Being Light 2011

by Helen Smith

  Perhaps Roy is being held somewhere against his will, unable to get back home? A few days after his disappearance Sheila came across an advertisement in the local paper which she pinned to the notice board in the kitchen, although she hoped she wouldn’t need it:

  Fitzgerald’s Bureau of Investigation

  ~ Discretion Assured

  It seems that the time has come to seek help from these people. When Sheila telephones, it is Mrs Fitzgerald herself who answers. She sounds sympathetic and experienced. Sheila makes an appointment to meet Mrs Fitzgerald and another woman named Alison, who will be assigned to help her look for Roy. For the first time since he disappeared, Sheila feels that she has got some help from people who know what they’re doing.

  Chapter Three ~ On The Bus

  Ella Fitzgerald is riding the buses again. She has found this an excellent opportunity to observe mad people, who ride around all day long on a Travelcard, mumbling to themselves. Today she has selected the 159, one of the few services that still uses the hop-on hop-off Routemaster buses with conductors. She has travelled from Brixton to Oxford Circus and is now on her way back home again.

  Looking through the windows of the top deck of the bus, she can see a silvery, shimmery bright sun. I must learn to see the world the way others see it, she thinks. There is something fanciful about the way I see things and I have to stop. Everyone knows the sun is gold or yellow. Even very young children know it, if you look at their drawings. I’ve always seen the sun as silver. If I can learn to see that colour as yellow, I’ll be like other people. I’ll be normal.

  Mrs Fitzgerald is thinking about madness. More than anything else, more than poverty or war or assaults from local teenagers, Mrs Fitzgerald fears going mad like her brother. What are the signs? She hopes to learn from her fellow passengers.

  When she looks outside again, as the bus pulls out of Lambeth Road and turns right towards Kennington, the world seems to have gone wrong. Her position at the front of the bus on the top deck gives her an excellent 270° vantage point. There to her left, as it should be, is the ImperialWarMuseum, formerly Bedlam. In front of the bus, behind the bus, all around the bus, there is a sea of people as far she can see. Most are walking but some are on bicycles. It’s impossible to tell whether the atmosphere is jolly or menacing. It has something of a carnival feel, which usually means a mixture of both. Mrs Fitzgerald can hear booming music and the shrill, discordant sound from whistles strung round people’s necks on coloured strings, jammed in their mouths, blowing at full volume.

  ‘Reclaim London’ is written on home-made banners waving above the crowds. Mrs Fitzgerald has the sudden, icy fear that these are mad people, spilling out from Bedlam, reclaiming the capital city and taking her with them as one of them. Looking around the bus, she sees she’s quite alone on the top deck. There are enough people outside to pick up the bus and carry it along on their shoulders, Mrs Fitzgerald above them like some carnival queen of the mad people. Is it possible that they know? Is she so like them that they can sense that she sees the sun as silver? ‘The sun is yellow, the sun is yellow, the sun is yellow,’ chants Mrs Fitzgerald, seizing on the thing that will make her normal and different from them. ‘The sun is yellow, the sunny’s yellow, the sunnys yellow, sunnys yellow, sunnys yellow, sunnysyellow.’

  The conductor lays a gentle hand on her shoulder. God, there are so many disturbed people on the bus these days, he should get a care worker’s allowance. The conductor’s fingers smell faintly of the grease from the roast chicken sandwiches he has been eating from their tinfoil wrapper a moment before. ‘It’s a demo, love. Anti-traffic, anti-vehicles. Bloody cyclists. They think they own London. You might be better slipping off the bus and taking the Tube. You can stay if you want, though.’ Sometimes they just like somewhere warm to sit.

