Being Light 2011

by Helen Smith

  ‘You are strong but you are not loose,’ the yoga teacher tells him. ‘Is that good?’ Harvey wonders. His head fills with questions all through the session. He is not comfortable with the dynamics of group teaching, he decides. He cannot tap into any sense of oneness. Behind him, someone breathes in ostentatiously through their nostrils, dragging mucus the entire length of their nasal passages and then making a triumphant ‘Ha’ sound on the out breath through the mouth. Everyone else in the group breathes quietly, including the teacher.

  Harvey and the others in the group are clearing their minds of all thoughts as they relax at the end of the session. ‘Imagine you are in a meadow on a summer’s day,’ the teacher tells them. Her voice is low and calming. Harvey can feel the sunshine. He can actually smell the grass.

  A sudden tickle catches at his throat. Harvey cringes, every muscle in his body clenching with the effort of not allowing the tickle to erupt into a dry, explosive cough, shattering the peace for everyone. The teacher’s measured voice continues. ‘I am strong,’ thinks Harvey. ‘I am not loose but I am strong.’ It feels like hay fever. Tears squeeze from his eyes and run down his face. His fists are balled. His toes curl in on themselves. His shoulders hunch up towards his ears. His diaphragm heaves but he keeps his lips pressed tightly together to prevent any sounds escaping and disturbing the others.

  At last the other people get up from their mats and Harvey lurches out of the room to the water fountain in the corridor, tense, red-faced, apparently weeping.

  Roy is sharpening the ends of sweet pea sticks so he can push them into the ground in a tent shape and train the sweet peas to climb them. He stops suddenly, in the middle of what he is doing, and stands right where he is without moving for a long while.

  ‘I will never see Canada,’ he says finally. It had always been a dream of his to visit Canada and meet up with a cousin who emigrated there in his twenties. They would go to Niagara Falls and swim in the Great Lakes. The itinerary had been the subject of jokey Christmas cards swapped each year between the two men ‘Yes, every one of the Great Lakes’ and it had been something he’d promised Sheila they would do one day in lieu of a glamorous honeymoon, which they hadn’t been able to afford when they got married. Now he knows he will never go to Canada.

  ‘Don’t you feel free here, Roy?’ Sylvia asks him. ‘I don’t have any worries at all. I feel as if one day I’ll get so light I’ll just spread my arms and rise up into the air a little way. I’d like to get so carefree that I feel I can fly again, the way I did when I was younger.’

  ‘I feel quite heavy.’

  ‘You haven’t left your old life behind you yet. One day you’ll feel so light and free you could run across the tightrope.’

  ‘Like one of your elephants?’

  ‘No, it’s too late for that. I’ll never know whether I could teach an elephant to walk across a tightrope, now.’

  ‘Perhaps you could teach me.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Sylvia will never teach an elephant to walk the tightrope and Roy will never go to Canada. For Sylvia’s sake, Roy makes an effort to feel light. This would show a commitment to Sylvia and to his new life in Heaven. Roy has never been able to tell people how he feels, only to try and show them. There were hundreds of ways he tried to show Sheila that he loved her, following her around the house and responding to every subtle change in her mood. He even fell in with Sheila’s volunteering schemes, erecting bouncy castles on his days off with that idiot Brian Donald as a way of letting her know that he cared.

  He hasn’t talked to Sylvia about life in Heaven and what he makes of it or how happy he is here with her. He can only try to make himself light as a way of showing her. It seems to take a lot of practice, so perhaps it is fortunate that he has all eternity to perfect it. Sylvia, lethargic and plump, although in an attractive way, the way a plum is more attractive than a prune, can tumble effortlessly, over and over like a ball of dust blown by the wind. He has seen her run across the tightrope as if she were accustomed to running through the air.

  Chapter Seventeen ~ Faecal Matter

  Venetia Latimer is marking the end of the long life of a celebrated aerialist she never knew with a party at her house.

