Being Light 2011

by Helen Smith

  ‘Mrs Latimer ...?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mrs Latimer, who controls the supply of performing dogs to the film and circus industries?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Roy, I don’t think we should talk about our other lives, before we came here.’

  Although there are no other human people in Heaven with Roy and Sylvia, she has been joined by some of her friends from the animal kingdom. Maybe Sylvia doesn’t need to talk about her old life because she’s surrounded by mementoes. An elderly dog lives in the house with her and an elephant sleeps in one of two hangar-sized barns in the garden. The other barn stores the elephant’s supply of hay.

  Roy has looked around for his old dead friends, in case they’ve been waiting here for him. There’s no-one and it’s made him realise that he didn’t really have anyone. He thinks sometimes about whether his wife will turn up one day but it makes him uncomfortable. How would Sylvia deal with the situation?

  Possibly he’s over-estimating the likelihood of seeing Sheila again. His wife was always very fond of the theatre, perhaps she’ll go to a thespian Heaven. It seems strange that, now it turns out there is an afterlife, he might not spend eternity with her. If there had been nothing after death, he could have accepted it. But this scattered eternity... At least he recognises there’s no point in arguing with Sylvia.

  ‘OK,’ he says. ‘Let’s not talk about it.’ Having come to terms early on with the theological difficulties of making love to an angel, Roy takes Sylvia’s hand and they go to bed at the end of a day that promises another just like it tomorrow.

  Brian Donald’s wife has sent him round to the flat in Brixton after work this evening to see if Sheila Travers is alright. Brian’s wife is at home looking after her bedridden mother so she can’t go herself. She’s worried because she can’t get any answer from Sheila on the phone and Sheila hasn’t returned any of her messages.

  Brian has always been a bit wary of Sheila. She is a quiet person, with a determination and depth to her personality that he has always shied away from, associating that kind of quiet certainty with people who suddenly become born-again Christians.

  Brian and his wife and his wife’s mother saw a local news item recently about a man whose solar powered roof panels generate more than enough electricity for his own house so that he has been able to sell some of it back to his local Electricity Board. The story reminded him of Roy and Sheila. They formed a happy unit together, as if they didn’t need anyone else. They were so solid together and generated so much happiness as a couple that Sheila persuaded Roy that they had more than enough for themselves and should give something back, which is why they helped out with fundraising at charitable events.

  Brian’s wife wondered sometimes why Roy and Sheila had never had children but it was not the sort of conversation Brian would have been comfortable having with Roy. He couldn’t see a gap in Roy and Sheila’s lives that would have been filled by children. His own son, twenty years old and incapable of doing his own laundry, is still living at home.

  Since Roy’s disappearance Brian and his wife have been wondering about the dark secrets Roy and Sheila’s life must have held. They turned the television off so they could spend the evening discussing it. Brian himself saw Roy float up on the bouncy castle. It couldn’t have travelled far. Roy has either had a bump on the head or he staged the whole thing and he’s run off with someone else. Brian’s mother-in-law suggested that Sheila’s capable manner hides a sexual coldness that drove Roy away. Brian’s wife thought Roy might have gambling debts. Brian wondered whether Roy had fled the country to be a sexual tourist in Thailand.

  Brian will ask Sheila if he can have a look at Roy’s passport, which will put to rest whether or not he has gone abroad if she can’t find it. Brian’s wife told him to buy Sheila a bunch of flowers to cheer her up but he hasn’t bought any in case she isn’t in. Also, Brian has never been alone in her home with Sheila before. He feels a bit uncomfortable about it under the circumstances, especially if she is sexually cold. He can always pop out and get the flowers later.

  Brian rings the doorbell. When there is no answer, he shouts her name through the letterbox. He’s not sure whether she would hear him as she lives on the second floor, but at least he can tell his wife that he tried. If Sheila is not in, he can use the £10 his wife gave him for the flowers for something else. If he puts it on a horse and it wins, he will take his wife out for the evening. Their son can look after his grandmother for a change.

  Sheila can see Brian Donald from her window. She has nothing whatsoever to say to him. He is well-intentioned but he would have nothing to say that she would want to hear. He would rattle the coins in his pockets, rise up and down on the balls of his feet and stare at her breasts. Sheila does not answer the door.

