Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

  Charred ribs.

  You’ve never seen any of that stuff, have you, not for real, not even in that film.

  But here it is. Charred ribs.

  No but, it’s not actually happening, is it. You’re only imagining it.

  Charred ribs.

  It’s just made up. It’s just in your head.

  Yeah, exactly, it’s in your head.

  So?

  Your head and nobody else’s. This is your doing.

  No it’s not. I don’t want it, I hate it, I want it gone.

  Really? Look at these people. Look at that git in the suit. Look at that girl in the jean jacket. You know the one. Where the buttons heh are under a bit of a strain. Big chest. Lot to button up. Yeah, that one.

  Shut up.

  You don’t want me to.

  I do.

  No you don’t. Her; him. D’you think they’re thinking of this stuff ? Course not. It’s just you. You all alone, you evil man, looking at them and thinking of

  Shut up shut up

  lips puffed and glazed like pork crackling, eyebrows

  shut up!

  melted to those little dots like the bristles on a roast

  stop

  eyes cooked white like the eyes on cooked fish

  o please stop

  Why? This is what you like.

  No it isn’t.

  Then why’d you think about it? You think about it all the time. You do. It’s on you. It’s your thing. It’s your favourite. You love it.

  No I don’t.

  Charred ribs, mate, charred ribs.

  Red, amber, green. Another fifty feet. Green, amber, red. And repeat. And repeat.

  I wish I could take my head off and wash it out with a hose.

  Well you can’t.

  At last they reach the front of the queue, and get their turn to be pumped through the clogged valve of the junction between the almost-touching angles of Green Park and Hyde Park. New green on the trees dulled by the fumes as if already defeated; scurf of litter in gutters and round the bases of lamp posts, left over from the winter’s bin strike; the triumphal statues and stuff from the old wars looking down at heel, corroded and tatty or choked in black paint. The flow’s not much better beyond, but at least a block of people want to get off, in the blank-walled stretch of road behind Buckingham Palace, and a few more get on, so thank heavens there’s something to do, activity that lasts Ben until Trevor pulls left into the slips of the Victoria bus station, where the red double-deckers wait in rows like clumsy racehorses, between the plastic fascias of the adult bookshop and the betting shop and the all-night caff and the tourist-tat place selling plastic bowler hats with Union Jacks on them on one side, and the echoing cast-iron canopy of the railway terminus on the other. Ben remembers this place from childhood as rather grand: a kind of palace for the steam trains, sooty on every surface, of course, but with gleaming boat trains and Golden Arrow expresses idling at the platforms like pampered monarchs, waited on by scurrying porters. Now its grime is glamourless. It just looks tired in there. Or maybe that’s him. He is tired. The front of his mind jitters fearfully on, but underneath there’s exhaustion waiting like a continental shelf. When days like these finally consent to end, he slips past the sentries of terror into dim depths of fatigue, and gratefully dissolves there. He’s yawning now.

  Thanks to the clotting of the traffic, they’ve caught up at Victoria with the buses that should’ve been ahead on the route, and are now the back one in a row of four 36s. Trevor turns off the engine, and steps out to lean against the cab and have a smoke. It’s getting on for teatime.

  ‘Other ones’ll be leaving first,’ says Ben to the chuntering passengers.

  ‘Move on up to the 36 at the front if you don’t wanna wait. Yeah, you can use the same ticket.’ Most get off, leaving only a nun on the longwise bench seats downstairs who seems as patient as a statue, and upstairs a harassed-looking woman with three young kids who presumably can’t face the palaver of moving them. Also the git in pinstripes is still there, slumped red-faced against a window and snoring.

  ‘Oi,’ says Ben, ‘wakey-wakey. Victoria!’ Nothing. Louder: ‘Mister? Victoria. This your stop?’ Still nothing. Ben’s not going to shake him, prod him or otherwise touch him; he doesn’t touch people, if he can help it. Almost shouting: ‘Sir! Sir! Is this your stop?’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ rumbles a voice of treacly grievance, without the puce eyelids opening, or the jowls shifting from where they’re squidged against the glass. ‘Go away, bus-wallah. Go ’way. My business where I get orf.’