  Mrs Latimer has the robust figure of a transvestite and has therefore never been airborne like her circus heroes. Her imagination was caught by the romance of the circus at an early age. She jumped up one morning and ran away from her nice girls’ school and the prosaic future it was shaping for her and tried to join the circus. They brought her back and she ran away, they brought her back and she ran away, setting up a pattern she repeated at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. It wrecked her chances of getting her exams but everyone pretended to believe it was due to a hormonal imbalance and let her resit them. She gave up running away but she never gave up the dream, she just worked out another way to get there.

  Mrs Latimer lives the horsy, farmy life in West Sussex that has always been her destiny but she teaches the horses to jump through flaming hoops and she breeds performing dogs and other, more exotic animals, instead of pigs or sheep, supplying them to circuses and the film industry. Mrs Latimer has a virtual monopoly on the supply of performing animals, she has built an empire that is the envy of other animal trainers. She is a legend. She wields an immense power that comes from having an immense income and she can visit the circus whenever she likes without someone trying to fetch her back home.

  Her only disappointment is her son Joey, who is firmly fixed on being something in the city like his father and his father before him. Mrs Latimer blames his public school education, which taught him lots of academic things but has rather restricted his outlook on life and made him shy with girls. Tonight, in one of a string of ongoing futile attempts to draw out and nurture the latent heterosexuality in her son’s nature, Mrs Latimer has invited him to her party.

  Mrs Latimer’s wealth and status have bestowed power on her but the stronger power of the circus still makes her vulnerable. She’s in love with the circus; hopelessly, profoundly, day-dreamily besotted with it. Like many people in love, the love humbles her and makes her behave foolishly. In the exotic presence of terse, foreign, muscular circus artists, Mrs Latimer makes a bundle of her articulacy, her business nous, her head for figures, her expensive private education, like a redundant bundle of clothes on a naturist holiday, and she lays them at their feet.

  Her family whole-heartedly disapprove. There was a bit of silliness a couple of years ago when Mrs Latimer lost her head entirely over a circus girl who came to work with her. Mrs Latimer told all her business and professional secrets. She loved and admired and bundled herself up. She wrapped the glittering girl in her love, bandaging her in layers and layers of admiration and confidences and foolish love. Eventually the girl repaid her by stealing an elephant and a great deal of money and running away.

  There are more than seventy candles alight in the house by the time Mrs Latimer’s son arrives. The ones nearest the front door flicker slightly as he and his best friend Hugo Fragrance let themselves in quietly and join the party. Mrs Latimer’s attitude to throwing parties is that she invites every single person she knows or has ever known without worrying about whether people will get on. The success is in the numbers rather than the mix.

  Tonight, the guests are mixing well, ladling punch for each other from the Emphglott-sponsored crystal bowls awarded to champion dog breeders, and caressing the award-winning dogs sprawled on the sofas. There are several researchers from Emphglott who are trying to give the impression they are in TV, several TV researchers who are trying to give the impression they are producers, lots and lots of people from the village, high-flyers from the City, farm hands, dog hands, acrobats, trapeze artists and elephant trainers, and Mrs Latimer’s accountants who are having an affair and will slip away later and have sex. Almost everyone is hoping to get very drunk at Mrs Latimer’s expense, except the people who have brought their own drugs.

  Taron is talking to a young man wea
ring a dress. She can see the blonde hairs under his arms, poking from above the sleeveless bodice, when he puts the bottle of beer to his mouth to drink. His short fingernails are painted a shade of baby pink that Miss Selfridge markets as ‘Miss World’. His face is beautiful. He has a performer’s swagger, as if he is used to being looked at and admired but when he speaks he looks down a lot, as if he is really quite shy.

  ‘Fifty per cent of trees planted in cities die in their first year,’ Taron tells him. ‘The parks departments are planting the wrong trees, they can’t survive the conditions. They suffer horribly from the pollution. Even if they make it past the first year, their life expectancy is cut by one fifth. I’m going to take some water containers out next week and give them a drink and try wiping some of the filth off their leaves.’

  ‘I’m going to stop the traffic.’ The young man smiles suddenly, making dimples at the sides of his mouth. Taron, unsure whether this is an anti-pollution plan or a comment on his outfit, turns away to dip her cup into the bowl of punch.

