Everything You Need

by A. L. Kennedy

  “And with you.”

  “Anyway, Maura didn’t come—she wasn’t there.”

  Not that you didn’t hope, just the same—eyes trailing over the pavements, picking through the crowd and finding her—fuck it—finding her all the time— catching at the angle of a shoulder, a glancing face, and then the turn of your heart breaking in at you again, and the jolting blood, even though your common sense is saying all the time don’t look for her, don’t look, she can’t be there, don’t look.

  Except I didn’t listen because I am a stupid, stupid man.

  And, of course, she wouldn’t have been there. She wouldn’t have wanted to be with me.

  Nathan swallowed, keeping his voice controlled, “If she’d been going, I would have stayed away,” but everything was starting to waver and fray. “Listen, Pastor, I really should go and check on Mary again.”

  “I quite understand. Give her my best. Or, possibly, your best—that might be better.”

  “Hm? Oh, yes.” He could feel the whining throb of circulation at his temples. “Well, I’ll give her yours and mine both. That should be enough for anyone.”

  “I’m sure you’re looking after her perfectly, Nate—you’re a good father.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t argue with nature, Nathan, it doesn’t become you. And look after yourself, too. And . . .” a smirk crept into his delivery, “God be with you, my son.”

  “And also with you.”

  Nathan set himself to slicing bread and then buttering it—building sandwiches again. He couldn’t think of a good filling this time: perhaps some tinned salmon and lettuce. With no tomatoes, she didn’t like tomatoes.

  My Mary—I wouldn’t want her to have a thing she doesn’t like.

  This, Nathan hadn’t expected: the music transecting his skull, a soft clatter in the meat of his thinking, an old lyric pushing his tongue’s root, swinging up and under his scalp in a warm diameter of sound. He recognised “Come Together,” felt it pressing in and making him certain that he’d been an altogether different person when he’d heard it last.

  Somewhere level with his spine, almost—weirdly—from behind him, his hearing was fingering in a cymbal spill, the pad of drums palpable in his right ear, and, tamping at his left, the private, hallucinatory reality of a voice. He looked about himself slowly, a minor elation ringing in his ribs at this new, almost perfect, secret din, unveiled at the back of his eyes.

  “Do you like it? I hoped you would.” Mary was studying him where he sat. Her face was thinner, firmer and he couldn’t resist thinking that, in these last weeks, she’d finished her growing up. This could mean she was moving beyond him—which, naturally, he didn’t want, but might accept— but mainly she looked as if she was growing much closer to the way he was when he wouldn’t wish the way he was on anyone. Genetic sadness, something you shouldn’t pass on.

  “Do you? Nathan?” She touched his cheek and then lifted his chin, as if he were her child, and he peered up at her, soaked with his own past.

  “Like it? Yes. Yes, of course.”

  She smiled for him while a shudder of time made him shake his head. “I haven’t heard this in years. It came out in what?—sixty-nine, seventy? Before you were even born. Abbey Road, Jesus . . .”

  “And something new to play it on. I was surprised when you said you’d never had one.”

  Another love song opened and caught Nathan’s mind. He found he could smell the kitchen in their first house: the one Maura had forever referred to as her favourite. She’d been fond of the Beatles, Maura— especially George, because of his seriousness and spirituality. And the sad eyes.

  There was a bewilderment in the words now, a certain tenderness, and he remembered singing them once in Maura’s kitchen, their kitchen, and knew he coudn’t listen any more. He disengaged the little earpieces gingerly and let his head clear, rubbed his neck, “Hm. Yes, that’s . . . Thank you so much,” and half-stood to kiss her, his lips dabbing her slightly awkwardly above one eyebrow before he subsided again. “I hadn’t thought of getting one. Just because I’ve never met somebody using one and not loathed them at first sight—all that hissing percussion. But this is lovely. Thank you. Really. You shouldn’t have, though.”

