by Helen Smith
When Roy comes in to the room, smelling of toothpaste, she pushes all the pillows to the edges of the bed. The pillow that has been resting against her back is very warm when he lies his face against it. She makes a place for his left leg where one of the pillows touched inside her thighs and knees. Her body is hot, insulated against the night-time by the feathers that have been all around her. Even her feet are warm, when she slithers them across the sheets and puts them on Roy’s feet. She keeps her eyes open but Roy can barely see them in the darkness. He puts his hand out to her face and touches it very softly, to be sure where her mouth will be when he kisses her.
She puts her hand on his hips and presses him closer but he resists, arching his back slightly so that he can move his hand up her body and feel her bosom. He slips his left hand under the pillow at his head and finds Sylvia’s right hand. He works his fingers into the palm of her hand so she will stop holding on to the pillowcase and he laces his fingers through hers.
He moves his right hand to her thighs, her bottom, the flesh above her hips. All the flesh has the same consistency as her breasts; firm, with a slight give when he presses his fingers into it. Oh my God, I’m fucking a giant breast, he thinks, just before he comes, in the moment that is like falling, when Heaven and Earth seem to fit together.
Chapter Nineteen ~ Usefulness
The zebra keeper is in his rented kitchen, lying on the ridged, prickly carpet near the fridge. The carpet is tough-wearing and of indeterminate colour, chosen by the landlord to withstand the enthusiasms of sloppy young men with an aversion to vacuuming. The zebra keeper is lying on the patch where the spilled food collects on its journey to and from the table.
The zebra keeper’s name is James. He remembers this almost as soon as he wakes up. His left arm is slightly numb where he has been lying on it. His underpants have hitched themselves a little way into the cleft between his buttocks, which he now remedies with his good hand.
James’s flatmate, Robert, another animal keeper and his best friend, walks bare-footed into the kitchen from his bedroom. He is also wearing the clothes he wore last night. He knocks James’s head lightly as he opens the fridge door to find a beer. ‘Man, that party was really kicking last night.’
James is sitting up, shaking his left hand vigorously and patting his discarded jacket with his right, trying to locate his cigarettes. ‘Yeah,’ he agrees. He begins to laugh. ‘Every time I looked at the old lady, she seemed to be morphing into one of her animals.’
‘She was necking the punch down.’
‘So was everyone. I was tripping off my face but they were just tottering around, making small talk like nothing was happening.’
‘The alcohol kills it. There wasn’t really enough in the punch to do anything except put a sheen on things, although I chucked a bit on the chicken satay as well. You and me and Christian had a whole phial each before we even went out. Don’t forget we had all that coke as well.’
‘God yeah, I still owe you for that. I better do some overtime this month to pay for it.’ James drags himself to a wooden chair and sits down, conserving his energy for the while.
Venetia Latimer has been up and about since early this morning, watching some of the CCTV tapes that recorded the events on the grounds during last night’s party. She finds them most instructive. Then she switches to the live camera and watches a couple of the kennel boys set off for Hampshire and Dorset in the van.
Venetia has suffered. She was once betrayed and robbed by someone she cared about. Venetia went into the tunnel of wretchedness and bitterness that everyone goes into when something like that happens, but she came out the other side deciding to work through the pain by doing good deeds. Venetia Latimer now strives to turn useless things into useful things. She brings this about by combining her formidable skills with endless financial means.
Who, other than Venetia Latimer, would have had the idea of trapping and training the mink that were set free by animal rights activists and are now colonising the countryside and interfering with the food chain? Mrs Latimer has a team working day and night to put together the first comedy circus routine starring performing mink. It is a difficult task because mink kill each other for sport and the supply of performers needs constant replacement. The kennel boys have been searching the English countryside for them with nets, stout leather gloves and – at their insistence – cricket boxes to protect their genitals.
Venetia Latimer is a busy woman. She doesn’t have time to sit back and rest on her laurels otherwise she would be feeling very proud of her achievements. From a very young age she has admired artists and performers and keenly felt the gap between their productive lives and hers. It is only now, past the age of fifty, that she has been able to see that she too can offer something good to the world – usefulness.
Chapter Twenty ~ Hot Line
Sheila has thought it over carefully and she’s sure that when she wears long, dangly earrings, the messages from the aliens are stronger. Consequently, she has been experimenting with other ways of enhancing the alien signals. The triangular caps she has made for her ears out of tinfoil seem to work very well. They are barely noticeable so long as she keeps her hair falling forward and doesn’t brush it back over her face nervously when she talks, which she has a habit of doing.
Sheila gathers all her courage for the next stage of her search for Roy. The time has come to try and find out how she can contact his captors. She picks up the phone. A bored young woman sits in a meagrely-furnished office by the phone with an A4 pad of paper, leaning on a plastic wood-effect table. She wears grey flannel trousers and a grey V-necked jumper. You might suppose she had come straight to this office from school if she weren’t five years too old to be wearing uniform. Her hand trembles slightly when the phone rings and she takes up her pen with very great care before she answers.
‘Hello, Hot Line. What activity do you have to report?’