  ‘Your funeral, squire,’ says Ben, backing off. ‘Don’t blame me if you wake up in the depot.’

  And this little bit of righteous defiance gives him enough fuel to go down and stand next to Trev and smoke a fag of his own in fierce sucks and endure the couple of minutes till the other 36s have moved off and it’s time to get going again. The fear sends needles of dread through him, almost playful. It knows it has him; it can afford to wait patiently to see how he fails next in the struggle to get rid of it.

  Off again. Rumbling down through Pimlico to Vauxhall Bridge. Traffic at least in jerky motion. A party of posh kids upstairs, aged fifteen or sixteen, presumably just finished school, all puffing away on Silk Cut and looking as if they’re enjoying the conscious wickedness more than the taste. Goodbye to the nun; hello to weary office cleaners coming off a shift that started at dawn, and a middle-aged woman wearing a carefully maintained outfit that hasn’t been in fashion for a decade. She raises her eyebrows at the posh boys, but as if she’s entertained by them, not tutting at them. They and she get off just before the Thames, at the stop for the Tate Gallery. The harassed mum gets off beyond the river, by Vauxhall station, and she needs Ben’s help manoeuvring the pushchair and her bags down the stairs. He manages to do this without making any skin contact with her good enough to eat offspring. And all the while, Ben is working, working in his head, having decided though you know it never works to look away from the fear; to starve it of the oxygen of his attention. Everything he does, he now does with an extra zeal or maybe just desperation, grabbing at its scope to fill his gaze. His mind’s eye’s gaze, that is. To blissfully ordinary eyes, such as other people’s, he might seem to be doing exactly the same things as on the northbound journey, when he was resisting the fear by skating the flow. But this is quite different; a different strategy altogether. Instead of not looking, and asking no questions, he is now actively refusing to look. He has turned away from the fear, inside himself, and is making himself go on facing away from it. Mentally facing away. There it is behind him, murmuring away, trying to send around tendrils of charred ribs alarm into the edges of his vision. But he won’t look, he won’t won’t won’t. He will not think of it. He will not-think of it. He is putting out anti-thought where it is concerned. He is charred ribs forgetting it, he is refusing it, he is turned away. He is chanting la-la-la-la-la-la. He is winning, he is winning, he is charred ribs not winning. The trouble is that it’s not safe to turn your back on a frightening thing. Every animal knows this. Every animal would rather be facing the predator than feeling it pacing about behind them somewhere, preparing to spring. Not knowing where it is is worse, even, than seeing it closing on you with charred ribs teeth bared. If you were walking on a lonely road at dusk and you felt that something was following you, its presence betrayed by ambiguous movements just at the margins of your sight, black shifting on black, grey flexing on grey, you’d turn, wouldn’t you; you’d turn to check. You’d swing around, hoping to be wrong; and till you did, you’d feel the tug of your fear urging and urging you to, taking priority as the sense of danger always does. This is like that, except, of course, that the lonely road and the monster following, the cornered mouse and the stalking cat, are all in Ben’s head, and none of this is visible to anyone else on the bus. There’s just the fine-boned little man in the grey polyester jacket with the conductor’s badge, quick-stepping about with sweat on his
forehead and his eyes as wide as a lemur’s. No one can tell. No one can help. It’s his head, and he’s locked inside it forever and ever, till kingdom come, amen.

  And not long after they’ve passed the Oval again, having deposited the last of the posh central London custom and picked up the wodge of travellers who’ve come up from the Tube there needing transport east into the Tubeless wastes of the city’s lower half, he gives in and turns round. He was right. The fear was behind him, just behind him, and CHARRED RIBS it roars in his face.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I said, Peckham Rye.’

  ‘Right. Sorry. Twenty, please.’

