Everything You Need

by A. L. Kennedy

  “Would you like a Thermos?”

  “You aren’t tired?”

  Mary hadn’t been able to take one. Sweet things this late weren’t allowed—except for on special occasions and Mary wasn’t sure of how special this occasion might be. Sometimes the rules weren’t important and could all be giggled away, but this wasn’t one of those times, she was certain.

  Then Morgan had given her a tiny, apparently understanding nod and had taken a large, round, chocolate digestive for himself, which he posted suddenly into his mouth, entire.

  “You’ve somewhere to stay in Cardiff?”

  While Bryn continued the interrogation alone, she had watched Morgan struggle to chew and then swallow. He looked like something from a nature programme—a snake swallowing an egg. And a small, cool idea had occurred to her then—a seductive, ashamed idea—she’d realised that when her mother left her all the rules might leave her, too. The Uncles’ house was very obviously run by very different regulations.

  Bryn lobbed in another question, “Aren’t you going to tell her goodbye?”

  At this, Mary’s mother, who hadn’t told her anything, had picked her all up and held her, suddenly. It had felt impossible then that they would really part. Mary had tried and been unable to feel how it might be without her. When she breathed against her mother’s green coat, she could taste the dirtiness of rainy buses, smoky trains and the smell of wet weather and nothing at all of the house she’d left that morning and wouldn’t see again. Her mother didn’t smell like her mother and Mary had wanted her to. She’d felt guilty about the biscuits and wanting one. She’d seemed somehow to be wrong for being left here, as if there’d been another rule she’d broken—a serious one that she hadn’t known about.

  Her mother had set her down, but then hugged her again, quite fiercely, almost made her hurt. Then she’d stroked Mary’s hair slowly and pressed her forehead with a feathery kiss. Mary, who always understood touch rather better than words, had felt that her mother was angry but also enormously sad. She couldn’t understand which feeling was for her.

  And then her mother went away.

  Mary had stood in the Uncles’ doorway and waved, been surprised when her mother paused and turned fully to face her, waved back. She was crying.

  By herself with the Uncles for her first night, Mary had scaled the stairs to her new room. She’d thought of her mother, alone and being rattled into Cardiff on another bus. Mary’s mother had told her that she hadn’t been to Cardiff in years and years. She might get lost. This was when Mary had started to cry.

  Then a small noise had happened behind her—Uncle Bryn was by her bed, dropping her quilt back over a new hot-water bottle, bought expressly for her. Mary had heard its fat, liquid impact and turned a bit to sneak a look at the side view of his face. He seemed all right—big and dark, but not heavy and not frightening. He’d kept pattering his hands at her pillows, flicking the coverlet, but also, she knew, he’d been listening to her crying and measuring how she was. Without looking, he’d said, “Are you feeling complicated?”

  When she didn’t say anything, because she didn’t know what he meant, he’d breathed out through his lips, one small puff. She would learn to recognise this in him as a sign of distress.

  He’d tried again. “Upset?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the bed getting warm, though. Come by here.”

  Which, again, she hadn’t understood at first.

  “Come by here.” He’d sat on the bed and faced her, extending one arm for her to do something with. He’d puffed again and looked a touch worried, but fundamentally contented, comfortable.

  So she’d walked up to him and slipped herself in beneath his arm. Neither of them thought of anything more to say, but they both moved in tiny and gradual ways until she had curled herself up at the big purr and beat and murmur of his chest.

  “Are we making you unhappy?”

  Mary shook her head against the warm size of his cradling hand.

  “You tell us if we do and we’ll stop.”

  She nodded.

  He didn’t puff.

  “Your mother means well.”

  She didn’t shake her head at this, but wanted to, and then found herself caught by a sob, an odd kick of angriness. Bryn stroked her neck until she had settled again.

  “Most people, they do mean well. They do try.”

  He sighed in a small way, but was, she was sure, not at all annoyed with her, not even impatient. And Mary decided that she might like the Uncles then, but this seemed—more than anything else—like leaving her mother and home and so she’d started to cry again while Bryn smoothed and drummed her back.

