He hung around in the kitchen, doing small jobs for Lilian, slowly, standing at the sink.
‘How old are you?’ asked Lilian.
‘I’m eighteen,’ said Lewis.
‘He’s already drinking,’ said Lawrence, coming into the kitchen with John, and the three of them stood there looking at Lewis until he had to turn away and still he felt the burn of their gaze on the back of his neck; he thought he could hear their heads shaking.
Lilian made her own lemonade and jam, and John pickled his own beetroot. Lewis had rather expected to discover that they made their own home-brew, but none ever appeared. In fact, Lewis discovered that John was a man who poured gifts of alcohol down the sink, leaving the kitchen rich with the scent of the wasted wine. Lewis had never had wine. He had not yet found anything he liked to drink, unless he mixed lemonade in with lager. He would have liked a cold shandy while he sat out on the steps, like the man of the house, like a rancher, watching the sun set. Instead, Lilian brought out tumblers of juice, saying to him, ‘Take these to the men, would you?’ Lewis took two tumblers around the side of the house, towards the back garden where the men were working. As he approached the corner, he heard their voices, his father and John talking. ‘He’s got this friend,’ his father was saying. ‘He’s a bad influence. He’s got Lewis drinking and I don’t know what else they get up to.’
‘Are they going with girls?’ said John.
‘No,’ said his father. ‘Not girls.’
There was a pause in which nothing was said, and then John said, ‘Ah.’
Later, Lewis ran a deep bath and lay in the water with his shoulders and knees sticking out. He thought about baptism and how one could access a bright new world. Could it happen when you were naked, he wondered, or only when you had your clothes on, a clean pair of pants? Could it happen when you were alone or did someone else have to be there, immersing you? There probably had to be a reading from the Bible; what came to mind were the Thou Shalt Nots, the rules of behaviour: Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet (anything? he wondered), and, Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.
In the morning, they said their goodbyes to Lilian at the door before going with John into Manchester. Lilian called for the dog to come and see them off too, but when they left she was still calling.
Lewis sat in the back of the car, wearing his own underpants and his own shirt. It was early and there was not much sign of life in the streets through which John drove them. He brought them into the city centre just as it began to get lively, delivering them to the bustling station just in time for them to leave.
5. He wants to feel an earthquake
LEWIS HANGS HIS dressing gown on the back of his bedroom door. He puts on clean underwear (You never know, his mother would say, who’s going to see it) and a clean shirt. Buckling the belt of his trousers, he sits down on the end of the double bed and appraises himself in the dressing table mirror. He wears sideburns and keeps his hair long. Edie sometimes tried to persuade him to have a trim, to shave off his sideburns. ‘You’d look so much younger,’ she said. ‘You look like a mountain man.’ (Lewis liked this idea, and tried to see it in his reflection — a mountain man, but with spectacles, and soft hands.) He calls his eye colour ‘hazel’ because he thought he saw a little green in the irises once, perhaps when he had a suntan, but he can’t see it now. He hasn’t had a decent tan for years. Perhaps he ought to just call his eyes ‘brown’, as others do. His spectacles have thick rims that make him look as if he is wearing a disguise, as if his large nose might be attached to the bridge of the spectacles, as if it might be just as removable. Ruth discovered contact lenses and said that he should try them too. Lewis, though, picturing his short-haired, clean-faced, clear-eyed self, thought that he would look like a grown man trying to pass himself off as a schoolboy, like Frédéric Bourdin.
He combs his hair and goes to check his emails. He has his computer in Ruth’s old room, on the desk she used to use for her schoolwork. There is an uncomfortable wooden chair on which he sits. He turns the computer on and waits.
All over Ruth’s bedroom walls, there are posters of young men who were famous when Lewis was a boy. One of them is wearing a lumberjack shirt and has his thumbs hooked into the belt of his denim trousers. He is smiling, showing his neat, white teeth. Lewis’s sister used to have posters of Cliff Richard on her bedroom walls. Every night, she went to sleep listening to his records. Lewis once went with her to a concert and saw grown women fainting when Cliff Richard came on stage in his shiny suit. She would have married Cliff Richard if she could. On her wedding day, she walked down the aisle to ‘Bachelor Boy’.
Lewis has been looking through old albums recently, unearthing photos that he has not looked at in decades — himself and Edie with Ruth as a baby, and before Ruth, in bright honeymoon Polaroids, and prior to that a decade of snaps of Edie in her early thirties, her late twenties, her early twenties when they first met in the library. And in the last album he looked in, he discovered himself as a single young man, and as a boy at school. He studied a photo of his sixth form class, finding his adolescent self standing at the right-hand end of the front row with his eyes closed. Mostly, he struggled to put names to faces, but when he scanned the back row and saw the boy who stood at the left-hand end, he knew that boy’s name instantly. For years, probably decades, Lewis believed that Sydney was the capital of Australia.
Sydney Flynn had not arrived at Lewis’s school until the sixth form. Born abroad, Sydney had moved around a lot with his family, his father being an army man, an older father who had then taken early retirement. Lewis had been struck by Sydney’s height, his bone structure, his blond hair, which came together to give him the look, thought Lewis, of Flash Gordon.
Lewis wanted to have been born abroad, or at least in a city, anywhere but Small Street.
Sydney sat at the back of the class, behind Lewis. Sydney called him Lewie, or Louise. Lewis sometimes felt the nib of Sydney’s pen poking into the back of his neck. He did not know whether Sydney was trying to be friendly or to hurt him. Turning around, he did not know whether to smile or glare.
At home, Lewis would stand in front of the bathroom mirror holding his mother’s hand mirror behind his head, and he would look at these dots of dark ink on the back of his neck, studying them as if they were some kind of message.
Sometimes, in class, when Lewis felt that pen nib touching the back of his neck, and he turned, he found Sydney looking not at him but at his own sums, his head bent low over his work, and when he got home and looked for ink marks on the back of his neck, he would see that nothing was there.
Sydney had a younger brother whom he adored and terrorised. Sydney boasted about waking his brother in horrible ways, setting alarm clocks to go off in the early hours and hiding them around his brother’s bedroom and under the floorboards. His brother came to school with a moustache inked onto his upper lip, or with one eyebrow missing. Lewis imagined what it would be like to be Sydney’s brother, always knowing that when you opened your eyes in the morning, Sydney might be there by your bed, with a pen or a razor in his hand, and you would know that something had happened, or was about to happen.