He Wants Read Online Free PDF Page B

told Lawrence that she wanted to marry him, he ignored her, or he found some reason to leave the room.
    In her teens, Ruth seemed interested only in pop stars and film stars who were either very old or dead. She never seemed to have a real boyfriend. One summer, during a family holiday at Butlins, she developed a crush on the ageing cabaret star. When they got home, she ran away, heading back to Bognor Regis to be with him. She was home again a week later and never mentioned him again. When, in her thirties, she married John, Lewis thought it might be a similar whim and has been waiting for it to pass, even though she was pregnant not long afterwards and that was years ago. Lewis does not find it easy to accept their dinner invitations but he adores the child. He had been expecting another girl, but it turned out to be a boy, the boy that he and Edie never had.
    Lewis has tried to give the boy what his own father gave to him. He has attempted rambles. The boy walks along holding on to his toy binoculars through which one can look and see everything far less clearly than before. Like Ruth, though, the boy is anxious. Hoping to toughen him up, Lewis has instead given the boy a fear of bulls. Trying to capture a newt in a jar, Lewis trod on the creature, bursting its bright yellow belly, while the boy stood watching. To teach him how to climb a tree, Lewis helped the boy into the lower branches of one, and then got them both up onto the next branch and then the next, lifting and climbing, lifting and climbing, branch by branch without stopping to look down, until they were just about as high as they could go and they perched there, feeling proud of themselves, watching the insects that crawled along the ridges and valleys of the bark. It was only when the boy said that he wanted to get down again and Lewis had to contemplate the descent, that he realised the difficulty of it, of getting both himself and the boy safely down to the ground. He kept them up there for as long as he could before painstakingly bringing the boy down, scraping the skin from his limbs and afraid, the whole time, of plummeting. Like Ruth, the boy has a poor sense of balance. ‘Did you not think,’ said Ruth, later, inspecting the boy’s wounds, his sprained ankle, ‘about what you would do when you got up there? Did you think you could just stay there, the two of you, all night, or for ever?’ When the boy hurts himself, he cries as if he might never stop. On another occasion, when Lewis returned the boy to his mother with a toenail split down the middle, Ruth said to Lewis, as if he knew nothing about children, as if he had none of his own, ‘Children his age have a fear of being damaged.’
    â€˜He’s only three,’ said Lewis. ‘He won’t remember this.’
    The shortness of the boy’s memory is astonishing. His mother asks him if he wants to go to Pizza Hut for tea, and he says yes, so she tells him they will all go to Pizza Hut for tea. She puts on the boy’s coat so that, she says, he will be warm on the way to Pizza Hut. They leave the house and get into the car so that, she tells him, they can drive to Pizza Hut. When they have been driving for a minute or two, he turns to his mother and asks her, ‘Where are we going?’
    When the broken toenail lifted after a few weeks, the skin underneath looked unsettlingly vulnerable. The new nail grew back a long time ago but the boy still mentions it.
    The boy is now almost the same age as Lewis is in the photograph on the mantelpiece. ‘I’ll take him sledging,’ thinks Lewis. ‘When it snows I’ll take him sledging on a tea tray.’
    Also on the mantelpiece are a handful of birthday cards – one from Miranda, one from his father that says ‘Joy’, one from Ruth that says, ‘You’re 70!’ It reminds him of Danny DeVito in Throw Momma from the Train shouting to his mother, ‘You’re alive!’