Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

  Now she’s got the boys on one side of the room split into two groups, singing a D and F respectively, and the girls on the other side, also split, singing an A and a D. They’re not singing their note in unison and then stopping, each group; they’re under instructions to sing until they need to breathe and then to start again, staying deliberately out of sync with their nearest neighbours, so that each group is between them producing a continuous note, in a sort of quick and dirty collective version of circular breathing. It takes them a while to get it, and she has to start them off, and occasionally to reinforce each group when they falter, by singing them the note she wants from them. They can’t find D, F, A or D by themselves, with the possible exception of Tyrone, but they can imitate, and even with the complication of the breathing and the stopping and the starting, they pick up confidence from hearing the one note they’re aiming for sounded out ringingly loud by the clump of people that surrounds them. Soon they can hold their shared note even when she starts to combine them, conducting each group in with a wave of her hand. D – F – A – D: it’s a minor chord coming (on and off and on again) from twenty-eight throats, and it sustains, it reverberates, it quivers in the knackered white soundproofing tiles in the music room. But it needs one more element, and she thinks they can handle the multitasking involved. She adds in rhythm. She gets the boys doing a slow Slap! – clap – clap, hands going down to thighs for the slap; and the girls, to avoid stereotypes, getting the faster football-ground rhythm, clapclap – clapclap – clap.

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Now we’ll build it all together. I’ll conduct you in, one bit at a time. Boys clapping; girls clapping; then the two notes from the boys’ side, one at a time, lowest first; then the two notes from the girls’ side, one at a time, also lower one first, so we’re building all four notes up from the bottom, right? And when we’ve got it all going, don’t stop. Everyone keep singing. Mend it if it seems to be going wrong. Try your best, anyway. Let’s see how long we can keep it up. Everybody ready?’

  And in come the different claps on top of each other, making new patterns and interference effects, percussive waves bouncing about. And then in she brings the four notes of the chord, climbing as they go. And yes, there’s wavering; yes, there’s faltering and moments of confusion. Part-singing is difficult for amateurs, even in this incredibly basic form. But through the wobbles, the chord steadies and persists. She’s tempted to put in something over the top, some freeform piece of soprano ululation, like Clare Torry’s thing on Dark Side of the Moon, not that anyone would recognise that. Tyrone’s eyes would widen satisfyingly. But she would put them off, wreck their momentary concentration. She’d ruin the structure, not add to it. Instead she just watches: their mouths opening and closing effortfully, the gasps for breath, as for a whole ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty seconds, forty seconds, Year 10 sustain the chord. Can they hear it, this immense organised sound they are making together? Can they hear the organ that they have briefly become, whose separate pipes are all those sticky pink organic tubes in teenage bodies? Imperfect pipes, made of damp twisted cartilage without a single straight line, pumped up by weird fluttering bladders, and yet capable of sounding a chord that seems to lay hold on some order in the world that already existed before we came along and started to sing. Making an order that matches an order. Music is strange, she wants them to see, and one of the things that is strangest about it is that it comes from our messy bodies. Sing, Hayley. Sing, Tyrone. Sing, Jamila, Simon, Samantha, Jerome. Don’t stop till you must. Notice if you can that your temporary orchestra of hormones and still-digesting Big Macs from lunchtime can be coaxed into playing the music of the spheres. If you let yourself be its instrument.

  Then the bell goes, and they clatter away laughing.

  At the end of the day, she drives home with Marcus. ‘How was your day?’ she asks. ‘’S all right,’ he says, staring at the road. This, from her pride, her joy, her last-chance late child who started the whole world anew for her when he came, who once lay so close to her, feeding, that they seemed to her to make one being, milky and whole. But then he angles his dignified, ironic, twelve-year-old head and for a microsecond bumps it against her shoulder.

  Alec

  ‘Did you ever read a book called The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists?’ asks Alec.

  ‘No, Mr Torrance,’ says Wayne the YTS trainee, warily. ‘What’s that, then?’

  They’re prepping bare walls for the first layer of render in an upstairs bedroom in one of the big houses right at the top of Bexford Rise. Big brushes and a bucket of dilute PVA glue. It slops on and then sinks in, leaving only a glisten on the surface. Wayne has been given the PVA to paint on because he’s only just started, and Gary hasn’t initiated him yet into the mysteries of actual plastering. And Alec has been given it to do because that’s all Gary trusts him with, experience having proved that he and a float and wet plaster do not combine productively. (He can in fact also strip off old render reasonably well, with a hammer drill and bolster, but that part of this job is behind them.)