  Chapter Five ~ The Message

  Jane Memory is scratching the inside of her right nostril with the rubber on the end of a pencil, briefing the stylist on her mobile phone. ‘The theme is empire builders. I need a great photo to go with this piece. Hold on to empire. See what you can do with it.’

  Jane Memory knows lots of people and phones them all the time to maintain her network. She’s popular because she’s funny, although she has a very critical eye. Every time she attends a dinner party in an unfamiliar house she murmurs a style-mag appraisal of it without stopping to think whether she’s offending her host. Jane is hungry all the time and the hunger makes her irritable and sometimes rather unkind. She’s hungry because she’s very thin, it’s her thing. She doesn’t even take slimming pills, she relies on willpower to resist the foods that pile on the millimetres.

  Venetia Latimer sits where the stylist has left her, on a wooden kitchen chair in the middle of the photographer’s studio. She has a maroon silk turban on her head, with a cameo brooch clipped on to the front, keeping its shape. Her body is swathed in emerald silk fashioned into an extravagant fifties-style dress, the plunging neckline edged in seed pearls exposing the cleft of her bosom. Two Dalmatians stand very still against her glimmering skirt while the photographs are taken. There are so many bracelets on her arm that after careful study of the contact sheets the next day, the photographer will fancy he can still hear them chiming.

  Roy would come back home, if he could. It is the one unarguable fact in Sheila Travers’s life. Why would he not come back? She has an unshakeable faith in Roy’s compulsion to find his way home, as if he were a spawning salmon and south London a sparkling stream. She is alone in this; even her own family are beginning to doubt she will see her husband again soon.

  ‘Sheila, maybe Roy has lost his memory? Or perhaps,’ Sheila’s sister faces the inevitable on her behalf, ‘perhaps he’s not alive.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s alive.’

  Given that Roy’s will to come back is a constant, everything else Sheila has ever believed is negotiable. Sitting in her finery in the upper circle of the Palace Theatre with her sister, trying to take her mind off Roy’s disappearance, Sheila receives a message about him.

  ‘Do you mean someone passed you a note?’ Sheila’s sister is bewildered when Sheila tries to explain as they sip their pre-ordered interval drinks. ‘I saw nothing.’

  ‘It wasn’t a note. It was a message that went directly into my head.’

  ‘The voice of God?’ Sheila’s sister’s lips are drawn very tightly over her teeth and her eyes are small. She disapproves of religious experiences very strongly indeed.

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t the voice of God. I’ve always expected that to be like an announcement over a tannoy system, very loud and slightly distorted. It was more like telepathy. I didn’t hear words, even. I just reached an understanding.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘He’s been abducted. He can’t come back because he isn’t free. Someone has taken him.’

  Tickets for West Ends shows are expensive. Sheila’s sister bought them as a treat to try and cheer her up. The two women sit through the rest of the play. Sheila’s sister is fu
rious because Sheila distracts her, sitting and fiddling with her earrings as if tuning them in to some Mayday frequency from outer space. ‘Come in, Lieutenant Uhuru,’ she says when she recounts the story to her husband that night, mimicking Sheila to make him laugh and relieve some of the tension she’s feeling.

  Back at her flat with a cup of tea, Sheila wonders whether there was something special that allowed the message to get through. Were her earrings acting as some sort of aerial?

  Chapter Six ~ Sylvia

  Sylvia Arrow is humming It’s raining men as she kneads the day’s supply of bread. Sylvia was a high wire artiste in her youth, but her hips and thighs broadened as she reached her twenties. She has the kind of body that will always be strong and flexible but she became too heavy to perform professionally. Sylvia remained with the circus for a while, the only life she knew, grounded but content, knitting spangly bikini costumes for the other girls using very fine gauge needles.

  When she grew tired of the performers teasing her about her doughy limbs and pinching her arms and legs to make red dots in the white flesh, Sylvia ran away from the circus. She left behind the only person she’d ever loved, a boy whose superficial resemblance to herself meant Sylvia treated him like a brother, whispering him stories from where she sat knitting in her deckchair as he rested between performances as an acrobat in the big top.

