Read Online He Wants by Alison Moore - Free Book Online Page A

has won nothing yet. ‘The minute I do,’ she says, ‘I’m out of here.’ Edie used to play at work, in a syndicate. At least once, maybe twice, they won ten pounds and shared it between them.
    Lewis asks about the sausages.
    â€˜We’ve only got vegetarian,’ she says.
    He makes a face.
    â€˜Pork and black pudding next week.’
    â€˜I’ve never had black pudding.’
    Miranda puts his drink down on the bar and turns to another customer who has come in, who is asking for Goldschläger. ‘We don’t have that,’ says Miranda. They watch the man turn away and then Miranda says to Lewis, ‘Have you ever had Goldschläger?’
    â€˜No,’ he says.
    â€˜It’s a Swiss liqueur,’ she says, ‘with bits of gold in it, flakes of gold leaf.’ As she says this, she is touching the flimsy gold necklace that she wears around her neck, tapping the tiny crucifix against her throat.
    â€˜Have you ever had it?’ asks Lewis, taking a sip of his shandy.
    â€˜No,’ she says.
    Lewis shakes his head. What kind of a man, he thinks, walks around asking for Swiss liqueurs with bits of gold in? He stands at the bar with his drink, thinking about the things he’s never had and never will.
    â€˜What are you going to have, then?’ asks Miranda.
    â€˜I don’t want the vegetarian ones,’ he says. He reaches for a menu and Miranda moves down the bar to serve someone else. Without his spectacles, though, he cannot read it. When Miranda comes back, Lewis says to her, ‘I haven’t got my spectacles. What else have you got?’
    â€˜Home-made steak and kidney pudding,’ she says, and Lewis brightens up. ‘But I just sold the last one.’
    Lewis turns to look at the man who is moving away from the bar, who is scanning the room for a table he wants, and Lewis sees, with a rush of indignation, that it is him, the Goldschläger man, who has decided to eat instead and is settling down now at a corner table, waiting for his suet pudding to arrive.
    The pub uses a local butcher. They know exactly, they say, what is in their meat products. Lewis remembers when Ruth went on a school trip to France and was given sausages that were – she discovered after eating them – made of horsemeat. She was furious, and Edie was furious, and Lewis pretended to be furious too. But when, more recently, the news broke that horsemeat had been found in frozen meat products, Lewis went to the supermarket, wondering about buying some. He was disappointed to find that they had already been removed from the freezers.
    Lewis, for his lunch, has a pickled egg. When Miranda is not busy, she comes and stands near him. ‘Let me cut your hair,’ she says.
    â€˜I haven’t had my hair short since I was in my teens,’ says Lewis.
    â€˜I’ll take years off you.’
    â€˜It was halfway down my back when I got married.’
    â€˜Let me take the ends off,’ she says, walking away and returning with a pair of heavy scissors, snipping at the air as she approaches.
    It was touching his shoulders when he met Edie.
    â€˜Cut it to my shoulders,’ he says.
    She pulls out a chair, sits him down, and gives him a haircut right there in the bar. Long hanks of grey fall onto the carpet, and he has the sense that she is chopping the grey off, that when she has finished what will be left will be brown.
    â€˜Cut it short,’ he says.
    She is cutting it to the nape of his neck when she says, ‘Have you had this mole looked at?’ Standing aside, she touches it with the tip of her long scissors, like a weather girl pointing out a weather front, and Lewis remembers his three o’clock appointment and what it is for.
    â€˜I’m having it cut out,’ he says, ‘this afternoon.’
    â€˜That’s good,’ she says.
    He notices that she completes his haircut without touching the back of his neck.
    When