by Helen Smith
Looking out at the sea from where he stands on the high wire platform next to Sylvia’s house, Roy wonders what would happen if he jumped from here, instead of trying to walk on the wire. Would it hurt? He cannot die, if he is dead already. If you die in Heaven, do you go to Hell? Do you drop to some other circle of Heaven that is less comfortable? Roy would rather stay here. He thinks about Sheila, as he often does, unreachable because he is dead and she is alive. If only there were some way of letting her know that he is all right. If only he could go back, like Alan Rickman in Truly, Madly, Deeply. Roy remembers walking Sheila home from the cinema after she’d been to see it with her sister, holding her as she sobbed. She said it was heartening the way someone with a big nose can get a starring role in a film and the woman was very convincing when she cried. It made her proud to be British. What was the name of the actress? Sylvia refuses to talk about her previous life but sometimes Roy slips in a reference to some cultural event to estimate how long ago she left Earth.
‘Who was in Truly, Madly, Deeply?’ Roy asks Sylvia, going to find her where she is kneeling in the vegetable garden, pulling up weeds. ‘Julie something. Julie Walters? Julie Christie?’
‘Juliet Stephenson,’ she says, not looking round. So she was there somewhere, ten years ago or so, when he was walking home with Sheila. Would she have looked at him, if she’d walked past? He’d have looked at her with her bright hair and her pretty face. It is difficult to tell how she would feel about him under different circumstances because here he is one of a choice of one.
Maybe she was never alive. He likes to say to himself that Sylvia is an angel, although he doesn’t feel that he is an angel. Has she undergone some sort of transformation that he has not yet completed, or do angels begin as angels? Was she in a holding place somewhere in the clouds, in some other Heaven where there is a giant video screen where she and all the other waiting angels could watch the latest releases? She hasn’t been here forever because she has told Roy that the land was overgrown and ugly when she first arrived.
‘How old is that dog?’
Sylvia’s elderly sheepdog totters by. It is black with a white patch on its face and white paws. One green eye, one blue. ‘She’s sixteen.’
‘That’s old.’
‘Yes. She was nearly fourteen when she came here.’
The dog has continued to grow older even after it has died. This information is a bombshell for Roy. Horrible, horrible information. Will he continue to age while he’s here? He thought he’d done well to stick at 42 but he will grow older and older with no prospect of release, as there is on earth.
Chapter Fourteen ~ The Dinner Party
Miss Lester, zipping across town on a very small moped, is vibrating with excited nervous energy. She has never, ever been so happy. The cause of this happiness is Ella Fitzgerald, who has accepted Miss Lester’s business proposal to set up a dinner party dating agency, using her own offices as its headquarters.
Miss Lester had been feeling rather low since the failure of an affair. This coincided with her departure from a management position in the genetics industry, under circumstances which left her reluctant to seek alternative employment with anyone who might wish to take up references. However the rehabilitating effects of Mrs Fitzgerald’s trust and kindness have been remarkable. Miss Lester has thrown herself into the task of setting up the dating agency, compiling business plans, charts and projected returns on investment. She has equipped herself with an infra-red pointer pen, of the kind that have been banned in schools and provincial night-clubs, and she has made lengthy presentations to Mrs Fitzgerald and all her associates.
For the very first round of dinners, Miss Lester has pulled in some favours, filling some of the spare places with people who are not genuine love-seekers, just to get the evening going with a swing.
Speeding through Soho’s stationary traffic astride her moped that evening, like a winged emissary from the gods bringing happiness to London’s single professionals, Miss Lester is struck by a pale face staring at her from the shadows as she draws to a stop at a set of traffic lights. A man in a dress steps out in front of her, as if daring her to drive through him when the lights change, his eyes holding hers for a few seconds through the visor of her crash helmet. The malevolence in the gaze unsettles Miss Lester even after the man crosses to the other side of the road, continuing his journey without looking back.
