Being Light 2011

by Helen Smith

  The zebra keeper and some of the other young men who work at Mrs Latimer’s have discovered that one of the medicines she feeds to the animals works well as a recreational drug. It’s better than E. And it’s free. This discovery has had a profound effect on their behaviour. They are all agreed on the need to keep the old lady sweet so she doesn’t check up on them and start putting the stuff under lock and key. No-one has stepped out of line, or given her any lip or even so much as turned up late for work since they started experimenting with the animals’ drugs. It is vital to ensure the supply doesn’t dry up until they can find out what’s in it and work out a way to get cheap copies made by the people who run the underground drugs factories, in Amsterdam or north London. In the meantime he and his friends have been stockpiling for the party next week. They are all really looking forward to it. It’s going to be pretty crazy.

  The young zebra keeper privately celebrates being able to hold his cock in a field and relieve himself without having to flash his arse to the world - one of the many advantages of being a man - by trying to spray as wide an area of the straw as possible as he pees.

  Chapter Eight ~ Jeremy

  Harvey keeps his mobile phone switched on while he waits for some friends in Old Compton Street in Soho. Known locally as Queer Street, it is a flourishing centre for coffee bars, kitsch household items and minimalist restaurants serving light lunches. A cursory visit to the area suggests gay men’s lives revolve around ornaments and cappuccino. Perhaps they do.

  ‘Harvey?’

  ‘Jane? You sound echoey.’

  ‘I’m upside down over the kitchen sink, Harvey, dyeing my hair. I think I’ve left the bleach on too long. My scalp has gone red and it’s burning like a bastard.’

  ‘Get the hairdryer on and come and meet me, you silly mare.’

  Jane drives round and round Golden Square in Soho before she finds a parking space. She gets out and leans against the locked car door, scrabbling to retrieve her mobile phone from her handbag before it stops ringing. It stops, just as her hand closes on it.

  A young man with blond hair appears and stands very close to her, one hand on the warm bonnet of her car. ‘The birds in the hedgerows are singing out of tune. They mimic the sounds of mobile phones and car alarms. They can’t hear properly because of the volume of traffic. It makes it difficult for them to mark their territory and find a mate. Did you know you were stopping the birds from singing with your car and your mobile phone?

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why don’t you do something about it?’

  He is powerfully built, handsome and passionate about birdsong. The dress he is wearing shows off his thighs and the muscles in his arms, like a Roman centurion’s costume in a Hollywood epic. He smells of fresh sweat and Nivea. Jane contemplates taking a break from her relationship with Philippe Noir. Philippe shaves his head and wears black jeans and white T-shirts. He doesn’t love her and Jane doesn’t love him. She hasn’t looked for love from a man since being betrayed by her first boyfriend, also a journalist. He was disfigured when he crashed the blue Ferrari he was driving on Hong Kong’s treacherous SouthBay road, while engaged in a sex act with an heiress.

  ‘I could do something. What do you want me to do? Do you want publicity?’ She watches him think about what she’s said. ‘I could get it for you, if that’s what you want. I’m a journalist.’

  ‘We’re going to turn back time. We’re going to hold London to ransom until the capital turns back the traffic.’

  Jane thinks If I put my hand inside the dress where it’s open at the neck, and touch my fingertips to his collar bone, would the contact make a faint squeaking noise like polishing glass, or would my fingers glide over the sweat where it shimmers on his damp skin? She says ‘That sounds very cryptic. Turning back time. Do you want a drink?’

  Jeremy follows Jane Memory to a fashionable gay bar she knows in Soho, so that he can outline his plans for stopping the traffic to her before she joins Harvey for lunch. Gay men go to some trouble to establish bars, restaurants and cafes where they can meet in the West End without jostling at the bar against puking football fans every time they want to get a drink. Then young women start coming in, for much the same reason, and also so that they can drink dry white wine together and say ‘What a waste’ every time a gay man walks past. Then straight men start coming in so all the gay men leave and set up somewhere else. This cycle is one of the many burdens of fashionability borne by gay people.

