‘I’ve never had sake,’ says Lewis.
‘What you really want,’ says Sydney, ‘is to have it in Tokyo, in a bar, with snacks — pickles and fish.’ Putting the carton down on the kitchen table, he mentions the pickled herring eaten with beer in Germany and Scandinavia, and Thailand’s painfully hot and moreish bar snacks, and Lewis thinks enviously of all those flights.
‘I’ve never flown,’ he says.
‘It’s safer than driving,’ says Sydney. ‘It’s safer than crossing the road.’
‘I’m not afraid of flying,’ says Lewis. ‘It’s just something I’ve never done.’ He has no idea why. He has been inside his nearest airport; he has been in the departure hall, where the first thing you see is a sign for the prayer room, and a picture of a little man down on his knees. He has seen the destinations on the information screens, the queues of people in front of the desks where passports are checked, boarding cards are issued and luggage is weighed. He just hasn’t ever been the one going anywhere.
‘You’re most likely to be injured at home,’ says Sydney. ‘You’re most likely to be harmed or killed by someone you know. You’re safest of all in the air.’
‘I believe you,’ says Lewis, ‘although at some point you would have to come down.’
Lewis reaches into the pocket of his coat and takes out a small paper bag. Opening it up, he holds it out to Sydney, who looks inside and extracts a jelly baby. The dog comes to the table, and Lewis gives her a sweetie too. ‘You’re getting fat,’ says Sydney, and Lewis can’t tell if Sydney is talking to him or to the dog.
When Lewis saw the ‘screaming jelly baby’ experiment executed in the chemistry laboratory, he had been teaching for more than forty years and was approaching retirement, but as he watched the demonstration — his colleague, in a white coat and safety goggles, melting potassium chlorate in a boiling tube over a Bunsen burner, dropping in a jelly baby that burst into flames and began to howl — he wondered for the first time whether he ought to have chosen something other than RE, something more dramatic. In truth, though, Lewis could not have handled a career as a high school chemistry teacher. He found the potential for accidents unnerving — the regular shattering of glass slides and test tubes, the explosions caused by adolescents not reading instructions, the constant smell of gas.
‘Did you join the RAF?’ asks Lewis.
Sydney looks puzzled. ‘No,’ he says.
‘You wanted to be a writer too.’
‘I did,’ says Sydney.
Lewis glances at Sydney’s watch, which he cannot read. ‘I’ll have to go in a minute,’ he says. ‘It’s a bit of a walk to the surgery.’
‘I’ll take you,’ says Sydney. ‘I’ve got the car outside.’
Lewis, whose knee hurts when he walks, is quick to accept Sydney’s offer.
Sydney stands, putting on his coat and shouldering his rucksack. Lewis is still wearing his coat and shoes from before. As he follows Sydney and his dog out of the kitchen, Lewis feels strangely as if he has only been visiting, as if he does not really belong here at all.
10. He wants a second chance
LAWRENCE WRITES HIS letters with a dip pen that once belonged to his Uncle Ted. He still has the original ink bottle, with a little purple ink left inside it. The ink, when it dries on the page, is the same shade as the interior walls of the nursing home. Lawrence thinks he could write all over the walls with this pen and no one would even know. He could say the things he would rather not say to anyone’s face. Your dog, he would write, is too small. And: I’m not all that fond of the processed meat. And: You don’t always come when I call. He could write these messages in big capital letters, like shouting that no one would hear. He would write to the craft lady: I’ve always liked the way you smell. It would be like using invisible ink.
He once sent a girl a Valentine’s Day card. He put it boldly through her letterbox with his name inside, written in lemon juice. She never mentioned it. On some occasion after that, Lawrence did something he shouldn’t have done (he does not remember now what it was; perhaps he had taken someone’s sweets) and it occurred to him that he could make his confession in that same way, in writing, with his home-made invisible ink. That way, he reckoned, if he died in the night, he would get into heaven but without the grown-ups ever needing to know what he had done. (Perhaps it was that time he took some jam without asking, getting into the pantry and sticking his fingers right into the jar.) His mother, though, lit a match and held it close to the surface of his white sheet of paper, revealing his secret writing with the flame, and sent him to his father to be punished as his father saw fit. (What crime had he committed? He might have cut off his sister’s dolls’ hair. It would be something like this, something small and quick but irreversible.)
His handwriting is good; he is careful with the pen. He dots his ‘i’s and crosses his ‘t’s and the loops beneath his ‘g’s and ‘j’s and ‘y’s are small and neat. At school, he was naturally inclined to write with his left hand but that was soon forced out of him and instead he learnt to manage with his right. A poem he transcribed using his best calligraphy won him a certificate, presented in assembly, after which his Uncle Ted gave him the pen. He sat Lawrence down at his kitchen table and asked him to demonstrate his fine penmanship. He winced to see how Lawrence pressed the nib of this lovely pen against the paper, bearing down on it so hard that it splayed, and splayed to such an extent that the inked line split. The solid white line of bare paper left down the middle was like the line on the road that means you must not cross it. ‘Don’t press so hard,’ said his Uncle Ted. ‘You’ll damage the nib.’ The forcefulness of Lawrence’s full stops made him gasp as if he himself had been stabbed with the nib. Lawrence wondered whether his Uncle Ted regretted, even then, saying that he could take the pen. Perhaps he would have liked to say, ‘I’m afraid I’ve changed my mind. This pen is very valuable to me and I do not think you are exhibiting sufficient care. I do not want to give it to you after all. I do not want to put it into your hands.’ But he did not say that. He did query the granting of the certificate, as if it were like a qualification, a licence, paperwork for a skill that Lawrence did not yet seem to have mastered. He still gave Lawrence the precious pen though, and Lawrence tried to press more lightly on the paper, striving to write well with his Uncle Ted’s pen in his right hand, always hoping for another certificate. Even when his Uncle Ted went away, he did not ask for his pen back; he did not speak to Lawrence at all.
Even now, in his nineties, in the twenty-first century, when no one would care or especially notice if Lawrence wrote with his left hand, he still uses his right. No one would bother if he pressed down too hard, but if anything he does not press hard enough — the marks he makes are light, and shaky, his hand unable to hold the pen quite as steady as he would like. He uses a proper writing pad, containing forty sheets of nice, watermarked paper, and a guiding sheet that he puts underneath, the thick black lines keeping him straight.
He sends his opinions to the local newspaper, in letters alerting people to the dangers facing society, threats to the community, vandalism and graffiti in the streets, the damage to the bus shelter and the amendment of street signs. SMELL STREET. His most recent letters were intended to discourage people from visiting the medium who was coming — according to the nurses, according to the notices on the telegraph poles and the gossip at the church — to the function room of the nearby pub, to commune with the dead. Lawrence signs his letters ‘Mr L. Sullivan’. Lewis wishes he would not. ‘What if people think it’s me?’ he asks. ‘What if people think I’m the one complaining and saying these things?’