Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

  ‘You shut up,’ snaps Becky. ‘Just shut up.’

  ‘Oh, that was—’

  ‘Shut up,’ she repeats. She is angry, which he expects, but looking at her, she also has tears in her eyes, which he doesn’t.

  ‘Come on, Becky …’

  ‘Not a word. Not one fucking word. Do you not get how humiliating that was?’

  He shuts up. She stares at the lift doors, face set, and when they open on the ground floor she’s out at a furious trot, past the startled receptionist and into the car park. She doesn’t wait for him. She marches ahead, and he hobbles in her wake. Behind him the stadium gives the pulse of crowd sound that means the second half’s begun. From far up ahead he hears the bup-bup of the Range Rover’s central locking, and thinks, at least she’ll have calmed down by the time I get over there. But Becky is too agitated to stay put. She throws her bag into the car and comes marching back again. When she reaches him she doesn’t walk next to him. She circles, she makes glancing little runs at him like an attacking fly.

  ‘Did you ever consider not ripping off every single person you ever did business with?’ she says.

  And again, on her next pass:

  ‘Do you know who the mug is? Not that poor sod. Me; muggins here, for trying to do something nice for you. I should have listened to Mum. She said you were a poisonous old git.’

  ‘Look,’ he says, the next time she comes in for the attack, ‘I don’t care, all right?’

  She stops, she stares. Something changes in her face. Something resolves there.

  ‘You really don’t, do you?’ she says. ‘It’s like there’s nothing left of you but spite.’ Suddenly, she is calmer.

  They’ve reached the lime-green wall of the Range Rover. Becky cocks an ear.

  ‘Listen, Dad,’ she says, ‘they’re playing your tune.’

  He hasn’t been paying attention to the noise coming from the Den. That kind of bellowing is not what he calls music. But the home fans are, in fact, delivering the ancient war chant of Millwall.

  No one likes us, no one likes us,

  No one likes us, we don’t care.

  Vern laughs, he can’t help it. And so does his daughter, but not with him.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘at least I don’t have to do this shit any more. Mum said I should put you in a home, and she was right. Go on, get in.’

  As they pull out onto the main road he reaches for Tosca, but she snatches the CD out of his hand, cracks the driver’s-side window and skims Dame Kiri into the traffic.

  ‘We won’t have any more of that dismal crap either,’ she says.

  And all the way to Faversham she makes him listen to ‘Lady in Red’ by Chris de Burgh, on repeat.

  Alec

  Four o’clock on Saturday afternoon. Waiting for his Tube, on the way back from his conference, Alec has one of those moments where you see that the crowd is composed of, is nothing but, individual after individual after individual. The city granulates. He’s seeing the leaves not the foliage, the trees not the forest, the spill of separate crystals not the bag of sugar. A Circle Line train – not his – slides into the platform and through its opened doors and lighted windows he sees his fellow citizens displayed as if in a gallery.

  A short, jowly guy with a head like a Christmas pudding, wider at the bottom than the top. An immensely tall posh old man in a long coat, nothing left of his hair but white tufts springing from parchment, studying his paper like an ancient tortoise. A plump blonde woman in leggings and leopard-skin mules, whose knees knock in and whose chin points down, turned in on herself. A blue-shoed dandy in his forties, with a white short coat, a white muffler, white gloves, all immaculate, but hair grey-streaked and tangled. A fair young woman wearing fawn, with one of those noses that comes straight down from her forehead, a nasal pier. A dark-skinned Bengali man in his sixties, sitting like one exhausted, who has around his watchful eyes and down onto his pitted cheeks stains of dark on the dark, like bruising. Woman in a puffa jacket, frizzy hair going thin on top, nodding at half the speed with which her friend beside her moves her hands. Melancholic Japanese tourist girl, pink beret standing up on her head like a rising cake, skin tinted greyish-cream with thick foundation, leaning unexpectantly against the window. Brown girl, twentyish, beautiful, whose long black bob curves round her face like a nut’s shell. Square-faced pasty white boy, with swags of beard at the corners of his jaw, like a playing-card king’s. Pair of Muslim lads in trainers and trackie bottoms, shaved sides to their heads, prayer caps, nudging each other and looking as if they’d like to make a claim to something, but they’re not sure what. Black-haired, groomed man of thirty, dark suit and T-shirt, sprawling legs, unconsciously picking his nose as he concentrates on his phone. Slight Asian woman, equally unconscious, who works and pats and stretches her mouth as she reads. Grave, bulky, patient, angry African man, dressed like an undertaker, who grips the rail over his head with thick fingers and glowers. Studious black kid with short dreads and horn-rimmed glasses, legs akimbo, poetry book in hand. Weary grandad with sawn-off grey stump of a quiff and a jutting stubbled ball of a chin, trying to keep hold of a little boy in red in mid-sugar-rush, doing comedy collapses—

