by Helen Smith
Reviews for Being Light
Chapter One ~ The Castle
Chapter Two ~ Personne Disparue
Chapter Three ~ On The Bus
Chapter Four ~ Heaven & Earth
Chapter Five ~ The Message
Chapter Six ~ Sylvia
Chapter Seven ~ The Zebra
Chapter Eight ~ Jeremy
Chapter Nine ~ The White Van
Chapter Ten ~ Convenience
Chapter Eleven ~ Colours
Chapter Twelve ~ Cherry Lip gloss
Chapter Thirteen ~ Truly, Madly, Deeply
Chapter Fourteen ~ The Dinner Party
Chapter Fifteen ~ The Models
Chapter Sixteen ~ Being Light
Chapter Seventeen ~ Faecal Matter
Chapter Eighteen ~ Night-time
Chapter Nineteen ~ Usefulness
Chapter Twenty ~ Hot Line
Chapter Twenty-One ~ Wind Chimes
Chapter Twenty-Two ~ The Café
Chapter Twenty-Three ~ Bandits
Chapter Twenty-Four ~ Dry White Wine
Chapter Twenty-Five ~ Anthropologists
Chapter Twenty-Six ~ Plague of Blonde Women
Chapter Twenty-Seven ~ Sylvia’s Flip-Flop
Chapter Twenty-Eight ~ Cruising
Chapter Twenty-Nine ~ High Wire Workout
Chapter Thirty ~ Frozen Yoghurt
Chapter Thirty-One ~ Laundry
Chapter Thirty-Two ~ The Albert Memorial
Chapter Thirty-Three ~ The Postman’s Dog
Chapter Thirty-Four ~ The Bridges
Chapter Thirty-Five ~ The Circus
Chapter Thirty-Six ~ Prince Albert
Chapter Thirty-Seven ~ The Smallest Room
Chapter Thirty-Eight ~ Big Ben
Chapter Thirty-Nine ~ Philippe Starck
Chapter Forty ~ Regeneration
Chapter Forty-One ~ The Race
Chapter Forty-Two ~ Vroom, Slam
Thank you for reading Being Light
This book is for my parents
Copyright © Helen Smith 2000
First published in Great Britain by Orion in 2000
This ebook edition published in 2010 by Tyger Books
The right of Helen Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-9565170-2-9
Tyger Books
Cover photo: Kevan Cummins, Lamma Island
Reviews for Being Light
Smith has a keen eye for material details, but her prose is lucid and uncluttered by heavy description. Imagine a satire on Cool Britannia made by the Coen Brothers.
Times Literary Supplement
This is a novel in which the ordinary and the unusual are constantly juxtaposed in various idiosyncratic characters… Its airy quirkiness is a delight.
The Times
A screwball comedy that really works.
The Independent
Smith’s world is as wacky as Nicola Barker’s, but much funnier, less disquieting. Perhaps the Evelyn Waugh of Decline and Fall comes closer… She is a great snapper-up of unconsidered trifles… Wicked!
Time Out
Smith’s second novel has a comic style with a clear, simple, buoyant prose.
Irish Independent
An exuberant, acutely observed second novel.
Shena Mackay, The Independent
Smith is a wonderfully original and inventive writer who never bores her readers. Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk
Chapter One ~ The Castle
Roy Travers and his friend Brian Donald begin setting up the bouncy castle in Brockwell Park early in the morning, while the light is still weak and they are only half awake. It’s a very windy day in late April, with a light drizzle forecast for this afternoon, but they and the other volunteers are expecting a large crowd to turn out from midday to raise money for St Thomas’s Hospital Scanner Appeal.
The bouncy castle, lent to them for the occasion by a local business, is the star attraction for the younger children, together with the pony rides. It is very shiny, made from an expensive prototype material of the kind that is primarily used in modern metallic stay-fresh crisp packets.