  He’d almost welcome it if the fear would actually pounce, if that would be the end of it. If it were possible to actually surrender to it in some final way, and let it (appropriately enough) crunch him up. A willing step forward, and then the whole thing over with. But that’s not its way. It isn’t substantial enough to make an end of him, only to keep him never-endingly afraid. (Though there are better days than this: a fact he struggles to believe, on a bad day.) Now, stared at, it falters momentarily. Just for a moment, it resolves into its constituent elements, like a looming figure in a dark bedroom that flicks back into being a pile of clothes on a chair. Just for a moment, as if the lighting has changed or something like that, Ben can see that his monster is only made of the ancient memory of a horror comic’s page, a teenage anxiety about what it means to want someone, an ordinary distrust gone septic. It’s as if a far-off window has opened. Not in this room, nor in the next, but somewhere; down some dark L-shaped corridor, perhaps, and across a landing, and up some stairs, but eventually to a chamber in the house of the self where a long-stuck casement has opened outwards, and let in an unexpected breath of air. Oh, says some tiny part of Ben. Charred ribs? offers the monster, pathetically. For a second, he could almost laugh.

  But the terrible truth is that these occasional moments of release are familiar too. They too are part of the familiar round, the long churning, of Ben’s fear, and they do not seem to help much. They certainly do not end it. Maybe they are another of the fear’s tricks and traps, maybe they are something else. But they go away, and the struggle resumes. So now, since he is staring at the fear anyway, Ben wearily switches to the opposite tactic, and tries to pin it with his stare: to look at it so unflinchingly, before it can regroup, that it will be unable to account for itself, and be forced to shrivel away. Not that this has ever worked either.

  Meanwhile, rumbling up the long straight of Camberwell New Road towards the junction with Walworth Road and the green, they’ve picked up some unwelcome cargo, a group of skinheads who go tramping up the back stairs in their big boots and occupy the whole front of the upper deck. The normally raucous school-kids who get on at the green and after for their journey home to Peckham take a look from the top of the stairs and prudently retreat, though a couple with Rock Against Racism badges shout something once they’re safely on the pavement. Two art student girls in dungarees and a boy with long hair on one side and a clip-job on the other move downstairs. Soon the top deck pretty much belongs to the British Movement, and everyone else on the bus – the hardy pensioners at the back upstairs, the overcrowded contingent filling the downstairs, Trevor in the cab – is nervously aware of the field of aggro being generated there. Except Ben; Ben, pushing through the crush in the lower-deck aisle, double-tinging the cord for departures, vending away like a contortionist, has other things on his mind.

  What are you? What even are you, really?

  You know what I am.

  No I don’t. Or anyway, I don’t know why I have to be afraid of you.

  Ooh, in’t he brave!

  I haven’t done anything, have I? I haven’t actually eaten anyone, have I? You’re some pictures in my head, that’s all.

  Uh-huh?

  I’m going to look at those ribs on that fire straight on. Go on, give me all you’ve got.

  Charred ribs?

  Hah! Nothing there! You’re nothing, you’re not made of anything, you’re literally just fear.

  Charred ribs.

  I look at you, and you can’t do anything, can you?

  Charred ribs.

  Ha ha. That’s it, is it? You’re a one-trick fear, ain’tcha. You poor—

  Look away, then.

  Eh?

  If you’re so safe, look away.

  I could.

  You will. You’ll have to, in the end. You’re only safe as long as you’ve stared me into stillness. But you can’t keep me frozen, you know that. You’ll blink. Your eyes are getting tired already. You’ll look away. And then—

  Shut up.

  Brave Ben. Fearless Ben. Heroic Ben. Whose mind is a barbecue in hell.

  Shut up.

  I can feel you’re going to blink, I can feel it, here it comes, here it comes—

  Ben has climbed the stairs without noticing. Has vended, on automatic pilot, two 10p fares to the pensioners tucked at the back. Now blunders forth up the surprisingly clear aisle towards a group he hasn’t clocked as anything more particular than his next task, because inside he has indeed blinked, reeled, looked away, and had the fear flash out roaring with the more power for having been temporarily confined, and fill all but a tiny leftover rind of his sensorium with dripping fat, bubbling skin, disgusting smells of roasting flesh, which expertly weave together with the blood smell that really is coming in through the windows just here on the route, where the 36C passes between the massed streetside butcher’s stalls of Peckham: and while the British Movement (Bexford branch) idly watch him come, to see if there’s any entertainment in the little pipsqueak’s attempt to make them pay, he doesn’t pay them any attention at all. A crescendo is taking place in his head.

  CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS shut up CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS oh please CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS shut up shut up shut up

  ‘Any more charred ribs fares, please?’

  ‘No thank you my good charred ribs I think we’d rather you charred ribs your little ticket machine up charred ribs if you would be so charred ribs.’

  A vague impression of the grinning mask of the largest and oldest of the skins.

  ‘Sorry,’ says Ben, ‘I didn’t quite charred ribs catch that?’

  ‘I said,’ the skinhead begins again patiently, winking at his friends, ‘that we charred ribs charred ribs charred ribs CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS—’

  Shut up shut up shut up, cries Ben desperately inside his head, and then, entangled by the confusion of inner and outer, without even noticing the difference yells out loud:

  ‘Oh just fucking shut up why can’t you! Shut up, shut up, shut up!’

  There is a moment of startled silence. Then the lead skin rises to his feet, with his shoulders up against the curved yellow enamel of the roof and his head bent over towards Ben’s face.

  ‘You what?’ he says, quietly, delicately.

  Something like a jolt of belated adrenalin goes through Ben, a chemical alert for real-world problems from a system neglected and overruled most of the time in favour of the hateful blizzard blowing in his psyche, but still just about operational and now insisting successfully on his attention. His vision clears. Or rather, what he has been seeing all along is permitted to register. The man whose face is in his face is a rangy, graceful, liquidly moving predator, on whom the shaved scalp does not produce the effect of scabby babyhood which can be seen in his two much younger male mates, or on the pinch-faced woman beside him, shrunken-looking and minimally female in her Aertex shirt, who is staring up at Ben with a peculiar expression on her face as if she recognises him. On him, the suede-fuzzed curves of skull have the heft of a weapon – the weighted, rounded surface at the back of a well-balanced ball-peen hammer, for example. His smile is jovial, his eyes are deep blue and fringed with pretty lashes, and his clothes are perfect for what they are. The wide bands of the red braces, the crisp white Fred Perry shirt, the jeans t
he exact right shade of blue faded almost to white, the boots tied immaculately with fat red laces. He puts a finger out to the crumpled grey lapel of Ben’s polyester uniform jacket, just under the round identity badge with his number on it, and stirs contemptuously at the cheap cloth. The top of Ben’s head comes to somewhere under his collarbone. The two of them must be pretty much of an age, but beside this pumped, gleaming, comfortably aggressive animal, Ben is a scrap, a wisp, an anxious little fleck of gristle.

  ‘Yeah?’ says the skinhead.

  I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead, supplies the rusty subsystem of Ben’s brain devoted to physical survival, and he’s surprised to find he minds the idea. It isn’t a relief after all. But he hasn’t a notion what to do about it; what to say, to turn wrath aside. His mouth hangs stupidly open, with his vulnerable herbivore’s teeth on display.

  ‘Someone’s-gunna-get-their, fuckin-head-kicked-in; someone’s-gunna-get-their, fuckin-head-kicked-in,’ chant the young male sidekicks, happily.

  ‘Oh, leave it out, Mike,’ says the woman. ‘Look at the poor little bugger.’

  Mike doesn’t look at Ben. He closes the pointing hand round Ben’s lapel, to keep him in place, and turns to look at her instead, sour irritation spoiling his mouth.

  ‘I told you,’ he begins.

  But then the Routemaster judders to a halt, and Trevor, who has been watching through the periscope from the cab and looking for somewhere to pull over, jumps down, runs round the back, and is up the passenger stairs three steps at a time. Trevor is six foot three and won a heavyweight title while he was in the merchant navy. He is also a deacon in the Joyful Assemblies of the Holy Spirit: but he doesn’t feel he is under an obligation to spell out his commitment to the path of heavenly peace in situations where the greater good would be served by keeping shtum.

  ‘Let go of my conductor, man, and get off my bus,’ he says: and his voice is a London-Jamaican rumble, full of the bass warning notes of one big beast addressing another.

  ‘Oh look, it’s the organ grinder,’ says Mike, switching his attention with relish to the larger and more promising target. ‘Or is it? Which is which, eh? Which one’s the organ grinder, and which one’s—’