Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

  Shrug.

  He hasn’t lost interest, though. He goes on looking down at her, and puts a hand experimentally on her bum. She twitches it away.

  ‘Get off, I’m listening.’

  ‘You really are, aren’cha?’ he says, smiling.

  Not for long, though. Willy Reeves’s set is over, and they’re calling for her. The Bluebirds are pushed aside by the stampede required to get the Tearaways on stage. It isn’t just the three of them, on vocals. They also need, to get the Spector-ish sound they’re after, live, the guitars and the rhythm section and the brass, all played as a favour by blokes they know from the studio circuit, backing musicians like themselves who’ve turned out to help see if the Tearaways can move on up from backing to headlining. No one is going to get rich tonight. The Pelican’s payment for the gig is getting split nine ways. In strict cash terms, they’d all do much better just turning up, prompt and professional and self-effacing, for another session laying down the harmonies for Miss Springfield. But you’ve got to try, haven’t you? You’ve got to find out if you have it in you to be the one the crowd’s eyes focus on.

  Now they’re in the tent of light. There’s the song they want to be a single, but they thought they’d better lead up to it, and get people going a bit first, if they can. So they open with ‘Mockingbird’: home ground for them, at least home ground in their old role as the chicks in a row at the back somewhere. Brian on bass starts up, deep with some echo on; they get the kinkily fabulous hip-sway going; the feet that are all they can see of the audience follow into tentative motion. Viv, slightly uncertain taking the lead, launches into call-and-response, and Jo and Lizzie sing it back to her.

  ‘Mock! Yeah!’

  ‘Ing! Yeah!’

  ‘Bird! Yeah!’

  ‘Yeah! Yeah!’

  Then a spurt of drums, and Terry and Nigel lift the cornets to their lips and loose a shining blare with crisp corners. And the feet in the front row begin to dance in earnest, and their own hips settle into the groove, and all together they sing:

  Mockingbird, everybody! Have you heard,

  Have you heard?

  The trumpets are golden. The trumpets are golden, and as she head-tilts right, left, right, she discovers out of the corner of her eye that though the wings have emptied of all the other Bluebirds, Frogface is still standing there, and she would swear that he is listening. To her.

  t + 35: 1979

  Ben

  It was the poster that did it, he tells himself. He was having one of his quiet times, with his thoughts only subject to a nervous ripple now and again, like the river surface when the tide is just on the turn, and the Thames does a slow grey boil on the spot, creasing and wrinkling. Manageable.

  But then on his day off, the day before yesterday, he was on the Tube, and somewhere when he was changing trains he found himself in front of one of those walls where they’ve stripped off the top layer of the posters ready to paste up something new, and some of the old layers below have ripped away too in strips and gouges. A Tube-palimpsest faced him: a concave slab glue-stippled, mildew-spotted, a dog’s breakfast of previous attractions in thirty-two shades of rotted brightness, showing by the thickness at its edges just how anciently the tunnels are caked with paper. And there on the right a triangle had torn off under which you could see a blocky scarlet capital E and after it a blocky scarlet exclamation mark.

  That was all, but he knew what it was. Once seen, impossible to unsee; once recognised, impossible to unrecognise. It was the poster, years gone now but horribly pushing back into the light, for the film called Survive! about the plane crash in South America. Which he’d had to dodge and sidle past for weeks when it came out, always aware of every poster for it, glowing red in the corner of his averted gaze. The poster only had words on it, not pictures, and of course he’d only ever seen (or tried to not see) the poster, not the film itself. Because why would you ever go and see something like that? Why would you ever want to look at people shut up eating each other? If you had a choice, if you could choose not to. Only the poster, then – only a corner of it now – but that was enough. That was enough to end the quiet time in his head. That was enough to set the fear stirring, and start another round of the endless struggle.

  He suspected it at once, too. He stood pierced and pinioned in front of the wall, a slight little man nearly forty years old with eyes big and fearful and fists clamped by his sides, till the next train came in and someone jostled him, and the kind crowd released him into motion again along the Bakerloo Line platform. He shook his head like it was a tin with a dried pea in it, and thought maybe he’d been lucky, maybe he’d shaken it back out. It’s only an old poster, what’s there to be afraid of in that? he told himself, and as he said it he nearly believed that he believed it.

  But gradually is how the bad times always come on. A thought he can push away, more or less. Then a pause. An ordinary hour, maybe two ordinary hours, in which he seems to be able to forget without effort that there is anything to worry about, except that in the act of reflecting this – reflecting that he is fine, and unworried – he is of course remembering that until now he had successfully forgotten. (Such intricacy; such compelled sidling about it, inside his own head; such long-practised efforts to prove himself unaware by catching himself unawares, this one time more. And this one. And this one, just to be safe.) Yet when he does remember that he had forgotten the fear, and feels compelled to check he isn’t afraid, to make sure he can forget it again, he really isn’t afraid, much. No, hardly at all. No, just the faintest trace, really, surely not enough to worry about, for hours and hours, as he traipses to and fro in his head, checking. (Wearing a kind of trail or groove in his thoughts, or that’s what it feels like.)

