Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

  ‘Is something up, though?’ he asks Steve, when Clare has shepherded little Alice and Jamie off to the loo.

  ‘It’s not – I dunno,’ says Steve, looking uncomfortable. ‘You should talk to Gary, really.’

  ‘Okay,’ says Alec, baffled. ‘Your mum’s not ill, is she?’

  ‘No! No, nothing like that. It’s just – no, you should talk to Gary.’

  ‘Okay.’

  When the lemon tart is eaten, Sonia’s brother Craig’s eldest’s new husband’s best man tings his spoon on a glass and kicks off the speeches. The best man is rude enough to get some groans as well as raucous laughter from the adult bridesmaids, and Craig’s nervous father-of-the-bride number is sweet enough to make the older contingent all go Aah. They toast the bride and groom, they toast the mother of the bride, they toast the bridesmaids.

  ‘I thought Vicky was bridesmaiding today?’ says Alec.

  ‘Yeah, she is,’ says Steve, looking down at his plate.

  ‘Only I can’t see her.’

  ‘I expect she’s nipped to the ladies,’ says Clare, with significant emphasis and her eyebrows raised.

  ‘Well,’ says the groom, ‘it’s brilliant you’re all here, we love you all, even you Terry, even after you pulled that stunt with the handcuffs, yer bastard. Me and the missus here—’

  ‘Ooooh!’

  ‘I spose I’ll get used to saying that …’

  ‘Give it fifty years!’

  ‘Thank you – me and the missus here are now going to dance our heads off, and we hope you’ll join us.’

  The DJ has already set up on the little stage at the end of the room, and when the central tables have been pulled back to make a dancefloor, on go the disco lights, down go the house lights, and the tunes begin. Hollow Eyes mister and Caterpillar Eyes missus are the first onto the floor as is only right, not touching, keeping it decorous, but so wholly focused on each other, so wholly directed at each other with their entire bodies, head to toes, that it’s as plain what they intend as if they were doing flamenco. Out comes the best man, you-bastard-Terry, with the tallest blondest bridesmaid, and their dance is a piss-take of intent, though perhaps it may become real in a few pints’ time. And Craig and his wife, giving it some for the honour of the middle-aged, the wife quite a mover, vibrating in her tight white and conjuring the girl who only eighty million heartbeats ago was dancing to Duran Duran in the school disco, but sitting back down knackered after one song. And the younger guests from all over, and among them the rest of the grown-up bridesmaids in a pink gaggle. Except Vicky; he still can’t see her. He likes to keep an eye out for her, these sort of events being the main way he comes across her now. She was the first of the grandchildren, and in his head remains perpetually the Vicky who faced him at the other end of the see-saw, every afternoon in the park. No, here she comes, back from the ladies or wherever, hurrying in her pink to the dancefloor.

  ‘Vicky!’ he calls, and then again louder, since her head is down and she doesn’t seem to be hearing.

  ‘Oh. Grandad,’ she says, but she doesn’t come closer. She lingers about as far from him as she civilly can, with her head tilted weirdly back, as if she’d like to keep her face even further away from him than the rest of her.

  ‘I just wanted to say hi,’ he says, confused.

  ‘Right,’ she says, and her voice sounds hoarse, scorched. ‘I’m going to have a dance. Got to dance at a wedding, right?’

  ‘I think this one’s a bit fast for me,’ says Alec. ‘Ancient knees, you know.’ He’s not thinking about what he’s saying. He’s staring at her. Perhaps it’s longer than he thought since he saw her – maybe it’s been a year or more. However long it is, something awful has happened to her in the meantime. The pink dress hangs on her like a satin binbag, and the arms that stick out of it are white twigs, with raw patches like eczema. For some reason she has fingerless gloves on. Her face is pancaked in foundation and her eyes are so daubed they look like blotches. It’s make-up worn for a mask, but it can’t hide her completely, and what he glimpses underneath is … shrivelled. A tight-skinned wretched little monkey-face, all bones, eyes too big in proportion, even without the mess of product.