  When she’d fully subsided, he’d squeezed her briefly and said to no one in particular, “Mo and me, we always wanted a girl.”

  Tonight in the fuggy kitchen Mary could look at her Uncles and be sure that she wanted them. She stepped close to Bryn, her arms opened.

  “Careful . . . the water.” He danced away from her to set down the kettle, so she hugged Morgan instead.

  He wriggled. “Mary Lamb, you are a funnyosity.”

  “No other word for her.”

  “I have never known another child like her.”

  “Nor another woman, either.”

  Bryn tried to keep the smile in his voice when he spoke, but they all heard his sentence echo with her growing older, more separate, choosing to go.

  “Morgan,” Bryn folded his arms sternly, “take those bloody bottles upstairs before they get cold.”

  “All right, Boss, all right.”

  Morgan kissed Mary: precise dry lips at a forehead he now had to stand up on tiptoe to reach. “Nos da, love.” He nodded to Bryn.

  “I’ll be up after you. Trahit sua quemque voluptas.” Bryn turned to Mary, eyes quick, attentive cobalt, awaiting her response. “Well? Trahit sua quemque voluptas. Hm?”

  “Each man is by his special pleasures led.”

  “True enough.” Morgan, calling back down the stairs.

  “Morgan, go to bed.” Bryn shook his head, hushing breath in between his teeth, enjoying a little vexation and then giving Mary’s response its due praise. “Yes. Correct. Well done. None of them’ll know that.” He didn’t like to talk about her leaving, but had peppered the last few months’ conversations with references to them and over there and your lot—as if she had already built a whole new existence away from his home, an alien place filled with people that she hadn’t allowed him to meet. He sometimes could make her feel as if leaving was in her genes, as if that much of her mother was in her nature. Mary knew he didn’t mean it and she knew it wasn’t true. She might go away from the Uncles, but she wouldn’t forget all about them, she wouldn’t fail to love them and let them know. She wasn’t her mother, she was herself.

  Mary sneaked in a shuffle or two until she could nudge against him, attempting to reassure. “I hope they’ll know some things. I mean, I would think they’ll know most things, between them.” But that made them sound far too much like a positive thing, when they were really more neutral, a necessity. “I’m going there to learn. If they don’t know anything, I’ll just have to come back . . .”

  Bryn let his eyes droop shut a little, the way he always did when he knew what she was up to. “You won’t have to come back. The island will be what you need. We’ll see the New Year in and then parcel you off and all of us’ll have a fresh start for a fresh year. Neat.” Bryn faced her with a watery grin and they slipped into a long embrace, while he rubbed in the usual way at her back and then paused, considering. He stood away from her, hands tracing her face at his arms’ length.

  “Do you want your hair cut?”

  “Ahm, I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Maybe you should, you know.” He brushed gently at the ends of her hair.

  “You leave my split ends alone.”

  “Maybe if you even made it just above shoulder length . . . Maybe something easier to wash and look after . . . What w
ill the facilities be like?”

  “Oh, you and facilities—you’re as bad as Mo.”

  “I am nothing like it. Morgan is the only one in this family who is mad for plumbing and, in that and many other respects, he is quite beyond saving.”

  “But we love him.”

  “Of course we love him. We love him precisely for his manifold peculiarities. We love him for his Ventolin and his Beconase and his inability to take them when he should and for all his different kinds of cough and his slowness on stairs . . .” Bryn was not being as jolly as he’d hoped.

  “He’s not getting worse.”

  “He’s not getting better, either. Filling him full of steroids and then leaving him like that . . . He hasn’t been right since. I told him—Doctor Morton—I went and spoke to him.”

  “I remember.”

  “He doesn’t listen much though, does he?”

  “Mo’s not getting any worse.”