  Mrs Fitzgerald, dry-mouthed, cannot bring herself to reply. Outside, head and shoulders above the other demonstrators, a beautiful blond young man balances on the pedals of a unicycle. He’s wearing a dress. He holds his hand up to the bus driver through the open sliding door that gives access to the driver’s seat. The driver keeps it open against regulations because he thinks it looks cool. The demonstrator’s hand, palm up, loose at the wrist, looks like a foppish invitation to the bus driver to dance. He wakes up all his muscles at once and lunges from the unicycle, pulling the driver from his seat and taking his place in front of the wheel, the bus engine still idling.

  Jeremy grips the wheel, his hands in position at ten to two, leaning forward slightly, mastering the great machine. He moves the gear stick on the shaft below the over-sized wheel into first gear and the bus edges forward, slowly. The protestors fall back, whistling and jeering, Jeremy clipping the pedals of the cyclists at the near side of the road as he adjusts to steering the unfamiliarly wide vehicle.

  Routemaster buses are semi-automatic. There is no clutch. The drivers slip into neutral and rev the engine before changing gear. Jeremy fails to do this. The bus lurches and comes to a halt two hundred yards further down the road, where the driver pulls Jeremy from the bus by his hair and regains his seat.

  The psychic postman stands at Alison’s door, patiently feeding birthday cards through the letterbox. Thirty years old. She hides from view, not feeling like talking.

  ‘Alison,’ calls the postman, his lips to the letterbox. ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘I’m frumpy, overweight, dog tired, smelling of milk, vomit, piss and Bonjela.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But it’s OK. I’m slowly climbing out of the pit.’

  ‘It might be post-natal depression. You should see someone about it.’ A plume of his cigarette smoke reaches Alison through the letterbox. The postman’s concern is touching. She presses her thumb and forefinger into the inner corner of each eye, using pressure to stop the tears the way first-aiders stop blood seeping from a small wound.

  Alison’s daughter, Phoebe, is around a year old now. She’s not sure of Phoebe’s exact age because she found the baby at the seaside last summer. While there is general sympathy these days for women who suffer from post-natal depression, Alison is aware there would be little sympathy left to go round for women who have found a baby and kept it.

  One of Alison’s birthday cards is home-made. It has a pressed cornflower on the front and a cutting from a newspaper inside, telling the story of a young child with defective vision who saw tiny particles of dust in the air magnified many times and thought they were fairies floating in front of her eyes. Optometrists corrected the child’s sight by giving her rose coloured glasses to wear.

  The card is from Jeff, Alison’s former downstairs neighbour. He’s moved a long way away in the hope of forgetting her. The card suggests he’s having some difficulty with this.

  Alison takes out a postcard of one of Picasso’s portraits of a woman with a messed up head, bought on a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and writes a simple message to the return address:

  My hands are rough, my lips are chapped. I’m 30, I feel old.

  Help me.

  Alison creeps up to the cot in the next room where Phoebe is having a nap. The child’s arms are thrown back and bent up at the elbow like a 1930s strongman, knees and toes turned out and her head turned to one side. Alison bends into the cot to watch for movement behind Phoebe’s long eyelashes and bluish eyelids as she sleeps. With a sudden deep, reassuring sleepy breath from the baby, Alison steps back and turns away.

  Harvey is sitting in his room in the fading light, hands tucked under his thighs, leaning forward, tensed. He looks like a track athlete practising for a new set of rules that require competitors to start each race from a sitting position on the sofa.

  Harvey’s eyes are closed, searching inward for his earliest memories of himself. He was a weedy child, popular with other children’s mothers because of his beautiful manners. Harvey remembers trying for the first time to grasp the meaning of the events that surrounded and involved him. It was while at school in the seventies, duri
ng an era when it was more fashionable to allow children to discover the great truths for themselves than to explain anything to them, that Harvey first tried to make sense of the world. He did this by paying attention to the labels given to everything and everyone by other people.

  Harvey is examining memories of shivering in a purple cotton matching vest and pants set in PE at primary school, fighting among the scaled down toilets in the infant block, queuing for school dinners, winding string around pillow cases and leaving them overnight in buckets of coloured water, twisting elastic around his legs then jumping high and clear of it. All these activities were unfathomable.

