by Alison Moore
It was indeed pleasant. Their cottage, though, was in the middle of nowhere and they had none of the things they needed for self-catering – no washing-up liquid, no tea towel, no dustpan and brush. (It was only on the day they left that they found a cupboard containing all the things they had needed during the week.) There was no newsagent selling newspapers. Arriving home, they discovered that there had been riots up and down the country, starting in London and spreading like a forest fire to the Midlands and then to the north. On hearing the news, Lewis felt a flush of excitement, and at the same time a touch of disappointment at not having realised it was happening until it was already over.
When Lewis woke up one morning not long after that and realised that Edie had died in her sleep, he felt as if he had come home to find his front door kicked open, his windows smashed, everything gone. He felt as if he had slept through an earthquake.
He does sleep through earthquakes. There was one very recently, with a magnitude of three, right where he lives but he was unaware of it until he read about it in the paper in due course. He would like to experience an earthquake, to feel the ground shaking beneath him, to feel the bed trembling, all the ornaments rattling like something out of an exorcism.
He opens up Google and, with one finger, types in ‘Sydney Flynn’. He clicks ‘search’, and Google returns more than seven million results. He looks through the first few pages but they are not the Sydney Flynn he is after. ‘Sydney Flynn’ is on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Pinterest, YouTube and Google+, but they all seem to be women. He tries some variations on his search criteria, finding an obituary that makes his heart seem to stop, but it is not his Sydney Flynn and he feels his heart start beating again. The only other link that looks promising takes him to a site that says ‘Page Not Found’ and no matter how many times he clicks on the link, he cannot access the page he wants.
He has not spoken to Sydney since the summer of 1961. On New Year’s Eve in the year of the riots, the year Edie died, the school hosted a reunion for pupils who had left fifty years before. Lewis went along, although not in the fancy dress that some people wore for the occasion – wigs, also chest wigs beneath wide-collared shirts, flared trousers and platform shoes. They’d worn nothing like this at the time, or ever in their lives, so why do it now, wondered Lewis, when they were old men, when it just made them look foolish? Lewis wore his normal clothes. He wore a clean shirt (whose collar was nearly as wide as some of the men’s joke shirts). He combed his hair (which was almost as long as some of the men’s centre-parted ‘hippy’ wigs). He thought he might see Sydney there. The few familiar faces, though, were those he already knew from the pub, the old boys with whom he drank in The Golden Fleece – because back then he could still go there. They were the ones who had stayed in the village, and some of their children had stayed, and some of them had grandchildren at the school. Lewis wandered into the school hall. The houselights were down. Up on the stage, a DJ was just getting started. A disco ball had been hung from the ceiling and as it spun, spots of light crossed the empty dance floor and it was like a sky full of shooting stars. (This was the dinner hall really, transformed for the evening. Lewis could almost smell – through the illusion of the music and lights – the food and the mop bucket. He imagined stray chips and peas on the floor, being trodden on by dancing couples and adhering to the soles of their shoes.) He kept thinking, as he walked around the room, that he heard people saying Sydney’s name, but he did not see him anywhere. Towards the end of the evening, when Sydney had not shown up and the DJ had come to the end of the 1960s tunes and was playing ‘The Final Countdown’, Lewis left the school hall. He walked away from the couples who were slow-dancing beneath the spinning disco ball, and headed down the corridor towards the classrooms, in which his father had taught English Literature until he could no longer bear to, and in which Lewis had taught RE for more than forty years, and into which Sydney had arrived more than half a century before. It was almost midnight. There would be a pantomime flash and a BOOM! and a cloud of smoke and glitter and, like a golden coach that was really a pumpkin, the dance hall – with the houselights turned on and the disco ball turned off (Pack up the stars, thought Lewis, dismantle the sun) – would become, once more, the place where school dinners were eaten.
