Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

  And beyond all that, there’s the issue specific to his own union, the technological threat that affects the compositors alone. In any conceivable future, the paper is still going to need printing; there’ll still have to be people to operate the presses. (Though, yeah, probably not the five-hundred-odd that Pat claims pay packets for, half with names like M. MOUSE and D. DUCK written on them, thinks Alec, his compositor’s lip curling at the dirty ways of NATSOPA.) But upstairs somewhere, management has already bought and installed a computerised system for photo-composition. There are keyboards up there from which you can set whole pages of type, not single lines, without the need for burbling reservoirs of lead, or noisy Victorian clockwork. The NGA position is that they’re happy to move on from hot lead to quiet, hygienic screens, so long as it’s union compositors who sit at those screens, tapping away. But management has noticed – how could they not? – that this essentially means the pointless retyping of what the journos have typed in the first place. You could put the journos at the keyboards, and give them ‘direct input’, and at a stroke (at a keystroke, ha ha) you’d abolish the compositor. You’d abolish the whole skill that has meant a good living for working men for eighty years. You’d abolish Alec’s grandfather, and father. You’d abolish Alec. This is what a management victory threatens. This is what they keep pushing for: not the whole thing at once, they know they won’t get that, but little holes to puncture the dam, thin ends to a very fat wedge. Won’t you let us … have the phone girls input the ads directly, just the ads? Won’t you agree … to let the NGA supervise a single journalist keyboarding – just as an experiment? So far all these little probes for weakness have been fended off. Les Dixon, the NGA president, comes faithfully down to Gray’s Inn Road once a week to report, and he makes it sound as if it’s perfectly possible to hold the line; as if the sergeant majors of the union have safely got the measure of the officers up on the top floor. (Back in the war, he really was RSM Dixon in the Royal Military Police while Marmaduke Hussey was being Captain Hussey of the Grenadier Guards.) Maybe, thinks Alec. Maybe. It’s true that the Guardian and the Mirror have signed up for photo-composition by the union. But alone with the loud melancholy of the building, surrounded by a million grimy brown tiles, it’s hard to avoid a melancholy of his own. In this blocked-off inlet of a dead building, the thought is horribly near that his own life in the print, these last twenty years, may also have been a blind alley.

  Oh, come on, he thinks, snap out of it. Whatever happens, he reminds himself, it has been a good life. He’s been able to feed and clothe and house Sandra and the boys. He’s been able to pay for school trips, nights at the pictures, a colour telly, a car. Holidays, too: though when they went to Spain, there was noisy boredom from the boys when he tried to get them to look at old churches. Stevie adores Gary, that’s the trouble; always has, from when he was a toddler. If big brother does it, he does it too. Oh well, that’s a melancholy sidetrack of its own. Alec liked it better last year, when the boys were left to look after themselves for a weekend, in a litter of fish-and-chip paper, and he and Sandra went bed-and-breakfasting in Kent, on their own. It was about this time of year, come to think of it. They went walking round a gravel pit, just the two of them, on a green-and-white day when mist up above matched the blossom on the thorn bushes. Both ways round: as if it was shreds of mist that had caught in the bushes, and as if the pale sky was about to burst out into flowers. A green-and-white world, and him and Sandra hand in hand in it.

  Oh, come on, you great softy, he thinks. Thrusts the neglected copy of The Godfather into his anorak, pokes his head out of the doorway. Nothing happening. He’ll just nip along to the main picket, check everything’s hunky-dory.

  ‘All right, lads?’ he’s just saying as he approaches, when a boy with sideburns whose name he can’t remember, not long out of the apprenticeship and fresh-moved to the Times when the lockout began, points at something over Alec’s shoulder.

  ‘Ey-ey-ey!’ he cries.

  Alec turns and a figure is indeed bowling across the road towards the emptied doorway, loose-limbed and slightly approximate but moving with intent.

  ‘Shall we come over with you, bit of moral support?’ says the boy.

  ‘No, no,’ calls Alec as he sprints back, ‘I know him. More chance if it’s just one.’

  He is just in time to block the entry as Hugo Cornford of the political desk reaches it. He’s in his early forties, but burly in that upper-crust way you get when the effects of public-school rugby linger lifelong. He has brogues and corduroy trousers on, and one of those non-functional scarves wrapped round his neck, like an enormous woolly cravat. And judging by his high colour and slightly random movements, he is indeed a journalist who has lunched.

