He Wants by Alison Moore

all this,’ he said to her. ‘How do I stop it?’
    â€˜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