As she arrives at the restaurant, Miss Lester sees that things have already gone slightly awry, with people moving the place cards and spoiling the boy-girl, boy-girl symmetry of the seating arrangements.
Mrs Fitzgerald’s associate Alison is sitting there with a scowl on her face. Alison’s best friend Taron is sitting on her left. Her friend and neighbour, Harvey, is sitting opposite. To Alison’s right is Hugo Fragrance, a stunningly handsome man who works in the City and can talk of nothing else.
Miss Lester, unaccustomed to wearing makeup, has selected a too-sticky lipstick that has already travelled over the edges of her mouth. She has the appearance of being made up of a series of interlocking triangles. Her face is an inverted isosceles triangle framed within the equilateral triangle of her hair. Her nose is a triangle. Even her clothes are triangular because she wears knee-length A-line skirts.
Miss Lester Miss Lester - side view
Miss Lester has chosen to set up a dating agency because her research has shown it will deliver a high return on her investment capital. Miss Lester is perfectly competent when it comes to pointing at a flip chart with an infra-red pen and saying ‘our vision is to be the best dating agency in Britain,’ but she hasn’t got much grasp of how to organise a successful dinner party. Nevertheless, she has already obtained, from one of her guests, the phone number for renowned director Philippe Noir, with the aim of interesting him in filming a docu-soap about her company for Channel Four. One of the best things about being on TV is that she would hope to be able to repay Mrs Fitzgerald in some small way by ensuring the director gives her benefactor plenty of prime time exposure.
Tonight, the dinner party conversation ranges between the jobs in the City held by the paying guests, what is happening in the news and the food being served. Taron and Alison aren’t hungry because they have been doing drugs in the toilet. This gives them more opportunity to talk than the other guests, who are restricted to talking between mouthfuls. Unfortunately, their contribution to the conversation isn’t grounded in any real understanding of the City, current affairs or indeed what the food tastes like tonight.
‘Mmm, this pork in cider is terribly tender,’ says one of the City chicks of her hearty and rustic main course. The red wine has brought a bloom of purple to her tongue and to the grainy deposit in the cracks at the corners of her mouth.
‘Alison read in the paper about this man who drank a whole flagon of cider while he was babysitting. The mother came home and found the baby’s legs sticking out from under him where he’d fallen asleep on it on the sofa,’ says Taron, deftly picking up the threads of the conversation to weave the subject of the food into current affairs.
‘Did the baby survive?’ asks the man to Taron’s left, looking carefully at her magnificent bosoms as if the answer were to be found written across them in very small print.
‘No, it was dead by the time the mother came home.’
Alison chooses this moment to sneak off and call Darren the babysitter at home. A young man with ginger hair and green nail varnish, supplied for the evening by Taron, he was chosen for the unlikelihood of being phased by Alison’s late return after her first night out in four months. The down side was his apparent astonishment at the concept of dialling 999 in an emergency, which had to be explained to him several times.
A couple of the City men move closer to Taron and stare at her. They lean forward, close enough to touch but not touching. The women at the other end of the table, having read in Cosmo that some men have difficulty in reading subtle body language, and unwilling to take the chance that Harvey is one of
them, are crowding round him and each of them is holding on to a piece of him. One woman is reading his palm, another is kneading his thigh muscle. Another stands just behind him and squashes one bosom against the back of his head under cover of reading the dessert menu on the table.
All the women smoke between courses. ‘It’s supposed to be a mystery why successful and attractive men and women can’t get it together and have to join dating agencies,’ muses Alison, leaning over so Taron can hear. ‘But on the evidence of the evening, it’s obviously attributable to the fact that all the women smoke and all the men are complete knobs.’
‘Except Harvey.’
‘Except Harvey.’ Harvey, catching his name, looks round and smiles. He’s acting his part very well for the evening, handsome and hetero in charcoal grey, having removed all his jewellery for the occasion.
