Everything You Need

by A. L. Kennedy

  “You always say that, Bryn. But the colour is about the paintwork, the plastics, not the make.”

  “But now what are the paint and the plastics about, apart from the make of the car? I’m telling you, Mo, I can pick out any bloody model by simply observing the shape of the flames.”

  Morgan enjoyed a sigh of disbelief. “Go on then, Butt. You know I do try to believe you. Even though I know what you’re like.” He took the chance to return a compliment. “Bad man.” Meaning that Bryn was a good man, because he was just so properly bad, their kind of bad, the kind that did no harm. “Terrible, bad man, you are.”

  “You know what I’m like and you know that I’m bad? That right?”

  “Oh, yes. That’s right.”

  They smiled for themselves, listening to the distant burst of a heat-strained window. Without noticing, they had settled into holding hands.

  “Toyota Corolla, Mo.”

  “Ah now, though, Bryn, you’ve let me down, because that could never be anything other than a Ford.”

  With one last billowing swing, the blazing shell slithered past its point of no recall and started to bonfire rapidly downhill.

  Morgan blinked and found his vision numbed by the blaze into scars of light and ghosting blurs. “It’s fast tonight, then, Butt.”

  The Ford or Toyota sped into a snap and flurry of sailing heat, showed its glowing back as it bounced, shivered, tacked, bounced once again and kicked into a messy roll. There were echoes of hard cheering before the Toyota or Ford opened in a final impact of cloudy flame.

  Morgan felt Bryn flinch against his arm and wanted to console him. He wanted to attend to the whole feline weight of him, from the sweet salt of his throat to the buckle of his knees and to be sure he was all defended and at peace. Then a spasm of asthma strapped in about him anxiously. He wanted to be of an age to protect his loves: to be stronger and younger and full of breath. “Nasty little buggers.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s Danno’s boy.”

  “I’d say so.”

  “What if they ever choose the other road? Nothing to stop them, is there? One push, either way.”

  “If they choose the other road, Mo, then they will hit the post office or Ianetta’s bijou and hygienic continental-style café. They got up a good momentum and a couple of healthy rolls, they could carry on down to us, right into the house—ruin the bloody carpet.” Bryn kissed Morgan on his lips to make a shudder of distraction race through their collarbones.

  “You don’t mind, do you? The way it’s all going?” Morgan heard his words sounding fragile, petulant—needing to be needed, as usual. “I mean you’re good at staying happy. Content.”

  “It’s only like the war again. That stopped. This will, too.”

  “You don’t remember the war.”

  “Well, if I don’t, I can’t see how you do.”

  “I was born in ’28.”

  “That’s what you’re saying.”

  Morgan nuzzled him faintly for the compliment. “In’28. I remember it better than you do—the war—you were just young, you were. It wasn’t like this.”

  “I know. It was worse. My Dada told me. He had to go to London and teach them how to tunnel out bodies from under the rubble. He taught them how to mine for people.”

  “You said.”

  “Little babies, all covered in dust. Men and women. Dead. He found one woman without a mark, except that her stockings were in holes and that might have happened before, that might have been nothing to do with the bomb and only her carelessness.

  “Dug with his hands, to be gentle. The only way.”

  “You said.”

  “When he came back, he would see them in the shadows underground— the dead ones. Every day. Grey dust on them, not like coal dust, more like plaster, or ash. He said that. I didn’t like to listen, but he said. All the time when he was working and then when he slept, he’d see them lying, grey. Never told my mother. And she would have liked to know.”

  “Of course.”

  “This isn’t as bad as the war.”

  “All right, then.”

  “Well.” Bryn kissed him, as punctuation. “It’s not.”