  ‘Call me Alec,’ says Alec, looking down at Wayne’s ginger flattop as the boy squats effortlessly to do the bits just above the skirting. But it’s a lost cause. Gary’s the boss; he’s the boss’s dad.

  ‘It’s about plastering, actually. Well – building work, all sorts, and painting and decorating, but it’s got plastering in it.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Mm-hmm. Probably the only novel in the English language where the author thought plastering was interesting enough to put in. Mind you, he could’ve been wrong there.’

  Slop-slop, load up the brush. Wayne wishes he would shut up, this is clear. He has a hunted expression.

  ‘Anyway, these blokes are doing up a house – they all work for the same firm, you see, so it’s one big job – and some of them are really good. Talented, you see. Artistic, even. But to get it done on time, for the price their boss has quoted, they’re basically forced to do a crap job. Cutting corners, scrimping on the materials, bodging it up so it looks okay, but it’s going to fall to bits ten minutes after they get paid.’

  ‘So they’re like … cowboys, then?’ says Wayne.

  ‘No!’ says Alec. ‘That’s the point! They’re not setting out to rip anyone off. They’re not the ones who put in the low quote, they’re not the ones who’re making a profit off the deal. They’re trapped by a stupid system. There they are, with all the skills they need to do good work, and their tools actually in their hands, and instead they’re fucking it up. They’re having to fuck it up.’

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  ‘And what the book’s saying is, that’s capitalism for you.’

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  ‘Dad,’ says Gary, appearing in the doorway.

  ‘And maybe you’re going to tell me, that was just the olden days. But it’s the same now, isn’t it? Look at you, fr’instance. You’re doing a full week’s work, and you’re getting ten quid for it. How’s that fair?’

  ‘Dad,’ says Gary.

  ‘But I’m learning the job,’ says Wayne.

  ‘That’s right,’ says Gary. ‘Don’t mind him, he’s a wind-up artist.’

  ‘I am not,’ protests Alec. ‘I’m making a serious point here. I’m trying to—’

  ‘Dad! Would you please, please, pretty please, stop trying to sign Wayne up for the revolution?’ He’s exasperated, but it’s within the bounds of humour, just as Alec himself is vehement, but not with the old bitterness. It was different straight after Wapping, with his occupation gone, his skill suddenly and forever useless. The humiliation was fresh. He hated taking shifts on charity from his own son, he hated being cut down into a middle-aged dogsbody, good for nothing but fetching and carrying. And he showed it, all the time. Looking back, he’s amazed that Gary put up with him.

  ‘Well, you know,’ he says, meaning the joke to be a kind of apology, ‘I’m just keeping my hand in. For old times’ sake. It’s my last day, after all. Gotta leave
with something to remind you how bloody awful it was, having me working for you.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks for that,’ says Gary.

  ‘But, but, that book?’ Wayne puts in.

  ‘What about it?’ says Alec, raising his eyebrows encouragingly.

  ‘If they’re doing a rubbish job, the guys in the book, ’cause the quote was too low – that’s, like, the customer’s fault, innit? They shouldn’t of taken the low quote. They paid for crap, so they’re getting crap. Right?’

  ‘You bloody Thatcher baby,’ says Alec.

  Gary laughs.

  ‘You done downstairs, then?’ Alec asks.

  ‘Yep. Ready to get in here, if you two’ve finished.’

  ‘Yeah, we’re good,’ says Wayne: and it’s true, while Alec has been standing there brush in hand, the boy has finished his own share of the walls and quietly moved on to finish Alec’s.

  ‘Right, then. Time for lesson number one for you, I think.’ Gary nods at Wayne.

  ‘We’ll help you fetch everything up,’ says Alec.

  ‘No, no, no need, me and Wayne can do it. You should be moving, shouldn’t you? Aren’t you doing the handover with mum at twelve thirty?’

  Alec looks at his watch. Bugger. Yes he is.

  ‘I better get going, yes,’ he says. ‘Well. See you tonight, son. See you, Wayne. Try not to grow up into a total Tory, okay?’

  And off he thuds down the stairwell over the huddled dustsheets, careful not to touch the buttery brown of new plaster that surrounds him, that pales as he gets into the dryer, older work in the hallway to a biscuity terracotta. As they dry, the burnish marks where Gary did his deft swivels and slides with the float edge become mere specklings, faint blushes of red on an apparently smooth surface. Gary does good work.