  “I don’t see why not. I have money now. A bit. Bryn . . . Uncle Bryn, he kept quite a lot in the house—a silly amount, really, it wasn’t safe—and then there was some other . . . even after the expenses . . . I mean, my mother didn’t want any of it and I don’t want it either, but there’s nowhere else that it can go. So I can buy presents. If I want.” She sat on the floor, leaning against the side of his armchair. “And I do want.”

  He reached down and let his hand rest on her head, the fine heat of her crown. Her hair was washed, brushed—such things being taken care of again, a sign she was coming back to normality. “Well, I’d say you should do precisely what you want. You bought one for yourself, too, I hope?”

  “Mm hm. Joe brought them both over from Ancw with the flour and the post and things this morning.”

  “Good.” He slipped his touch back until he was cupping Mary’s neck, rubbing very lightly, in exactly the way—he remembered with a leap of fear—he had liked to in the evenings sometimes when they were together before: together in his other, former, better life: together inside the same family, father and child. With some stupid detail like this, the repetition of some triggering incident, he might unwittingly slip into recognition, being known.

  You wish . . .

  Her head shifted towards him, pleasantly needy. “No, don’t stop. It’s relaxing.”

  Of course it’s relaxing, it always was relaxing, that’s exactly what I mean it to be.

  “I used to do this for my wife.” Which was true, but he had no call to say it.

  Too late now.

  “Your wife?”

  Mary tried to turn and look at him, but he maintained the pressure of his palm and kept her softly, unresistingly in place.

  “I didn’t know you had a . . . I thought I’d heard . . . but then . . .”

  “I was married. A long time ago. And then I lost her. And our child.”

  This time she did turn and he didn’t prevent her. “They . . . ?”

  He let her face him, although he couldn’t, now, entirely meet her eye. “They went away.”

  She kissed his hand and he rested his head back in the chair, stared and winced and stared again, the first blur of tears rising up at him, the sting of a coming collapse, quite plain on the roof of his mouth. “The point to make . . .” speaking for the sake of speaking, his voice thick, “the important thing, the serendipitous . . .” and her fingers at his wrist now, tight. “I started to love music. It filled the space. For quite a while, once I’d lost them, I really couldn’t leave my house, because I needed the sound of the music so much—to hear something clean in my head, something without my voice, without their voices.” He felt her grip on him grow fiercer, fastening him to this island, this moment, this daughter, this here and now. “It’s a good present. And it might suit you, too.” He understood she wouldn’t let him go. “Thanks.”

  They sat quietly after that, Nathan with his eyes closed, his future open and babbling.

  She is a wonderful girl. Really, very wonderful. I would say that, because I’m her father—but she is, in any case. And she’ll make her way through this bit—she is making her way through this bit—and I’ll help, here and there—and then we’ll be ready and I’ll tell her and she’ll be my daughter. She needs a father now, she’s got the space for a father now. I’ll tell her. I will tell her.

  We’ll be here together.

  We’ll write our novels together.

  Separately, but together.

  Close in a way that won’t be cloying, only very natural and something to admire. Quiet articles in the press.

  No. No press. Fuck ’em. Just us with each other.

  All good things to those who wait.

  I’ll have her back, get her bac
k, and then, and then Maura. Why not? No reason why not.

  All good things.

  And he slithered towards a doze, jarring quietly in and out of the warm awareness that his daughter’s cheek was rested on his arm, that her hand still held him, that he was safe.

  “Yes. Yes, I know, love. Sssh.”

  Nathan, his mind unfastened in sleep, was taking an embrace, keeping it, closing it round him until it stroked his stomach, cupped his balls and mouthed them with want.

  “I would like that. Jonno . . . that would be lovely.”

  His dreaming thumbs trembled at the fastening of a bra he could not possibly have deserved to recall in such excruciating detail.

  “I can’t say that—not just now . . . because I’m not alone, Nathan’s here, sleeping. In a chair.”

  Hooks and eyes: they were always so temperamental just precisely when co-operation was required. But any minute now, the first, hard suckle, the hot urge to bite . . .

  “I can’t say that . . . Because . . . because, I wouldn’t—even if he wasn’t here.”