  And the doors close. We are so many, thinks Alec. Every single one of these people homeward bound, like him, to different homes which are to each the one and only home, or else outward bound, to different destinations at which each will find themselves, as ever, the protagonist of the story. Every single one the centre of the world, around whom others revolve and events assemble. So many whole worlds, therefore, packed in together, touching yet mutually oblivious. So much necessarily lost, skated over, ignored, when the mind does its usual trick of aggregating our faces.

  And he also thinks: Right, go away now. It may be true, this glimpse behind the city’s usual scrim of categories, but it is not the vision for dealing with things. You couldn’t walk up a rushhour street, negotiate a bus queue, sit in a theatre, if you were constantly aware of the millionfold press of beings as entire and complicated as yourself. Stop, please. Give me back my normal, callused apprehension of all these as a pink, brown and black forest, vague in the mass, from which I only need to pick out individual faces when I have a reason to concentrate on them. Begone. Scram. But the alteration to his sight goes slowly, unwillingly, as hard to shake as the awareness of breathing is when you’ve once become conscious of the in and the out of the air in your chest. He’s still blundering among over-noticed faces when he boards his eastbound train, still ringed around as he sits down with his briefcase on his knee by eyes universally bright and significant because they are all of them the windows through which single souls are looking out.

  In the end it’s anxiety that pulls him back. The anxiety is centred on his briefcase and on the documents in it. He has just escaped from a day of watery coffee, long-life Danish pastries and (unless he’s misread things) veiled threats. Along with fifteen other primary school heads whose last Ofsted report was only a Satisfactory, he’s been shown endless PowerPoint slides in which the word ‘opportunity’ repeated. The Department for Children, Schools and Families is pushing academisation. They can’t actually force him to cut Halstead Road’s connection to the local education authority but they’re piling up the inducements, and behind every inducement there seems to be a menace implied. All day long, the bright young civil servants with the laser pointers have been uttering sentences that curdle at the end. ‘Of course, there’s no statutory power to compel this change at present,’ they say. ‘We can’t guarantee that the transitional arrangements will remain available.’ ‘It may be that existing supports for areas of high deprivation will be judged to be offered most effectively within the package.’ ‘D’you get the impression,’ he wanted to whisper to his neighbour, who was prodding her Danish with the end of a pencil, ‘that we’re being told to jump before we’re pushed?’ But she must have known that already, and maybe she approved.

  It’s not that Alec is a reluctant player of th
e bureaucratic game. On the contrary, he has been competing in it with eager skill for more than a decade. This is why, in fact, his colleagues at Halstead Road were happy for him to become headteacher, even though at that point he’d only been in the staffroom for three years, and been teaching for less long than any of them. They knew he actually relished the task of shaking the money tree for the school, and would do his damnedest – old union skills coming in handy – to get the most out of New Labour’s generosity while it lasted. It was a pity, he thought, that the Labour government had decided back in ’97 to double up on the Tories’ regime of testing and league-tabling, instead of abolishing it, but you worked with the world as it was. So he schemed, he networked, he persuaded. He looked for the advantage to Halstead Road in every newly announced initiative. He made assets out of his school’s decaying buildings, its high proportion of kids speaking English as a second or third language, its sky-high scores on the deprivation indexes. He conjured the budgets to recruit teaching assistants, specialist mentors, enrichment visits by artists. He got SEAL money, EiC money, EMAG money, LIG money, NDC money, NRF money. Yes, the multiplying acronyms were ridiculous, but laughing at them, getting irritated with them, struck him as a kind of snobbery. A bourgeois affectation. If you were operating where there wasn’t private money strewn around the landscape, where the parents were only just coping themselves, where you couldn’t count on the PTA offering helpful little subsidies for school trips – what was the alternative? There was a duty to the kids to claw out every chance you could.