After shutting down the computer, Lewis sits for a while looking around Ruth’s room. Her shelves are empty of the classics that belong there, the stories he read as a boy, stories in which you can walk through a mirror or through the back of a wardrobe or climb to the top of a tree and find an unlikely and magical land. He used to try it, half closing his eyes and stepping forward, walking so hopefully, with such desire, into his mirror, into the back of his wardrobe. He could never get in. He read these stories to Ruth when she was little, and he supposes she has taken them to read to her boy. In the children’s television programmes she used to watch, a man passed through a changing room door into another world; and a boy, put to bed by his mother, used his torch to open up a portal in his bedroom floor, sliding with his dog down a helter-skelter into Cuckoo Land.
She has left the posters. Where Ruth lives now, she has magnolia walls hung with monochrome studio portraits of her family. These men in their unbuttoned lumberjack shirts, these men with whom she was briefly in love when she was young, grin down at Lewis now.
A dreamcatcher dangles from the ceiling.
He looks at his watch, and at the same time removes it from his wrist. It aggravates the skin where his arm got burned and increasingly he finds himself leaving it off.
It is almost opening time. Not much more than a year ago, he might have been going to The Golden Fleece now, but not any longer. These days he goes to another pub in the opposite direction. It is not as popular with the locals but Miranda is friendly. He thinks that he would like to be able to say to Ruth, when she comes round in the morning, that he did go out of the house, and not just to the bin.
Leaving his watch next to the computer, he gets up out of the uncomfortable chair and heads downstairs.
6
He does not want the sausages
AT THE BOTTOM of the stairs, Lewis stops to take his coat down from the peg. The buttons are coming off – they are hanging by threads, and one is missing altogether. His gloves are in the pockets. Holding on to the banister, he lowers himself onto the second stair, where he takes off his slippers and puts on his outdoor shoes. Standing again, he pauses to check that he has his key and to put on his hat, and then he heads outside, stopping to slam the door behind him. He sometimes has to slam it three times before it closes properly. If he does not, he might come home and find his door standing wide open.
He goes carefully down the front steps and onto the path of concrete slabs. He laid the slabs himself when he and Edie first came to this house, along with the garden walls at the front and back. Eyeing the grass on either side, passing the stone lion at the gate, he looks up the road. A hundred yards away are the public toilets. A sign on the wall of the toilet block says, ‘THESE FACILITIES ARE FOR ALL TO USE’, and, beneath a picture of a family of four rounded stick people, ‘IS YOUR CONDUCT APPROPRIATE?’ Beyond the toilets is The Golden Fleece. He turns in the opposite direction and wanders down the road towards the other pub. He goes slowly, scanning the pavement for his missing button.
Everything is quiet. There is a spit of rain in the air. It reminds him of the seaside, the salt spray when the tide comes in and the sea pounds against the wall as if it cannot accept that this is as far as it goes.
His grandparents lived on the coast. They had a beach hut until it was lost in a storm. Lewis had imagined a whirlwind lifting it neatly out of the row, whisking it intact into the sky, like the little wooden house in The Wizard of Oz.
He always imagined living by the sea, perhaps in his retirement. But he is now seventy years old, retired years ago, and is still living in this village in the Midlands, less than a mile from the house in which he grew up and ar
ound the corner from the school in which he has spent the best part of his life.
His parents’ house on Small Street is gone now, knocked down to build the supermarket car park, which has signs around the perimeter that say, ‘Motorists! Your car is at risk from thieves’ and, ‘Leave it on show expect it to go’. The pub is half a mile ahead, but Lewis turns right, towards the school. When he reaches the school railings, he stops, gazing into the deserted playground. When the double doors open, he flinches in anticipation of the headmistress striding out, coming towards him. His instinct is to run, as if he were not a grown-up, a previous employee of this establishment, but a truant, a runaway, an absentee who might be dragged by the ear to the headmistress’s office. It is not the headmistress, though; it is a boy, going from one building to another, perhaps with a message for a teacher or a wound for the school nurse. Lewis thinks for a moment that it is a boy he knows, but then he realises that it is not, that it can’t be, because all the children he knew will have gone by now.
