He notices, too, that she is not driving towards the office. She seemed, he thinks, to be in a bit of a rush. He wonders where she is going, what errand she might be running in her little car. And was she wearing a new coat?
He looks at the stone lion standing in concrete at the far end of the path, its head turned towards him, facing the house. It ought really to be watching the gate. They usually come in pairs, he thinks, these guardians of gateways. He only got the one. Ruth used to love that lion. Her pushchair always had to be stopped beside it so that she could reach out and pet its hard head, run her hand over the cold furrows of its brow. There is a layer of lichen on the stone now. It is powdery to the touch.
When Ruth is no longer in sight, Lewis turns away. He goes back into the living room and switches off the television before heading to the kitchen to look at his lawn from the window. He does not think it is dying, except perhaps in certain places where it has been used as a toilet by the neighbourhood’s cats. He should get a dog to keep these intruders at bay. He used to have one, but it got out and was lost, perhaps to the traffic and the council’s waste department, or perhaps it found someone who gave it nicer dog food.
Edie did not much like dogs. She got a kitten, a scrap of a thing that came and went from Lewis’s lap without him noticing. He let it out of the house too soon and they never saw it again.
He opens up the fridge to take a look at what Ruth has left him. She comes every morning, on her way to work. She does administrative work for an arts organisation that has no theatre, no art gallery, not even a café; it is just an office and he does not really know what she does there. Whatever it is, she has been doing it for twenty years. She comes here — letting herself in with her own door key — at the same time every morning. She makes him a cup of her milky tea and leaves a Tupperware tub of soup in the fridge for his dinner. She makes these soups herself, with leftovers, all the vegetables her little boy won’t eat. The soups are grey-brown, the same colour as Ruth’s hair.
There is not much else in the fridge. There is a supermarket in the village, on Small Street, just past the secondary school. It is a perfectly good supermarket and within walking distance but he does not go there. When he was still driving, he once parked for more than the permitted two hours in the car park of this supermarket. A few weeks later, he received a letter stamped with the scales of justice, citing video evidence of his infringement of the rules and fining him heavily. He paid the fine but has not been back to the store since, even though it is the only one that he can get to now. Ruth thinks he is staging a boycott, being stubborn, but really he is just too embarrassed to return to the scene of the crime.
What Lewis really wants is one of Edie’s steak and kidney puddings, her chicken curry, her hotpot. He wants that excellent beef Wellington he had in a restaurant once. He does not remember what restaurant it was, somewhere on a summer holiday perhaps. It was a long time ago. He does not want soup but Ruth brings it anyway and Lewis eats it. He hates to waste it, and hates to see her taking away, with the slightest of comments, his tub of uneaten soup. More often than not he eats it cold, straight from the fridge, minutes before she arrives to take away the empty tub and leave him with another. He prefers pizza. He has discovered the joys of pizza delivery services. He orders Supremes and Delights and they are brought to his door by young men on motorbikes.
He once wondered about getting a motorbike.
Closing the fridge, he looks at the calendar on the wall beside it. Every square is blank except for one, and that one, he realises, looking at the day, at the date, is today. It says: 3 pm. But what, he wonders, is happening today at 3 pm? What else was he supposed to write before he got distracted, by a thought or the doorbell or a cat scratching in the garden? He has no idea if someone is coming or if he is supposed to be somewhere. No one ever comes except for Ruth, and there is nowhere he goes to other than the nursing home and the church on Sundays, and the pub, sometimes, for a shandy and a speciality sausage. He feels a flutter of excitement in his stomach at the thought that something out of the ordinary might be going to happen to him today.
3. When he was a child, he wanted to go to the moon
IN A PHOTOGRAPH on his living room mantelpiece, Lewis is four years old and riding his mother’s tea tray down an icy slope with an almighty grin on his face. He imagines his nose and cheeks pinked by the cold air, although the camera has made them grey. It makes Ruth anxious, this picture; it worries her to see him hurtling down, as if he might still come to harm at the end of the slope, as if he could still break his bones.
Ruth was always a nervous girl, scared of many things — climbing a climbing frame in a playpark, climbing the ladder of a bunk bed, riding a bicycle or being on roller skates, being alone in the dark. Lewis could not stand it, that she did not have guts. He wanted a fearless child. Instead he had a girl who always wanted her mother. He wanted a boy, but he and Edie had left it too late and only had the one child. Perhaps nowadays it would be different, there would be things they could do; they store embryos in freezers, although some fail to survive the freezing, or they explode when thawed. He thinks of Walt Disney, cryonically frozen, to be thawed out in a distant future, although apparently this never happened.
When Lewis was a child, he liked to climb. He got up trees. He imagined being able to jump from up there, to spread his arms and will himself to fly. Instead, up in the branches, he read his comics and books: The Brave Book for Boys and The Schoolboy’s Annuaclass="underline" Tales of Sport and Adventure — hard-covered hand-me-downs, one bright yellow and one with bombers on the front. Lewis, whose name meant ‘famous warrior’, wanted to be the boys in these stories, to have their adventures at sea and up mountains, their encounters with smugglers and bears, their golden age of boyhood; he wanted to at least have their dogs. Above all, the character he most wanted to be was Flash Gordon. He wanted to have Flash Gordon’s bravado and Flash Gordon’s torso, to travel in a rocket ship, to travel in a starship that was faster than light.
His mother did not like him being up in trees. She worried that he would get stuck up there in a storm and then he might get hit by lightning. He never was up a tree, though, during a storm. Once or twice, he was outside when he heard thunder, and he stood still, holding his breath, but he never did get struck by a bolt of high-voltage electricity.
They lived in a different part of the village then. They lived on Small Street, near the secondary school. He can see the very spot from the back bedroom of the house he lives in now. For a time, in this house on Small Street, they lived next door to relatives — his father’s uncle, who moved away when Lewis was young, and his father’s cousin, whom Lewis does not even remember.
Lewis’s back bedroom window is also where he and Edie had stood watching for the Perseid meteor shower. He had thrown the window open to let the night air in, imagining explosions like fireworks. The trails of light were infrequent, though, and hard, in fact, to see at all, and silent. Edie referred to them later, to Ruth, as shooting stars, but they were not stars, as Lewis had been disappointed to discover; they were particles like dust, burning up in Earth’s atmosphere. The comet from which the particles came was long gone and would not be back for something like a hundred and fifteen years. Lewis wonders if Ruth’s boy will live to see it. Probably not, he thinks.