  Until the moment when on one of these repeating errands, the tenth the twentieth the millionth, he finds that with a malevolent logic all that tramping through the house of himself to check has somehow in itself tramped something in with it, has brought in on the feet of his thoughts an undeniable smear, a spoor. A speckling of blood, of shut up melted fat. And then he has to admit he is afraid. That it is one of the bad times he is coping with here. But surely not a very bad one. Come on, you, out, he says to his fear with, still, an almost convincing confidence. And smirking slightly, mocking slightly, it yields possession, it slinks out, it consents to be banished. But every time for less long, and with more effort.

  All through yesterday, he trod around the cycle required to push the fear out, faster and faster. He had to get himself well out of it to sleep last night; and this morning the fear was waiting for him the moment he woke up, or after only the most microscopic pause during which the sun fell on his sore eyelids and was merely itself, and there was nothing wrong, as if he were one of the lucky ones. One uncorrupted photon, mate, one instant of easy natural light; that’s your lot, that’s all you get today. The time before he saw the poster already seemed like another age, a golden one, far away and long ago. On the way to work he was fending, fending, and the fear was jealous now, it didn’t like him paying attention to anything but it. Busy fending, he trusted bare animal consciousness to get him to the garage, pilot him across roads, clock in, nod to Trevor, sling the ticket machine over his shoulder, hop up onto the rear platform of the Routemaster. 36C, Bexford to Queen’s Park, Queen’s Park to Bexford. Oh the mind, the mind has mountains. Cliffs of fall. Hold them cheap if you never dangled there. Hold tight. Hold tight, please.

  (Why this? Why is it always this he’s afraid of, why specifically is it the thought of cannibalism, of all things, that the horrors huddle round? He has no idea. A long time ago, before he first got sent to hospital, before he left school even, someone showed him one of the old American horror comics that used to go around, and there was a story in there where the pay-off was that the tramps sitting around the campfire were eating a person. You could see that what was roasting on the flames was a person’s head and part of their ribcage. The flames were coming through the ribs. But, and here
’s the thing, it didn’t particularly get to him. He went, yech, in an ordinary way, and pushed the nasty object back at Vernon Taylor without giving him the satisfaction of being upset. And didn’t think about it for, probably, years. It was later on, when he was, what, fifteen or sixteen or so, that certain things got connected that probably shouldn’t of. He threw up at the christening do when his Auntie Madge described his cousin Stephanie’s baby as ‘good enough to eat’. Out of nowhere: just his gorge suddenly rising and the cake he’d swallowed the minute before geysering back up. And then again in the alley next to a Wimpy bar when his sister brought him along on a double date, a shy fourth, and her boyfriend did this whole yum-yum-yum thing of munching up the chip she was holding out and pretending he was going to move on to her finger. The girl who was supposed to be his date, clearly chosen because she was an object of faint pity too, with thick thick glasses, stared at him as he puked. ‘You’re mental, you are,’ she said, and fled. But once he had seen how alike the food adverts and the film posters were, how the camera lingered on the golden brown of a Findus crispy pancake and then lingered on the golden brown of Sophia Loren, he couldn’t stop seeing it. He couldn’t stop seeing how close flesh was to meat, he couldn’t stop thinking of the vileness of a wanting that would destroy what it wanted, that would enjoy by gnawing, tearing, grinding, chewing, swallowing. Was that him? Was that his desire? Was that what he wanted? He didn’t think so, but how could he prove it? He could never quite lay the fear of it to rest after that: and the more careful he was, the more he tried to avoid even the slightest ways in which you could look at girls like food, the guiltier he got, the more unsure of what he might be capable of. And then the ancient EC Comics panel of the human barbecue came floating out of the deeps of memory to give a shape to his fear. It fused to it and never let go. He did not want to eat anyone, he was almost certain. He never had eaten anyone. He had never bitten anyone, never licked anyone, never for that matter kissed anyone. Yet what comfort was that? Turn it and turn it as he liked, study the whole question over and over till it made him want to scream, he couldn’t ever know for sure that he was safe.)