  On the temporary dance floor in the living room, very close to the speakers broadcasting a selection of Mrs Latimer’s favourite tunes, the zebra keeper and his best friend are clinging together, cigarettes alight. Both have damp hair, grey faces, dilated pupils. They are grimacing, or possibly smiling, their expressions like teenagers on a scary fairground ride. Their teeth are chattering. ‘Fucking hell,’ whispers the zebra keeper, breaking away from his friend’s embrace to find his bottle of poppers in the back pocket of his jeans.

  The cloudy, moonless night conceals Mrs Fitzgerald, a little way removed from the house, wearing a very smart brown tweed skirt and pink Marigold gloves. She is crouching in a field collecting faecal samples and urine-soaked straw with Alison. Alison is dressed more casually but is taking the same sensible precautions in protecting her hands. Phoebe is with them in her stroller, wrapped against the chill of the spring evening, staring into the middle distance as children tend to do when they’re with adults who are engaged in inexplicable tasks that don’t involve them.

  Mrs Fitzgerald is engrossed by the task of collecting the samples with a trowel and placing them in labelled plastic bags held open for the purpose by Alison. If a crowd of students from a local university were to walk by, one of them might comment ‘Ner, you’re mad, you are’ but an engagement in the serious business of investigating is one of the occasions when Mrs Fitzgerald has no such doubts about her sanity.

  ‘Harvey, I need your help.’

  ‘That makes a nice change, Jane. You sound echoey, where are you?’

  ‘I’m having a colonic.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that is a change. You’ve never called me under such intimate circumstances before.’

  ‘Yes I have. I can’t interest any TV production companies in the story about Jeremy. I want to go ahead and make a short film anyway and use it as a show reel. I need you to do the camera work.’

  ‘I made a film at art school, that doesn’t make me Steven Spielberg.’

  ‘Philippe can get me all the kit for free. I’ll carry the fuzzy thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s in shot, I think it lends authenticity. Come on Harvs, I’d do it for you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘Why are we friends, would you say? Is it because we both hate men?’

  ‘I like men.’

  ‘Oh yes. Is it because we both hate women?’

  ‘I like women too. I like everyone and you hate everyone. It’s an attraction of opposites.’

  ‘Jeremy’s got a sister who’s run away from the world. She’s living miles away. In the middle of nowhere, effectively. She’s escaped her old identity. Do you see, Harvs? She’s got no name and no sense of place. She’s living in a void. If you do this teeny bit of filming I could get Jeremy to take us to meet her. Maybe she can be your guru. Just don’t tell Jeremy that I can’t get him on TV, I promised him some publicity.’

  ‘Don’t tell Jeremy? It sounds as if it’s getting serious. Will you start wanting to take care of him?’

  ‘No, taking care of someone is just a way of trying to control them.’

  ‘You like to control people.’

  ‘Yes, but I like to give them a list and say “do this, do that.” I don’t want to arse about cooking some man a fried breakfast and ironing his shirts as a precursor to influencing all his decisions.’

  ‘Well, why do it the hard way? You’ve certainly come up with a labour-saving strategy.’

  ‘Did I tell you that I’ve been having sex with Jeremy?’

  ‘Is it any good?’

  ‘Yes, I really like him. Part of the attraction is that I don’t really know what he’s thinking, he’s quite unpredictable. Do you remember when we bought those teen mags to pass the journey when we took the train to Cardiff?’

  ‘Wasn’t it Edinburgh?’

  ‘Whatever. We completed all the quizzes for each other and ticked all the right boxes. It’s great to know someone as well as I know you, don’t get me wrong. But with Jeremy, I wouldn’t know which boxes to tick.’

  ‘Alison? It’s Taron, I’m just back from Mrs Latimer’s. Sorry, were you asleep? I wish you could have been at the party.’

  ‘I was doing something. Anyway I couldn’t leave Phoebe. Never mind, how was it?’

  ‘It was great. Do you remember going to parties as a child? There’d always be a party bag full of goodies to collect at the end of the night. I’ve never grown out of that, I hate to go home empty-handed from a party.’

  ‘What do you mean. Did you bring a man home?’