One of the women at the dinner table starts on a fairly innocuous topic of conversation that segues into how interesting and busy she is: ‘I much prefer dogs to cats, don’t you? Mind you, I have to make do with a cat because of my lifestyle. I’m out most nights and I have such a demanding job that I have to get into work very early to get through everything.’
‘My mother breeds dogs,’ says a quiet young man called Joey who has loops of springy hair piled on top of his head and very bright blue eyes. ‘She trains them for adverts. She loves them. I think she loves them because she can control them.’ It’s his one opportunity to make an impression on the others round the table but he’s blown it because they’re already off on another topic, led by Taron. She’s abandoned any pretence at discussing neutral topics that flow naturally from the conversation and is shouting out anything that comes into her head. Alison leads her away to the toilet to give the others a chance to shine.
From the wash basin she calls out to Taron, still in the cubicle ‘My hair’s getting triangular.’
‘Like Miss Lester.’
‘Do you think that’s my destiny, will I slowly turn into Miss Lester as I get older?’
Taron emerges and meets Alison’s eyes in the mirror. Without washing her hands, she reaches up and curls strands of Alison’s hair round her fingers, as if she’s trying to make ringlets. ‘Cheer up, Alison,’ she says, tugging the hair gently, still holding her eyes in the mirror.
In the taxi on the way back home to their loft apartment in Clerkenwell, Joey Latimer and Hugo Fragrance have a de-brief of the evening’s events.
‘Taron was great. She was a good laugh. The best thing about her, really, was-’
‘Top quality drugs?’
‘Yeah, well, she had some good stuff with her. The best thing about her was she’s exactly the kind of girl my mother would like.’
‘She hardly said one word to you all night.’
‘Well, I spoke to her when I left. I invited her to the party in a fortnight.’
‘Your Mum will be really relieved if you bring a sparky bird like that home with you, after all the money she’s spent on signing us up for those dreadful dinners.’
‘Do you reckon that lad Harvey was a poof?’
‘Yep. It was written all over him.’
‘Where’ve you been?’ Harvey asks Alison, opening the door to their house in response to the scratching sound she’s making near the lock with her key.
‘To a club.’
‘At your age?’
‘I didn’t like anyone at that dinner party except you and Taron. The club was much more my scene.’
‘You probably gave the people on the door a heart attack. No-one wears smart casual to a club except the drugs squad.’
‘I had a halter neck under the jacket. Once I’d given my pound to the old bag to guard it in the cloakroom, I was transformed into a party princess. The lighting kills the wrinkles and my eyes are gobstoppers under these lashes.’
‘A princess? So, did you meet a handsome prince?’
‘It’s so easy to pick up a man in a club, isn’t it? I’d forgotten. As soon as I walked in the door, a stranger held out his lighter for me as I put my cigarette to my lips.’
‘I thought you’d given up smoking?’
‘Give me a break. After that dinner party? Anyway I always smoke when I’m drunk.’
‘OK, so what else?’
‘Another man slipped his arm around my waist.’
‘Very intimate.’
‘Much too intimate, considering I was all bare skin and nipples in that halter top. He didn’t say anything, just clung on to me and moved in time to the music.’
‘Well, did you say anything to him?
‘His eyes were vacant - he looked as if he was trying to remember something. I had a bottle of water in my hand, glowing like a luminous baton in the ultraviolet light. He took it from me three times for a drink and each time he forgot to unscrew the lid before putting it to his lips. I didn’t say anything, I just wriggled out of his grasp. There was a girl with a smile that lit up her face as she danced. Her whole body revolved round her smile. I went up to her and said, “You’ve got a beautiful smile.” She said, “You’ve got a beautiful body”.’
‘You have.’
‘Well, you can’t tire of hearing something like that. Every so often I’d sidle up to her again and say, “You’ve got a beautiful smile”. I got the smile but that was it, she didn’t mention my body again. Then at the end of the night a boy of around eighteen walked up to me as I was dancing and slipped his hand between my legs.’