Lewis turns away, walking on in the direction of the pub. Passing a bus shelter, he thinks about Ruth and her saying to him, ‘You can travel for free all over the country – what are you waiting for?’ He could go to the seaside; he could go all the way to Dover. He will do it, he thinks, one of these days. Not right now. He would want to wait for warmer weather. He would need to apply for a bus pass. He would have to go into town to get a passport photo taken.
You are not allowed to smile in your photo any more.
He stops to watch a yellow car go by, turning to meet the gaze of the dog that is staring at him through the rear window, its mouth open and fixed in a smile. The car, a Saab, stops at the pedestrian crossing a little further along the road, letting across a woman with hair that is grey at the roots and dyed red at the ends. Lewis starts walking back towards it, but the yellow car is already moving again. Turning the corner, it goes out of sight.
Lewis is still gazing at that empty corner when he realises that the woman for whom the car stopped, the woman who crossed the road, is now very near. She comes, in her dogtooth coat, to a stop just in front of him. Lewis is lifting the hat off his head when the woman raises her hand and strikes him sufficiently hard that his spectacles fly off his face. He is still holding his hat in the air; his mouth is still slightly open, ready to speak. He saw, before he lost his spectacles, the scarring on her face, the damage to her skin. She starts shouting, jabbing at his chest with her index finger, and he realises who she is, and he, apologising, replaces his hat and reaches down to the ground for his spectacles. While the woman is standing there telling him off, Lewis returns his spectacles to his face but finds that the lenses are smashed and takes them off again. He puts them in his pocket and walks away as quickly as his poorly knee will allow.
Just outside the pub, he sees what he thinks for a moment might be his button lying on the ground, but then he remembers that it is a pound coin; it has been there for months. The first time he saw it, he stopped to reach down and pick it up and found that it was glued to the pavement. He remembers his confusion, his scrabbling fingertips. He remembers when Ruth’s boy was a baby and would try to get hold of things that could not be grasped, that could not be picked up – a biscuit pictured on the lid of a tin, a dot of light on the living room carpet. Lewis, scratching at the pavement, had to straighten up again and walk on without it.
The pub always looks closed from the outside, but when he pushes open the heavy door there is light and sound and Miranda smiling at him as the door settles behind him. The interior reminds him of somebody’s living room. The wallpaper shows quaint farming scenes, a man with a scythe surveying his land, the pattern repeating around the four walls. There is a busy carpet, a threadbare sofa, sport on a small television in the corner and a handful of classic board games on a table underneath. There are floral curtains, vases of plastic daffodils on the windowsills, ornaments on the mantelpiece above the fireplace in which logs are arranged as if ready to be lit, although they never are. There are shelves containing ancient hardback books that no one reads: Todhunter’s Differential Calculus, three volumes of Harmsworth’s Home Doctor: BRU–DUC, DUL–JEA and POW–SYS, and Carter’s Outlines of History in which history stops in 1918. Lewis wonders if there are later editions in which history instead comes to an end in 1945 or 1961 or 2013. There are two copies of Les Misérables and faded children’s classics, a beautiful old edition of a little book of nursery rhymes that he had when he was a boy. Topsy-turvy, upside down, the sea is on the moon. He doesn’t know where his copy has gone. Sydney would just take this one.
There is no clock. Sometimes the pub has lock-ins. With the door bolted and the curtains closed, you can lose your sense of time. Each time he enters, he half expects to smell Woodbines, to see, through a smoky haze, an old man sucking on a cigarette, the ash dropping off, the end of the cigarette smouldering. There is no smoking in the pubs, though, these days.
When Lewis has made his way across the room, Miranda says to him, ‘What do you want, love?’
Yes, he wants to say to her, yes, please.