  Harvey remembers the morning he and the rest of his class spent their time folding scratchy pieces of paper very small and snipping at them with scissors with rounded ends. ‘You’ve made a snowflake,’ the teacher told him. The information gave him some comfort, even though it was a palpable untruth. Once one of the activities had been named he could ask for it again, or avoid it, or measure it against other things with the same name.

  It was only in his nightmares, or under the bed, or behind the curtains in the dark that shapeless frightening things remained, still unnamed.

  A phone call brings Harvey back from the darkness and he opens his eyes.

  ‘Your advertising campaigns for cars are very successful.’

  ‘Well, thank you. I can’t really take the credit. I’m a hired hand - part of a creative team. I’m sorry, I don’t think I recognise your voice.’

  ‘Mine is a lone voice roaring in a concrete jungle.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you know what cars are doing to this planet?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m the one who’s going to make you see that you’re wrong. I’m going to stop the traffic.’

  Harvey walks upstairs to Alison.

  ‘Do you know what cars are doing to this planet?’

  ‘The lead in the petrol makes children stupid. Cars clutter up the streets and knock cyclists off their bikes. The fumes from the exhaust turn the buildings black and they wither the trees at the side of the road. Ask Taron, she goes out morning, noon and night to try and revive the trees.’

  ‘Do you ever feel like campaigning for a cause?’

  ‘No. Causes are for students, politicians and the childless.’

  Harvey lives in Alison’s basement. He likes to talk to her about the need to define and label everything in his life.

  ‘If something doesn’t have a name, how can it be?’ he asks. ‘If you’ve never heard something described or named, how can you know you want it? How can you be sure you’ve ever experienced it? Once you’ve given something a name, you’ve captured it and made something constant in an inconstant world.’

  ‘Like naming stars?’ asks Alison.

  ‘Naming stars doesn’t count. They’re intangible, too far away. It would be like naming particles of dust. It doesn’t contribute anything to our experience of the world.’

  ‘I think naming stars is cute.’

  ‘Yes, it’s cute, but it doesn’t affect anyone except the person who’s named it. No one would ever see the star and wonder what it was called. The whole thing is too remote from our normal world.’

  ‘What about feelings? They’re intangible.’

  ‘Describing feelings is different than naming stars. Feelings influence the way everyone acts and so they make the world the way it is. But I’ve often wondered, if you don’t have a name for a feeling, then maybe you don’t feel it. There’s a word in Welsh, hiraeth, that’s like homesickness but it’s stronger, it evokes a kind of national pride as well. I don’t think English people feel that word. The thing is, if the word existed in English, would it increase the range of people’s feelings? Would some people feel like that?’

  ‘Are you saying that if you don’t know about something then you can’t feel it?’

  ‘Maybe. If you don’t know a place exists, how can you know you want to go there? If you’d never heard about New York, if it wasn’t even called by any name, how would you know how exciting it was? Once a few people have come back and said, “You must go to New York, it is a city that never sleeps,” you know you will go there eventually.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why so many people feel so lost. There’s a place they should be, but they don’t know it exists or where it is or how to get there. Do you ever feel that you’re adrift, Harvey?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know whether you should try to make sense of the small things around you or understand the bigger picture. I dither between the two approaches. I sometimes think the key is to try to convert every unknown thing into something I know and understand.’

  ‘What is it about the unknown that bothers you so much?’

  ‘I think I want everything around me to be solid to stop that drifting feeling you’re talking about. Maybe I’m just worried about missing out on something. Imagine if there’s life after death, for example. There could be a great big decadent party going on in Heaven and we’re all grimly clinging on to life, with scientists finding ways for people to live longer and longer.’

  ‘I know what you mean. I drove for ages on the A3 once expecting it to turn into the M3 and it never did. It’s that horror of being stuck on a dual carriageway when you could be whizzing along on the motorway.’

