Being Light 2011

by Helen Smith

  Her advice is of very little use, so far as Harvey can see. And the woman has a cat. Luckily he took the precaution of swallowing an anti-histamine tablet before he came out. Why is it that mystic types always keep animals? The fabric of her blouse pulls slightly at the buttons. Harvey can see Dorothy’s freckled flesh in the gaps she makes in her clothing when she moves. He fixes his eye on the Lladro duck on her mantelpiece until it is time to leave.

  ‘One more thing. I can see a man falling from somewhere very high up. I’m not sure when it will happen but it is an event that is going to change your life.

  A little top has appeared on Clapham Common. A little top is like a big top in every respect except its size. A line-drawing of an acrobat advertises a one-man show on red and white posters pasted on local telegraph poles. A poorly drawn moustache garnishes many of the posters, courtesy of an anonymous local graffiti artist.

  Venetia Latimer sits on the hard bench in the little top in her finery and thinks about Sylvia. She thinks about the way Sylvia looks when she washes her hair in the bath. Her face, naked without makeup, tilted upwards against the spray of the showerhead, her eyes closed to keep the water out. The freckles visible on Sylvia’s nose and across her cheeks under long brown eyelashes pressed together in a semi-circle, catching drops of water on their ends. Pale eyebrows, pink lips, white teeth, unlined skin. Sylvia looks younger than her thirty-nine years. Mrs Latimer is remembering her the way she was at thirty-one when she first came to live in her house.

  The water swells and dulls Sylvia’s bright yellow hair and makes it look soft and greyish, like wet feathers. Venetia removes the shower attachment from its hook on the wall above the bath and takes it in her right hand. The nubs of the individual vertebrae are visible through Sylvia’s skin as she leans forward, her knees drawn up, her spine curving slightly, while Venetia directs the shower away from her towards the back of the bath, adjusting the temperature, darting her left hand back and forth into the water to test it.

  Venetia takes her left hand and puts it flat against Sylvia’s forehead where her hairline begins, then makes a curve with her hand and presses it hard to fit against the curve of Sylvia’s head, following her hand with the spray of water. When she reaches the ends of Sylvia’s hair she squeezes it gently. She repeats this process several times until the shampoo is rinsed away completely and the water coming from Sylvia’s hair runs clear. Then Venetia brings her hand to the top of Sylvia’s head once more and digs her fingers in through her hair, massaging her scalp.

  At first when she used to help Sylvia wash her hair, Venetia used to kneel at the side of the bath but the effort made her breath heavily and her weight on her knees made them uncomfortable. One day she found a three-legged milking stool in a bric-a-brac store in the village and that made the task much easier.

  When she looked at Sylvia in the bath, pink nipples resting on the shelf of white skin where her stomach jutted outwards from her belly button, Venetia used to think that Sylvia looked as if she had been packed for a long journey by a thoughtful god or other supreme being. She had spares of everything. As she sat sideways on, facing the taps, the roll of fat under her bosoms looked like a shadow set, in case the first should go missing. When Sylvia stood in the bath, before she bent to pull the plug, Venetia could see scoops of fat at the tops of Sylvia’s thighs which, with her buttocks, make a shape like butterfly wings.

  Finally Sylvia would turn and shake the water from her body before stepping into the embrace of the extra large white bath towel that Venetia held up for her, clean and warm from the airing cupboard.

  Venetia Latimer opens her eyes and stops remembering just as the audience breaks into applause for the circus performer in the little top in front of her.

  Venetia wanted to feel closer to the circus, by being close to Sylvia. Sylvia was easy to confide in because she absorbed everything, apparently without judgement, and told nothing in return. Venetia gave away so much of herself to Sylvia, hoping to plant some part of herself in Sylvia and make it grow, as if they were living in a less educated era when women, even married women like Venetia, were rather vague about where babies come from. She used to watch Sylvia with pride, fat and getting fatter, walking around her house apparently swollen from all the love and attention she received from her mentor, as if she really might give birth at any minute to a miraculous circus child engendered by love alone.