‘A rather novel kind of greeting.’
‘“Weren’t we at school together?” he asked. Maybe he thought I was a teacher? He had a sensuous, soft mouth, his hair was damp at the temples, his arms were slim, like a girl’s.’
‘And what?’
‘And nothing. He recognised me because twenty minutes before he asked me for a cigarette so he could skin up in the bar upstairs. The music was too loud to try and explain so I disengaged myself from his hand and went to get my jacket.’
‘So it was a good night?’
‘I felt young and pretty, although the illusion is fading. I know my skin’s mottled and my hair smells of fags-’
‘- No, darling. You are young and pretty and your hair is very fragrant, usually. You do look a bit blotchy, but that’s probably an allergic reaction to the fabric on the seats from the taxi ride home.’
‘My knees are aching. I think I may have overdone the dancing a bit, like an auntie at a wedding.’
‘Shall I make you a cup of tea?’
‘Yeah, sling some whisky in it, Harvey, to help me sleep.’
Chapter Fifteen ~ The Models
‘I’m a model,’ explains the young lady. ‘Like my friend Felicity.’
Miss Lester has heard that once models have scrubbed all their make-up off their faces, they look very plain. It certainly seems to be the case with Felicity and her friends. They look plain even with a great many layers of make-up, but they are very keen to help out Miss Lester with her dinner dating agency, which has yet to get off the ground by attracting workable numbers of applicants to sign up for love.
Every Friday, Miss Lester has to find twelve people for each of five or six dinner parties across town. She needs to have a larger numbers of guests available than she currently has on her books so she can mix and match them, ensuring they don’t dine with the same people every week. Fortunately, Miss Lester got talking to Felicity in the newsagent’s on Brixton Hill one day. Felicity explained she was a model who would be prepared to make up the shortfall in the numbers at dinner in return for a free meal and wine and a bit of cash in her pocket.
Felicity has recommended a few of her friends who are prepared to help Miss Lester on the same terms. Miss Lester’s latest recruit, Prudence, is rather a busty girl with very good skin. Miss Lester suspects that Felicity, Prudence and her friends are prostitutes. When she has finished interviewing Prudence, Miss Lester telephones Philippe Noir. She reaches his assistant, Harriet.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Lester, prostitutes are commonplace o
n the television these days. Are any of them transsexuals?’
‘Well, I don’t think …’
‘That’s a relief, anyway. Philippe and I can hardly turn round in here for transsexual prostitutes seeking to make their fortune through the telly.’
‘It isn’t just the dating agency. A friend of mine runs a detective agency.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, she’s a real character.’
‘Hold the line a moment.’
In her office next door to Miss Lester’s, Mrs Fitzgerald takes a break from her scrutiny of Venetia Latimer’s accounts for a meagre lunch of crispbread and celery. She wipes her hands carefully between each mouthful so she doesn’t smear the borrowed copy of Paul Merson’s Rock Bottom she has taken out from Brixton library to read in her lunch hour. Diana, My True Story, is on top of a stack of books on the side table that she must return on her way home from the office. Mrs Fitzgerald shudders every time she catches sight of them because they make her think about the demons that pursued these people because of their fame.
‘Miss Lester, are you still there? I’m sorry, we just can’t do it. They’ve had customs officers and the RSPCA on the BBC, debt collectors on ITV, and the police on just about every channel, every day of the week. I don’t think the market could bear another law enforcement type programme. Besides, Philippe’s going global. He’s not limiting himself to the UK at present. I could give you his girlfriend’s number. She might be able to do something in print for you.’
Chapter Sixteen ~ Being Light
Harvey is lying on a thin mat in a warm room that smells subtly of feet. His quest for knowledge has brought him here, although he’s not sure why. ‘Everyone does yoga now, even Madonna,’ explained Jane, booking him in.
