Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

  Val

  I’m too old for this, thinks Val, as she clings wearily to Alan’s waist, and the scooter buzzes along like a huge wasp, and the air stinks of petrol, and her head aches, and more and more and even more cherry orchards and cows and other rural stuff go by as they file along the A-whatever-it-is with all the rest of the bank holiday traffic.

  ‘All right?’ shouts Alan, grinning over his shoulder.

  ‘Yeah, great,’ she says. She should have insisted on the train. She should have not worn the pink batwinged mohair sweater, which is picking up flying crud from the road, and which Alan slopped tea on the sleeve of when they stopped for a breather at a snack van in a lay-by two hours ago. She should have not said yes in the first place to going to Margate. He’s a nice enough lad and they’ve been smiling at each other in the Co-op for weeks but he’s only nineteen; and when she turned up this morning, as arranged, at the garage by the railway arches, it turned out he was, if anything, the oldest one in the little crowd of boys-with-scooters and girls-with-beehives who’re going to Margate. She feels middle-aged compared to the sixteen-year-old dollybirds, and don’t they let her know it. They’re in the middle of a whole excited tribal thing, and she’s not dressed right, and they treat her like someone’s interloping auntie.

  Alan says something, but a lorry overtakes and the words get lost in the grind and the roar.

  ‘What?’ she shrieks.

  ‘I said, we’re nearly there! Only another coupla miles! But there’s this great caff! Where we always stop off for a bite! Fancy it?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes! Great! Whatever you like!’

  And in fact they and their particular flock of scooters are already pulling off the road into a car park which is, oh of course, absolutely choked with scooters. The caff is a red-brick building the size of a pub, with picture windows and a married couple behind the counter on whose faces can be read the reserved wariness of those who aren’t sure about young people these days. But they are still selling them egg and chips and beans on toast and orangeade and transparent cups of milky Nescafé as fast as they can get the till to open and close. They are still making a living from the half-crowns and ten-bob notes of the slightly threatening young. She could catch their eye; she won’t. Instead she goes to the ladies while Alan’s lot fold excitedly into the company of a mob of other kids who look just like them. There are girls jammed in the loo stalls in twos and threes, twittering and laughing, and she has to push to get in front of the mirror to repair her mouth, next to a sneery little madam who’s got so much eyeshadow on she looks like a raccoon.

  But when she threads her way back out, and locates Alan over by the jukebox, she finds that another lad has come and joined the group. He’s sitting on the plastic chair with his knees wide apart, like he doesn’t care how much space he claims in the world, even though the caff is burstingly full and it’s making everyone else shuffle up. His only responses to what’s being said to him are little tilts of his head, and uh-huhs and mmms from bruised-looking lips. He’s gazing straight ahead into space with his big dark eyes, as if he’s bored senseless; and he’s beautifully dressed. No, beautifully, in a peacock-blue suit with narrow lapels and drainpipes that must have cost him weeks of wages, ’cause it has to have been made to measure. He’s got high cheekbones and feathery black hair and a nasty look, and he’s the best thing she’s seen in basically forever. Neville-the-louse, before he scarpered, did not look this good. Compared to this one, it is suddenly clear that Nev’s wide-boy act, which at the time was all too successful at getting him into her knickers, was only a very approximate and second-rate thing. And poor old Alan, for sure, looks as appetising next to him as a piece of tinned ham, well meaning, sweaty, sitting there all pinkly in his Aertex shirt.

  ‘Oh; there you are,’ says Alan. ‘Got you a bacon sarnie. This is Mike – turns out he’s from Bexford too.’

  Mmm, says Mike, looking at her.

  ‘Funny that we’ve never run across him, really, innit,’ says Alan.

  Mmm, says Mike, still looking.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Val, looking back. ‘I’d remember.’

  Mmm, says Mike.

  One of the beehive girls snickers.

  ‘Well; right,’ says Alan, glancing from face to face. ‘We should be on our way, shouldn’t we, pet? If you don’t mind eating as you go.’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ says Val.

  ‘She don’t look like anyone’s pet,’ says Mike unexpectedly. ‘Not to me, mate.’ His voice is full-on nasal South London, as if it’s being broadcast in sawtooth vibrations from a point between his black eyebrows. When he finishes he presses his lips together and curls them.

  ‘Er, anyway …’ says Alan.

  ‘No. But. Are you, then?’ says Mike. ‘Are you his pet? Are you, like, a budgie? Or one of them little dogs?’

  ‘No,’ says Val.

  Mmm, says Mike.

  ‘I’ve got a headache,’ says Val. ‘Really splitting. In fact.’

  ‘Yeah?’ says Mike.