  Down in the valley, the car was settling into a failing blaze, now and then lighting the side of an older wreck, or the mad edge of a door. The dark thickened beyond it into breaks of pine, scrubland, an invisible river dropping to scour at the valley floor. Further east, and house lights began to make a nervous sequence, then looped and chained and finally settled into the thin glow of Capel Gofeg’s central, spinal street, its moving blink of cars. The Uncles could have stretched out their arms and measured the shine and pattern of it all between their palms like some bright kind of fish—their home that never got away. Instead they only watched and thought about making a move soon, about heading back to Charter Road and to their house and to Mary Lamb.

  The same Mary Lamb who had just left the pub in Capel Gofeg High Street and paused, trying to breathe herself clear of the evening’s cigarette smoke and second-hand heat.

  Mary stood to face the breeze: the dark, westerly air which, elsewhere, was coiling round Nathan Staples and his island and his wait. She drew the night inside herself carefully, checking every element—burnt rubber, spruce, explosives and the underlying, spacious roar of green from hills and valleys that hunched out beyond her like the weird undulations of brains or crumpled papers.

  She heard the pub door open behind her and then swing to, a mutter of feet. She could guess this meant that Jonathan had followed her out. This was good, but now they might well argue, which was not.

  There was only a rind of moon. Mary would have preferred the full, grubby milk circle with touches of cloud to pass across it and spin out a haze of diffraction between breaks of open night. She was saving things up to remember and that would have been her first choice.

  Mary edged a glance to her right before she crossed the road. Jonathan was there. Her Jonathan: the one whose name could turn in her unpredictably with a nice, cold charge. She reached out her hand in his direction and waited to feel how he’d made up his mind, to feel if he would join her, touch her, maybe mumble a little grievance across her fingers, rub her thumb.

  “Are you all right, then? Jonno?”

  “Yes.”

  They set off together, Jonathan’s hand now round hers, but immobile, carefully silent, straining not to ask what he wanted to ask.

  Usually he had talkative, well-read fingers, which she liked. And he was a gentle person, which she liked, too. She also liked that he would, very occasionally, agree to sing, producing a light and careful voice with a tremor sometimes in its breathing—a surprisingly insubstantial, delicate sound rising from the density of what she knew was him. She understood his body as something smooth, compact and definite, which she had, for some time, absolutely liked.

  Slowly Jonno’s fingers tapped down to her wrist. He sighed and then coughed and then began, “I do know . . . I understand that you . . . you aren’t going to. I mean, that you won’t.” A small note of hope edged in, “Will you?” He was pursuing his own little inventory of good things to save up. “We could, though.” His index finger strummed at the heel of her hand.

  “I know we could. Of course we could. But we won’t.”

  “But we would have. Wouldn’t we? In the end. We would have?” He was trying his best to keep his voice buttoned flat, to sound neat and undemanding. She felt his arm shaking.

  “We might have. Eventually. But we wouldn’t have done it now.” They’d stalled their progress, halfway up the steps to the opposite kerb. Mary stroked once at his back. It was almost impossible to touch him for any length of time and not begin to be persuaded that she should let him collect absolutely whatever he’d like from her—with her—because it was easy to feel she would like it, too. It was easy to think she should do that thing—should make love, be with him, fuck him, fuck, precisely because she was going to leave soon. And because, as he’d said,
they might have done it soon, might have done it any day.

  They already knew each other, here and there, had already moved along the way. And she didn’t have much to compare him against, but he did seem to be good, to have ideas that were good. He would do things to make her thinking wander over words like pert and buxom until she gripped his head against her and breathed in the warmth of his hair, while her eyes closed and her whole mind crimped and puckered between his teeth. This was a memory she’d collected already, but she wouldn’t object to collecting it again.

  “Do you have to go?” Jonathan dropped Mary’s arm, knowing that he’d asked the wrong question. He let his hands drift miserably into his pockets. Mary didn’t like to see him so sad. In all the years she’d known him, he’d been cautious, patiently expecting disappointment, forewarned but clearly not hopeful of being appropriately forearmed. Mary had thought he’d be safe in her hands and that they’d be gentle together. She knew she’d begun with honourable intentions: no thoughts of abandonment. As he scuffled beside her, she looked at his ears, the pale shape of them. They were the only ears she’d ever found worth noticing: small, almost clenched, but also vaguely fragile and a tender pink. They made her have to touch him and feel how he was.