  ‘Vicky!’ he says in alarm, stepping forward, but she shrinks back, jumps back, leaving him only with a brief wash of a really disturbing smell, acrid and rancid together. The stomach-juice smell of puke, combined with some secretion, waxy and metallic together, that human bodies are not supposed to produce.

  ‘Gotta go,’ she says, bruised eyes blinking. And she heads into the flashing topaz and the circling glitter-ball motes, to the furthest side of the dancefloor, where she starts to do something that’s more like a jerky exercise routine than a dance, and that has no reference at all to anyone around her, or to their boogieing, or (whatever she says) to the wedding in general. She moves like a solitary, manic insect. People give her space.

  Alec watches, troubled, baffled. It has been a while, for sure. Maybe he is out of practice with the way she is now. But he’s pretty sure that when he did see her last, whenever it was, she was in that late-teenage state of arriving at your settled face. The midteens startlement and hormone surge is calming down, the puppy fat is coming off your brow and your cheeks; and, tightening into focus, swimming up and firming up, here’s the you you’re going to be. In Vicky’s case, this pretty girl, a white South Londoner with plucked eyebrows and careful clothes and an expression sitting habitually on the self-possessed/sarcastic borderline. Where’s that gone? What undid that?

  You should talk to Gary. He looks for him, and finds him at the top table, leaning over Sandra and Tony to say something but glancing up every little while at the dancefloor. Alec’s gaze and Gary’s gaze cross. Can I talk to you? Alec mouths. Gary shrugs, pats Tony and Sandra, and makes his way over.

  ‘Dad,’ he says neutrally. The music is loud enough that they have to push words at each other, and lean close, but it gives them a kind of privacy, at the edge of the dancing.

  ‘What’s up with Vicky?’ asks Alec.

  ‘You noticed, then.’

  ‘I know I haven’t seen you all for a bit, but yeah.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s nice to fool myself, you know, that people can’t tell.’

  ‘I’m not “people”, least I hope I’m not. What is it?’

  Gary sighs. ‘Vicky has an eating disorder.’

  ‘What, she’s anorexic?’

  ‘No, the other one. She eats, but she throws it back up again. Bulimia.’ Gary says this patiently, tiredly, as if the words are a doom he has had to pronounce on his daughter over and over again.

  ‘She looks terrible.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad.’

  ‘She was fine the last time I saw her.’

  ‘Was she? We can’t work out when it started. After a bit, you start thinking, was that a sign? Was that? Perhaps it goes way back.’

  ‘Come on, no,’ says Alec, not sure why he’s arguing. ‘She was just this happy, pretty girl. And it can’t have been that long. She’s only seventeen.’

  ‘Eighteen; but, you know, so what. It’s old enough to fuck yourself up. Apparently.’

  ‘But you can get it sorted, right? She’s got her whole life ahead of her.’

  ‘No,’ says Gary, with a touch of weary aggression, ‘apparently I can’t sort it. There she is, Dad; still fucked up. She’s just eaten a three-course dinner with coffee and mints and puked it all up, and now she’s gonna dance like a maniac in case any calories accidentally stuck to her. And then she’s going to go all faint and wobbly, and icy-cold, and we’ll drive her home, and tomorrow morning she’s going to wake up just that little bit more starved than today. Just in time to throw up her breakfast.’

  ‘Sorry,’ says Alec. ‘Sorry, son. It’s just a bit of a shock.’

  ‘It is that,’ says Gary.

  ‘What … happened?’

  Gary puffs out a breath. ‘Like I said: we don’t know. She doesn’t know, least I don’t think she does. I m
ean, she broke up with her boyfriend; but that seemed to be all right. She was worried about her A-levels; but so were all her friends. She listened to gloomy music; but, you know, teenagers. She didn’t like the way she looked, and she went on these daft you-can-only-eat-porridge-type diets: but, you know, teenagers! It was like she fell over this invisible cliff, and everything went from a little bit bad to impossible without us noticing.’

  ‘And she started, what, sneaking off to the bathroom after meals?’

  ‘No, not to begin with. She thought we’d smell it in the bathroom, or the loo. She’d go off to her room with a carrier bag and lock the door.’

