Alison Moore - He Wants

‘I saw him again,’ says Lewis, ‘the last time he came here, in 1989. I took Ruth.’ He had been expecting Billy Graham in person, like the first time. Even as he entered the tent that had been erected in a field at the edge of the nearby town, he thought he was going to see the man himself. He was disappointed to realise that he was only going to see Billy Graham on a screen, that he was appearing by satellite, beamed from London. Someone fainted, though, nonetheless. People left their plastic chairs and walked down the aisle of sun-warmed grass, disappearing behind the screens as if, thought Lewis, they had gone to take a peek at the Wizard of Oz.

‘That’s right,’ says Lawrence. ‘I couldn’t go because your mother had booked a cruise. I thought I’d get another chance to see him. She’d always wanted to go on a cruise. She said it would be a dream come true. Oh, it was dreadful.’ He talks about the violent diarrhoea they and everyone else on board went down with — they suspected the salad. And then he talks about a British cruise ship recently turned away from Argentina. And he talks about the Khian Sea incident that was taking place the year before their cruise — the cargo ship carrying thousands of tons of nonhazardous waste, unable to dock. ‘For more than two years they went from port to port, from country to country, unable to stop anywhere. Imagine being stuck on a ship, at sea and wanting to get home, all that time.’

‘Yes,’ says Lewis.

Sydney is watching him. ‘You think you might like it,’ he says.

Lewis does not say anything. He looks at the coconut macaroon that is going to waste in the saucer of his father’s teacup.

‘It was a ship carrying thousands of tons of ash,’ says Sydney. ‘It wasn’t a cruise ship. It wasn’t the Love Boat. You’d go stir crazy after a while.’

‘Seeing Billy Graham,’ says Lawrence, ‘encouraged me to take action. I stopped reading DH Lawrence and after a while I gave up teaching literature altogether.’ He is back, then, to expounding on the rot that had spoiled his DH Lawrence, his Lady Chatterley’s Lover . It was no longer possible to enjoy the great tufts of primroses under the hazels, the dandelions making suns, the first daisies, the columbines and campions, and new-mown hay, and oak-tufts and honeysuckle. The novel seemed soiled. Creeping jenny would always now make him think of a penis — ‘a man’s penis,’ he says. And Women in Love , beginning with embroidery and yellow celandines, soon turned to the dangling yellow male catkin and the inseminatory yellow pollen and then came the descent into naked men wrestling and they ‘penetrate into the very quick’, they ‘drive their white flesh deeper’, they ‘heave’, ‘working nearer and nearer’, and just thinking about it now, Lawrence is reminded how he felt whenever Lewis was going off to or coming back from Sydney Flynn’s house, or when he opened Lewis’s bedroom door and saw them there on the bed together, and although he never actually caught them doing anything, everything was suggested. This was the novel that finally forced him to abandon his post at the school. He speaks about it through lips gone small and tight. The book, he says, is all about homosexuals and therefore he could not advocate it. He could not ask his students to study a book like that, a book with homoerotic undertones. He could not talk to them about one man feeling that way about another. He is getting agitated. He found that when he ceased to read DH Lawrence, he ceased to read literature at all, favouring theological works.

Lewis has not read Lady Chatterley’s Lover ; he has only read the dry account of its trial. He has read Women in Love , in which two men wrestle naked on the carpet.

‘But it’s about more than that,’ says Sydney. ‘It’s about a longing for a new world.’

Lawrence turns to Sydney and stares hard at him, narrowing his eyes again, frowning. ‘I know who you are,’ he says.

‘Come on,’ says Sydney to Lewis, ‘let’s go.’ He stands, and as he does so his knee bangs against Lawrence’s, upsetting the cup and saucer still balanced on the old man’s bony thighs, spilling stone-cold tea into his lap. While Sydney walks away, heading into the entrance hall, passing the woman who cannot get home, making his way out into the car park, Lewis hurries off to find a cloth. When he comes back, his father says, ‘Is Billy Graham still alive?’

Lewis, wiping down his father’s trousers and his chair, says that he is.

‘I want to go and see him,’ says Lawrence.

‘I don’t know, Dad,’ says Lewis. ‘He’s in his nineties. He doesn’t tour any more. He’s retired.’

‘I want to see him.’

‘We’ll see.’

As he leaves, his father says, ‘God loves you.’

When Lewis was little, his father always said at bedtime and on parting, ‘Your mother loves you.’ This was corroborated in junior school, where Lewis received the same message while eating his sandwiches in the dinner hall, until the day when he was instead told otherwise. Some years later, when Lewis began to live away from home, in halls of residence, his father took to saying, on doorsteps and train station platforms and over the telephone, ‘God loves you,’ and Lewis always felt that it was surely only a matter of time until someone suddenly said to him, ‘God doesn’t love you,’ and that would be that.

When Lewis gets outside, he looks for the Saab and instead of seeing Sydney standing beside it he sees another man. Sydney is lying on the ground near the driver’s door. The other man is standing above him, talking calmly down at him, with a boot on Sydney’s groin. It takes a moment for Lewis to place him, to realise that this is Mrs Bolton’s son.

Barry is saying, ‘I want my money.’

‘I haven’t got it,’ says Sydney.

Barry says again, more slowly, ‘I want my money.’

Lewis does not hear what Sydney says, but he sees Barry’s boot move and he hears Sydney yelling out.

‘I’ll take the car, then,’ says Barry. The driver’s door is standing wide open, and Barry gets in. The key must be in the ignition because he sets off so fast that it is the momentum that slams the door shut.

With the car gone and only the fumes lingering in the dusk, Lewis makes his way across the car park to the spot where Sydney is now getting to his feet, but Sydney is in turn setting off after the car, and the dog that is still in the back.

THERE ARE FOUR mugs in the office. The two that are Ruth’s say, ‘TEA’ and, ‘COFFEE’. She does not drink coffee — the ‘COFFEE’ mug is her soup mug, although this bothers her a bit. Norman’s number one mug says, ‘WORLD’S BEST BOSS’. The other one says, ‘I ♥ MY COMPUTER’.

Norman brings his favourite mug to his mouth, his lips reaching for the rim. The coffee — made from a big, cheap jar of brown dust that he is working his way through — is too hot. He sucks at the surface of it, at the coffee-scented steam, and then puts the mug down. ‘So how was your morning off?’ he says.

‘All right, thank you,’ says Ruth, without looking up from her work.

‘So what’s with the face?’ When Ruth doesn’t answer, Norman asks, ‘What were you doing anyway?’

‘Waiting in for a washing machine,’ she says. The window is open and she can hear the children in the school playground, the blur of a few hundred shrieking voices. Standing up to close the window, she adds, ‘It didn’t come.’

‘They never do,’ says Norman. ‘Have you rung them?’

‘No,’ says Ruth.

‘Ring them. Tell them it was supposed to arrive this morning and you bloody well want it this morning.’