by Alison Moore
12
He wants the Messiah
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.’
‘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 a
lways 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.
13
He wants the impossible
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.’
‘But it’s not this morning any more.’
‘Ring them anyway.’
‘I will.’ She won’t though, because there is no new washing machine. She invented the new washing machine because she did not want to have to say to Norman that she was going to meet a man, a stranger, an ex-con.
Sydney is not a total stranger – Ruth and he have exchanged many letters – but they have never met. She does not know what he looks like; she is not sure how old he is. He once mentioned that he liked the Rolling Stones.
And it is so much easier to say to Norman that her new washing machine was not delivered than that this man never showed.
‘Are you wearing lipstick?’ asks Norman. ‘You don’t usually wear lipstick.’ When she does not answer, he adds, as he picks up his mug, ready to try the coffee again, ‘The colour suits you.’
She wasn’t late. She left her dad’s house with more than enough time to spare. She did not take the direct route between the villages; she went a long way round, going through town, driving away from her destination before circling back. She drove past a car showroom, eyeing the shiny, family cars parked outside with large numbers in their windscreen
s. She drove past the horse that lives at the edge of the industrial estate in a triangle of field too small for galloping in. She drove past the train station, from where trains go all the way to London St Pancras, and from there the Eurostar takes you under the sea to Paris, and then a fast train will take you to the south of France, or elsewhere. She always meant to take a trip on the Orient Express, to go from Paris to Istanbul, although apparently they stopped doing that route before she was born and the Orient Express no longer runs at all. There is a modern substitute, though. You can ride in the same old carriages along the same old routes and she thinks that would be wonderfully exciting.
Despite the detour, the killing of a surplus half hour, she still had a little bit of time in hand when she arrived at the strange little café that stood alone on a slope in Nether. Nervous in her new red coat, she pushed open the door and a bell rang over her head. These bells they have above the doors of cafés and sweet shops always make her feel like one of Pavlov’s dogs.
Inside, there was only one customer, a woman with a baby held to her bare breast, a coffee cup on the table in front of her. Ruth watched the baby feeding, his fat hands clawing at his mother’s breast, his fat legs kicking. When she caught the mother’s eye, Ruth looked away.
At the counter, Ruth asked for decaffeinated tea and was told by the man (who was wearing a floral apron and a badge that said, ‘How Can I Help You?’) that there was none. She accepted normal tea instead (‘but not too strong’) and took it to a table near the woman. She observed the woman drinking her coffee whilst feeding her baby and said to her, ‘Is that decaffeinated?’