  ‘A carrier bag?’

  ‘To puke in. Then she’d tie them up, stash them under the bed.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ says Alec.

  ‘Sonia found them, vacuuming. Bags and bags of cold sick. Course, she stopped hiding them after that.’

  ‘Oh God, that’s awful. I just can’t— She’s always been so neat. Upset if her clothes got muddy. Felt-tips in a row. Puking in a bag? In a bag? How could she bear the mess?’

  ‘Apparently, after a bit,’ says Gary, ‘the throwing up starts to feel good. It’s like a ritual thing. You feel gross until you do it.’

  Somehow this detail is the worst so far. Children vomit, and you clear up after them. They throw up in the night over their pyjamas and the bedclothes, and they’re all pitiful and horrified at the natural logic of things running backwards and their tea reappearing from their tummies, falling chaotically out of their mouths again in chunks and ooze. You clean them up and change the sheets and put everything back in order. Safe, calm order. You sit with them while they go back to sleep. You make it right again. Alec has mopped up Gary and Steve, he has mopped up little Vicky, in the days when he was minding her. The thought of this innocent wretchedness turning into, what, he can hardly imagine, a compulsion, an inside-out greed, an urge so overriding it welcomes the chunks and ooze: that’s horrible. Oh, Vicky.

  ‘You should have told me; you should have said.’

  ‘What good would that have done, Dad?’

  ‘What about, I don’t know, um, therapy? Counsellors? Rehab?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Gary. ‘What about them.’

  ‘You’ve tried …?’

  ‘Course I have. Course I have. I have run around like a blue-arsed fly. Doctors. Psychologists. Counselling services. Expensive houses in the country where rock stars go. None of ’em work if you don’t want ’em to work, do they.’

  ‘She won’t go?’

  ‘Well, she’s been to hospital twice. Didn’t have any choice. After a bit you just fall over. Then they section you, put you on a drip, send you home when you’ve put on a pound or two, ready to do it all again. But she won’t go to rehab, no, no, no. How,’ says Gary, and suddenly there’s a sob in his voice, ‘how I hate that fucking song.’ He is staring at the dancefloor with his face set. Gary, capable Gary who never seemed to want anything Alec knew how to give, sounds helpless. Alec catches himself in an instant of tiny ignoble pleasure, drowned at once in shame.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. On the other side of the floor the insect dance continues. But she’s so young, Alec wants to protest. It feels as if it ought to be possible to appeal to her youth against all this. Surely nothing too serious can happen to someone so new, so near to their beginning.

  ‘I’m sure she’ll be all right,’ says Alec. ‘She’s such a lovely girl.’

  ‘Everyone says that. Like it can’t be much of a problem when she’s got all her advantages going for her. But what if it’s the other way round? She’s got all her advantages, and still she’s fucked up. Maybe that means the problem’s really bad … But yeah; yeah; she is a lovely girl. She is.’

  ‘Well, if there’s anything I can do to help.’

  ‘If I knew what needed doing, I’d be doing it, wouldn’t I. But,’ says Gary with an effort, ‘thanks, Dad. Thanks.’

  And he bumps shoulders with Alec – the first time Alec can remember them touching in he doesn’t know how long, but a signal of goodwill sent, clearly, from far far away, across a great distance of trouble.

  ‘Oh, here we go,’ says Gary. The insect has faltered, is folding up. Before she can collapse all the way to the ground Gary has arrived and scooped her up in a horribly little-girlish double-armful, bony legs dangling. ‘Let’s get you home, little lollipop,’ Gary tells his daughter, who lolls on his shoulder smelling of vomit and a body digesting itself; and there is such an expression of stricken tenderness on his face, he is down so deep in a desperation Alec has not even suspected, he is so far beyond embarrassment as he carries Vicky off through the wedding – that Alec falls back, silent, and after a moment backs off too. His impulse is to go away right out of the room, right out of the building, but that seems like such a confirmation of his total failure with the family that he makes himself withdraw only to an empty table in the dark at the room’s edge. From here the points of light tracking across the dancefloor from the glitter ball form a swaying oval through which the dancers shuffle darkly, heads lit in flashes. Round they go, on they go. It feels as if, for the second time today, a hole has appeared in the fabric of things, showing what lies behind. Only this time, instead of a gentle thinning of habit, there’s a rip, a gash, and the view through is to a void of waste and disaster. He rests his forehead on his fist, as a dignified alternative to putting his head in his hands.