  ‘Who’ll look out for people like us if we don’t look out for ourselves?’ he asked a governors’ meeting. ‘Er, “people like us”?’ said a social worker called Liz Boateng. ‘Working-class people! People who’ve only got their labour to sell! Honestly, doesn’t anyone read Marx any more?’ ‘Okay, Alec,’ she said, with an ironic kind of smile, and he felt like a dinosaur; like a hypocrite too, with his absurdly gigantic salary.

  But he has got the school rebuilt. Alas, it isn’t beautiful. If it were up to him the young would be educated in temples to astonishment, every bit as strange and rich as the dragon-scaled houses by Gaudí that he and Priya have been to see in Barcelona. Spires! Weathercocks! Mosaics! Mermaids and angels! Instead of which he has had to settle for fawn cement. But it is new, and it doesn’t leak, and there are 234 kids at Halstead Road Primary School and he knows all their names – the Kurdish names, the Igbo names, the Bengali names, the Polish names, the Somali names – and no one is afraid of him, and nobody gets shouted at, and nobody gets hit. And nobody is unhappy? No, he reminds himself; you can’t know that. You can do your best to make them laugh, and to see they eat breakfast, and to lead them through the British Museum unintimidated, but who are you to say what’s going on inside, which of them privately inhabit a hive of busy misery, impossible to communicate? You’re only a teacher, not a magician.

  But now the era of new money is ending, thanks to capitalism and its crises, and so with horrible timing is the era of him. Him as a head, anyway. He is sixty-nine years old, and he’s already deferred his retirement once, because he wanted to see out the building works. He can’t do it again. Next summer he’ll be done, ready or not, and there is no one obvious lining up to take over. Even with the absurd salary it is hard to find people who want to take on the fifty acronyms and the guaranteed blame involved in managing an inner-city school. Especially one that has just emerged from an Ofsted ordeal with a grade only one up from the bottom. (Fucking Ofsted. His value-added numbers are excellent but apparently that doesn’t count for much.) And now, as well as the cold wind blowing in the post-crash world, there is also this sudden, specific pressure: cut loose from the poor old Bexford LEA, what is left of it, and redeem yourself from Ofsted disgrace as a shiny, rebadged academy. The ideological wrappings round the idea, he straightforwardly detests. All that magic-of-the-market crap; and there’s nothing wrong, either, with having one authority for the borough, answerable to voters, making decisions about schools. Yet it’s also clear that, in order to cajole schools to academise, the powers-that-be have consented to hang one more fat fruit on the magic money tree. Perhaps he owes it to the kids, and to whoever follows him as head, to say yes. Perhaps, since it’s going to be such a big deal in the school’s future, the decision has to be left to his successor. He shouldn’t tie their hands, should he. But it might be easier to find a successor if it were the shiny (et cetera) Halstead Road Primary Academy that were hiring. And there’ll be an election next year. Brown may win it but he may not, and if the Tories get back in, God knows what they’ll do. Classes of forty sitting on upturned buckets, probably: and they might well snatch away the incentive package for academising, if he hasn’t grabbed it while the grabbing was good.

  The question goes round and round inside him, blurring his fellow passengers back into the comfortable aggregate, but not revealing the hint of an answer, all the way home. East to Canary Wharf, then up above ground and south on the DLR’s Bexford extension. Then up Pevensie Street to the terrace by the common which he and Priya bought on his head’s and her lecturer’s salary. His feet would still carry him to the maisonette off the Rise, if he let them; he has found himself walking there from the school, on evenings when he’s very tired.

  ‘Helloo?’ he shouts, entering their whitewashed hall with its Indian art in niches. No answer, but that’s not definitive. Priya sometimes doesn’t hear him if she’s reading. He enters the kitchen but instead of her mass of grey curls arrested over a book on the counter, there’s a note. GONE TO ANJALI’S, SEE YOU MUCH LATER. Oh well, probably easier, because his worlds are about to collide, and he needs to be on his way again as soon as he’s showered. It’s – got to get this right – Gary’s Sonia’s brother Craig’s eldest’s wedding. He’s missed the actual ceremony, they knew he couldn’t get out of his conference in time, but the reception starts at six at the Tudor Tavern on Catford Road, and that he has to be at.

