Free He Wants by Alison Moore Page A

pulled down. Lawrence is not allowed to go into the kitchen. When they find him in there, they take his arm. ‘Inspection time, is it, Lawrence?’ they say, looking at one another. ‘Pass or fail?’ And then they take him back to wherever he was.
    He sees someone in the corridor – a lady, perhaps a nurse going by. Lawrence calls out but she does not hear him, or does not come anyway. ‘I know you’re there,’ he says. He listens, hearing voices, hearing a fly that has got itself stuck to some fly-paper. ‘Where are you?’
    Doris Bolton is sitting a few seats along from him, her small hands gripping the arms of her chair as if the nurses might want to take it away from her, just as they have taken, so she claims, her mother’s silver hairbrush and her gramophone. Her son comes every day, just before teatime. He is very sweet to his mother, although Lawrence is aware of the boy’s reputation and has noticed that some of the nurses are nervous around him. When Doris’s boy leaves, he always takes the trouble to say goodbye to his mother’s friends, as he calls them. He shakes Lawrence’s hand; he knows him by name.
    â€˜Oh,’ says Lawrence.
    Doris is watching a home improvement programme on the television. The workers are in the garden, putting down black polythene to stop the grass and weeds growing through. They are spreading a ton of pebbles on top of the polythene, erecting bamboo fencing and installing a water feature, electrically driven running water. They are laying nonslip decking, putting up waterproof fairy lights and arranging outdoor furniture and pot plants so that the people will have somewhere nice to sit at the end of the day.
    On these makeover programmes, they always go back a year later. Lawrence sometimes wonders if they wish they just hadn’t looked, if they wish they had just done the job – laid the pebbles and the decking, cleaned the limescale off the sink and cleared out the fridge, thrown away the middle-aged lady’s sequined tops and replaced them with the trouser suits that flatter her figure and her autumnal colouring – and then walked away, knowing that their work was done, that they had done some good. But they go back. They wait a year and then return, with the camera already filming as they stand on the front doorstep and knock. They can’t help it, they have to look. They have to see the state of the garden now, the state of the kitchen; they have to see what the lady is wearing. They will find that the weeds are growing through despite the polythene. They will see the cat excrement in amongst the pebbles, the sticks of bamboo that have split and snapped, the half-dead plants flattened by footballs, the decking turning green. They will see the limescale on the sink, the double cream in the fridge. They will discover that the lady has been into the bin bags, digging out a sequined top and wearing it to the karaoke on Thursday nights; they will find the autumnal trouser suits still hanging in the wardrobe, barely worn. They will be disappointed.
    The house on Small Street had a back garden. No wider than the narrow house and only ten feet deep, it backed up against a field whose edges you could not even see and you could almost think of that as an extension of the garden, except that there was a wall between the two, and the field was private with no public right of way. Signs on the gate said, ‘ KEEP OUT ’ and, ‘ DOGS WILL BE SHOT ’. You could see the field though, from the upstairs windows. A size­able tree grew in the nearest corner. Its branches hung over the wall, dappling the bed in which Lewis planted apple pips that never grew into trees, and in which he tried to grow sunflowers faster than the slugs could eat them. The garden did not get much sunshine, but they put the stripy deckchairs out there anyway, next to the sunflower stumps.
    There are other residents in the living room