When the moment came — when he was called, while the choir was singing — his father got to his feet and went to the front in his wedding suit. Lewis almost followed him but by the time he’d thought about it, he’d lost sight of his father and Lewis was still in his seat.
While Lawrence was up, he made friends with a local couple. He introduced them to Lewis after the service. ‘This is Lilian,’ he said, of a young woman in a gay dress, and Lewis said, ‘Pleased to meet you, ma’am,’ as if, said Lawrence, shaking his head, he thought he were Elvis Presley. Lewis had put out a hand but Lilian laughed at it, reaching out to pinch his cheek instead. ‘And this is John.’ Lewis, turning to Lilian’s husband, did not say, ‘Pleased to meet you, sir,’ or hold out his hand. He did not say or do anything, he just looked at John, who was looking back at him with bright blue eyes, and Lewis can hardly believe to this day that blue in an iris is an absence of colour. It was so hard not to stare at this startling blue; it was so hard to look away.
Lilian, meanwhile, was saying to Lawrence, continuing a conversation they had started before, ‘You must come. We want you to. Do join us.’
‘It’s very kind of you,’ said Lawrence, ‘but my son and I have a coach to catch.’ He put his hand on Lewis’s shoulder and Lewis prepared to leave, but still these three stood talking and when Lewis and his father went to look for their coach, it appeared to have gone.
‘We don’t live very far away,’ said Lilian, who had walked along with them. ‘Come and spend the night with us.’
‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Lawrence again, and Lewis waited for his father to say, ‘but that won’t be necessary,’ but instead he said, ‘thank you.’
The couple led the way to their car. ‘You’re welcome to stay for as long as you need,’ said Lilian.
‘We’re a bit out of town,’ said John, ‘but I’ll drive you to the train station when you’re ready to go.’
Lewis and his father were driven through what remained of that June day to a house on the outskirts of the city. As he drove, John talked about the help he could do with in the garden, digging up the vegetables, and about the animals they had, so that Lewis was picturing a big house surrounded by land, a long, dusty driveway with chickens running around, a veranda at the front and a number of dogs. He was surprised to arrive at a small house with a square of tarmac at the front and a cramped garden behind, not a dog or a chicken to be seen.
They were shown inside, directly into a sitting room. Invited to make themselves comfortable, they sat down on the large sofa, whose brightly coloured fabric was covered in protective plastic that creaked beneath them. A magnificent chandelier hung from the high ceiling, dominating the small room. Beneath it, on a table, was a goldfish in a bowl.
Lilian went to the kitchen and came back carrying a tray. In order to put it down, she pushed the fish to one end of the table, the water sloshing violently inside the little bowl. She handed out glasses of flat lemonade before sitting down in a plastic-covered armchair. She shut her eyes and for a moment Lewis thought that she had gone to sleep, but then she fanned her face with her short fingers, made an exclamation about the heat, and called for the dog. They talked about the meeting in the stadium. Lewis’s father said, ‘I’m a new man.’
‘I’m full of light,’ said Lilian.
John turned his blue eyes on Lewis. ‘And how about you, Lewis?’ he said.
Lewis, swallowing his flat lemonade, shrugged and said that nothing had really happened to him in there.
‘Don’t you want to give your heart to Jesus?’ said John. ‘Don’t you want to know that you’re going to heaven?’
‘It will come,’ said Lilian. ‘Give it time.’ She called again for the dog. ‘It’s as hot as hell in here,’ she said. Catching her husband’s chiding glance, she added, ‘It really is hot.’
The side window was open and a whirring fan stood near it, facing out, as if to keep the sultry air from getting inside in the first place.
Lilian poured more lemonade and said, ‘This room gets all the sunshine and gets so hot the dog won’t come in here.’ She called again, more insistently, but there was no sign or sound of the dog.
John said to Lawrence, ‘So tell me where you come from,’ and Lawrence told him about the house on Small Street, but he was talking about his childhood, his Uncle Ted, a widower, ‘who,’ he said, ‘I loved more than I loved my own father,’ and his handsome cousin Bertie who was like the brother Lawrence did not have.
Lawrence asked about baptism. ‘Can it even be done at my age?’ he asked.
‘It’s never too late,’ said John.
Lewis was picturing a font, a dribble of water on the forehead, but, said John, it would not be like that. Lawrence would be immersed. When he came out of the water, it would be as if he were entering the world anew.
When they had finished the lemonade, Lilian showed them the spare bedrooms. Of the smaller one, the box room, in which Lewis was to sleep, Lilian said, ‘The window sometimes slides open a crack. If it bothers you, just tell John and he’ll come and nail it shut for you. The dog will sometimes sleep in here so just keep your door closed if you don’t want him to.’
Lewis left the door open. When he woke, wearing no pyjamas, in the middle of the night, he did not know where he was. He thought that he had fallen asleep closer to home. He was remembering the sound of horses’ hooves on the road outside, ringing through the still afternoon, echoing off the houses, sounding like the drum beat of a samba band, as if there were a carnival; he thought that he had heard an ice cream van playing ‘Greensleeves’ in his sleep. When he realised where he was he felt lonely.
Lying in John and Lilian’s spare bed somewhere near Manchester, Lewis listened for the sounds of the city just outside, but he couldn’t even hear the dog. He wanted the night air to come in, bringing the city with it, but the night air was unmoving and even at dawn the only sounds that came in were birdsong and the milkman doing his rounds. Lewis, who wanted to feel that he was on the brink of the city, and who had wanted the dog to come in and sleep on his bed, was disappointed.
In the morning, he expected to leave, but instead, after breakfast, his father offered to help John in the back garden. What they harvested was cooked by Lilian for the evening meal, and then it was bedtime again. When Lewis woke from those dreams of his, he found on the floor a pair of underpants and a T-shirt that did not belong to him.
‘Did you find them?’ asked Lilian, when he got downstairs. ‘I put some of John’s things on the end of your bed. You can wear them while yours are in the laundry.’ And so they stayed another day and another night, and again Lewis slept with both the window and the door slightly open, but he did not see the dog. It seemed to feed at night when the house was cooler. Lilian went from the sweltering kitchen where she laboured to the stifling front room to rest. John spent all day in the small garden, stripped to the waist in the sunshine. He should have been a pioneer farmer, thought Lewis, seeing him resting with one foot on the edge of his spade. He could imagine John standing in the middle of a cornfield in Canada or Australia in the 1800s, holding a scythe or the reins of a horse.
In his garden, John dug up small potatoes and skinny carrots. He picked fruit from the dwarf apple tree and the gooseberry bush, and Lilian turned the fruit into pies with not quite enough sugar in. Lawrence helped him, and Lewis would have helped too but he found it too hot and avoided doing anything much during the day. Instead, he sat on the shady front steps, gazing in the direction of the city or watching the birds flying overhead, watching them land. He thought about migration, about birds that were programmed to fly south to France, and he wondered if they ever wanted to fly further than they should, whether any bird had ever tried to cross the Atlantic and found that it could not get that far in one go.