  ‘He talks like a teacher, your dad, doesn’t he?’ he can just hear Wayne saying, cautiously, at the top of the house, and Gary replying, ‘Funny you should say that …’

  Twenty past twelve. Out of the cool damp cave into August heat outside. Past the signboard saying FEATHERSTONE (in 10,000-point Baskerville) and the white van with TORRANCE BROTHERS on the side (sans serif, but he doesn’t know the font). For once, the job is near enough to walk home from. All he has to do is stroll – trot, rather – down under the big avenue trees from the top of the Rise to the point where the estate cuts into the right side of the street. Then the maisonette’s just round the corner. (Their maisonette, now, owned by them and not the council. He hadn’t wanted to do it but Gary insisted, and operating on benefits, operating on Gary’s goodwill, with nothing else to offer to the family economy, Alec didn’t feel he really had a leg to stand on.) Leaves still and heavy overhead; only the faintest stirring of the air. He feels the heat as he hurries in overalls. He feels the strangeness as he realises that, unless he takes to DIY, he’s not going to be wearing overalls again, ever. Not to work in. This is the end of him as a working man. Tomorrow morning he’ll be presenting himself in the staffroom in a suit and tie. Mr Torrance, indeed.

  ‘Sorry!’ he cries as he lets himself in.

  ‘In here,’ calls Sandra from the front room.

  He can tell she’s got Gary’s little girl with her straight away, from the particular small-person-present smell in the house: a mixture of lotions and creams, the steam of boiled veg and a hint of used nappy. He missed it the first time round, thirty-two years ago. That was Sandra’s department then; he was always off at work in the ink and roar while Sandra did the kids’ lives. But he knows it now, intimately, and he feels the familiar bump of delight and boredom together, as he puts his head round the door and finds Vicky on the carpet with legs sticking out of the corners of her little red dress at right angles, and a plastic giraffe held up to her face to be given a talking-to. How can you be bored and delighted at the same time? Filled with love and conscious at the very same point of how many hours there are to get through till bedtime? You just can, that’s all.

  What he’s not expecting to see is Gary’s Sonia’s dad Tony sitting on the settee as well. They don’t move apart from each other as he comes in or anything like that, but he has the impression somehow that they are, as it were, deliberately not moving apart. There’s a self-consciousness about them; about them being seen, and being seen by him. Oh.

  ‘I’ll just nip upstairs and change,’ Alec says.

  ‘Better take Vicky with you, love,’ says Sandra. ‘I’m out of time. We should get going. – Tony’s giving me a lift.’

  ‘I’m just giving Sandra a lift down,’ Tony explains, unnecessarily.

  ‘Right,’ says Alec. ‘Come on then, Your Majesty, come and help Grandad choose which shirt to put on.’

  ‘Can Horton come?’ asks Vicky. She must mean the giraffe.

  ‘Of course he can,’ says Alec. He takes the hand that isn’t holding the giraffe, and so it begins, the afternoon at child speed, where every task breaks down into a multitude of tiny sub-tasks. This one is Getting Up the Stairs. They have reached the fifth step by the time Sandra, with purse in hand, is heading out through the frosted-glass front door with Tony. Sandra’s part-time job on the check-outs at the Co-op has metamorphosed into something semi-managerial at the huge new Bexford Tesco’s, still on the shop floor but moving briskly around sorting out the teenagers and pensioners who run the tills. Her shifts start at one.

  ‘Isn’t Grandma coming upstairs with us?’ says Vicky.

  ‘No, Grandma is going with Grandpa Tony,’ says Alec, and wishes he hadn’t put it like that. ‘Wave bye-bye.’

  ‘Bye-bye, chicken,’ calls Sandra as the door closes. ‘See you later, love.’

  Two more stairs, Vicky concentrating on the big steps up required. Then she stops.

  ‘Why do you say “Your Majesty”, Grandad? That’s not my name!’

  ‘Because “Your Majesty” is what you say to queens, and there was a very famous queen who did have your name.’

  ‘A queen called Vicky?’

  ‘Well, Victoria.’

  ‘I think Vicky is nicer.’

  ‘Mm-hmm. Up we go.’