  Thanks to splurging on a taxi, he makes it at ten past with his hair still damp. The forecourt of the Tavern is full of cars, including the white Roller the happy couple must’ve arrived in, and a Torrance Brothers van, and a Costello van too, that being the other clan in this gathering of the clans. Sonia was a Costello, Craig is one, Sandra weirdly enough has become one. Two clans, two vans. Plasterers on one side, builders and decorators on the other. Not that anyone needed to travel by Transit to get to the knees-up. The vans are there as totems, badges, declarations of pride; specially important at the minute, two years into the property crash, with everyone anxious, and the supply of work inexorably shrinking, and both empires reduced sharply in size by lay-offs. For this very reason, Alec is willing to bet, all of the speeches tonight will be full of bouncy optimism, and there’ll be a very large float indeed at the bar.

  He’s right about the bar. In the function room at the back of the Tavern there’s a press of men by the long serving hatch through into the pub proper, and they’re loading themselves with armfuls of pints, white wines, blue cocktails and alcopops to carry back to their womenfolk at the round dinner tables. The bride and groom are sitting up at the top end, she in cream silk with eyelashes the size of escaped caterpillars, he hollow-eyed and the worse for wear from his stag night, but both grinning helplessly, the way you do; both shining with the astonishment of being, themselves, this moment, standing on the magic pivot, the trampoline of transformation, where your life is being changed and for once you know it. Right then, right there, as you feel the dizzy hilarious bliss of it, the change is underway. Bexford, 1961, the evening of his own wedding day: him and Sandra looking at each other. Wonderingly. With a wild surmise. ‘Well, you’ve done it now,’ Sandra said, mock-stern. ‘Yes,’ said Alec, and he remembers he found it hard to get his breath. Also their faces ached from smiling so much. And right now, right here, there she is sitting next to Tony in his wheelchair. She sees him looking and waves – nudges her husband, who waves too, and she points him out to Craig, who points him ou
t to Sonia, who points him out to Gary, and people call out Alec! and Dad! and Grandad! and beckoning arms go up at Steve’s table, where a place has been saved for him. And over he goes to them, to join people who are glad to see him, with his usual sensation that he has gone somewhere, in life, and his family have gone somewhere else.

  The starter has been eaten and they’re onto the mains. Steve has kindly piled up a backlog of food for him.

  ‘Cheers!’ says Alec, stabbing a prawn.

  ‘Cheers, Dad,’ says Steve, saluting him with his pint. After all these years Alec’s younger son still looks like a slightly miniaturised version of his older son, shaved head a little nearer to the ground than Gary’s, burly shoulders fractionally less burly. Always and forever, Steve is Torrance Brother No.2, number two in the firm as well, and apparently happy that way. ‘Sorry that your lady couldn’t make it.’

  ‘Oh, you know how it is,’ Alec lies. ‘She had something on at college she couldn’t get out of. She sends her best.’ Priya’s actual words being: Not in a million years. ‘Everything go off all right, then?’

  ‘Think so,’ says Steve. ‘Well; the registry office bit was fine, but a bit of a wobble with, uh …’

  ‘Mm-mm!’ says his wife Clare, rolling her eyes significantly at their two kids. Alec has no idea what she means.

  ‘Grandad,’ says their little girl, ‘do you like my bridesmaid’s dress? It’s pink!’

  ‘Isn’t it just?’ he says. ‘It’s lovely.’

  ‘It won’t be lovely any more if you get gravy on it,’ says Clare. ‘Keep your serviette tucked in. That’s right.’

  They smile at him, and he smiles back, and all of the gap between them that goodwill can cross, goodwill does. He asks about the firm and Steve gives him a bulletin till Clare says she’s sorry, she really needs an evening off from their troubles. Then he and Clare chat about schools, the school run, requests at bedtime for complete dinosaur costumes that have to be ready for 9 a.m. the next day, that stuff, it being an understood thing that Alec is, professionally speaking, a kind of honorary woman, able to keep his end up in conversations of this kind. There’s a pint by his plate not a glass of white wine but, thinks Alec, it may have been a close thing. He tilts his head towards Clare and gives silent thanks that Steve and Clare live ten miles south and east of the catchment area for Halstead Road, thus keeping things straightforward. He doubts they’d be keen on his school, for all sorts of reasons. This is the whitest roomful of people Alec has been in for some time.