  For five years Sylvia worked as a croupier, salting away the pay and dreaming about the circus. For five more years, Sylvia trained animals, working for the undisputed expert in the field, Venetia Latimer. Then she ran away from that life too. Sylvia’s name is a reminder of the very early days; she chose it for herself when she went into show business. As she flew in the air, spinning above people in the big top, Sylvia had a vision in her head that she was shining and metallic and swift and hard like a silver arrow. The other reminder is the high wire and the net she stretches in the garden sometimes, just to practice, just for old times’ sake. It was as well for Roy she was feeling sentimental the day he flew overhead because the net probably saved him from breaking his neck as he fell.

  In her twenties, Sylvia sometimes thought she didn’t need sex if she could eat fresh bread every day instead. In her late thirties, with cupboards full of flour and yeast, the time and patience to bake every day, and a man who has dropped from the skies to be her companion, Sylvia is pleasantly surprised to find she doesn’t even have to choose any more.

  Mrs Fitzgerald is at home with a cup of black coffee. It is late but she is still working, straining her eyes as she bends over the paper trail she has amassed in her latest investigation into animal welfare.

  Animal welfare is of such great interest to young people in Britain that it has been estimated that at any given time, up to fifteen per cent of casual workers in zoos and circuses are undercover agents working for animal rights organizations. Although the elaborate concealment of fragile miniature video cameras can occasionally restrict their capacity for heavy work, the majority of them can make themselves useful with a spade. Given declining ticket sales, it’s doubtful whether the zoos and circuses could survive without the contribution made by these young people.

  Following her seminal report about the circus industry, published to wide acclaim ten years ago and credited with being in part responsible for growing public distaste at the spectacle of performing animals, Mrs Fitzgerald is acknowledged as something of an expert in the field of animal welfare. Mrs Fitzgerald’s current investigation aims at the heart of the supply of performing dogs and other animals – to Mrs Latimer. Mrs Fitzgerald is not the sort to arm herself with a pair of dungarees and a pitchfork to monitor the daily care and feed of the animals. Reports from America suggest that Doris Day has been visiting the new homes of dogs adopted from their local pound. She rakes her film star fingers through the animals’ fur looking for fleas and she goes into the owners’ kitchens to check on the freshness of the water in their drinking bowls, although whether she tests this by actually drinking the water is not clear.

  Mrs Fitzgerald does not operate like this. In the first instance, she asks the questions and tracks down the answers from her office and her home in Brixton, visiting the suspects’ premises in person only when she needs to collect forensic evidence.

  Mrs Fitzgerald has checked Venetia Latimer’s animal balance sheet; elephants in, elephants out. ‘Where has she hidden that elephant?’ Mrs Fitzgerald asks, over and over again. There is one elephant that has not been accounted for.

  Mrs Fitzgerald looks into the accounts and assesses the quality and supply of feed, the integrity of the relationship with the supplier, the regularity and nature of medical care, the turnover of staff and the provision of training. She enquires into the pressures created by client expectations; she collects anecdotal evidence from past and current employees. Mrs Fitzgerald is a professional investigator, with all the resources of her profession at her fingertips. Mrs Latimer is a professional animal trainer, treading the fine line between discipline and cruelty. As Mary Chipperfield once famously remarked of an elephant in her care, ‘I’m not beating it, I’m encouraging it with a stick.’ If Mrs Latimer crosses the fine line, Mrs Fitzgerald will find out. Mrs Fitzgerald cares very much about animals.

  In Paradise, Sylvia is dreaming about the circus again. On special nights like this, images of the twentieth century’s greatest and most dazzling aerialistes and high-wire performers thread through Sylvia’s dreams. Sometimes they appear as they were in their heyday, strong men and women in their sparkly costumes performing one more time for her benefit. More often than not Sylvia sees them as the active elderly people they grew into before departing the temporal world for their final destination.