  The next day is the anniversary of the first visit to London of animal trainer Rudolph Knie. An advertisement appears in the personal column of The Times newspaper.

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

  Chapter Thirty-Six ~ Prince Albert

  Sheila meets up with other members of the alien encounter group at the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens. She sets off at dusk in the pouring rain. It is an easy journey to Kensington Gardens from Brixton. Sheila could have taken the Victoria Line, which is modern, clean, quick and efficient, changed on to the District Line (which is not) and stepped off the Tube at South Kensington. She has chosen to drive. There are plenty of parking spaces on Exhibition Road next to Imperial College, its windows giving a view to basements filled with heavy machinery, work benches, pulleys, metal tubing the diameter of a man’s height, all assembled to study and measure invisible things, like pressure and temperature and sound waves.

  Sheila walks up the steps to Kensington Gardens from the pedestrian crossing in Kensington Gore and meets the other members of the Encounter Group on the chequered stones, black, brown and white, in front of the Albert Memorial. The ground is freshly wet but it has stopped raining and the sky is clear.

  In 1868 the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott, inspired by the shrines of medieval times, designed an ornate memorial to Queen Victoria’s husband Albert, prematurely dead at forty-two in 1861 and sadly mourned by the Queen until her own death in 1901.

  The figures of Dante, Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, gather at the memorial. The assembled poets, artists and scientists create a testament to achievement that must impress anyone who sees it, even beings from other worlds, no matter how advanced the culture they hail from. Pink granite and red granite were brought from Scotland for the pillars and the pedestal; grey granite from Ireland for four pillars made from single stones each weighing 17 tons; Portland stone for the arches of the canopy and semi precious stones in the mosaic.

  ‘I must find him,’ thinks Sheila, walking around the memorial to study the statues of the four continents. She remembers an old skipping song she and her friends used to sing in primary school:

  North, South, East, West

  Find the boy that I like best.

  The Albert Memorial, 175 ft tall, is stunningly, goldenly, symmetrically beautiful. Golden stars shine in a blue mosaic canopy above where Albert sits, one knee raised, a programme for the Great Exhibition in his hand. Golden angels are above him, the monument topped with a golden cross. The marble frieze of poets, scientists and other notables is below him. One hundred and sixty nine figures crowd the monument in all. The marble figures at the four corners of the monument depicting the four continents shine brilliantly white. Albert himself is newly dipped in gold following the recent £10 million restoration project. ‘For a life devoted to the public good’ reads part of the inscription in the canopy above him.

  If a monument were to be built to commemorate Roy’s life, what would it say? Is it possible to define your life with great works, for example as the prime mover behind the Great Exhibition, as Albert was? The Crystal Palace that housed the exhibition, visited by six million people, was built in Hyde Park in just six months using more than 290,000 panes of glass. Can a person expect redemption through one great act or is it necessary to live well all your life?

  Prince Albert was forty-two when he died, probably from typhoid. Roy’s age. It is uncanny, Roy and Sheila and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert all being the same age. It is like being thrown together with another couple in a queue for Wimbledon or waiting to see
Princess Diana’s funeral procession and discovering they have so much in common. If they had met at a caravan park in north Wales during two weeks in August they would say, ‘We must keep in touch,’ but the contact has been made through a historical monument, across a time span of over a hundred years. It is more than a chance encounter. It is another message. The tinfoil is working. Roy Travers has disappeared from Brixton but his life is not over yet. Sheila may be forty-two but she feels as young and vigorous as she did on her twenty-first birthday. She will get Roy back if she has to fight for the rest of her life to set him free.

  Sheila turns around from the Albert Memorial to face the Royal Albert Hall. She makes a little sound, ‘Oh,’ at the familiar sight of the enormous oval red brick building, with its glass domed ceiling. She sees clearly as she never has before that it is modelled on the shape of a space ship. ‘You see, Sheila?’ members of the group ask her. It is a beautiful moment for all of them.