  ‘Yes,’ says Val; and if she could, she’d like to pull the dirty coil of the ache out of the side of her head, and step up to him, and shove it into his forehead with the heel of her hand, just where the words seem to buzz, so that the sick hollow feeling is something they share. So that both their heads are adjacent chambers of queasy vacancy.

  ‘Shame,’ says Mike, raising his eyebrows. He gets up suddenly, in a movement as bonelessly graceful as if he were on strings like a marionette, and he holds his hand out towards her face. Just for a moment it’s like he’s read her mind, and he’s reaching out with finger and thumb to actually take the headache, too impatient for her to bring it to him. But he isn’t. He’s holding out a pill to her, blue and triangular.

  ‘Try that, then,’ he says. ‘That’ll sort you. Maybe.’

  ‘Oi!’ says Alan, uncertainly.

  But she takes the pill and swallows it straight away, dry, without even stopping to think, tasting the chalky coating as she squeezes it down her throat; and Mike, not looking round, raises his empty hand to shoulder height and shakes his finger at Alan behind him, once. Nu-uh.

  ‘See ya,’ he says, and stalks out.

  Back on the scooter, Alan’s stiff damp back in front of her again, Val attempts a quick conscience check. She doesn’t know Alan, not really. She’s not his girlfriend. She’s not – she just— But they’re going downhill, the white boarding-house stucco of Margate is rising around them, there’s a grainy glitter ahead that is the sea, and also the pill (whatever it is) is coming on, express-train fast on her empty stomach. The headache is going, oh yes; the headache is a cloud she left behind her some time, some long time ago; the thing she was trying to worry about likewise slid out of view ages back. This is not a day for worrying. The sun is out. The colours on all the parked cars shine as if freshly glazed and enamelled. Wherever she turns her head, something astonishing and fresh and remarkable snags her attention, and sends her off on a circuit of gloriously rapid thought, from which she returns with a start much later, surely much much later, when the next glint from a dry-cleaner’s sign or the crisp crisp aspidistra in a window reels her attention back in. With a spring, with a bound, with an elastic snap and thwunk and hurl as if the whole bright world were a pin-table in a pub, and her thoughts were doinging and flying and here-there-here-there-here-there hammering to and fro between rubberoid bumpers. Or—

  Alan parks the scooter on a piece of waste ground already crammed with others. She has never noticed before how the branching mirrors on the scooters give back a flitter of light, a mosaic of little reflected samples of everything around, a smashed ocean ingeniously cached in round-cornered dishes on stalks.

  ‘It’s all pinball, innit?’ she says.

  ‘You what?’ says Alan.

  ‘You look like ham,’ she says, ‘nice ham and of course I met you in the Co-op but you weren’t on the meat counter you were in hardware, what a
shame, but to tell you the truth even if you had been I wouldn’t fancy you, no offence but there it is.’

  ‘What’s up with you, girl?’ says Alan, blushing.

  ‘She’s had a dexy, hasn’t she?’ says one of the beehive girls.

  ‘I’m having fun, is all,’ says Val, ‘first time today to be honest, you know what Alan, Alan, Alan my old mate, you know what, you should lighten up, you should take things with a bit of what’s the word, what is the word, it’s on the tip of my tongue, don’tcha hate it when that happens, it’s like a hole in your brain innit, ha ha, mind like a Swiss cheese, me. Or a colander.’

  ‘Fuck,’ says Alan, concisely.

  ‘You should sit her down somewhere, shouldn’t you? Get her some tea or something. You can tell she’s not used to it.’

  ‘We’ve just got here,’ says Alan. ‘I don’t want to be a flaming nursemaid. I wanna get down the front. Can’t you girls keep an eye on her? Go on.’

  ‘You’ve got a nerve, haven’t you? You brought her – you sort her.’

  ‘Go on, please. Just for a few minutes. Go on.’

  The chief beehive girl looks at Alan in disgust, and spits out her gum onto the back of a finger whose nail is lacquered postbox red. Then she sticks it demonstratively onto the seat of the scooter.

  ‘Steady on,’ says Alan. ‘Watch out for me upholstery.’

  ‘Upholstery!’ cries Beehive Girl, and she and her mates scream with laughter.

  ‘Hey,’ says Val, who has been waiting an inconceivable age for this very boring conversation to finish. ‘Hey. Hey hey hey hey hey. You know what? Fuck you.’

  ‘Oh, charming, I’m sure.’

  ‘Val—’ begins Alan.