  They come in to the dream all together, grey-haired and limber, dressed gracefully in loose-fitting jersey and cotton leisure-wear. Their hands are linked and their arms extend from their sides, forming a vee with each other. They dance, forming a chain, pointing with the left foot, bending their knees and kicking up with the right heel, heads turned, smiling, hair flying all in the same direction with the motion of the dance. Then they come back again, pointing with the right foot, kicking with the left.

  Sylvia tries to recognise them as they pass. There is Judith Gordon Innes who died aged 87. In the thirties she topped a human pyramid on a high wire as the only British member of The Great Wallendas. There is Joseph Hodgini who died aged 102. His wife Etta Davis is next to him. She had a high-wire and knife-throwing act with her twin Rita before marrying Joseph and joining him in his comedy riding act.

  When he has been dancing in Sylvia’s dreams in Paradise, Joseph Hodgini sometimes finds his way to where Venetia Latimer is sleeping in her house in West Sussex. He is Venetia’s favourite animal trainer. She chose her son’s name as a tribute to him. As a boy Joe Hodgini rode horses bareback in German and Russian circuses as Miss Daisy, a female impersonator. In the fifties he worked with a dog troupe, the first man ever to successfully train Dachshunds for the circus. Venetia Latimer’s dreams are male-dominated, as the profession of animal training tended to be in those earlier years. It is not something that troubles Venetia, she has never yearned for female companionship. She would rather enjoy the company of Jack Smith, unrivalled trainer of big cats and bears, the man who prepared the lions for their role in the film Quo Vadis, as he trades circus gossip with Poodles Hanneford who, in an earlier era, delighted audiences with his comedy riding turns.

  Venetia Latimer never sees herself in these dreams but it is enough that her heroes are there, chatting as informally amongst themselves as if they were guests being treated to a fork supper at her house in Sussex.

  In Brixton, every one of the twelve hundred dancing bears in captivity in India parades through Mrs Fitzgerald’s crowded, horrible dream. Helplessly, she watches them twisting their tortured bodies to earn a few rupees for their owners. Even in her dream she knows she’s too far away to help them slip the chains attached to their nostrils by rings sunk into the tender parts of their flesh.<
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  From Spain, herds of stampeding bulls thunder into Mrs Fitzgerald’s dream, blood spraying from the puncture wounds in their slippery, sweating hides where they have been speared and stabbed deep into the muscle underneath. Flecks of foam fly from between their bared teeth. The doses of strychnine they have been given have dulled the pain, not the fury. Their eyes are wild. As Mrs Fitzgerald watches, they start to tumble, front legs buckling first, then the hind legs, animal piling on top of animal as they fall.

  She turns, restlessly, half awakes, then falls back to sleep. There is no respite. North America’s diving mules rain from the skies in her dream. Tempted by as little reward as a carrot, they risk death or serious injury by jumping from high platforms into shallow pools below, urged on by the showmen who make money from their recklessness. Mrs Fitzgerald watches them come down, splayed hoofs splashing as they hit the water, jaunty straw hats floating away as they scramble to the edge of the pool, ready to jump again for another meagre reward.

  When she wakes next morning, Mrs Fitzgerald sets to work early, redoubling her efforts to help the suffering creatures within her circle of influence in mainland Britain.

  Chapter Seven ~ The Zebra

  A group of her employees are putting the dogs through their paces in a muddy field near Mrs Latimer’s house. They jump extravagantly through hoops. Repetition makes perfect. The trainers are as enthusiastic as the dogs. It’s sometimes difficult to tell who enjoys the games more – the men or the animals. Everyone in the field is terribly pleased with the results.

  A lad with a zebra stands and watches the dogs for a while. As the training session reaches its ‘towering inferno’ finale, he notices he’s desperate for a pee. The walk back to the lavatory in the house is a long one and he has nowhere to park the zebra once he gets there. He walks over to the edge of the field, where the dogs have been taught to leave their mess, and fishes inside his combat trousers. In neat and tidy Amsterdam the phenomenon of ‘wild pissing’ is a nationally-acknowledged problem, the streets flowing with smelly urine as the local men relieve themselves in public after a night on the beer. The lad smiles as he remembers his cousin’s stag night in that city. A drop of virgin’s water on the straw here in Sussex won’t hurt.