  ‘That’s very visual,’ says Jane, more than once, as Jeremy outlines his plan. Perhaps she will two-time Philippe rather than finish with him, so that he can help her pitch the idea for a forty minute TV programme that follows Jeremy and his rabble as they prepare to stop the traffic.

  The restaurant in Old Compton Street is crowded but Jane squeezes easily past the other diners to where Harvey is waiting at a window seat. She is wearing tight, shiny black trousers in man-made fibres that twitch across her fleshless buttocks when she walks, accentuating her cinched waist. She has very small buttocks, a masculine characteristic like many others in her emotional and physical repertoire. Jane Memory is masculine, but in a ball-breaking, sassy, ambitious way that is attractive to men. She’s not mannish. She dyes her hair blonde and can talk at length about women’s issues. Almost every single one of her close friends is homosexual.

  ‘I’m trying to find a way of dealing with this fear of the unknown. I think I need to confront it first,’ Harvey tells Jane over lunch.

  ‘That’s a good idea. There was something about confronting your fears in the Style section of The Sunday Times this week.’

  ‘Who do I get advice from? A therapist? A Buddhist monk?’

  ‘Darling, I’ll give you the name of my spiritual healer.’ Jane chews her spinach salad very thoroughly. A society woman once told her that the way to ensure none of it gets stuck in your teeth is to chew very energetically, moving your mouth when it is closed in such a way that your lips rub against your gums like windscreen wipers and sweep the spinach away.

  ‘Really, you’ve got a spiritual healer? I didn’t know you had any spirituality at all.’

  ‘Well, it’s more of a networking thing, but I can get you in. He’s very good, I think. His glasses are exactly the same shape as the Dalai Lama’s, which gives him tremendous credibility and creates an atmosphere of trust and sharing at the meetings.’

  ‘I don’t think I want someone who’s very good, after all. Someone told me once that if you need advice, you shouldn’t necessarily ask a successful person. You learn more from failure.’

  ‘That’s a very good point. I did this fantastic feature about diets, once, with quite a lot of input from my friend Alvin who has to be very careful with his weight. If you want to know about diets, you should ask a fat person. They can evaluate every single kind of diet around – low fat, high carbohydrate, high protein, cabbage soup – you name it.’

  ‘I think I’m looking for a broken person.’

  ‘Broken people are terribly depressing. If I can find you someone living successfully without a name or identity, would that help?’

  ‘I suppose so. Jane, why do you like getting involved in my life?’

  ‘It’s a nurturing thing, Harvs.’

  Alison is reading to Phoebe. They are sitting on Alison’s bed. Taron is in the garden smoking a cigarette, watching them through the open French windows. Phoebe’s eyes are fixed on Alison’s face, watching her mouth move as she reads the words in the picture book.

  ‘ “The lion is floating down the river on a raft” Why do you think he’s doing that, Phoebe?’

  ‘Is he looking for his friends?’ asks Taron.

  ‘Is he? Is that why he was building a raft?’

  ‘Well, I think he was miserable all the time and he stopped going out so his friends gave up on him and ran away.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t get that at all. Anyway the monkeys stayed around. They were the ones who helped him build the raft. Phoebe, come back.’<
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  ‘I don’t think much of this book. Can you read Melisande next time, about the Princess whose hair grows and grows?’

  ‘Do you think it’s suitable?’

  ‘Oh yes. It’s my favourite story. Are you coming out tonight?’

  ‘I can’t leave Phoebe.’

  ‘I could get you a babysitter.’

  ‘Next time.’

  Chapter Nine ~ The White Van

  Roy has explored and mapped Paradise, from the horse shoe seashore as far as the sign on the fence. He has cleared a small area near Sylvia’s vegetable patch and built a scale model of her house using pebbles, shingle and driftwood. It’s a task he started merely to pass the time but the accuracy of its execution has since become important to him.

