Sydney once bit a boy’s ear in the playground, in a brutal play fight that Lewis watched, along with at least fifty others who cheered the boys on. Afterwards, Sydney shook the boy’s hand. On another occasion, Lewis saw Sydney take a tin soldier from a younger boy, put it in his own pocket and take it home. The boy made only the slightest protest and looked, thought Lewis, quite proud. Alone at home, Lewis thought about this sinking of teeth into flesh. He thought about this stealing of other boys’ valuables, kept warm inside Sydney’s pockets. Lewis had valuables too but Sydney never stole anything from him; Lewis always had to take them home again.
Sometimes, Sydney cycled past him, singing out, ‘Louie Louie’. Lewis, at that time, had not heard the song. A few years later, he heard the Kingsmen’s version, and at the same time heard the rumour that the song was obscenely sexual, although apparently the only way to make out the words was by playing the single at 331⁄3 rpm. He did this, but he still could not fathom what was sung. It was so dirty, it was said, that the lyrics were investigated by the FBI. It turned out that there was nothing improper secreted in the song, whose lyrics were not filthy but sweet, all about a sailor sailing home to the girl he loved. When Lewis discovered this, he was disappointed.
Edie, who only came to the village in her twenties, never met Sydney, who was long gone by then. When Lewis and Edie finally came to arrange their wedding, Lewis, thinking about his best man, thought of Sydney, his poking pen and the brother whom he terrorised. He imagined that Sydney would be the kind of best man to put Lewis on a long-distance train or handcuff him naked to a lamppost or shave off his eyebrows the night before the wedding, who would have him turning up at the church without his trousers, with his buttocks tattooed. He asked Edie’s brother, a reliable man, to fill the role. On his stag night, Lewis kept waiting for the handcuffs to appear, for something unexpected to occur, but nothing did, nothing happened at all. When the wedding was over, Edie’s brother tied to the bumper of Lewis’s car a pair of old slippers that dragged behind them for miles, all the way from the church hall to the Peak District without making a sound.
When the computer is ready, Lewis opens up his email, finding new messages in bold. Someone he knows — a friend of his or someone he’s acquainted with — keeps sending him pictures, but Ruth says he mustn’t open them, he mustn’t look. ‘That’s not a friend,’ she says. One email says he’s due thousands of pounds, but there is a link he must click on to claim the money, and he daren’t. ‘Incompetent in love,’ says another. He does not want cheap Viagra or SuperViagra; he does not want bigger, harder, longer-lasting erections. He does not want a nineteen-year-old Russian girl or an Australian virgin who wants to talk. He does not want a replica Rolex watch or a fake Gucci handbag. He does not want a pair of modestly priced cufflinks (‘a dream come true’). He does not want these dazzling boons. He does not want the Federal Government of Nigeria to transfer fifteen million United States Dollars into his bank account; he does not want three million, five hundred thousand Great British Pounds from the Manager of Gulf International Bank. He moves these emails to the rubbish bin.
He has complained to Ruth about the spam. ‘I don’t want all this,’ he said to her. ‘How do I stop it?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure you can.’
While she watched, he clicked on ‘Get Mail’, downloading a message that said, ‘Feeble in bed’.
He goes onto the internet. It was in his retirement, and after he stopped driving, that he got a computer and learnt to use the World Wide Web, to google. He checks the news and the weather. He tries to keep up. He becomes anxious if he does not see the news for a while; he wonders what he is missing. He once stayed with Edie on a farm in the Lake District. They had a cottage with no radio, no television, no phone. They saw the farmer’s wife on arrival and then did not see her again. They saw the farmer going by in his tractor, the tyres six feet tall. They saw the odd stranger as they hiked beneath the mountains. Crossing a small stone bridge (with moss growing on its walls and fleece clinging to the moss — straggly white strands, slightly kinked like pubic hairs) they passed a man who smiled at them, opened his arms to the warm day, and said as he passed them, ‘Very fucking pleasant.’
It was indeed pleasant. Their cottage, though, was in the middle of nowhere and they had none of the things they needed for self-catering — no washing-up liquid, no tea towel, no dustpan and brush. (It was only on the day they left that they found a cupboard containing all the things they had needed during the week.) There was no newsagent selling newspapers. Arriving home, they discovered that there had been riots up and down the country, starting in London and spreading like a forest fire to the Midlands and then to the north. On hearing the news, Lewis felt a flush of excitement, and at the same time a touch of disappointment at not having realised it was happening until it was already over.
When Lewis woke up one morning not long after that and realised that Edie had died in her sleep, he felt as if he had come home to find his front door kicked open, his windows smashed, everything gone. He felt as if he had slept through an earthquake.
He does sleep through earthquakes. There was one very recently, with a magnitude of three, right where he lives but he was unaware of it until he read about it in the paper in due course. He would like to experience an earthquake, to feel the ground shaking beneath him, to feel the bed trembling, all the ornaments rattling like something out of an exorcism.
He opens up Google and, with one finger, types in ‘Sydney Flynn’. He clicks ‘search’, and Google returns more than seven million results. He looks through the first few pages but they are not the Sydney Flynn he is after. ‘Sydney Flynn’ is on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Pinterest, YouTube and Google+, but they all seem to be women. He tries some variations on his search criteria, finding an obituary that makes his heart seem to stop, but it is not his Sydney Flynn and he feels his heart start beating again. The only other link that looks promising takes him to a site that says ‘Page Not Found’ and no matter how many times he clicks on the link, he cannot access the page he wants.
He has not spoken to Sydney since the summer of 1961. On New Year’s Eve in the year of the riots, the year Edie died, the school hosted a reunion for pupils who had left fifty years before. Lewis went along, although not in the fancy dress that some people wore for the occasion — wigs, also chest wigs beneath wide-collared shirts, flared trousers and platform shoes. They’d worn nothing like this at the time, or ever in their lives, so why do it now, wondered Lewis, when they were old men, when it just made them look foolish? Lewis wore his normal clothes. He wore a clean shirt (whose collar was nearly as wide as some of the men’s joke shirts). He combed his hair (which was almost as long as some of the men’s centre-parted ‘hippy’ wigs). He thought he might see Sydney there. The few familiar faces, though, were those he already knew from the pub, the old boys with whom he drank in The Golden Fleece — because back then he could still go there. They were the ones who had stayed in the village, and some of their children had stayed, and some of them had grandchildren at the school. Lewis wandered into the school hall. The houselights were down. Up on the stage, a DJ was just getting started. A disco ball had been hung from the ceiling and as it spun, spots of light crossed the empty dance floor and it was like a sky full of shooting stars. (This was the dinner hall really, transformed for the evening. Lewis could almost smell — through the illusion of the music and lights — the food and the mop bucket. He imagined stray chips and peas on the floor, being trodden on by dancing couples and adhering to the soles of their shoes.) He kept thinking, as he walked around the room, that he heard people saying Sydney’s name, but he did not see him anywhere. Towards the end of the evening, when Sydney had not shown up and the DJ had come to the end of the 1960s tunes and was playing ‘The Final Countdown’, Lewis left the school hall. He walked away from the couples who were slow-dancing beneath the spinning disco ball, and headed down the corridor towards the classrooms, in which his father had taught English Literature until he could no longer bear to, and in which Lewis had taught RE for more than forty years, and into which Sydney had arrived more than half a century before. It was almost midnight. There would be a pantomime flash and a BOOM! and a cloud of smoke and glitter and, like a golden coach that was really a pumpkin, the dance hall — with the houselights turned on and the disco ball turned off (Pack up the stars, thought Lewis, dismantle the sun) — would become, once more, the place where school dinners were eaten.