  ‘Buggeration,’ he says. ‘I thought there wouldn’t be anyone in these little doors. Hello, Alec.’

  ‘Hello, Hugo. Sorry, the picket’s here too. Anyway, ’s locked.’

  ‘I,’ says Hugo, his voice booming in his chest like an echo trying to get out of a cave, ‘happen to have a key, actually. And I’m coming in. As the bishop said to the actress.’

  ‘Well, I won’t stop you—’ begins Alec.

  ‘Can’t stop me, actually, legally, I think?’

  ‘—but I am going to ask you to think about it for a sec.’

  ‘Oh-kay. Thinking about it, thinking about it, thought about it now; still coming in.’

  Cornford is much less of a bullshitter when he is sober, Alec reminds himself. He’s a foreign correspondent turned parliamentary sketch writer, and Alec has been reading his work for more than a decade now. (Some compositors, maybe most, let the copy flow through their minds untouched by conscious attention, like a stream of Morse code. But not Alec.) Terse, atmospheric, anger-breeding reports from Vietnam; more recently, acidic comedy from the House of Commons, as the Labour government lurches from emergency to emergency. He’s good. His sentences are a pleasure to set. He is – at least he used to be – one of those posh Trotskyists, with their own mysterious little world from which they emerge to be a good sport, old bean, on protest marches.

  ‘I suppose you’re here to write up something for the German edition,’ says Alec. ‘Am I right?’

  ‘For the forlorn rag which is all that remains of a great paper, yes. And why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Well, because this is a picket line, and you’re a socialist.’

  ‘Am I?’ says Cornford, rubbing at his face. ‘I don’t know what that word even means any more.’

  Not very promising.

  ‘Cigarette?’ says Alec, offering his packet.

  ‘No, no, I should get on,’ Cornford says, and he starts fumbling in his corduroys for a key.

  ‘All right, then, because,’ says Alec, ‘the German print run probably won’t even happen?’

  ‘Is that right.’ Jingle, jingle.

  ‘Yes. I don’t know if you know, but we’ve got the German print unions looking for the outfit that’s doing it, and when they find it—’

  ‘They’ll try to shut it down, I suppose? Oh, charming. Very constructive.’

  ‘When they find it,’ says Alec, getting crosser himself, ‘they’ll let them know that it’s a sleazy ploy to get around a legitimate dispute back in England, and then it’ll be up to them whether they want to piss off IG Papier and be blacklisted forever after.’

  ‘I see. How dignified. How righteous. So?’ He’s found his key.

  Alec looks at Cornford. It’s as if some piece of awkward but previously negotiable understanding has vanished, or been withdrawn, and in its place has appeared, or reappeared, something … harder.

  ‘So,’ Alec persists, ‘for the sake of something that probably won’t even happen, you’ll be risking your’ – what’s the best word – ‘relationships with all the people you work with.’

  ‘Work with?’ says Cornford, and now he looks hard at Alec, and seems bull-like, threatening almost. ‘I don’t “work with” you. I get messed around by you; I get hel
d up by you.’

  ‘Me?’ says Alec, holding the look.

  ‘No, not you personally. I mean you chaps in general; all of you chaps. This last couple of years, we don’t even know if you’re going to deign to let us bring the paper out. It’s touch and go every bloody night.’

  ‘That’s not us, that’s NATSOPA.’

  ‘Who cares which of you it is? NATSOPA and the NGA, SLADE and SOGAT: I’m sick of the lot of you.’

  ‘Well, this last couple of years,’ says Alec, ‘we’ve turned into the worst-paid workforce in Fleet Street. Did you know that? Management have stuck to the government’s bloody incomes policy, and we’re the ones who’ve paid the price for it. Maybe that’s why things have got a bit bad-tempered, did you ever think?’

  ‘Don’t care; sorry, don’t care. I just want to be able to write my stuff, and know it’ll be printed. Now can you move out of the way, please?’

  I just want to write my stuff. Alec is suddenly able to draw the obvious conclusion from Cornford’s agitation, his sense of urgency, and flings it out as a last gambit.