  Some kind of spasm locked his fingers while Maura’s body roared against his skin. He wished that she would help him. He knew that, if she wanted to, she could.

  “It’s different then . . . I would say it then . . . Yes, when there’s no need to.”

  His consciousness was fighting to surface, while his imagined fists punched it down and then stammered back to his wife more slowly than he could bear. He felt that he was running out of time.

  “Oh, bloody hell, man, OK—I want you to lick me there. Where d’you think?”

  His mind was cramping, getting the bends.

  “All right, all right . . . There. My cunt.”

  A sharp, fast breath elbowed him closer to consciousness and jerked him away from his last chance at a kiss, left his thought craning forward, anxious and bereft.

  “My. Cunt. There, now. Satisfied?”

  He frowned out blearily at the room, unwillingly aware. The lights were on now, the night settled outside. His hands were cold and his mouth clammy. Mary’s voice, tactfully compressed, was perfectly audible, murmuring behind the curtain that hid her bed.

  “I know that, I know . . . You do cheer me up. You’re very good . . . And I’ll see you . . . quite soon. I’m just going to stay here for a while now— Nathan’s looking after me . . . No.” She started a gentle giggle. “No, he’s not like that. Not with me, anyway. He’s . . . he’s a good man.”

  Nathan swallowed at that, feeling it warm away a part of the yawning loss he’d woken to. The chair, he noticed when he stretched, had moulded a needling ache into his side.

  “Yes. Yes, I will. And you take care, too. Yes. Love you.”

  Now, now, now . . .

  A sweet twist of jealous happiness made Nathan grimace and begin to stand.

  No, then she’ll hear me and think I’ve been listening. Which I have. But not much. Not too much . . .

  Maura’s ghost rose in him again and his dream of her crept back under his fingernails, hurting him. He attempted to shiver it off and work himself into a suitably somnolent pose.

  I know she was saying something, I’m just not sure what. The usual young love stuff, I suppose. Young love, Jesus.

  But she should have it, she really should have it in spades—the best of everything. Nothing standing in her way.

  Beyond his convincingly closed eyes, he could hear her moving, walking closer, halting and leaning close enough for him to recognise her scent, the smell of her hair.

  “Nathan? Nathan? Are you awake?”

  He allowed himself a tiny intake of breath, a moment of apparent confusion. “Mm?”

  Lying to my own daughter.

  Not exactly lying—avoiding embarrassment.

  He stirred, yawned, massaged his forehead and peeked at her while his fingers were still in position to partially mask his face. “Mary?”

  She smiled at him with a long, straight look.

  Bugger it, she knows I wasn’t sleeping.

  “Naturally Mary—who else?”

  “Indeed. What time is it?”

  “Gone seven.”

  “Seven? Shit. I must have been tired. Sorry.”

  “It’s OK.” Another overly intelligent smile. “You were no bother. While you’re here, can I make dinner? Pay you back for all the sandwiches?”

  “You’re going to cook at me?”

  “Like I said—pay-back time. Omelette do you?”

  “Omelette would be fine.”

  So she cooked and he cleaned up after her until she told him to go away and just sit down. They ate slowly, even exploring a bottle of Louis’s fatal potato gin, before abandoning the washing-up.

  “I’ll just throw the dishes away in the morning.” Mary thumped down into a chair and felt about for her glass.

  “Quite right, although I usually give mine to the dog and he licks them clean.”

  “You know, I almost believe you.”

  “You can always believe me.”

  And I mean that—and you can see that I do—so now we both know it and everything’s fine.

  They smiled at each other until Nathan had to drop his head, an even broader, uncontrollable grin, welling dangerously. He tried to cough it away, but heard himself giggle instead. “Hm. Yes. Well. That was lovely. Thank you. I’ve had a good day.”

  “Oh, I am sorry, Nathan.”

  He narrowed his eyes, made his best suspicious face while she tried to stay deadpan and nearly managed—only showing a twitch at her lip.

  “And why are you sorry, exactly?”

  “For making you have a good day—goes against your nature, doesn’t it?”