  When they reach the top, Vicky needs the loo, so they do that first; and there’s washing her hands, and drying her hands, small fingers and pearly nails wiggling in the towel, and then rescuing Horton, who has somehow fallen into the toilet, luckily after it was flushed; and washing Horton, and managing to stop Vicky from helping with that, and consequently needing her own hands washed and dried all over again. In the bedroom, she doesn’t help pick a shirt. She climbs into the bottom of the wardrobe and tries to hide among the dry-cleaning bags.

  ‘I’m a lion,’ she says. ‘Rawr!’

  ‘Rawr,’ agrees Alec. He succeeds in changing his clothes while being-a-lion lasts.

  ‘Now. Have you had your lunch?’

  ‘No. I’m a hungry lion! Rawr!’

  ‘Rawr. Then let’s go and see what Grandma made for you. Why don’t I carry you this time?’

  ‘No, I want to do it myself, on my legs. Horton wants to do it himself on his legs too.’ A microsecond’s pause. ‘Where is Horton?’ Another microsecond, which is quite long enough for happiness to transit all the way into wailing panic. ‘Where is Horton?’

  ‘Horton’s in the bathroom, I expect, petal. Let’s go and look, shall we?’

  ‘Horton is lost!’

  ‘No he’s not, no he’s not. Look, there he is.’ Horton is among the toothbrushes. When Alec passes him over, Vicky is so eager to grab him that Alec gets clouted on the side of the head with him in passing. She presses him to her cheek, trembling. Then the sun is out again as if it had never been eclipsed. Loss is total; then loss is totally cancelled.

  ‘I thought Horton was an elephant,’ says Alec, unwisely.

  ‘Horton-on-the-telly is a nellyphant,’ says Vicky with scorn. ‘My Horton is a giraffe. He has spots.’

  ‘So he does,’ says Alec. ‘Now, let’s go and find your lunch.’

  ‘Lunch,’ agrees Vicky.

  They labour down the sta
irs.

  ‘Upsy-daisy!’ says Vicky on each step.

  ‘Downsy-daisy?’ suggests Alec.

  ‘No,’ says Vicky.

  Three hours later, Alec is in the park, sitting on a bench with the pushchair beside him, enjoying a momentary respite while the bossy woman with the double-buggy parked at the other end spins Vicky on the merry-go-round along with her two. In between he has fed her her lunch of fish fingers, tried and failed to get her to go down for a nap, sat her in front of a video of Rosie and Jim, and had her go to sleep there instead. He meant to ease away from the small, hot weight of her leaning against him and to nip upstairs to check his lesson plans for tomorrow, but he dropped off himself. Now they are out in the high-summer heat, under the glowering sky of city August. He has remembered to put on her sun hat. They have worked their way from the swings to the climbing frame to the see-saw, and now he has a moment to look around him, and even to try to think.

  He is, as usual, the oldest person in the park and also the only man. Apart from him, it’s all mothers, and young mothers too, busy with the business of fertility. A cloud of oestrogen surrounds him. His presence with Vicky most weekday afternoons has won him a kind of friendly half-admission to the club. He’s welcomed, and chatted to, but he is too male to quite belong. Yet at the same time – pass, friend – it’s insultingly clear that to them he’s much too ancient to count as male in the operative sense of the word. He’s not a boyfriend, a husband, a babyfather, one of the maybe desired or maybe resented but definitely visible impregnators who have helped bring about all this burgeoning and swelling. Under the circumstances a bit of middle-aged lechery is inevitable: but also kind of abstract. Self-limiting. Known to be pointless. Rendered remote and theoretical even as it happens, given that you’re only shown what you’re shown because you’re safely neutered. You’re allowed in because it doesn’t matter. Mrs Bossy here is never going to whip out her tits, but yesterday a red-haired girl sat next to him with her two-month-old on her knee. She hesitated fractionally, saw that Vicky was running to and fro bringing Alec sticks, and smiled decisively at him. She pulled out a big pale milk-swollen breast and plugged the baby’s mouth with a thick tender copper-coloured nipple. The baby sucked away, making little lip-smacking sounds of contentment. Far away, faintly, a part of Alec thought: I’m not surprised the kid’s happy, I’d be happy if I had that in my mouth. But only far away and faintly. It was like being a eunuch in the harem. Or what Alec imagines it would be like to be a eunuch in a harem. Or what he reminds himself he shouldn’t be imagining it would be like, because all that harem stuff is an orientalist stereotype. Orientalism was one of the set books on his Open University course.