  ‘This hall was erected for the advancement of the Arts and Sciences and Works of Industry of all Nations’ proclaims the inscription running around the Royal Albert Hall. Albert bought the site with proceeds from the £186,000 profit he made from the Great Exhibition in 1851. Even with the predicted crash in house prices, that sum is unlikely to buy more than a one-bedroom second floor flat in Clapham these days. Even the Victorians had some delay in raising the funds to build on the site. The foundation stone was laid by Queen Victoria in 1867 and the Hall was finished in 1871, when it was inaugurated by the Bishop of London and the unfortunate echo was first noticed.

  It is raining again. The rain is running down Sheila’s sleeve and soaking her blouse. As the near relative of someone who has been captured by aliens, Sheila enjoys an elevated status among the encounter group. Nevertheless, there has been some jealousy over Sheila’s tinfoil ear caps. One or two of the members have taken to wearing tinfoil to meetings, although they are cagey about whether or not this has heightened their sensitivity to messages from extraterrestrials.

  The boy who wears Adidas insists on sharing Sheila’s umbrella as he hasn’t brought one of his own, but there isn’t enough room for the two of them to shelter under it. He is wearing a home-made tinfoil skull cap under a woollen Quicksilver beanie hat popular with snowboarders and other adventurous yet fashionable young people.

  Rosy draws Sheila aside to talk about dolphins again. This time there is a greater note of anxiety in her voice. ‘Did you read today’s papers?’ she asks Sheila. ‘A dozen dolphins were washed up from the Pacific Ocean with small puncture holes in their skin, as if something had been implanted in them and then detonated. The reporter says they had been trained to detect mines as part of a French military experiment and then blown up when the experiment concluded.’

  ‘Really? That’s horrible.’

  ‘It’s nonsense. It’s obvious they were assassinated by the CIA because they had been making contact with extra terrestrials. You mustn’t waste any time in getting to the Kent coast to make your picture, Sheila, before the dolphins there meet a similar fate.’

  As Sheila engages in a polite tugging match over the umbrella with the Adidas boy, she looks up and sees a bright ellipse-shaped light in the sky. The edge of the umbrella moves where it is pulled, providing greater shelter for her companion, and blocking out Sheila’s view of the light in the sky. By the time she pulls the umbrella back again and looks up, the light has gone, hidden behind a cloud. The few seconds’ sight of the space ship are enough. It is another sign. Sheila makes up her mind to go to the coast within the next few days.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven ~ The Smallest Room

  Jane telephones Harvey from ‘the smallest room in her house’ as her mother used to call it. It is neat and tidy, decorated in dark blue with a marine motif. Jane’s bathroom has none of the range of feminine hygiene products showily displayed by other women of her age in their homes. Jane simply has no need to let visitors know that she menstruates. Her moods usually advertise the progress of her monthly cycles adequately enough.

  ‘Can you come to Westminster with me tomorrow to do some filming? Jeremy needs to get up to the top of Big Ben to see how to stop it and I want to get some pictures.’

  ‘Why does he want to stop it?’

  ‘It’s part of a protest, he wants to turn back time.’

  ‘Like Tina Turner?’

  ‘No, like Cher. He wants to go up there tomorrow to see whether we need any specialist equipment on the big day,’

  ‘Like blow torches, you mean? Or a spanner? Is there a spanner big enough to unscrew the nuts and bolts that hold the hands on the clock faces?

  ‘I mean harnesses, specialist equipment for the performance. He hopes that if three of them hang off each end of the minute hands at the same time they can jam the mechanism.’

  ‘I heard they balance the mechanism with old pennies. In fact I think I saw it on Blue Peter once. If you just collect all the old pennies in the land and wait for the ones they use to wear out then it will go haywire eventually. It would be rather sweet, like collecting all the needles so Sleeping Beauty wouldn’t prick herself.’