  Nathan produced a vaguely strangled laugh, thoroughly delighted to be mocked, but also tasting something of his own blood. “No, it doesn’t go against my nature—it goes against my luck.” That sounded too solemn. “I don’t know—I spend years imparting the mysteries of my craft to her and then all she does is take the piss.” Better.

  “But she doesn’t mean it.”

  “Of course she doesn’t mean it—he understands that.”

  But he’d disturbed her a touch and she was standing now, moving to the desk, the sadness that had gone from her all evening seeming to mist in again. She rummaged in a drawer. “I want to show you something. If you don’t mind.”

  “Of course.”

  She was holding a photograph, walking towards him, offering it out. “This was them years ago, on Barry Island. I took it—that’s why I’m not there, not in the frame. This was them.”

  Dear God, love, don’t. You’ll hurt too much.

  He took the picture: two studiously smiling faces, summer shirts open at the throat, behind them, a sunny blur. “This is . . .”

  “Bryn.”

  “Then he’s Morgan.” He stumbled towards an effective comment, a believable truth. “They seem fine men.”

  “They were.”

  He tried to offer back the image, but she wouldn’t take it, only leaned one hand on his shoulder and spoke again, very gently. “I kept this with me after Morgan died and it never seemed right—that both of them were there, when one was really gone. Then I took it out last night and now . . .”

  She stroked at him, brushed at the lobe of his ear in a way he could guess she would have done with one of the Uncles, the other fathers in her life.

  “Now it’s . . .” she sighed in, “now it’s OK. In the picture they seem to be together again, looking out from another country. Somewhere else they went.”

  “Together.” The beautiful, terrible word.

  “Together. Yes.”

  “Give us a shag, Nurse Collins.”

  “Once you’ve grown up, Mr. Grace.”

  “Eleven inches, Nurse Collins. Possibly more.” Jack’s voice seemed, somehow, more painstaking than usual, more deliberate.

  “But all of them flaccid. No use to me.”

  “You are a cruel woman, Nurse Collins.”

  “B
ut you can call me Anne.”

  Nathan edged his chair in closer to the bed as Nurse Collins brushed past him crisply. He gave her the bashful nod of a man apologising for his sex and intending to distance himself from the boorish and recidivist behaviour of others. She rolled her eyes and marched from the room, frighteningly dignified, sensible shoes squealing softly away along the corridor outside.

  “Well, this is nice,” Nathan lied and inhaled another mouthful of hospital: the stifling clamp of cleaning fluids laid across all those other troubling traces of bad stew, strayed body fluids and accumulated sweat.

  Jesus Christ, I hate these fucking places. Being ill is the least of your problems, once you’re here.

  “You’ve got your own room and everything . . .” Nathan peered round at the buttermilk walls, the pastel blue floral dado line, the bewildering accretion of Yuletide flora dangling near the door, and the solitary Russell Flint print, to say nothing of the solitary patient. “It’s very . . .”

  Jack Grace was reclining in sea-green pyjamas, blankets to his waist, surrounded by a scatter of watchful equipment and tubes—one of the monitors was tinselled.

  It’s only November, for crying out loud—is this leftover festive spirit from last year, an early start for this, or just a general urge to make things sparkly? Jesus Christ, it’s all appalling, whatever.

  Jack was currently connected to no particular device, although a shunt was fixed in the back of his hand, discreetly taped. He had the air of a man who had just put the finishing touches to a major work of art—or, perhaps, of a man who had just become one.

  J.D. smirked. “It’s very . . . like hell. Pas-tel hell. God knows how anyone could stand it if they didn’t have a private room. Health insurance, Sport—got any?”

  “With my medical history the premiums would be fatal.”

  “Ah.” Jack nodded, slightly chastened, but brightened again. “I wasn’t joking, you know.”

  “Mm?”

  “About the inches. Want a look?” He leered, delightedly. “You can touch it for a fiver. I’m thinking of becoming a religious icon.” He twitched at his coverlet teasingly while Nathan shook his head.