  ‘You’ve got a story, haven’t you?’ he says. Deliberately, he grins.

  ‘Yes!’ says Cornford.

  ‘And you’re dying to get it down, aren’t you? You want to tell the world, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Cornford. ‘Come on, Alec, move over.’

  ‘Well, if you go in there, it won’t get printed, will it. Why not tell it to me?’

  Cornford laughs, then he stops.

  ‘Seriously?’ he says.

  ‘Yes. Go on.’

  ‘No offence, but you’re not exactly the audience I had in mind. You’re more the subject matter.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that I’ve just been to a lunch at the House of Commons, and the times they are about to change.’

  ‘We can deal with the Tories,’ says Alec. ‘We saw them off last time.’

  ‘This is going to be different. They’re not the half-hearted patricians you’re used to; not any more. And then – and then – I’m afraid you chaps are going to get blown away like dandelion fluff. Gangway!’

  Cornford pushes past in a spiritous vapour, jiggles open the door, shuts it behind him, and is gone up the stairs. A storey up, he must click a light switch: a small, bleak patch of fluorescence flickers into existence on the steps at the end of the dead stub of corridor.

  Jo

  Jo has a little house on the heights. Really, the summerhouse of the grander glass-walled place next door, but separated from it during some kind of marital dispute of the landlord’s, and now rented out on its own, with its own little crease in the hillside filled with the deep green shade of pines and succulents, bamboo and yucca: the California green that can make you forget the California brown all around it. The deck is upstairs, on a level with the tops of the branches, and looks west through a notch in the skyline towards the bruise-coloured inversion layer and the mica glitter of LA on the plain below. When she breakfasts out there, it isn’t usually morning. Times they are recording, like now, make her almost nocturnal, and once she’s got rid of any company – less and less of a necessity these days – and comes blearily outside with a cup of black coffee and a sliced peach taken cold from the fridge, it’s around five in the afternoon. The sun is sinking westwards, swollen and bloody, and she sits in a puddle of crimson light, her eyes itching behind her shades. But then the track of the sun takes it behind the canyon wall. The last lip of its disc blazes into a bright line and disappears, and all of a sudden she finds herself in a space of gentle air, long-shadowed, blood-warm. The cicadas are tuning up their instruments, the smog above the city is dimming to pearlescent prettiness, the lights below are just beginning to twinkle out their come-on that never tires. She’s tired, though. She pours a second cup of coffee and in the couple of hours that are hers before she is due at that night’s restaurant rendezvous, she makes herself fetch out the four-track in the twilight and, with no one to hear, tries to work out a little music on her own account.

  Guitar first. This is a song she’s trying to come at from both ends. She has a few of the words, and an inkling of the tune, but not the whole of either. What she knows is the colours it should be. It should be grey, silver and brown; the brown, that is, of old wood, or old brick walls, not the warm living brown of skin, which needs a different music altogether. Cold-weather colours that are nowhere on the Californian palette, even in this tender evening glow. So, maybe A minor? And acoustic, of course. She settles the Ovation on her knee, and picks out a basic little pattern in four-four time. Plucks it, rather, with her nails, to give it a melancholy sharpness, an almost tinkling plaintive edge in the sound. Steady, though: she doesn’t want to pick the steel strings too hard and turn the sound too country. Hmm.

  Round and round she goes, and her intuitions of tune begin to take some more shape and to declare themselves. Something is forming: a structure for the verses (three lines: two short, one double-long) that goes Dee-dee dee DEE, Dee-dee dee DEE-ee, Dee dee-dee dee dee DEE dee dee dee-dee DEE-ee. And a chorus, higher, which for three little sets of call and response will make a wistful, tentative, suspended kind of sound, at least the first time she sings through it, but which can then fill out with a stronger push of mournful feeling on the next visit, before soaring out (both times) into a line that will use her full voice. Dee-dee-dee, DEE-dee; Dee-dee-dee, Dee-dee; Dee-dee-dee, DEE DEE; Dee dee dee dee dee-dee DEE DEE DEE. Like that, or nearly like that. Something’s there, and it has the colouring she wants, grey silver brown, which for her are memory-colours, the shades for things remembered rather than physically present. Is it hers, though? In this groping early stage it’s hard to tell apart a melody you’re discovering from one you’re half-remembering. She thinks so, but tucks a little mental reservation into place so she isn’t wholly surprised or disheartened if she remembers a source for it in another song, later.