  He faltered to a stop when she hugged him. She kissed him goodbye and sorry and I do care only its complicated and sorry I am sorry I am, but she was still going to leave him and still couldn’t quite sleep with him first. She couldn’t do it, even when the brace of his back against her hands and the mild push of his stomach, hips, that extra, other nudge called through her. Breathing the smell of his neck and kissing him there, what she felt most of all was his impending lack. He was receding while she held him, her planned future slipping him further and further away.

  “Well?” His voice was very soft.

  She grew still, unsure if he’d really spoken. A lone firework slapped open in the air, shivered into straggles of light. She couldn’t tell if Jonathan flinched at the sound of it, or at the thought of her saying again that she was leaving him.

  “Well? Do you have to go?”

  Then they tugged and scrambled at each other, rather than let her answer, pivoting about each other along the pavement until they reached the post office doorway and came to rest. Across the street, someone walked by, not pausing. Mary tried to sound loving while she said, “I think I do. I do. I have to go. I’m sorry. It’s such a chance. I’ve thought about staying here. I mean, I don’t want to leave the Uncles—”

  “Oh, the Uncles. I see.” He managed to make this sound unmistakably desolate, while holding her tighter, one hand in her hair, apparently impatient for every detail that he was about to lack.

  “And I don’t want to leave you, either. But the letter, when it came, it put the idea in my head that I could . . . that I might . . .”

  His hand took the end from her sentence, closed fast round her palm and smothered her sense. His whisper jolted and pattered through her concentration, tickled her cheek. “You see—you don’t know, really, do you? What you’ll do when you get there, what they’re like . . .”

  “I don’t have to know.” She kissed his eyes shut, found their discreet trace of salt. “I’ve never known what I wanted to do before. If I could do anything.”

  “You don’t have to do anything, you can just be .”

  “But I’ve always needed something. I can’t forget it now that I’ve found it finally. Can I? Could you?”

  “Yes.” He blinked like a man who was waking from a bad dream to a worse, cleared his throat, “No. No, I couldn’t,” and looked at everything he needed: all of her, all there, Mary Lamb.

  Her eyes and hair could sometimes seem precisely the same colour. They fascinated, made him think of looking through stained glass into hot, gold places: interiors that curled with fawn and odd, reflected lights.

  Wrists, slim but nicely strong.

  Thighs, perhaps fuller than she liked them, but perfectly and softly wonderful to him.

  Body, so wonderfully hungry when it fitted and formed against him, even though—tormentingly—she frequently seemed unaware of its effects. He would often watch her walk off home without him after one of her more heated goodbyes and she would be apparently quite steady and composed while the whole aching stump of his brain was up and pushing him towards another sleepless night. She made him mad. She haunted him with her promises of skin and her silky-hard, demanding, extraordinary tits and all the other things he couldn’t get to, but which coloured his every educated guess.

  “Jonno?”

  “Yes, I know.” He peeled himself away from her, hearing his voice sound grey. “The Uncles will be coming home soon and you have to get back.”

  His proper absence began to chill her. “I don’t have to hurry, though. You know . . .”

  “But there isn’t much point in us staying here, now is there?” He sounded sour. “I mean tonight, I don’t mean . . .” and then simply bereft.

  “I’m sorry, love.”

  “You’re doing, doing . . .” he was slumping towards a kind of stammer, “I suppose, the right thing. You think so, anyway.” She found it difficult to bear when he was forgiving.

  “No.” She gathered him up to herself again and licked his lips. “No, I’m not.”

  “You . . .” He pulled away, stared at her, quiet, and she realised numbly that she’d given him the wrong hope, that even while she tried to love him, she was going to disappoint him again.