  But Val, smiling broadly, steps backwards into the crowd surging along the pavement, and that’s all she has to do. The bank holiday flow takes her, and Alan’s worried face, and the girl’s scornful one, recede on the instant, dwindle to pink crumbs, to nothing. Out of sight, out of mind: immediately her eyes are full again with other stuff, and the crowd bumps her along sustainingly, as if an ocean has taken her by both elbows and lifted her off the shingle, with a pluck and a pull and a sway.

  There’s the real ocean, actually. All the side streets are pouring people down onto the curving road that runs along the front, and where she turns – where she is turned, carried along by the mass – you can see the pier sticking out into the hot blue water and beyond it, the whole curve of Margate Beach, hundreds of yards of it, and all of it thronged with the spicules of human bodies. On the roadway they sway to and fro, loose-woven and relatively fast, holding up the traffic. Out in the sea the crowd frays into individual clumps of bathers, little kids in rubber rings, grannies holding up their dresses as they paddle their bunions. But in between, the people are packed tight and only sluggishly convulsing: tight as the bristles on a brush. Three zones of density, three different kinds of movement. She sees them all with a kind of contented impatience. Anything she looks at, she feels she’s been looking at for a long time, too long. She jerks her gaze onwards and as soon as it snags again it’s been snagged forever. But she doesn’t want to do anything but take in this day in more and more of these dragging instants.

  She sees: the gloss on the papier-mâché cheek of Judy as Mr Punch swings his stick into it in the booth by the pier-end while the watching children roar wail clutch their heads in consternation. She sees: women five years ten years twenty years no years older than her, swabbing babies wiping noses towelling hair passing sandwiches. She sees: sleeping dads angry dads patient dads reading-the-Racing-Post dads. She sees: encampments of families arranged in deckchairs unto the third and fourth generation, temporarily connecting again on Margate sands everything they permanently connect at home. She sees: a pat of bright-yellow vanilla ice cream sticking up from the tarmac between its wafers at the angle of the sinking Titanic, having dropped from the sticky starfish hand of a child. She sees: the swaying blue-serge bulk of policemen buttoned hotly into their uniform jackets, patrolling along the roadway one heavy leg at a time. She sees: the paler blue nylon shirts of the police reserves, standing round the vans that brought them, waiting for trouble, each topped with a blue-and-silver Noddy helmet where sunlight winks and burns. She sees: the bristles on the high-shaved pigskin necks of the men forty and older who’ve come to the seaside in their ties and who’re loitering around the police vans like supporters’ clubs, stubs of fags between forefinger and thumb, waiting for there to be some scandalous disorder, so they can cheer on order’s restoration.

  And in between all this, greatly outnumbered in the granular mass of needle-people, particle-people, people packed close like cress growing on a windowsill, little rivulets of young men are moving, clumsily, uncertainly, looking for each other and also waiting. For what? Attention. Without attention they grin sheepishly, bump shoulders, wipe their sunglasses, pass chips to each other, and drop them on the beach and pick them up and try to blow the crunching sand grains off them. With it, though – when the families turn to look, or the older men in ties do, or the police start towards them – they seem to know what to do. Activated by disapproval, they perform fighting in little clumps and clusters. They push at each other in wavering rucks. They knock each other down and roll over and over, disturbing the deckchairs and trying to free their arms enough to aim clumsy punches. Here and there, one acquires a bloody nose. Mums tut and stand up; the men in ties shake their heads tightly; the hot policemen wade in and pull the boys away by their collars, with their arms flapping and their shoes dragging runnels through the sand. It’s not exciting to watch. It’s like the slow heaving as a pan of porridge comes to the boil. A porridge-boil of an event.

  But then, in one of the struggling groups, her eye picks out a different kind of movement: someone in peacock blue who is in the ruck but doesn’t seem to be weighed down by it, who is moving quickly, precisely, elegantly. What looks like a metal comb glitters at the end of his deft blue arm, and where it goes it cuts and cleaves a path, and the strugglers divide. Looking down over the railings at the edge of the esplanade, Val sees Mike: and pausing momentarily with the chin of a groggy bloke with a quiff tenderly poised on the outstretched upturned fingers of the combless hand, he sees her seeing. He grins. Something twists and tightens under her ribs, something else throbs and loosens in her groin. Time pulls itself together with a start, and instead of passing as a series of frames held in dragging delay, suddenly consents to flow. Flowingly, Mike spins and leans and kicks the groggy boy underneath his chin with a pointed winkle-picker. Something crunches, probably; there’s blood, probably; but it’s a little way away and the kick flings the bloke off into the melee and he vanishes as if he’d never been, leaving all her attention filled by the neat sweet movement of the kick, and Mike turning back to her like a dancer, his hands theatrically spread, as if to say, d’you like my trick?