  ‘Not this time. There was no-one there that I wanted. Mrs Latimer gave me a big parcel of food to take away, though, and two dozen candles.’

  ‘Anything else happen?’

  ‘I drank too much and got really trashed because I’ve given up drugs.’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d given up drugs.’

  ‘Yeah, I just stopped getting high so I gave them up.’

  ‘Maybe you need to try a different brand.’

  ‘No. I feel about drugs the way I’d feel about an old love affair. It made sense at the time but I wouldn’t want to go back and try again. I’m finding it quite difficult, though. If you don’t do drugs you have these huge gaps in your life that you have to fill. Time goes really slowly and you have to be on the lookout for adventure the whole time. Drugs create a whole momentum of their own where you chase about finding a dealer, getting high, recovering, buying more drugs, getting high. It really fills up the spare moments. Now I’ve got so much quality time on my hands I don’t know what to do with it all. And I get pissed all the time because I’m not used to drinking without taking drugs to temper the alcohol.’

  ‘How long has this been going on?’

  ‘Two weeks.’

  ‘Two weeks? We were at Miss Lester’s dinner party two weeks ago.’

  ‘Well, ten days. Listen, Alison, drugs are just a fast track to some kind of excitement you recognise because you’ve experienced it before somewhere. It’s like using a microwave instead of conventional cooking. Whether you’re using drugs or not using them, you’re still trying to get to the same place. All I have to do is remember how to get there the slow way.’

  ‘Are you drunk now?’

  ‘A bit. I feel pretty weird, actually. I think I’d feel toxic if I went anywhere near any more drugs. I’ve done so many over the years that one more little grain of anything might tip me over the edge. I may as well chew on pencil lead.’

  ‘That won’t do you any harm. They use graphite now. You’d have to lick tin soldiers in an antique shop. Was Joey at the party?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s really cute, he seems very fond of me.’

  ‘And do you like him?’

  ‘I’ve kind of taken him under my wing.’

  ‘Under your wing? Where would that put him? In your armpit?’

  ‘Alison. I thought you wanted me to go to the party so I could report back to you about Mrs Latimer. There’s no point being r
ude or I won’t tell you anything.’

  ‘Well, did you find out anything about Mrs Latimer?’

  ‘She loves me to death and there’s something weird going on with her animals.’

  ‘What kind of weird?’

  ‘Have you ever seen a dog typing and smoking a pipe?’

  ‘Like Ernest Hemingway?’

  ‘They’re like really bright undisciplined kids. They paint and chase rabbits and ride bicycles. There was a Doberman on the couch who looked as if it was reading a newspaper.’

  ‘Is chasing rabbits necessarily a sign of weirdness in dogs?’

  ‘No, but it is in children. I saw a programme on TV once about some posh kids who were allowed to do what they wanted at school and they chased a rabbit and killed it.’

  ‘So what’s happening with Joey? Are you going to start seeing him?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. He’s just going to help me out with a few of the projects I’ve got on at the moment. What about you, Alison? Why don’t you get yourself a man?’

  ‘Men are like cigarettes. I only want one when I’m drunk.’

  Chapter Eighteen ~ Night-time

  Watching the street outside their flat in vain for Roy’s return, Sheila suddenly pulls up the sash window and leans out, looking up. She wouldn’t be able to say why, if anyone had been there to ask her. Perhaps she was tired of breathing her own warm breath in the flat and she wanted to take in the cool, smoky London air for a change. Above her, hanging among the drifting clouds in the sky, is a very bright, ellipse-shaped light.

  Sylvia likes to sleep naked in Paradise, drawing the pillows around her in her big bed as if to cushion herself against a potential fall while asleep. A family in England recently searched all night for their missing teenage daughter before realising she had been safely tucked under the covers in bed the whole time. Roy would never make such a mistake with Sylvia, the curves of her body accentuated under the patchwork counterpane in the places where she props pillows around her body. She slips one arm under the pillows at the head of the bed, hugging her face to them. She keeps one pillow at her back, cuddles another at her side under the crook of her arm, another under one bent knee, or between two bent knees. She is lying on her right side, watching the doorway.