‘I don’t have anything to report. I’d like some information.’
‘We don’t give information about extraterrestrials, we collect it.’
‘Do you know where I can get information?’
‘We don’t give information.’
‘You won’t even give me information about where to get information?’
‘No.’
Sheila sighs and puts down the phone. The young woman, unseen at the other end of the line, makes a V sign at the receiver before she replaces it in the cradle. She stops up her pen and replaces it, unused, on the blank pages in front of her. Then she leans back on the table top again, inadvertently rubbing shiny patches on the elbows of her fashionable yet unremarkable wool and viscose mix jumper.
Sheila picks up the phone again and dials Alison. She takes a tangential approach to the subject of her phone call. ‘Theatres are like people, sometimes,’ she tells Alison. ‘They can be ugly on the outside but able to convey beauty inside. Take the South Bank, for example. The buildings are hideous but the seats are comfortable, the view of the stage is good and the acoustics are great.’
‘I don’t really go to the theatre much.’
‘You should. There always seems to be a message for me, when I go. The words speak to me. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Songs are like that. The words always seem really personal to your situation. Like when you’re in love or when you break up with someone. Suddenly every song you hear seems to express the emotion you’re feeling.’
‘Do you think that there’s more to this idea of hidden messages than we realise?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you think possibly it’s a special way of communicating with us?’
‘Oh yes, I think artists always hope to communicate something, whether it’s through theatre or painting or music.’
‘I think what I’m really trying to ask is whether that communication could be hijacked in some way.’
‘By politicians?’
‘By aliens.’
Alison, slumming her way t
hrough the conversation without paying too much attention to Sheila’s questions or her own responses, now tries to backtrack in her mind to see if she’s missed out a chunk of the conversation and hasn’t quite followed Sheila’s meaning.
‘Um. Aliens.’
‘I think that aliens have been communicating with me through the medium of theatre. I know it sounds strange.’
‘Yes, it does.’
‘I feel so powerless. I feel as if Roy is standing just the other side of a door and I can’t see him. I need someone to help me but when I come up against snotty people like the woman on the Extra Terrestrial Hot Line, all the breath is knocked out of me and I feel as if I can’t get started. It makes me feel very alone. Don’t you ever feel lonely, Alison?’
‘No.’
After she has hung up, Alison walks around the flat for a while, thinking about Sheila, then she takes a poem with a phone number written on it from a notice board on the wall above her computer and goes back to the phone.
‘Jeff?’
‘Ali?’
‘Thanks for the lip gloss. I thought I might come and visit you. I could cook something for you. Everything would be brightly coloured and fragrant.’
‘You said you had a lot of colour in your life.’
‘I’d make a salad and scatter it with flower petals. I’d build a pyramid from scoops of melon soaked in vodka. I’d use watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew – red, yellow and orange. Then I’d add some green from little twists of lime and mint picked from my garden.’
‘And you’d cook them?’
‘I wasn’t actually going to apply heat to them, no. I suppose it isn’t cooking so much as assembling and balancing fruit.’
‘When will you visit me?’
‘I wonder if it would be a good idea or a bad idea if I came to visit you? I don’t think I could sleep next to you. I’d just lie awake listening to you breathing. It’s a habit I’ve got into with Phoebe.’
‘I think it would be a good idea.’
‘I could bring my mobile with me. Taron would be able to tell me.’
It is 2 o’clock in the afternoon. The bright light outside reaches into the corners of Jane Memory’s bedroom and intensifies the vivid green and blue of the large checks on the expensive cotton covers and pillow cases on the bed, where Jeremy is lying without any clothes on. Jeremy’s tan line stops two inches below his navel, approximately where a pair of hipster trousers would begin, if he ever wore them.
Jane used to bite her nails when she was a teenager and her manicurist uses extensions in natural pink to disguise the damage that remains. Jane uses the acrylic tip of one these nails to tap Jeremy gently on the ribs, signalling that he should roll over. She rests her silver-ringed hand in a fan shape on one white buttock and inspects the rest of Jeremy’s body. It is very lean. She pinches a little bit of skin between her thumb and first finger. He probably has no more than fourteen percent or fifteen percent fat on him.
‘Ow’, says Jeremy. Jane puts her mouth to his shoulder and smells the skin before she bites him, sweeping her hand between his thighs. He turns over so that she can sit on top of him, the soles of her feet tucked under the backs of his legs and her hands at either side of him on the blue and green checked pillows under his head.
A shower of shiny, golden pound coins has fallen from the hip pockets of Jeremy’s summer dress into the bed, as if riches have flowed directly from his loins. Every so often Jane or Jeremy rolls on to one of the coins, gasps, and throws it on to the floor where it bounces against the skirting board with a ‘ting’.
There is no part of Jane’s body that she dislikes. She exfoliates her knees and her elbows regularly. Her nipples point up, her buttocks point up, her hips are narrow, her stomach is flat. There is a clear, straight line of vision from her breast bone to her pubic bone, with nothing wobbly in the way. She might get her belly button pierced, but she’s not convinced it won’t hurt. If she got sick of it and removed it, she’d hate for it to leave a scar.