‘Funny weather for a Fun Day,’ says Brian, who has no gift for observational humour. Roy ignores him, crouched inside the bouncy castle at the back, patting and smoothing the walls to make sure it is inflated correctly. The inflation is just right. They have made the walls and the turrets of the castle fat and sausagey without putting a strain on the material.
Brian hunches over a Silk Cut Ultra Mild with his disposable lighter, his back turned against the wind, hoping to reward himself with a quick smoke before checking that the guy ropes are secure. His wife doesn’t like him smoking. She was the one who told the Hospital Fundraising Committee he would be prepared to spend his day off buggering about with the bouncy castle, so he doesn’t feel too bad.
The wind nudges the castle. The ground is soft because it has been raining. The metal pegs slide from the earth like hungry fingers through custard. The castle bumps an inch or two along the ground, trailing the guy ropes. Unheeding, Brian flicks at his lighter and makes a windshield for the cigarette with the lapel of his jacket, turning his back one way and then another against the intensifying wind, whipping around him from all directions.
With the persistence and strength of an elephant moving tree trunks in the jungle, the wind produces a fierce, blowing burst that transforms the anchorless castle into a flying craft, Roy Travers its only passenger.
At first Roy laughs as he feels it lift beneath him. Bouncy castles are usually a bit tame as an amusement, except for the smallest children, but a flyaway castle strikes him as funny for a few seconds as it rises swiftly on the strong spurt of wind.
‘Hey,’ Roy shouts, as much to the castle as to anyone else, as if it might come to its senses and deposit him back on the ground. Brian runs after him and tries, and fails, to catch hold of the guy ropes to bring him back to earth. Perhaps he’d have made more of an effort if they had winning lottery tickets pinned to them.
Neither Roy nor Brian have been involved in a tragedy before, although they sometimes watch the drama documentaries on the BBC that recreate real life rescues, with many of those involved self-consciously playing themselves. Unfortunately, like so many amateurs in tragedies of this kind, Roy and Brian have no sense of occasion and as a consequence they fail to act quickly or appropriately. They both assume that the flying bouncy castle will drift back to earth. Brian takes out his camera and snaps a few photos. The bouncy castle climbs higher and higher, the wind keeping it aloft skilfully as if harnessing the gentle hands of an invisible juggling circus troupe.
Roy crawls to the front of the castle on his knees, holds on, looks down. He tries to overcome his fear of heights. He has to jump from the castle and save himself. He raises himself to a standing position, knees slightly bent to keep his balance, still holding on. The castle has risen high enough in the air to brush tree tops. How tall are trees? Ten feet? Twelve? Fifteen? Roy tries to visualise himself standing on Brian Donald’s shoulders. Would he be able to reach out and touch the tree tops? How tall is a first floor window? If you jump from the first floor, do you survive? The castle continues to climb. What about the chances of survival if you jump from a second floor window?
Roy returns to a crouching position, then
moves again to get comfortable, resting his weight on his knees, holding on, looking down. He is too dangerously far from the ground to risk a jump. He switches his focus to remaining on the castle, as if it were his saviour rather than his captor. He finds a reasonably comfortable position, half reclining like a Roman guest at a feast, his feet jammed into a pocket in one of the side walls, his hands gripping the material beneath him. He feels secure enough to appreciate, if not actually enjoy, the view of the English countryside as he sails above it.
With the quietness, the wind in his hair, the gentle bobbing motion of the castle, Roy could almost believe himself lost at sea if it weren’t for the scenery below. In a rustic tableau reminiscent of an earlier, more innocent age, he sees a mother with two children on bicycles in a country lane. They wave at him as he floats overhead. What is the correct response? He has no materials to make a placard and spell out ‘Help’. The tiny figures are too far below him to read his distress in hand signals. Unwilling to disappoint the children, he waves tentatively. Still the flying castle climbs. The air is very cold. He wishes he could sail nearer the sun, so he could feel its warmth.