  It’s an April morning, blustery and grey and prone to little spitting showers, and both ways on the first trip to Queen’s Park and back they make good time, which Ben is glad of. London’s traffic has moods. The same time of day, and it can be fluid or clotted, easy or jammed. Today the lights go green as they approach the junctions, the mobs of school-bound kids and work-bound adults slip easily on and off the bus, and the moving weave of the vans and the Cortinas and the black cabs seems light and open, somehow. Trevor darts quick and sure through the gaps between the lanes, through London’s gaps, and they fly across Peckham Camberwell Kennington, over the river under a brief oculus in the clouds that strews a rumple of light on the water, and quickly even through the tourist core of the route round Marble Arch, which often sticks. No stickiness now. Ben darts up and down the ridged-wood floor of the two decks, vending tickets in ceaseless motion, making change, giving the double-pull on the cord to the bell in Trevor’s cabin when the platform clears, dodging the hot ends of lit ciggies between the smokers’ seats upstairs, and balancing, balancing without even noticing, as Trevor’s deft kicks to the accelerator bend the gravity inside the Routemaster this way and that. The blue smoke that floats upstairs jerks and reels like one unit, on a sharp corner. Grark go the gear-changes of the big diesel. At junctions, at idle, the floor shudders impatiently, and then smooths into a bass buzz, a rumble, a roar as they pick up speed, till the ground under the rear platform flows past in a blurred grey ribbon. And being in such continuous motion gives Ben something different from what’s in his head to attend to. So long as he doesn’t look down (down inside himself, he means, not physically down, down the curved stairs and out onto the receding tarmac) he can perform a kind of skating from task to task to task. The rhythm of the bus, when it flows, puts a fragile surface beneath him. Each action requires the next action, each bit of compelled speech brings about the need for the next bit of compelled speech, so long as he doesn’t stop to think about it. Fares, please. Where to? Thirty pee, please. Got anything smaller. There you go. Hold tight. Move the bag out the aisle, please. Marble Arch!

  It doesn’t banish the fear. You can tell the fear’s there all the time, underneath, gaping. Staying busy just gives him that faint support for his mind. But there’s a trap. (There’s always a trap. Every good way of being, Ben has found, has somewhere in it a hidden door into nightmare, waiting to catch you out.) With the quick moving around the bus, and the conjuring from it of the thin ice to skate across, the trap is that he might be seduced by the ordinariness around him, the ordinariness of his own actions, into believing for an instant that all is well; that he might then make the grievous mistake of thinking he could appeal to the ordinary world and ask it to protect him. If he was going round the Oval, say, and looking out from the top deck at the curving wall of the cricket ground. Hey, you red-faced men in SCCC ties glimpsed for a moment at your shepherd’s pie through a dining room window. Hey, you space of billiard-table green rimmed with hoardings pasted gold for Benson & Hedges. Hey, you row of squats on the far side, with paint like rotting custard, where grungy banners hang. Hey, all you solid things, all you solid world – aren’t I solid too? Couldn’t I be here as straightforwardly as you are? Couldn’t I just trust the day? What is this cannibal shit, anyway? Grievous; fatal; because then he’d be looking at the fear dead-on, and none of that reasonable-sounding stuff has the power to send it away. You can’t disbelieve your way out of a fear when you are, really and truly, afraid. The fear is stronger than him, always. He knows that. All you get for challenging it is panic. Better to keep on the surface, as long as you can; better to skate on and be grateful for what he can get, as he’s grateful now for the swift run up to Queen’s Park and back. The second time they go north, things are slowing, however.

  This time at QP, the statutory crew break. Cheese-and-tomato sandwich with curled-up corners, milky coffee in a polystyrene cup, fag sucked so hard it shortens with an audible crackle at every drag. Trevor doing the quick crossword and rolling his eyes at the sight of Ben twitching, pacing, stealing glances at the sky as if something might be hiding in the grey folds up there, which he would invite out if he let his gaze linger. C’mon, off we go. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon. They go in the end. The diesel gives its judder, and out they lurch between the brick pillars. But meantime the weather of the traffic has changed. The weave has tightened, the gaps have sealed, what was smooth and free-running has gone viscous at best, and by Marble Arch the route of the 36C is bumper-to-bumper, and Ben has nothing to do but wait along with the passengers, alone with them on a stationary red island out in the middle of the four-lane gyratory. A rotund businessman the worse for drink works his way out to the bus through the chinks between the cars, making exaggerated and provoking bows of apology to the drivers. Honk honk. Parp parp. Ben offers an arm up and has it smacked away, probably harder than intended. Elephantine pinstripes disappear up the stairs. Ben’s trousers are a child’s size.

  Petrol fumes from the cars around gust in through the rear. It’s a smell that’s a taste. It’s a chemical smell. It’s a burnt smell. It’s nearly a cooking smell. Charred ribs. He goes up top and sells a 55p ticket to Fatso, who drops his change all over the floor. Seared flank. Even for the sake of the distraction Ben’s not scrambling about to pick the money up. No one else needs anything. He goes back down. Nothing doing there either. He stands in the little conductor’s alcove at the bottom of the stairs and drums his fingers on the upright chrome of the pole. Ching-ching-ching-ching-ching. Ching-ching-ching-ching-ching. Charred ribs. I’m not going to think of that. Sizzling skin. I’m not going to think about that. Charred ribs. Go away. Arm-fat melting and making the fire spit. O please go away, please please. Charred ribs. Shut up.

  He is thinking of those things, though, isn’t he? And once he is, and avoidance has failed, he has to argue, even though
he knows it’s no good; even though he recognises, and is sick of, and knows the uselessness of, every single thing he can conceivably say back to this shutup shutup picture of ruined blistering burning hideous cooked shutup flesh. The lights far ahead change, and Trevor manages to creep fifty feet down Park Lane. The trees along the edge of the park thresh. The petrol fumes briefly blow away and then reassert themselves.

  All right, says the piping little voice of reason in Ben’s head, those are horrible things, but what have they got to do with you, eh?