‘Oh,’ says Jeremy. ‘God, Jane.’ Jane leans forward with one hand against the wall behind his head and dips her head so she can kiss him. If they shower together it will save time and she can drop Jeremy back at his flat before the rush hour traffic begins, unless he insists on travelling back there by bicycle in which case she can probably have sex with him again and still have enough time to pop into Marks & Spencer to pick up something for her dinner.
Jane’s boyfriend Philippe Noir has square feet with a high instep. His fingers are rectangular. His hands, like his feet, are slightly moist, even in the cold weather. He has full lips, which is supposed to be an indication of sensuality, although he displays none of this when in bed with Jane. When they first spent time together, Jane would bring pots of strawberry fromage frais or vanilla ice cream to bed and leave them where they were easily to hand in case Philippe should feel the urge to slather her body with it and flick it away with his thick pink tongue. He preferred to finish eating the food – one spoon for you, one for me; he has always been fair about sharing it – while she grasped his cock and said ‘umm’ a lot to get him in the mood.
Philippe likes to keep abreast of developments in the competitive docu-soap world and schedules their love-making so that there is plenty of time to sit up in bed, find his designer glasses with thick rectangular frames wherever he has discarded them, and switch on the TV for the next edition of a rival’s work. The thing about Philippe is that he doesn’t really have to try very hard as he has a good job and could always get another girlfriend if he wanted one.
Since Jeremy insists on getting himself home on his bicycle this afternoon, Jane has enough time to have sex with him again. She lies him on the floor, ties him to the wooden feet of the bed by the wrists with a pair of her knickers (she makes a kind of slip knot with the leg holes), tucks a cushion under his arse so he doesn’t get carpet burns, and tips some of the most delicious contents of her freezer over his body and licks it off. Jane often eats in restaurants with friends so there isn’t much to choose from but she manages to take Jeremy through the full range of emotions using a tub of frozen blackberry yoghurt, a bottle of frozen but still viscous Absolut vodka and a tray of ice cubes. He wobbles a little unsteadily on his bicycle when the time comes to leave, but whether this is due to the alcohol or the sex, Jane couldn’t say.
Chapter Twenty-One ~ Wind Chimes
Sheila wakes groggily to a terrible thumping sound. She is not sure at first whether there is someone at the door or whether the noise is inside her head. Since Roy’s disappearance she has been suffering from headaches. Unless she rests, the headaches get worse and eventually she has to close her eyes to bright lights and spots of colour that she sees jumping across her vision, even though she knows they are not there. Her sister would say it is stress.
‘Sheila?’ Her sister is at the door now, calling her name. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. The woman has fists of steel. ‘Sheila?’ Bang, bang, bang, tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. Bang, bang, bang.
Sheila waits until her sister has gone. The phone starts to ring but she doesn’t answer it. Ring ring. Ring ring. Ring ring. Ring ring. Ring ring. After five rings it rolls over onto the answer machine.
Sheila gets out of bed and checks the message, in case it is not from her sister. It is, though. Above her head, on the table where she keeps the phone, there hangs an unusual wind chime made from re-cycled cutlery that she bought recently from Covent Garden Market. When the tines of the forks strike against the bowls of the spoons and the blades of the knives, there is a very pretty ‘ding’ sound.
It is rare that a breeze stirs within Sheila’s flat as she prefers to keep her windows closed against the traffic noise. However, the primary purpose of the contraption is to gather and concentrate messages from aliens so on the whole Sheila is very pleased with her purchase and the frown lines in her face relax a little whenever she passes it in her hallway.
Roy has climbed the wooden ladder leading to Sylv
ia’s high wire, now more-or-less permanently strung in place, and is standing on the platform next to the house, looking out over the small bay. To the left, past the orchard, he can see the top of the hay barn, a maroon structure the size of an aircraft hangar. The land behind him is hidden from view by the house. He still dislikes heights but by climbing up here often and just looking around, he is coming to terms with the feelings of dizziness and disorientation that come from being so far above the ground.
When Roy was a child he thought that Heaven would be familiar, like a sunny England. During his difficult teenage years, he didn’t believe in the after-life. As an adult he thought Heaven would be exotic and unfamiliar, the sort of place that is unattainable for ordinary people, like Richard Branson’s island in the Caribbean.
This morning, as he walked along the path leading to the beach, he noticed hundreds and hundreds of cobwebs in the hedgerows, each strand of each web sparkling with drops of moisture from the mist that had come in from the sea. By the time he went to fetch Sylvia to show her how magical it looked, the mist had rolled back and the cobwebs had shed the moisture, their patterns barely noticeable among the leaves as they had been every other morning that Roy had walked along the path. If it weren’t for magic like this, Roy could almost be disappointed in how much Heaven is like the English countryside of his childhood.
Chapter Twenty-Two ~ The Café
Venetia Latimer is feeling lonely. On days like these, bitterness can creep up on her unless she takes care not to let it in. Her husband is at work, her son has left home. She has a business of her own to run, but still the bitter feelings ambush her in the quiet moments when she is alone in her office.