Roy loses track of the passage of time. He feels himself becoming light-headed as the air grows thinner. The prototype bouncy castle material, subject to unpredicted changes in temperature, begins to shrink. Roy lifts his lolling head and squints at the sun, trying to assess whether there is a danger of sailing too near and shrinking his craft enough to plummet him to the earth. His last thoughts are of his wife as, eyes tightly shut, he feels the material beneath him wrinkle and contract, hears the menacing hiss of the air inside escaping, feels the too-quick descent towards earth and certain death.
Roy has heard that if you don’t wake up when you feel yourself falling as you go to sleep at night, you will die. Dying and falling are indistinguishable for Roy in his final moments. He wakes in the arms of an angel. She isn’t beautiful, although she is wearing white and she’s soft and comforting. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Well, well, well. Welcome to Paradise.’
Chapter Two ~ Personne Disparue
Sheila Travers reports Roy’s disappearance the next day, calling in to Brixton Police Station to file the information in person.
‘You have to wait forty-eight hours before you can file a missing person report,’ the desk Sergeant tells her.
‘It isn’t a straightforward missing person report. It’s an accident report. An incident report.’ Sheila picks at the bobbles on her coat, looking down. Then she looks the Sergeant straight in the eye. ‘Please, I need to know whether a body has been found.’
The desk sergeant checks his computer screen and reassures her that Roy’s body hasn’t been found.
‘What kind of man is your husband?’
The question seems a strange one. It strikes Sheila as being unnecessarily intrusive. It carries the implication that Roy’s personality could have some sort of bearing on the outcome of his freak accident, which is impossible. ‘Roy is a sensible man.’
The sergeant, following Sheila’s troubled reaction to his question in the frown lines on her face, seems relieved by the answer when she finally gives it. ‘Well, then. Wherever he’s landed, he’ll try to make his way back home. Why don’t you go back there and wait? I’m sure you’ll hear something from him soon.’
Sheila waits for him for over a week, starting at every sound outside her front door in case it is Roy without his key; lifting the phone receiver every so often to check the dialling tone; not eating properly; not going out in case there is some news; switching on the kettle to make tea and then not making it, switching it on again, letting it boil; switching every switch in the house and switching them all off again.
On the following Monday, with no sign of Roy and still no body found, Sheila decides she needs to enlist the help of all available agencies, including unconventional ones. She visits a clairvoyant in a pleasant, airy flat in Josephine Avenue, off Brixton Hill. The visit is a first for Sheila, although strictly speaking she is no stranger to the supernatural. When she was nine years old, she and her friends watched as a very bright, elliptical light hovered above their heads as they walked home from the school bus stop in the winter darkness. The likelihood of alien life forms drawing near to study the tiny figures in red and grey uniforms was debated in the junior school for weeks. It is the only other time in her life that Sheila has been prepared to believe that there might be more in this world than whatever she can see on the surface but the incident is half-buried in the mythology of Sheila’s childhood and she hasn’t thought about it for more than thirty years.
Sheila has never written to a magazine for advice, never taken part in a documentary for Channel Four, never believed in her horoscope (although she reads it) and never, ever turned to the spirit world for guidance. Now something outside the ordinary has happened to Roy and Sheila needs someone outside the ordinary to provide a clue to Roy’s continuing absence, as the police cannot. Sheila sets aside her misgivings and sounds the buzzer for the flat in Josephine Avenue.
The clairvoyant’s name is Dorothy. She’s in her late thirties, has badly bitten fingernails, an expensive feathered haircut and ever so slightly too-tight trousers. Her flat smells of air freshener but her manner is reassuring.
Dorothy takes the photograph of Roy being blown away on the bouncy castle, thoughtfully passed on to Sheila by Brian Donald, and rests her hands on it in her lap, closing her eyes. Seconds pass. Long seconds, running into minutes. Sheila is embarrassed and impressed by the silence, unsure whether to fill it. From the kitchen, she can distinctly hear the sound of Dorothy’s cat eating its dry food supplement from the plastic bowl on the linoleum.