  ‘There would be a national appeal for old pennies funded by the Sun newspaper and broadcast on Crimewatch and someone would find a store of them under a pensioner’s bed. Anyway hiding pennies and waiting for something to go wrong isn’t very visual. I want you to come with me to see whether you can film from Parliament Square or whether we need to get inside the car park in the House of Commons and set up the camera on St Stephen’s Green.’

  ‘Is that the bit of grass where politicians are interviewed for the evening news?’

  ‘Yes. The police won’t let us in to the grounds unless we have a valid reason to be there. I might be able to swing an invite with my press pass, although I wouldn’t want Jeremy’s antics linked back to me, it might destroy my career. It would help if we knew an MP. Do you know any of the gay ones, Harvs?’

  ‘Because I’m gay, do you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘It’s got to look great and I have to be sure we can capture everything on camera. It’s a full moon tomorrow night and the weather forecast is fine for a change so we should have a clear view. The whole group is going to attempt the protest at the next full moon so we’ll have four weeks to iron out any problems but on the night itself we won’t have much time for fancy camera work. While Jeremy’s on his own up there tomorrow I’d like to try and get some shots we can cut into the film we shoot next month. I want him silhouetted in black as he passes across the clock face, flying like Peter Pan.’

  ‘I went to see one of those yogic flying gurus at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday. I didn’t go in because it was too crowded but I got talking to a very interesting woman outside, all patchouli oil, hair extensions and henna tattoos. I told her about naming things and she said that my search for the truth is external and that instead I should look inside myself.’

  ‘Nonsense, you are looking inside yourself for the answers, that’s just the problem. You’re afraid of everything because there has never been any one thing that you have had to worry about. You need to find something, some cause that can test your limits and you need to fight for it to take your focus outside yourself.’

  ‘This isn’t a Foreign Legion thing, is it? I don’t think you can join the military over twenty-six and I never got further than O- level French.’

  ‘Don’t be flippant, Harvey. That’s what comes of taking advice from hippies. I doubt she could even find her way to the service station to buy chocolate to cure the munchies, let alone signpost the way towards the Great Truth for you. What do you really care about? If you don’t know, then find something. Your whole life should be an act of defiance, then you wouldn’t be afraid.’

  ‘So it doesn’t matter about naming things? Are you saying I’ve been going down the wrong track and I should live life as some kind of performance art? Do you live like that?’’

  ‘No, but I do
n’t have to. I was reading about it in Waterstone’s the other day while Philippe was buying some artsy film book. We all have different roles and we have to identify and accept them. All that cave man hunter-gather thing is bollocks. We’re civilised now. This is Cool Britannia. We’re starting the new renaissance and we have to learn from the models of old renaissance societies. Find what you’re good at, or what you want to be good at. It doesn’t really matter, so long as you do it for the greater good. For example, I should be a poet and you should be a knight. There were some other roles I think, like the princess in the tower and the evil witch, the monk and the wandering jester, but I didn’t read about them because they didn’t sound very relevant so we’ll have to make do with the poet and the knight. The poet is the chronicler, the knight is the crusader. I’m OK because I earn my living by writing but you’ve never had a fight in your life.’

  ‘Are you saying that I needn’t have embarked on this long search to confront my fears, I could have just browsed through a self-help book in a book shop?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I should live valiantly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Damn.’

  Chapter Thirty-Eight ~ Big Ben

  Alison has been too preoccupied with the postman’s dog and the baby to photograph Harvey’s new advert. Before committing to be involved in tonight’s filming, Harvey has persuaded Jane to follow him around south and west London with his stills camera. Jane has taken Harvey’s photograph from several angles in front of the giant hoardings in Vauxhall, Hammersmith and Clapham Common that bear the latest car advert with Harvey’s strapline: ‘To Die For.’

  When they get to Westminster that night, Jane and Harvey set up their camera on the grass on the Parliament Square roundabout, just next to the statue of Churchill looking uncomfortable in an overcoat and listing slightly to his right. Jeremy is already there. He is wearing peacock blue and Seville-orange Lycra, trimmed with velvet and accessorised with matching tights.