  ‘Yes. If I know as much as possible about everything then every choice I make will be informed. I just don’t know how I can go about making sure that I know everything. I’m not doing much about it at the moment. I spend my days going to the gym and hanging out with Jane Memory, in between doing a bit of freelance work.’

  ‘I wonder if we’re all just dribbling our lives away?’

  ‘No. Some people live valiantly. Someone called me up just now, someone I don’t know, and told me he was going to stop the traffic. I keep thinking about it. He sounded so certain that he could do it.’

  ‘You were contacted by a voice from the unknown?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With some sort of plan that could change your life?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘Do you think that was maybe your one chance to live valiantly?’

  ‘I didn’t see it like that at the time. I just put the phone down. Anyway I don’t want to live valiantly, I want to live knowing I haven’t missed out on the party being thrown by all the other people who are living valiantly.’

  Chapter Four ~ Heaven & Earth

  Roy’s a little disappointed, although not surprised, to find that life in Heaven is similar to life on Earth. The air is purer, the scenery lovelier, the stars brighter but otherwise it’s pretty much the same.

  Roy thought Heaven would be crowded with all the other people who have already died but there are no buildings other than the one he lives in and no-one around except Sylvia, the angel who caught him as he fell. He wonders if Heaven is different for each person. He has plenty of time for reflection now that he doesn’t have a job to go to. Perhaps you get what suits you. On Earth, he wasn’t sociable, he was always happy just spending time with his wife. Here in Heaven he also has one constant companion - Sylvia.

  Sylvia lives in a stone farmhouse with cool white sheets on the bed and a warm kitchen that always smells of bread. She keeps some chickens, ducks, a cow, a dog and an elephant. There’s a vegetable garden, a flower garden and an orchard. Roy walks out every day and explores his patch of Heaven. It is bordered on three sides by the sea. If he walks inland for about forty-five minutes, there’s a small white fence with a hand-painted sign that says ‘Paradise’.

  Time is the one thing that is endless in Heaven, stretching forward into infinity. It is impossible to imagine beginnings or endings. The days are long, uncluttered by work, unpunctuated by television or radio, by visits from friends or trips to the supermarket. Time is a luxury but it is also awesomely powerful and endless. Every day that ends promises another just like it tomorrow. There’s a sense of power in being able to change the day just by doing some small thing di
fferently, by preparing something different for dinner, by starting a conversation on a new subject matter, by walking in a different direction to the sign on the wooden fence. Waking up in the morning and looking at the blank canvas of the day, for Roy, is like looking at the ocean and contemplating the infinitesimal changes and understanding the timelessness and the not-sameness, the endless variations on being an ocean. Perhaps the physical limits of the Heaven that Roy and Sylvia inhabit are restricted because restriction enhances the ability to comprehend infinity.

  Sylvia pads about comfortably and talks only when she needs to communicate something to Roy, she isn’t a chatty person. Roy isn’t surprised that Sylvia speaks English, or if she doesn’t speak English, that in dying he’s been given the facility to understand the language they speak in Heaven. Roy doesn’t talk to Sylvia about Heaven or what it feels like to be here. The one thing he’s curious about is what kind of life she used to live.

  ‘In my old life, I trained animals for film and TV work. My hero was Rolf Knie, the humane animal trainer. He taught elephants to ride a scooter, climb stairs on their hind legs and use a typewriter. He made history in 1941 by training an elephant to walk the tightrope. He was so famous that Princess Margaret was in the audience when he brought his elephants to London in the early 1950s. My dream was to train an elephant to walk the tightrope. I was always kind to the animals but I know now that it’s wrong.’

  ‘Why is it wrong, if you were kind?’

  ‘Because we were displaying the animals for entertainment. It was wrong. I read a report about it a few years ago that completely changed my life.’

  ‘Well, I used to do something similar. I used to work in a kennels where we bred and trained dogs. They lived like kings. They had everything. There was no cruelty, it was all done on reward. Mrs Latimer was very careful about that.