‘I see him floating,’ says Dorothy at last. ‘I see him floating.’ She settles back, easing the pressure caused by sitting upright in the trousers, apparently prepared to let the matter rest. Sheila tries to pin Dorothy down to an interpretation of this information.
‘On a boat?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘On a river or on the sea?’
‘The sea?’ The inflection in Dorothy’s voice suggests participation in a parlour guessing game rather than the insight of an all-seeing oracle.
The minimal information Sheila gathers in this consultation with Dorothy strongly indicates to her that the wind has taken Roy across the Channel. What other stretch of sea could have transported him to a land mass quickly enough for him to have survived the journey? It is extremely fortunate that she has been collecting tokens from the Daily Mail to exchange for a ferry ticket to France for only £1, as this will enable her to travel inexpensively to look for him there.
‘One more thing, Sheila. I can see him standing on a platform, preparing to step off. It’s a very vivid picture. I don’t know what it means.’
Sheila spends Tuesday and Wednesday with a French dictionary, paper, pens, glue and scissors. By Thursday she’s ready to go to Calais to search for Roy, one of only a few foot passengers to make the trip. Most of her fellow travellers are bootleggers in cars or vans, making a round trip to Calais to buy bottles of Jacob’s Creek at prices which offer a considerable saving compared to current deals in British supermarkets and off licences.
Fifteen minutes into the journey, Sheila starts to feel sick. Her weakened body is powerless to stop anxious thoughts crowding her mind. Where is Roy? What’s become of him? She clings to the hope that he’s alive. Sheila cannot and will not believe that Roy is dead. She holds tight to the rail of the ferry, pea green and sick, not with the motion of the boat but with the effort of disbelieving the evidence of his disappearance. He cannot be dead. He would not have left her. She must believe in him. Believing will give her the strength to bring him back, wherever he has gone, or been taken. Alone, sick, frightened, Sheila spaces her feet a little apart on the wooden floor of the deck of the ferry to keep her balance as the boat rocks with the movement of the sea in the middle of the English Channel. She’s determined to believe.
Sheila has a thin stack o
f home-made A3-sized posters with her, photocopied in the local newsagent’s, each with a photograph of Roy. The words ask for help from the French people in their own language: ‘Personne Disparue. Est-ce que vous avez vu cette personne?’
Standing on the ferry, attempting to create a reality in which Roy is still alive and trying to get back home, Sheila tries to transmit her belief in him to wherever he is, so that he will know and take comfort. She reaches into her nylon travelling bag and takes out the posters to look at his blurry likeness, enlarged and photocopied from a holiday snapshot. The wind tugs at the topmost poster and whips it out of her hands, flinging the paper against the rail before snatching it up again, toying with it and then dashing it down into the waves. Sheila stuffs the rest of the posters back into her bag, not watching.
Once she reaches Calais, Sheila glues the posters all around the town. The day is exhausting and disappointing. In attending to the detail of creating the posters and buying a ferry ticket, Sheila hasn’t paid attention to the overall strategy of the plan. Now that she has arrived in France, Sheila feels daunted by the scope of her search. She feels useless and frustrated and foolish. She has no idea how to generate leads or gather information. She walks round and round and tries to talk to people, without learning any news of Roy. At the end of a disappointing day, Sheila goes into the hypermarché to buy some cheese and some wine before catching the last ferry home. She hopes that shopping will provide some solace because it is normal and everyday but the lights in the hypermarché are so bright that they give her a headache and, as she takes a trolley from the rack, out of the corner of her eye she sees the doors of a lift close on a man who has been too slow to get out of it, trapping his arm.
The day after her return to England, Sheila visits the clairvoyant again.
‘I think he’s in a happier place,’ Dorothy tells Sheila, with tears in her eyes. Sheila pays the clairvoyant the money for the consultation but she won’t believe her. She goes back to the flat to wait for him.
