He goes back downstairs. He does not stop to put on his shoes but goes outside in his slippers, pulling the door to behind him. He can feel, through his slippers’ thin soles, the cold, hard ground. He is aware of the inadequacy of his dressing gown against the night’s chill, compared to his warm winter coat. He is missing the familiar warmth of his hair against his neck. His sideburns are keeping his cheeks warm though, and he at least has his underwear on.
Lewis walks — his bad knee aching — up his side of the street. Crossing over the road, he approaches the car. He is sure, now, as he draws closer, that it is Sydney’s car, Sydney’s dog. She is watching him and looks happy to see him. If the car is unlocked, he will fetch her out.
Lewis tries the driver’s door, and it opens. He takes a look at the ignition but the key is not there. He is reaching for the dog when he pauses, looking at her, looking at the brandy barrel around her neck. Instead of leading her out, he gets hold of the brandy barrel, opens it up and finds the spare key inside.
As quietly as he can, he gets into the driver’s seat and closes the door. He is aware of the deterioration in his eyesight since he last sat behind a steering wheel. He slips his hand into his dressing gown pocket for his spare pair of spectacles, but he has lost them again. He will have to drive slowly.
Starting the car, he pulls away from the kerb. He had assumed that a left-hand drive would feel stranger than it does. The Saab might be old but it handles nicely.
He has barely gone any distance when he sees that the front door of his house is standing wide open. Pulling up outside his gate, he gets out, going as quickly as he can up the garden path, with a shooting pain in his knee. He closes the door properly, slamming it. It strikes him that he does not have his door key but there isn’t time to think about that now. The back door is probably still unlocked. He ought not to dash off in that case, knowing that the house might not be secure, but he has to get going. He has turned around and is coming back down his path when he sees Barry Bolton standing outside the toilets, looking down the road at him. ‘You!’ he shouts. ‘Sullivan!’ Lewis gets himself back to the car, climbs in behind the wheel and drives off again, going faster than Barry can run, his adrenalin soaring as he tops twenty miles per hour in the Saab.
His first thought is to turn around and drive up to the nursing home; to take the dog inside to show to his father, who would like to see a golden retriever. But then he realises that Barry might follow him there, and it also occurs to him that visiting hours are over so he would not be allowed in anyway. His father will be in bed; they will all be in bed or on their way. He cannot linger around here though. Instead, he drives out of the village towards the only place he thinks he might find Sydney.
15. He wants a time machine
THE DRIVE IS excruciating. In constant anticipation of someone or something unseen in the darkness running into the road, with his foot ready to jump on the brake and his knee throbbing, Lewis heads out of the village. There is someone on the pavement near the postbox, and someone else strolling alone with an empty dog lead, but when Lewis slows down beside them, he sees that they are not Sydney, and he drives on again.
He gets onto the main road, which will take him from one village to another, or into town if he were to take a different turning. He considers doing it, driving into town, something he has not done for years. He could buy a new coat; he could buy a new suit, or something more fashionable, for going out in. He could find Sydney and take him to the pictures.
There is a cinema in town that shows 3D films. If you wear the correct spectacles, the images come right out of the screen towards you and it seems as if you could touch them or that they might touch you. He has never seen one of these films. Ruth’s boy has seen one. There were birds, said the boy, that flew out of the screen, and shooting stars that fell towards you, and it was like you could reach out and catch them. ‘And could you?’ said Lewis. ‘Could you catch them?’ ‘Well, no,’ said the boy, ‘you couldn’t actually catch them,’ and he looked at his granddad as if he were a fool for thinking it. ‘And there were bubbles,’ said the boy, ‘that popped right in front of your face.’
Another day, Lewis tells himself; he’ll do all that another day, when he has not come out wearing his pyjamas and slippers, when he has not come out without his spectacles and his wallet. Anyone finding him wandering around town like this would only want to send him back to whatever institution he’d come from.
There is a man walking along the verge, wading through the long grass in between the road and the hedge. Lewis slows down beside him and when the man turns towards him, Lewis sees the yellow top beneath the open coat.
Sydney, seeing the Saab and expecting Barry Bolton, runs, hopping awkwardly between the uneven verge and the gutter. Lewis has to drive along beside him with the window down, saying, ‘It’s me, Sydney, it’s Lewis,’ so that Sydney will stop running.
‘What are you doing in my car?’ says Sydney. He is leaning over with one hand on his knee, out of breath, and one hand on his heart. ‘How did you get the car?’
‘I saw it parked outside the public toilet,’ says Lewis, ‘while Barry Bolton was using the facilities. I took it.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I was looking for you,’ says Lewis. ‘I figured you might be staying at your parents’ house.’
‘You figured right,’ says Sydney.
Lewis moves into the passenger seat so that Sydney can get in behind the wheel. Sydney greets his dog, and at the same time pushes her eager face away from him. They drive on, and Sydney tells Lewis all about Barry Bolton, who lives in Nether, the village towards which they are now heading.
‘Does he know where you live?’ asks Lewis.
‘Yes,’ says Sydney.
‘He knows where I live too.’
They drive through the countryside in darkness, the kind of darkness that is not found in cities but is found in the countryside, in between villages. When they pass a sign that says, ‘Concealed entrance’, Sydney, slowing just enough, takes the turning. The dog, staggering, starts to whine.
‘Do you remember,’ says Sydney, ‘the last time you were in this car? I picked you up from Small Street.’
‘It was my first time as well as my last,’ says Lewis. It was early in the summer of 1961, the day Sydney brought round the puppy, Old Yeller. They drove around for a while and then Sydney took Lewis to his parents’ house in Nether, where they sat talking in Sydney’s bedroom. Lewis remembers looking at Sydney’s teeth while he was speaking, at the spike of his canines and the sharp incisors that he had once seen biting into another boy’s ear, Sydney bearing down on the boy like Dracula. Sitting on the edge of Sydney’s bed, looking at Sydney’s teeth and thinking about Sydney fighting in the playground, Lewis said, ‘Have you ever tried jiu-jitsu?’ He had to look away before adding, ‘I’ll show you what I can, if you like.’ At that moment, though, Sydney’s mother had come in with a plate of home-made biscuits and when she had gone neither of them mentioned the jiu-jitsu again. They ate some of the biscuits and then Lewis said, ‘Perhaps I should be going.’
‘Don’t go yet,’ said Sydney. For a little while, neither spoke. They finished the biscuits and then Sydney said, ‘So what do you want to do?’
‘What?’ said Lewis.
‘What do you want to do with your life?’
‘Oh,’ said Lewis. ‘I don’t really know. What about you?’