  Roy is a practical man and he’s used to being busy. He was in charge of the maintenance of the buildings at Mrs Latimer’s. He carried business cards with ‘Facilities Manager’ printed on it but he thought of himself as a handyman. Everywhere he went, he carried with him a battery-operated reversible screwdriver, a tape-measure, a pen and a walkie-talkie. It was second nature to him to detach the radio from his belt every fifteen or twenty minutes, bring it up to his mouth, depress the switch and issue orders or ask questions of his staff over the air.

  It takes some adjustment not to stop where he is standing and expect to connect to Sylvia to ask an important question ‘Why is there a fence in Paradise? Over,’ pressing the receiver to his ear to try to discern the reply over the hiss and crackle. There are no walkie-talkies in Heaven. By the time he has walked all the way back to where Sylvia is working, the importance of the question usually diminishes to the point where he seldom asks her anything except whether she would like a cup of tea.

  Walking back to the house one day, counting the paces from the farthest edge of the shore, Roy sees a white van speeding along the path away from the house. He stops still in astonishment at the first sight of an outsider in Paradise. Then he breaks into a run, waving. Standing still and waving is fairly straightforward but running and waving is more difficult, the waving slows him down. The dust thrown up around the disappearing white van disguises the wheels, giving it an other-worldly appearance, as if it is being transported everywhere on a cloud.

  The van disappears, unheeding his stumbling, waving attempts to communicate with it. Roy is frightened and excited by the sight of the van, wondering what it portends. Perhaps it has been dropping off another of Sylvia’s animal friends, newly demised and recently arrived from Earth? Perhaps it was collecting something? Roy decides to rush back to the house but then to say nothing, giving Sylvia the opportunity to explain in her own time, in case it’s something sensitive.

  She’s sitting in the kitchen eating chocolate, day-dreaming. The suspense is too much for Roy. ‘I saw the van.’

  ‘Yes. Deliveries.’ When Sylvia eats chocolate she sucks each piece until it dissolves, rather than chewing it. Apparently it is not so fattening if you eat it that way.

  ‘Delivering what?’ Is Sheila here? Another elephant? His friend Brian Donald? A whole host of performing dogs?

  ‘Delivering provisions. We were running out of things to eat, Roy.’ She gets up very slowly from the kitchen table and switches on the kettle. ‘And some paperwork I’ve been expecting.’ She waves a brown envelope. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

  Roy is shocked and frightened by the emotions stirred by the possibility of the death of his friends and loved ones. Death is usually associated with loss but in this case it would involve a gain of some kind. In fact he’d be gaining more than he could cope with, if faced with the arrival of Brian Donald or Sheila or Sylvia’s animal friends. But he’d like to see Sheila again. The thought makes his head spin. What would happen if Heaven and Earth met somehow?

  Roy thinks about Sheila, so far away and impossible to reach. What is Sheila doing now? Is she weeping and helpless with grief, or is she coping as always, briskly getting on with things, organising volunteers for the next hospital fundraising day?

  Roy walks outside to his scale model of Paradise, removing a few of the faded blossoms and leaves that have blown onto it from Sylvia’s flower beds, adjusting the angle of the twig fence, raking the earth with his hands. Then he walks off to the seashore, carefully pacing the distance.

  Chapter Ten ~ Convenience

  Sheila goes to the newsagent in Brixton Hill to buy a one-day Travelcard. The people who own the shop stand a foot higher than their customers on a platform behind the counter, smiling with infinite good humour. Theirs is the only local convenience store for a radius of two miles in which the people serving in the shop are prepared to engage in eye contact with the customers during any transaction. In every other shop, the young men who work there talk incessantly on mobile phones, punching the price of the shopping into the till with a very off-hand manner, as if the work is beneath them, which it may very well be, as they all drive expensive jeeps which they park outside and watch jealously through the windows.