  “I mean, I’m not entirely . . .” She watched his hurt turn raw again and then cover its tracks.

  He edged himself towards a smile for her, but then couldn’t make it. “Not entirely . . . ?” But he already knew what he would and wouldn’t get.

  “I think one of my decisions was wrong.”

  He frowned at her gently for a space, hoping he’d misunderstood, and then caught at her, held her, huddled his face to her neck, her cheek, searching, kissing, wanting to taste her change of heart, wanting to be happy with whatever her change of heart.

  She kissed him back, as fiercely as she could, and tried to make this all that they could think of. “I was wrong to say I wouldn’t.” This had to be them together now, just together and playing the way that they liked to and not worried by anything. “I might.”

  She felt the particular movement of the beginning of his smile. “Might what?” A real smile.

  And she knew he’d understood her perfectly well by the small pounce of his interest against her, his curiosity growing plain, near the crest of her hip.

  “You know what. I’m saying I will. I would like to. I want to. Yes.”

  “You sure?”

  “I wouldn’t say so, if I wasn’t.”

  “You weren’t sure before.”

  “But I am now.”

  “Quick decision.”

  “Your tongue in my ear must have swung it.”

  “Ah. Like I hoped.” A softness in his last word, a touch of panic, washing back.

  So they rested, tight at each other, beating with thought, before Mary moved back. She finger-tipped through his hair to set it straighter, leave him neat, and shook her head to stop him speaking or making her consider other things that she would like to do right there and then.

  “Goodnight, love.” She kissed him carefully.

  “I’ll see you later, then?”

  “Yes. I’ve said you will. So you will. And I will.”

  “That’s . . . ahm . . . that’s good.”

  “Good?”

  “Fantastic, great—whatever word you want, whatever you want, altogether. Always.” He hadn’t intended that to sound like an accusation, but she felt it, all the same.

  “OK.”

  “Yes.” He kissed her back, one soft, concluding brush that blurred into more depth than was calming, or conducive to saying goodbye.

  “Now don’t you start, Jonathan Davies.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m not.” She bent her head to lick along his knuckles. �
�� ’Night, then.”

  “Yes. Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight.” And Mary let the fall of the street start to ease her home, down to Charter Road.

  Behind her, Jonathan shouted, “Goodnight, Mary Lamb.” She turned back to wave and watched curtains twitch in windows above his head. She waved at them, too.

  Nathan’s window glass shivered and blinked at a knock of rain. It scared him, eased him a little further along his edge.

  But it’s all right, though. Everything’s fine.

  Something bridled in him, surprised by this outburst of gentleness with himself. It wasn’t like him.

  Executioner’s courtesy, that’s all.

  Ssssh, never mind.

  Outside, a downpour was downpouring—spinning high, white coils of malevolent water across the little lights his cottage gave into the night. He thought, extremely cautiously, of fixing in his mind the important points to establish, the ones that would make sure that this evening’s proceedings wouldn’t be focused on killing, or dying, or any kind of suicide. His actions might seem to be that way inclined, but this would be absolutely not so.

  Jesus.

  All his very personal alarms were tripped and sirening anyway.

  Heart’s banging about like a bastard. Hardly surprising, but even so . . .

  I don’t feel well.

  Which means I have to take things gently. Means I have to be delicate.

  The island’s sky had started to rock and howl an hour or so ago—which was, coincidentally, round about when he’d tucked away his haunted photograph and decided he’d try his luck with the Main Event. He was due for another attempt—the pressure towards it had been building in him for months—modest emotional squalls before the proper storm. Now he was almost ready to start and outside a full, raw gale was dumping rain in gravelly armfuls against his western window, shuddering round his stovepipe and clattering his roof into a corrugated bedlam overhead. He couldn’t have picked a better backdrop if he’d tried.

  But I do need something more before I start—some kind of music—I do. And not a requiem, none of that nonsense. I want something I’d like.