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

she has finished, when his hair is lying in a circle around him like a nest, he peers into the pickled-egg jar, trying to see his reflection, but it is unclear. Staring into the depths of the jar, he says to Miranda, ‘Byron consumed vinegar on a daily basis. He believed in its health benefits. He ate potatoes soaked in vinegar.’
    Miranda looks at the slightly cloudy, pale-yellow liquid inside the jar that holds the eggs. ‘I know someone who drinks his own wee for the same reason,’ she says.
    Lewis does not have his watch on but he feels that time is pressing. Leaving the last half inch of his shandy, he prepares to leave. ‘Thanks for the cut,’ he says to Miranda, reaching up to touch the surprising softness of his crop, the neat bristle around his ears. In the doorway, as he exits, he passes a young man who is on his way in. For a moment, they are holding the same bit of the door; the young man’s hand is on top of Lewis’s. The way he is dressed reminds Lewis of the Teddy Boys of his youth. He never saw a real one but he has seen pictures. Once, when Ruth was in her teens and interested in youth culture, Lewis told her that he had been in Manchester in the sixties, and she was impressed. When she questioned him about it, he was oblique.
    He went back, once, to see Lilian and John, taking Edie and Ruth along. He drove up to Manchester, to the outskirts, trying to remember the route, to recognise where he was. ‘What are you looking for?’ asked Edie, and Lewis could hardly tell her. When, finally, he stood on the steps on which he had spent so many hours just sitting, and when he knocked on the front door, he did not know what he would say. He was expecting Lilian to come to the door, but it was John who answered. Eighteen years old when he had first met John, Lewis was then in his early fifties and realised with surprise that John was not much older than him; he was no more than sixty. He had seemed so much older when Lewis was young. Ruth, at seventeen, did not want to be there – ‘I’ve got things to do, places to be,’ she said, although there did not seem to be anything ­specific – but John turned his bright blue eyes on her and said, ‘Please come in,’ and they all went inside.
    Without making eye contact, the young man who is dressed like a Teddy Boy moves his hand and squeezes by, disappearing into the pub.
    Outside, the pavement is dry. The spit of rain has come to nothing. Lewis touches his pocket, feeling the shape and weight of the little book of nursery rhymes stowed inside. Arsey-versey, back to front, the past will be here soon.
    As he nears his house, he hears the sound of a plane going overhead. Looking up, concentrating on the sky, he does not see the yellow Saab parked by the kerb just in front of his house.

7
    He wants a cup of tea
    T HE WALLS OF the nursing home used to be painted pink, ‘Drunk tank pink,’ said Lewis on one of his first visits. ‘That’s the colour they painted the cells where prisoners are put to cool off.’ You would think, he added, looking around, that everyone in this place had done something wrong and was being given some time to think about it.
    The shade was believed to induce calm. When the manager learnt that the shade was instead suspected of, over time, increasing agitation, the pink was painted over with lavender. The manager hopes that the new colour in the corridors – these lavender tunnels – will prove to be soothing to the residents.
    There are pictures hanging on the walls – small watercolours of boats in harbours, of woodland in the autumn, of setting suns. There is no modern art, nothing that, like a Rorschach image, might be open to interpretation.
    The furniture is rounded or cushioned; there are no sharp corners. Some of the wood is real and when it is polished the whole place smells of Mr Sheen. There is a CD player on an oval table in the corner of