  “No. No, you’re right. He’ll outlast me, I’m sure.” He walked to lean in the crook of the worktops, by the stove. “And we’d have to love him just the same—even if we knew he’d die tomorrow.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “But I’m bound to, aren’t I?” He huffed out a little sigh. “I’m bound to think it. But I don’t brood, that’s the thing. I think of it and then I move on, try to appreciate him. If he’s saying he can’t eat pork and that it’s never, ever agreed with him when I’ve been serving him pork for decades without a single breath of complaint and if he cuts up badly about how I’m contradicting him and then refuses to eat a bite except for boiled tomatoes until the weekend—I can still appreciate him, because he is still wonderful and because I should. That’s how it works, loving people.”

  “And you know he hates boiled tomatoes.”

  “That too. Daft article. But I wouldn’t want him sensible.”

  Mary watched him stretching and working his shoulders, deciding to change the subject. He began quietly. “Talking of the men we love . . .” He crossed his feet at the ankles, easily, elegantly, folded his arms, his sleeves rolled back on his arms to exactly the right degree. He’d always had the best of his generation’s grace—the knack of strolling, of handling humdrum objects with unhurried fluidity. There were times, Mary thought, when his age seemed a relaxing fiction, something to ease the pressures on a sporting young man with a left-handed grin and a warm, unpredictable look.

  He began again, almost smiling. “Yes, the men we love . . . That poor, bloody Davies boy. I can’t pass him in the street without losing my appetite. He’s so miserable. I’m not saying it’s your fault, girl, but if your Jonathan was a horse, I’d have shot him by now. Are you going to do anything? About him?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Now he did smile, but only quietly. “Yes, you are. We could see it in your face when you came in. Morgan said—she’s decided —and you know Morgan, never wrong in matters of the heart.” He waited kindly, but with the clean, direct expression of a man who was thoroughly educated in her particular turns and twists. Mary never lied to Bryn with any kind of confidence or success and they both knew it.

  She folded her arms and looked away to the freezer, then examined the cupboards and next the fridge and then found herself facing the leisurely line of Bryn’s legs, his body waiting, his eyes expecting nothing other than a perfectly honest reply.

  “All right. Yes, I have decided.”

  “Well, that’s a relief, then. See you in the morning, love.” He swung forward to kiss her.

  “You don’t want to know what I’ve decided?”

  He settled a light peck in her hair. “Oh, we know what. We were just waiting for when. ’Night.”

  “What do you mean—we know?”

  “I mean precisely what I intend.” He ambled out, pleased that he’d said all he wished to without fuss or embarrassment. Or almost all he wished. He didn’t turn in the doorway, only paused. “You’ll be sure and take care, won’t you? With him. And with you. Care’s the thing. For everyone concerned.”

  “I didn’t know everyone was concerned.”

  Bryn creaked towards the upstairs landing. Mary had hoped—as pointless as she knew this hope would be—that her plans for Jonathan might stay slightly private. Now they quite obviously weren’t she found that she felt more comforted than irate.

  And under the comfort came an easy prickle of something else.

  She moved to the stove and lit one of the gas rings, then switched out the light and watched the rose-blue leaves of flame breathe up a shimmer of dark heat. Mary’d learned how to make this happen, almost as soon as she’d managed her first strike at a match. She supposed that if the Uncles had kept a proper, open hearth, she could have settled down, last thing, for a quiet half-hour and been able to stare into that. But the fire in the sitting room only offered combustion that played like a mauvish liquid over plain ceramic slabs.

  So she stayed where she was and watched the gas flowering up into nothing and let her mind fill with its tranquil hiss. Mary thought briefly of the Uncles, tumbling each other’s locks in their deep, broad bed, and then lifted the concentration that had kept her Jonathan Davies weighed down in unspoken and unspeaking thought. Now she could revive the dogged argument of his hands, the hot tug of his breath, all of the marvellous chaos he could light. Her memory tickled her with him and sucked and whooped and sank, precipitate and slick.

  She wondered if she really would—if she really would with Jonno— and was, nicely, almost scared.

  And standing, face awash with cool light, she was also lovely. Nineteen, her skin not far off from a child’s: the uncomplicated pink of light and blood and young, transparent surfaces. A young man called Philip Bracer had once said she had kissable lips and this had made her laugh, but was pretty much right. They were, quite clearly, lips it would be good to kiss. Her hair was thick and did need cutting, really, but in this light it was a soft, dim shadow, threaded with small glimmers of something fine.