Taking his hat off and putting it down on the bar, he asks for a shandy. While she is pulling his half, she says to him, ‘I didn’t win.’ She means the lottery. Lewis has seen the advert, the giant hand in the sky, a formation of stars, the finger pointing, ‘It could be you’. He hasn’t seen it for a while though. He has a feeling all of that’s long gone now; there’ll be a new slogan. Miranda plays every Saturday but has won nothing yet. ‘The minute I do,’ she says, ‘I’m out of here.’ Edie used to play at work, in a syndicate. At least once, maybe twice, they won ten pounds and shared it between them.
Lewis asks about the sausages.
‘We’ve only got vegetarian,’ she says.
He makes a face.
‘Pork and black pudding next week.’
‘I’ve never had black pudding.’
Miranda puts his drink down on the bar and turns to another customer who has come in, who is asking for Goldschläger. ‘We don’t have that,’ says Miranda. They watch the man turn away and then Miranda says to Lewis, ‘Have you ever had Goldschläger?’
‘No,’ he says.
‘It’s a Swiss liqueur,’ she says, ‘with bits of gold in it, flakes of gold leaf.’ As she says this, she is touching the flimsy gold necklace that she wears around her neck, tapping the tiny crucifix against her throat.
‘Have you ever had it?’ asks Lewis, taking a sip of his shandy.
‘No,’ she says.
Lewis shakes his head. What kind of a man, he thinks, walks around asking for Swiss liqueurs with bits of gold in? He stands at the bar with his drink, thinking about the things he’s never had and never will.
‘What are you going to have, then?’ asks Miranda.
‘I don’t want the vegetarian ones,’ he says. He reaches for a menu and Miranda moves down the bar to serve someone else. Without his spectacles, though, he cannot read it. When Miranda comes back, Lewis says to her, ‘I haven’t got my spectacles. What else have you got?’
‘Home-made steak and kidney pudding,’ she says, and Lewis brightens up. ‘But I just sold the last one.’
Lewis turns to look at the man who is moving away from the bar, who is scanning the room for a table he wants, and Lewis sees, with a rush of indignation, that it is him, the Goldschläger man, who has decided to eat instead and is settling down now at a corner table, waiting for his suet pudding to arrive.
The pub uses a local butcher. They know exactly, they say, what is in their meat products. Lewis remembers when Ruth went on a school trip to France and was given sausages that were – she discovered after eating them – made of horsemeat. She was furious, and Edie was furious, and Lewis pretended to be furious too. But when, more recently, the news broke that horsemeat had been found in frozen meat products, Lewis went to the supermarket, wondering about buying some. He was disappointed to fi
nd that they had already been removed from the freezers.
Lewis, for his lunch, has a pickled egg. When Miranda is not busy, she comes and stands near him. ‘Let me cut your hair,’ she says.
‘I haven’t had my hair short since I was in my teens,’ says Lewis.
‘I’ll take years off you.’
‘It was halfway down my back when I got married.’
‘Let me take the ends off,’ she says, walking away and returning with a pair of heavy scissors, snipping at the air as she approaches.
It was touching his shoulders when he met Edie.
‘Cut it to my shoulders,’ he says.
She pulls out a chair, sits him down, and gives him a haircut right there in the bar. Long hanks of grey fall onto the carpet, and he has the sense that she is chopping the grey off, that when she has finished what will be left will be brown.
‘Cut it short,’ he says.
She is cutting it to the nape of his neck when she says, ‘Have you had this mole looked at?’ Standing aside, she touches it with the tip of her long scissors, like a weather girl pointing out a weather front, and Lewis remembers his three o’clock appointment and what it is for.
‘I’m having it cut out,’ he says, ‘this afternoon.’
‘That’s good,’ she says.
He notices that she completes his haircut without touching the back of his neck.
When she has finished, when his hair is lying in a circle around him like a nest, he peers into the pickled-egg jar, trying to see his reflection, but it is unclear. Staring into the depths of the jar, he says to Miranda, ‘Byron consumed vinegar on a daily basis. He believed in its health benefits. He ate potatoes soaked in vinegar.’
Miranda looks at the slightly cloudy, pale-yellow liquid inside the jar that holds the eggs. ‘I know someone who drinks his own wee for the same reason,’ she says.