Alison Moore - He Wants

It is only when Lewis has let himself out, when the door has closed behind him, that he wonders whether the doctor, having removed the growth, remembered the stitches. He did not feel the needle going in to sew him up. He did not feel the tug of brightly coloured thread closing the wound. And even imagining that happening, he feels not so much like one of the more daring boys at school on a trip to A&E, but instead like a teddy that needs to be darned where he has worn thin.

LEWIS WALKS BACK through the Strepsil-yellow waiting room, exiting through the automatic doors. He half expects to find Sydney gone and his knee aches at the thought of the walk home.

But the Saab is parked right where it was. Sydney is out of the car, sitting on the bonnet, just as he once sat under the jubilee bunting except that then he had his shirt off in the sunshine and now he is wearing a gabardine coat and his hands look a little bit blue in the last of the winter daylight.

‘Does it hurt?’ says Sydney, putting away his electronic cigarette and lowering himself off the bonnet.

‘I can hardly feel it,’ says Lewis. He opens the door on the passenger side and gets in.

Sydney climbs into the driver’s seat and leans over, inspecting the back of Lewis’s neck. ‘Nice job,’ he says.

‘Are there stitches?’ asks Lewis.

‘There’s a stitch,’ says Sydney.

Holding on to the back of Lewis’s seat with one hand, Sydney leans forward, reaching into the box of tapes in the footwell, rummaging through the contents. Lewis turns his head to the window. He can sense the approach of spring. In the coming months, the country air will fill with pollen. His eyes will redden and start to water; his nose will run. He never got hay fever when he was a boy; it came on later. If he was ever going to run through a meadow, knee deep in grasses and wild flowers, he ought to have done it while he was young, when he had the chance.

He can feel Sydney’s cold fingers touching the back of his neck, but when he turns his head he sees that Sydney has both his hands in the box of tapes now and it is not Sydney but the dog that is touching him, her wet nose against the back of his neck, and then a wet tongue right where the wound is.

Sydney, sitting up again, puts a tape into Lewis’s hands. ‘That’s for your dad,’ he says. When Lewis looks at it blankly, Sydney says, ‘That’s the recording he wants, the Messiah he asked you to get for him.’

‘Ah,’ says Lewis. ‘Thank you. I’ll give it to him on Sunday.’

‘Let’s go and see him now,’ says Sydney, choosing another tape to put into the car’s tape deck.

‘He won’t be expecting visitors today,’ says Lewis, but Sydney is already heading for the exit with his indicator flashing. When he turns in the direction of the nursing home, it is with the Rolling Stones blasting from his speakers so loudly that, despite the windows being up, people turn and stare.

The nursing home has an unnecessarily large car park at the front. All this empty tarmac, thinks Lewis, and no garden. Sydney parks the Saab in the middle of a vacant row of marked-out spaces. They get out and go to the front door, where Lewis enters the four-digit code that keeps the residents safe.

There is a woman standing just inside the entrance hall. She reaches for them as they enter. ‘I want to go home,’ she says, holding on to their sleeves, their wrists. She has her hair in two long plaits and Lewis thinks of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz , grown old, and then he thinks of his grandparents’ beach hut even though it was not, of course, lifted into the heavens and flown to Oz but was smashed to bits right there on the beach. Lewis did not see it happen; he only saw the space where it had stood.

Sydney pulls away from the woman but she holds Lewis back. ‘You don’t regret what you’ve done,’ she says. ‘You’ll regret what you haven’t done.’ Lewis looks at her, not knowing what to say, and then he too pulls away, pursuing Sydney.

Lewis is used to coming here on a Sunday to escort his father to church. Entering the lounge now, Lewis half expects to be going to church next. He notices his unpolished shoes. He pats absentmindedly at his pocket, checking for change that he does not have on him, looking for something for the collection plate.

His father is sitting very upright in his chair. He is preaching. ‘Cunt,’ he says. Gripping his knees, he says, ‘Balls.’ There is an untouched cup of tea at his elbow. ‘Shit and arse,’ he says.

Lewis pulls up a couple of visitors’ chairs, taking one from near Doris whose son will not arrive until teatime. He places the chairs in front of his father, who looks up and greets Lewis pleasantly enough but not by name, so that Lewis cannot tell whether his father knows who he is. His father also turns to Sydney and, frowning, narrowing his eyes, stares hard at him.

‘We’ve brought you that Messiah you wanted,’ says Sydney, looking at Lewis, who holds out the tape.

Lawrence, looking at it, says, ‘I don’t have a cassette player.’

‘Oh,’ says Lewis, ‘that’s right.’

Lawrence turns and looks again at his other visitor.

‘Do you remember Sydney?’ asks Lewis.

‘You were telling me about your uncle,’ says Sydney. ‘The one who went to Australia.’

‘Oh yes,’ says Lawrence, brightening up. ‘There were opportunities there. They were advertising for men. You could make a good living. I’ve never been.’

Lewis is about to change the subject, to ask his father what he had for his lunch, but Sydney begins to speak about Australia, describing for Lawrence the Australian birdlife: the yellow figbird, the golden whistler. It is the males, he says, that have the yellow throats, the golden underparts; the females are drab, grey and brown. And while he speaks, Lawrence, with his feet amongst the enormous flowers on the carpet, is as rapt as if he were actually there, at the edge of the rainforest, gazing up into the trees, towards the sky.

‘You’ve got a cup of tea here, Dad,’ says Lewis. ‘Shall I pass it to you?’

‘Yes, please,’ says Lawrence.

Lewis picks it up by the saucer and hands it to Lawrence, who places it on his lap but does not drink it. He looks at the coconut macaroon that is in his saucer but he does not eat it.

‘Oh,’ he says, and Sydney looks at Lawrence as if expecting something important to follow, but nothing does.

A nurse arrives beside them with a tea trolley. ‘Cup of tea, Lawrence?’ he says.

‘Yes, please,’ says Lawrence.

The nurse is handing one over when he sees the cup of tea that Lawrence has on his lap. He rolls his eyes and offers the cup to Lewis instead. Lewis hesitates. He does want a cup of tea but there are alternatives on the trolley, at which he looks. They have camomile, calming . He does not want calming. There is a bottle of Edie’s bubble bath at home in the bathroom, and that is lavender, calming , but he does not use it. He considers again the normal tea, but the nurse has already turned away and is offering it to Sydney, who asks for a cup of milk. The nurse is thrown by this request but provides the milk anyway. Lewis watches Sydney gulping it down. He thinks now that he would like milk too, but the nurse with the tea trolley has already moved on.

Sydney, wiping off his milk moustache, says to Lawrence, ‘How was Billy Graham?’

Lawrence, who has picked up his coconut macaroon, puts it down again, a fond look coming over his face, his eyes lighting up, a shy smile lifting the corners of his mouth. ‘Billy Graham?’ he says, wearing an expression such as one might have when recalling a long-ago lover and finding oneself unexpectedly saying their name. ‘Yes, we saw Billy Graham.’