why did you come here?’

‘You’ve got my book,’ says Sydney. He is looking at the work surface, at a Bliss Tempest book that Ruth must have left out on the side.

‘What?’ says Lewis, following his gaze. ‘No, that’s my book.’

When Lewis turns back, he sees Sydney slumped, as if he has fainted, or, he thinks, it is his heart. Sydney’s head is hanging down near the corner of the table. Lewis reaches out and is just about to touch him when he sees that Sydney is only bending down, fetching something out of his rucksack. Taking out a tall carton with a colourful Oriental design on a gold background, Sydney says, ‘I brought some sake for Ruth.’

‘I’ve never had sake,’ says Lewis.

‘What you really want,’ says Sydney, ‘is to have it in Tokyo, in a bar, with snacks — pickles and fish.’ Putting the carton down on the kitchen table, he mentions the pickled herring eaten with beer in Germany and Scandinavia, and Thailand’s painfully hot and moreish bar snacks, and Lewis thinks enviously of all those flights.

‘I’ve never flown,’ he says.

‘It’s safer than driving,’ says Sydney. ‘It’s safer than crossing the road.’

‘I’m not afraid of flying,’ says Lewis. ‘It’s just something I’ve never done.’ He has no idea why. He has been inside his nearest airport; he has been in the departure hall, where the first thing you see is a sign for the prayer room, and a picture of a little man down on his knees. He has seen the destinations on the information screens, the queues of people in front of the desks where passports are checked, boarding cards are issued and luggage is weighed. He just hasn’t ever been the one going anywhere.

‘You’re most likely to be injured at home,’ says Sydney. ‘You’re most likely to be harmed or killed by someone you know. You’re safest of all in the air.’

‘I believe you,’ says Lewis, ‘although at some point you would have to come down.’

Lewis reaches into the pocket of his coat and takes out a small paper bag. Opening it up, he holds it out to Sydney, who looks inside and extracts a jelly baby. The dog comes to the table, and Lewis gives her a sweetie too. ‘You’re getting fat,’ says Sydney, and Lewis can’t tell if Sydney is talking to him or to the dog.

When Lewis saw the ‘screaming jelly baby’ experiment executed in the chemistry laboratory, he had been teaching for more than forty years and was approaching retirement, but as he watched the demonstration — his colleague, in a white coat and safety goggles, melting potassium chlorate in a boiling tube over a Bunsen burner, dropping in a jelly baby that burst into flames and began to howl — he wondered for the first time whether he ought to have chosen something other than RE, something more dramatic. In truth, though, Lewis could not have handled a career as a high school chemistry teacher. He found the potential for accidents unnerving — the regular shattering of glass slides and test tubes, the explosions caused by adolescents not reading instructions, the constant smell of gas.