Lawrence’s letters are never printed anyway.
After Lawrence’s third and final missive about the medium, the nursing home staff decided to take the residents along to this event, this evening of communication with the spirits of the dead, as a treat. The craft lady expressed an interest in joining them, which left Lawrence conflicted. He pictured the two of them strolling up the road arm in arm, the craft lady’s vanilla scent on the night air. But, he said, he would not be going, because that sort of thing — summoning the dead — was just not right. At worst it was toying with the devil and at best it was a con.
‘But have you ever been to one of these evenings?’ the craft lady said. ‘It might not be like you’re thinking it will be.’ She’d been to one, she told him. She’d expected the room to be dark, ‘like how you’d turn off the lights to do a Ouija board. But they kept the lights on,’ she said, and more than anything else, it made her believe in heaven; it made her believe that we go to heaven when we die and that our loved ones are waiting there for us.
And so, on the evening of the event, the craft lady helped Lawrence out of the minibus and into the pub, and then up to the function room whose plastic chairs were set out in rows. She sat beside him and held his hand. ‘See?’ she said. ‘They keep the lights on.’
When everyone was seated, the house lights were lowered. ‘Oh,’ said Lawrence, and the craft lady squeezed his hand. A young man in a plain shirt walked onto the stage. He was going to point out the exit, thought Lawrence; he was going to tell them about the fire assembly point and the happy hour deal at the bar. But this, it turned out, was the medium. Lawrence had been expecting a woman, robes, a bit of shimmer. The audience, sitting in the dim half of the room, gazed expectantly towards the spotlight, towards this man who was preparing to bring messages through from the other side. Lawrence looked around at the rest of his party. Even the ones who had said that they did not believe in this sort of thing were waiting, he reckoned, to hear their name called out or the name of someone they had lost.
‘I have a Mary,’ said the man. ‘Can anyone claim Mary?’
And he said, ‘I’m getting the scent of roses. Who liked roses?’
He strode across the room with his fingers pressed to his temples as if his head ached. ‘There’s a lady here,’ he said, ‘who wants to say she’s sorry. Who’s David?’
It was all such nonsense, thought Lawrence.
‘I’m seeing bluebells.’
The craft lady had let go of Lawrence’s hand so that she could eat the crisps she had got from the bar. He couldn’t smell her perfume; he could just smell smoky bacon.
Much later, Lawrence wondered about the bluebells, but by then he was back at the nursing home, alone in his bedroom, and the medium was long gone.
He writes, as well, to his Uncle Ted. Dear Uncle Ted, he writes, even though Ted did not like Lawrence to call him ‘Uncle’ once Lawrence was no longer a child. ‘Call me Ted,’ he had said, before the accident, after which he did not say it again.
Lawrence writes every month. Each letter says much the same thing as the last one. His Uncle Ted has never written back. Lawrence worries that if his Uncle Ted is not receiving these letters, then should his Uncle Ted want to contact him, he would not know how. He would not know that the houses on Small Street are gone. Lawrence imagines letters from his Uncle Ted delivered to the supermarket car park, blown against windscreens and binned, or blown into puddles, ground beneath tyres.
I am still in the village, he writes, although where we lived on Small Street is a car park now. He does not mention his children, both of them retired now, with children of their own, and even grandchildren.
I want you to know, he writes, that I am sincerely sorry about what happened in the woods. I hope you know that I loved Bertie like a brother. I wish I had woken up that morning and found that it was raining or foggy so that we could not go out hunting, or that we had finished hunting half an hour earlier, when Bertie suggested stopping and coming home for tea, or that I had not taken that final shot at what I thought was something else, an animal in the bushes, or at least that I had missed his heart.
He does not say, He bled so much. I was kneeling beside him, trying to stop the blood coming out. When I finally stood up, I was like Lady Macbeth.
I hope you are well, he says, and I look forward to your reply. He ensures that his postal address is on the letter, and then he signs it, folds it, puts it in an envelope and sends it to Australia. He does not know his Uncle Ted’s address but sends his letters care of the post office. He does not know which city or town his Uncle Ted might be in, so he spreads the letters around. He has sent them to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth; to Adelaide, Wollongong, Townsville and Cairns; to Darwin, Toowoomba, Ballarat and Bendigo; to Canberra, Orange, Coffs Harbour and Broken Hill; to Albany and Albury and Bunbury; to Shepparton, Whyalla, Mount Isa and Mackay; to Rockhampton, Bundaberg, Port Hedland and Port Lincoln; to Maryborough and Alice Springs; to Tamworth and Wagga Wagga. ‘Where are we sending it this time?’ asks the nurse. ‘Outer Mongolia? Timbuktu?’
Lewis says — every month, when Lawrence mentions that he has written his letter — that he very much doubts that Ted is still alive, but Lawrence cites people who have lived to be a hundred and fifteen, a hundred and sixteen. ‘A woman in France,’ says Lawrence, ‘lived to be a hundred and twenty-two.’
Ruth brought him some airmail stationery, the sort where one sheet is both paper and envelope, the blue page thin and delicate like the pressed petals of the bluebells that grow in the woods. Lawrence prefers to use the proper, heavier writing paper, the good, heavy envelopes. It costs him more.
He watches the nurse walk away with his letter. It is possible, he thinks, that his Uncle Ted receives them all, that every letter Lawrence sends him finds him in the end. He imagines them dropping through his Uncle Ted’s letterbox, one after another, wherever he is. He puts away his writing pad, puts the lid back on the bottle of ink and looks again at his pen. He wonders whether his Uncle Ted, if he saw the handwriting on the front of the envelope, would recognise the shade of the ink, the thickness of the line, the characteristics of his old pen, and he thinks, then, of a Stephen King novel that Edie once read, in which a man is bludgeoned to death with his own severed arm.
11. He wants to be seen
BEFORE LEAVING THE house for his appointment at the surgery, Lewis takes his broken spectacles out of his coat pocket and puts them down on the table in the hallway, to remind himself to get them mended. Also on the table is an ill-fitting dental plate that he needs to show to his dentist. The table resembles a small shrine to an old man, or an altar bearing sacrificial offerings so that the gods will look upon him kindly.
Lewis walks with Sydney to the yellow car that is parked by the kerb, in the same space Ruth was occupying earlier. Patting the roof, he says to Sydney, ‘It’s lasted well.’
‘It’s still going,’ agrees Sydney, holding the passenger door open for Lewis, who lowers himself into the front seat, the leather upholstery creaking.
Sydney, getting into the driver’s seat, says, ‘So you read Bliss Tempest?’
‘No,’ says Lewis. ‘It’s not my sort of thing.’
‘How do you know,’ says Sydney, ‘if you’ve never read it?’ It is the sort of thing they say to the boy when he is looking dubiously at a vegetable: How do you know, if you’ve never tried it?