When he sent another letter, she recognised the stationery and his handwriting straight away. Norman was at his desk, looking at her without seeing her while he talked on the phone. Using a pair of scissors as a letter opener (thinking of her granddad and the real and rather fine letter opener that lived on a small table inches from his letterbox in the house on Small Street) she sliced open the envelope. ‘What have you got there?’ said Norman, whose phone call had finished and who was watching her, and she wondered if it was just the care she had taken with the envelope that made him ask, or perhaps she had been smiling. ‘Just junk,’ she said, and when he wasn’t looking she stole it into the soup bag at her feet.
Sydney told her, in the letters he sent, that he had grown up not far at all from where she was; that he had gone to school in the village in which she worked (the village in which you work — and live?, he wrote). He worked, he said, in the prison library and spent a lot of time reading, and writing; he was a published writer, he said, and Ruth imagined a poem published in a village newsletter, as one of hers had once been. He said that when he got out, when he was a free man, he wanted to travel all over the world. She is not sure he’ll be able to, with a criminal record. She expects that many countries will turn him away.
When, some months later, she began a relationship with John, she stopped writing to Sydney, and eventually heard nothing from him until he wrote to say that he was coming out of prison (the first thing I’ll do is go and get my dog) and would like to meet up. By then, Ruth was married, and she’d had a son. (Full of pethidine, she’d been split in two without feeling the pain.) At first, she thought she wouldn’t go, that she wouldn’t meet him, but this morning she set off in her car, in a new red coat, and she knew that she would go to the café after all.
She picks up the phone again, dials the printers and listens to the ringing for a while before replacing the receiver.
Sydney picked the venue, suggested the date and time. She wonders why he changed his mind. That might have been him sitting on the bench, getting a good look at her first. She feels rather foolish.
She is eating her apple when she suddenly thinks, ‘It was a scam. He was just getting me out of the house so that he could burgle me.’ And then she thinks, ‘But he wasn’t getting me out of the house, he was getting me out of work. He doesn’t know where I live.’ Frowning, she finishes the apple. There were girls at school who would eat the whole thing, the core, the pips, the calyx. She found it astonishing. She throws her core away.
Norman, returning from his meeting, settling himself at his desk, says, ‘Did your friend show up?’
‘What?’ says Ruth, looking up quickly.
‘A friend of yours was here, asking for you. I thought it was your dad at first, because of his age. Is he a family friend?’
‘What was his name?’
‘Stanley or Sidney, something like that. I told him you were at home waiting in for something. I asked if he knew where you lived and he said he did. He didn’t come and see you?’
‘No,’ says Ruth. She wonders why he said he knew where she lived. Just so as not to appear suspicious, she supposes, having come to the office pretending to be a friend, when in fact, no doubt, he was hoping to burgle it in her absence. Presumably, he was in cahoots with the man on the bench whose job it was to let Sydney know that she was safely installed in the café.
‘Where are we with the print? Is it ready?’
‘There’s no one there,’ says Ruth. ‘No one’s picking up the phone.’
‘They must be there,’ says Norman. ‘I want that print today. If they’re not picking up, you’d better go there in person.’
Ruth puts on her coat (‘New coat?’ asks Norman) and picks up her handbag. As she heads through the door, Norman calls out to her, ‘Are you going anywhere near a bakery?’
‘No,’ says Ruth.
She steps outside, into the cold, fresh air, and as her feet hit the pavement she recalls an evening the previous week when she got the feeling that she was being followed home from work, although, whenever she turned to look behind her, she could see no one there, and nothing happened.
She gets into her car, and into her mind comes the possibility that it was Sydney that evening, following her home so that he would know where she lived and could break in while she was wasting her time in that strange little café. Except that she was not going home; she was on her way to her dad’s to look at his computer. He’d been getting emails he didn’t want. ‘They’re still sending those emails,’ he said, as if they were like nuisance calls, somebody hounding him. She does not usually visit him in the evening, but she had not been surprised to find him right where she had left him that morning, in his armchair. She thought at first that he was praying, the way his head was bowed towards the lamplight, but he was asleep.
She turns around, no longer heading for town, heading instead towards her dad’s house, worrying about the possibility of a break-in, and the likelihood — Ruth, in her little car, speeds up — that her dad would have been at home at the time, the burglar giving him a surprise.
14. He wants to see two men wrestling naked on the carpet
LEWIS STANDS FOR a minute outside the nursing home, in the darkening car park. He considers going back inside, braving the woman who grabs at his wrist as he goes by, but instead he walks home.
He goes slowly, resting often, leaning on a lamppost, a bin, a low wall, pushing his tongue against a shard of walnut stuck in his tooth. He wonders if Sydney will come back.
He feels his mobile phone — the one Ruth gave to him for emergencies — trembling against his thigh. He puts his hand into his trouser pocket and realises that the phone is still in the kitchen drawer, no doubt with the battery run down. The trembling he felt against his leg was a phantom; it was his body playing tricks on him.
The tune the phone plays when someone is trying to get in touch with him is something Ruth put on there, or else it came with the phone. It is the same tune they play in the doctor’s waiting room and down the phone when they have you on hold and when the ice cream van is coming. It is as if it is the only song there is, the only piece of music in the world.
When Lewis opens his front door and finds someone standing in his hallway, it takes him a moment to adjust to the fact that it is not Sydney but Ruth.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ she says, and her cursing, her saying ‘hell’ like that, makes him flinch. Lewis has never spoken that way. He thinks of Sydney saying Jesus fucking Christ. What if he were to talk like that? He imagines saying to her now, Jesus fucking Christ, Ruth. Chill out. That’s how they talk, the young people: Chill out. Take a chill pill.
‘I thought something had happened to you,’ says Ruth.
Lewis has to wait for her to take a few steps back before he can get inside and close the door behind him. ‘Nothing’s happened,’ he says.
‘You’ve had your hair cut,’ she says. ‘And you’ve done something else as well.’ She studies his face while Lewis looks over her shoulder into his house. ‘Where are your glasses?’
‘They got broken,’ says Lewis, moving past her towards the stairs, where he sits down to take off his shoes.
Ruth stands over him. ‘I’ve been on the phone to everyone,’ she says.