He Wants by Alison Moore Page A

‘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.
    After shutting down the computer, Lewis sits for a while looking around Ruth’s room. Her shelves are empty of the classics that belong there, the stories he read as a boy, stories in which you can walk through a mirror or through the back of a wardrobe or climb to the top of a tree and find an unlikely and magical land. He used to try it, half closing his eyes and stepping forward, walking so hopefully, with such desire, into his mirror, into the back of his wardrobe. He could never get in. He read these stories to Ruth when she was little, and he supposes she has taken them to read to her boy. In the children’s television programmes she used to watch, a man passed through a changing room door into another world; and a boy, put to bed by his mother, used his torch to open up a portal in his bedroom floor, sliding with his dog down a helter-skelter into Cuckoo Land.
    She has left the posters. Where Ruth lives now, she has magnolia walls hung with monochrome studio portraits of her family. These men in their unbuttoned lumberjack shirts, these men with whom she was briefly in love when she was young, grin down at Lewis now.
    A dreamcatcher dangles from the ceiling.
    He looks at his watch, and at the same time removes it from his wrist. It aggravates the skin where his arm got burned and increasingly he finds himself leaving it off.
    It is almost opening time. Not much more than a year ago, he might have been going to The Golden Fleece now, but not any longer. These days he goes to another pub in the opposite direction. It is not as popular with the locals but Miranda is friendly. He thinks that he would like to be able to say to Ruth, when she comes round in the morning, that he did go out of the house, and not just to the bin.
    Leaving his watch next to the computer, he gets up out of the uncomfortable chair and heads downstairs.

6
    He does not want the sausages
    A T THE BOTTOM of the stairs, Lewis stops to take his coat down from the peg. The buttons are coming off –