  Right. Catch it, while the catching is good. (The shadows have lengthened out into a sheet of shade, abolishing the gold etching round the edges of the leaves, and the sky is going to dark violet, and the lights of the city on the plain are sparkling brighter in proportion.) Plug in the pick-up. Stretch the leader from a new spool of decent BASF tape through the heads and onto the take-up reel. Fast-forward a little way. Flip flip flipflipflipflip. Zero the timer. Turn on track one and check the needle moves with a chord or two. Check tracks two, three and four are safely off. Cue up the combination of buttons for Record, with Pause engaged as the trigger. Breathe. And … Pause off. The sweet-tipped melancholy jangle of A minor floats over the darkened paddles of the cactuses and the resinous asterisks along the pine branches. With the part of her mind that isn’t concentrating on picking as precisely as possible, she notices how inevitable the tune is already sounding: how meant, how deliberate, this thing that she has been pulling together from who knows what vapour, who knows how. It’s necessary, this hardening of the separate parts of a song. Without it, as you turned to a new task, the rest would melt back into the mush of possibility again. And if you need to alter what has already hardened, there is scope to return and soften it again, for a while. She does so now: as she plays back the guitar track, and is provisionally pleased with it, a thought occurs to her, and she goes back and re-records the same thing on track one, only now with a bit of reverb on. Yes, that’s right. Though the physical space she’s working in is the room behind an open deck, with the French doors open, her pointillist sad steelwork now sounds as if it’s happening somewhere bigger and emptier, echoing back just a little from the surfaces of distant objects. From the remembered things, the absent things, the song will name, perhaps. This is how the feel builds, laid physically into the acoustics, integrating sound and idea.

  If this were proper studio work, not homebrew improvisation, she’d go on to figure out a bassline, a piano line, maybe, on one of an electric piano’s lonelier-sounding settings. But with just her and a four-track, the guitar is the only ins
trument she has space for. She wants the other three tracks for voice. That’s where there’s most to work out, that’s where the heavy lifting of mood needs to go; and she has in mind – half in mind, half-loose and indefinite and out of reach until she has the actual sounds before her and can wind them to actuality – a delicate thing where on two of the tracks she harmonises with herself on a time delay, so that echo between two versions of her duetting in time creates, in another reinforcing way, the empty space, the longing absence of the song. Leaving the last track for her as her own backing singer. A chorus of Jos: two at the front facing each other, and another behind doo-wopping, oo-woo-ing, yay-yay-ing. And all on her terms.

  The land is black now, though, and the sky behind is a deep indigo, gauzy, cinematic, looking as if it’s waiting shamelessly for searchlights and kettledrums. (That’s the trouble with living in the Hollywood Hills. Reality tends constantly towards movie cliché, particularly once nightfall has smoothed away the daytime scurf of Los Angeles, refining all those one-storey breeze-block bodegas and bail bond offices into vistas of tail-lights and skyglow.) She looks at her watch. No time to do it all. But time to begin. If she hurries. If she can manage to keep hurry out of her voice.

  Track two. Plug in the mike. Fetch out the pad that’s got her criss-crossed first thoughts about the lyrics on it. She can hardly see it in the small leaks of light from the meters of the four-track, but it’s important to have the piece of paper there, somehow, even if she’s working mostly from memory. It’s another solidification, another little handle on something still only half-formed. Sing a little against the guitar track with Record off to play with the levels. That’ll do. Remember to press the Simul-Sync button, so the playback she’s singing against isn’t a randomising twelfth of a second out of sync with the voice – not a delicate game with time, that, but a toe-stubbing trip over time’s doorstep, when you get it wrong. Breathe. Breathe. Try to banish the anxieties of the night, and find grey, silver, brown: the sound of missing what is missing, of feeling the distance of all you name, as you name it. For some reason it is getting hotter again, as if the withdrawal of the light has stilled the air currents on the hillside. The LA night presses. Pause off, and Jo raises a voice, a small voice, an unhopeful voice, and sends it winding out into the hot dark.