  Sheila takes a bus from outside the newsagent’s to Clapham Junction and then takes a train on the West Sussex line to Mrs Latimer’s house, as Roy used to do on the days when he worked there, cheating one of the disadvantages of living in London by taking a twenty-five minute journey against the commuter traffic.

  Venetia Latimer, wary but sympathetic, receives her missing employee’s wife with kindness and a cup of tea in the kitchen. She has had a little while to prepare for the meeting as Sheila’s worried face showed up on the closed circuit TV system when she first entered the land surrounding the estate and it tracked her progress until she reached the kitchen, at the heart of Mrs Latimer’s empire.

  ‘I think he’s alive.’ Sheila tells Mrs Latimer. ‘But I don’t understand why he hasn’t found his way back. If he were free, he’d find his way back home to me.’

  Mrs Latimer understands. Sheila is talking about love. Mrs Latimer sympathises enormously but there is nothing she can say to make Sheila feel better. There is never anything anyone can say in these circumstances. Everyone is unreachable in their own private hell. Perhaps Roy has run away and left Sheila. She’ll come to terms with it in her own way in the end.

  ‘I was wondering whether you could shed any light on his disappearance, Mrs Latimer?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Mrs Latimer is jarred out of her reverie on the pain of abandonment.

  ‘Is there any reason, any business reason, why someone should keep Roy from coming home?’

  Mrs Latimer stares, astonished. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You have a very successful business empire, Mrs Latimer. Roy was a part of it. A small part of it. I know he worked here for less than a year but even so, I wondered if there was anyone who could have kidnapped him?’

  ‘I’m sorry? I thought he, um, blew away.’

  ‘He may have fallen into the hands of your enemies. I wondered if they would try to obtain your secrets from him. The training techniques for the performing dogs, for example.’

  ‘But my dear, why would they have waited until he, er, blew away, to obtain this information from him? It doesn’t make sense.’ Mrs Latimer watches as Sheila’s face collapses in pain. ‘I’m sorry, I wish I could help you.’

  ‘It’s OK, I’m not working alone. I’ve hired a private detective to help me. She was very helpful and very supportive. “Only believe.” ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what Mrs Fitzgerald said to me: “You’ll find him. Only believe.”

  ‘Only believe? Well, then, there is something I can do. I’ll pay the detective’s fees. As Roy worked for me, it’s the least I can do. You can handle all the contact, I don’t need to be involved at all. Just send me the invoices for the next three months and a copy of the reports she makes and I’ll pay all reasonable expenses. If we haven’t found Roy in three months then perhaps we should talk again. But we will, Sheila. Love will find a way. He’ll be back with you in no time and we’ll all be laughing about it at the Christmas party. Just some
silly misunderstanding.’

  Sheila’s visit has put Mrs Latimer in a thoughtful mood. A little while after Sheila has gone she takes her credit card from her purse and telephones The Times newspaper. She asks the sales assistant at the other end of the telephone to place an advertisement on her behalf in the personal column two days later, on the anniversary of the death of the great Poodles Hanneford:

  “It doesn’t matter about the money. Please come back. V.”

  ‘Is that it?’ asks the assistant.

  ‘It’s enough,’ says Venetia.

  She walks into her study and opens a drawer in her desk. She takes out a faded report into the care of performing animals entitled ‘Unkindness Kills.’ The report deals with animals trained for film, television and circuses and those kept in zoos. It argues that teaching animals to perform is unethical. The author cites proven instances of cruelty by trainers and keepers. It lists the names of horses killed in steeple chases. Mrs Latimer flips it over and re-reads the familiar summary: ‘If every person who reads this report refuses to approve of performing animals, withdraws their support, refuses to participate even as a spectator, this will wither the industry. There is no need to campaign or protest. Just walk away. The industry cannot survive without an audience. Only believe.’ And then the initials at the bottom, ‘E.F.’.