  ‘Hey, you,’ says Sandra.

  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Hey.’

  ‘Gary just talked to you.’

  ‘Yes; yes, he did.’

  ‘Can I sit down?’

  ‘Of course you can.’ Grey hair now instead of blonde, deep grooves at the corners of her mouth, yet still the same slender being as ever, in the dark opposite him. ‘Did you know about this?’ he says.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says.

  ‘It’s so awful.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘I suppose everyone but me knew?’

  ‘No. No. Gary and Sonia haven’t been spreading it about. It’s a shock when you find out, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah!’

  ‘So I thought I’d check you were all right.’

  ‘I feel,’ says Alec, knowing he probably shouldn’t but unable to resist the invitation to speak his misery, ‘as if I haven’t managed to do one single good thing in my life.’

  ‘Oh, what crap,’ says Sandra calmly.

  ‘Well – everything I do ends in failure, doesn’t it.’ The paper; the family; the school too, maybe.

  ‘That’s different, isn’t it,’ she says. ‘Everything ends. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. You were a very good dad, you know.’

  ‘I never worked out how to talk to the boys.’

  ‘Or they never worked out how to talk to you. They’re very proud of you, you know.’

  ‘You’re not sorry you were married to me, then?’

  ‘No!’ says Sandra, making a noise of exasperation no different from the old noises of marital exasperation. Bus shelter; registry office; kitchen in the maisonette; darkened table littered with plates and glasses. All the times lie on top of each other. ‘No, love. Don’t be daft. It’s not your fault we couldn’t make it work in the end.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to change,’ says Alec.

  ‘I’m not sure you did really, love.’

  ‘It feels like I should have been able to fix it.’

  ‘Mr Responsible,’ says Sandra, and reaches between the glasses to take his hand.

  ‘It feels like I should be able to fix this now.’

  ‘Vicky?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Me too. I’ve been all through it with Gary and Sonia. Everything I could think of ?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘They’d already thought of it. Every single idea I could come up with. And you know what I realised?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That this is on them now. Not us. We’ve done our heavy lifting. They’re Vicky’s mum and dad, n
ot us. All we can do is hope they find a way. We can’t sort it for them. Or for her. It’s their problem, not ours.’

  ‘It’s just such a terrible way for it all to end up.’

  ‘End up? End up? Nothing’s over, you berk. Vicky’s eighteen. She’s got the whole of the rest of her life coming.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, she has. You’ve got to believe that. But when she gets out of this mess, you know what? There’ll be something else, and something else again, and we won’t be able to wave a wand over those things either. Problem after problem after problem, going on forever. It never stops.’

  ‘I suppose,’ says Alec, feeling better, though he couldn’t exactly say why.

  ‘Right. So – come and have a dance.’

  ‘What? No. It’s a bit fast for m—’

  ‘It’s a slow number, Alec. Come on.’

  ‘Won’t Tony mind?’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  And she yanks him to his feet, and draws him through the mess of tables into the tilting oval of lights.

  ‘Maybe don’t put your hands on my bum, though,’ she adds, a minute later.

  ‘Sorry,’ says Alec.

  ‘Behave, or I’ll report you to your, you know, your lady.’ Whether because she’s afraid of mispronouncing it or for some other reason, Sandra like Gary and Steve tends to avoid saying Priya’s name. Alec, who was not misbehaving but only sliding without thinking into past time, thinks now of Priya. Admirable Priya, up for a conversation about Gramsci whenever he likes; terribly rational Priya, who would fail to see that there was anything to make a fuss about here, even if she were told. Priya who would not understand that even if he places his hands with absolute propriety, the very act of him dancing close with Sandra has a helpless infidelity to it.