  Watching her, silent in the kitchen, almost anyone might have guessed that, very early on, Mary had taken her father’s breathing and tied it up tight with her own. She couldn’t remember him, a man who’d died years ago, but nevertheless it was true that when he’d first encountered her slightly milk and slightly apple and slightly animal scent, she had altered him for good. She didn’t know it, but she’d given him a permanent change of heart.

  None of which even remotely concerned her when she finally turned off the stove, waited for the pop and flutter that brought things to a stop and eased up to bed, slightly later than was sensible. The house ticked, cooling. Behind the Uncles’ door, Morgan’s voice was being pleased at something not for her.

  Mary prepared herself quickly and shivered into bed. She was all set to pay attention and thoroughly enjoy a night of restless possibilities. A man in her mind to keep her wakeful: she wasn’t completely used to that. She couldn’t yet predict her dip and duck through quick dreams of great ferocity and surprise.

  And she couldn’t know that under the same darkness, the same night, she and Nathan Staples matched each other turn for turn under their blankets, heat for heat. Their two bloods ricocheted through hearts that seemed to clatter and then flinch under skins that were nothing more than a moist babble, aching at every sound. In the end, for their separate reasons, they both watched the dawn.

  Which blurred in shakily, dry-mouthed or tender-eyed, depending, and bringing very little for Nathan, but a letter for Mary Lamb—a letter from Foal Island and from a man Nathan Staples knew well.

  The letter’s contents seemed peremptory, rigid, almost cruel. Mary read them out across the breakfast table while the Uncles listened, Morgan’s breath whining softly in his inelastic lungs, and she learned that her schedule had been drastically, arbitrarily changed. If she still wished to accept the Fellowship’s offer of a Llangattock Bursary, if she still really wanted the distant but luminous promises their offer appeared to imply, then she would have to com
e out to Foal Island by November the third. She had only days, not months, before she would have to leave behind the better part of all that she’d known as her life. This was not fair.

  “It doesn’t say why?”

  Mary patted Bryn’s wrist—he would want to be angry for her now and there was no point. She couldn’t not go: Foal Island had been all that she’d aimed at for more than two years. There was no question, whatever the Fellowship did, that she needed them.

  Morgan’s voice sounded tight. “Is it the same man who’s written? I mean, he’s seemed so decent up to now. Does he know what he’s asking?”

  Now it was Bryn’s turn to pat at Morgan.

  “All that work she did, sending off bloody envelopes of stories for months . . . Passing all their bloody tests . . .” Bryn stabbed at his toast and Morgan jerked in an anxious breath, a spasm starting to pull in his diaphragm. He nodded, beginning to sweat. Bryn pursued his point, dirtying the butter with crumbs. “If they want her that much, if they picked her out of so bloody many, then they should show her some respect.”

  “It’s all right.” She tried to sound as if she actually believed this.

  “It’s not all right.”

  “I know, but still . . . The Chairman—Christopher—he says they can’t hold things open as long as they thought they could . . . then he . . . bad weather’s coming, in a couple of weeks they’ll probably have trouble with the boat and I won’t be able . . . Oh, I don’t know—it doesn’t make any sense.” She lifted her head from the paper and met the Uncles’ eyes. They hurt.

  Mary started to speak again, inching her words forward, picking them to carry tenderness and weight. She’d never yet worked so hard to build a proper fabric of sense, to set out love. “I wanted to be here for all the time I could. And if I could learn what they’re going to teach me and stay here, I wouldn’t ever go away. You know that.”

  The Uncles winced, hearing so much of what they needed, feeling so much sad happiness.

  “I do want to come down by here every morning and eat breakfast the way you cook it and be with my Uncles, all comfortable, see?” They’d taught her to speak Welshly—she didn’t always, but she could. She did it now to please them, to show them where she really came from, to show them she wouldn’t forget. “They’ll give me seven years, they’ll feed me, house me, keep me and when it’s over I’ll know, I’ll know if I can do it . . . If I’m any good or not.”