Being Light 2011 (2 page)

Roy
returns to a crouching position, then moves again to get comfortable, resting his weight on his knees, holding on, looking down. He is too dangerously far from the ground to risk a jump. He switches his focus to remaining on the castle, as if it were his saviour rather than his captor. He finds a reasonably comfortable position, half reclining like a Roman guest at a feast, his feet jammed into a pocket in one of the side walls, his hands gripping the material beneath him. He feels secure enough to appreciate, if not actually enjoy, the view of the English countryside as he sails above it.

With the quietness, the wind in his hair, the gentle bobbing motion of the castle,
Roy
could almost believe himself lost at sea if it weren’t for the scenery below. In a rustic tableau reminiscent of an earlier, more innocent age, he sees a mother with two children on bicycles in a country lane. They wave at him as he floats overhead. What is the correct response? He has no materials to make a placard and spell out ‘Help’. The tiny figures are too far below him to read his distress in hand signals. Unwilling to disappoint the children, he waves tentatively. Still the flying castle climbs. The air is very cold. He wishes he could sail nearer the sun, so he could feel its warmth.

Roy
loses track of the passage of time. He feels himself becoming light-headed as the air grows thinner. The prototype bouncy castle material, subject to unpredicted changes in temperature, begins to shrink. Roy lifts his lolling head and squints at the sun, trying to assess whether there is a danger of sailing too near and shrinking his craft enough to plummet him to the earth. His last thoughts are of his wife as, eyes tightly shut, he feels the material beneath him wrinkle and contract, hears the menacing hiss of the air inside escaping, feels the too-quick descent towards earth and certain death.

Roy
has heard that if you don’t wake up when you feel yourself falling as you go to sleep at night, you will die. Dying and falling are indistinguishable for
Roy
in his final moments. He wakes in the arms of an angel. She isn’t beautiful, although she is wearing white and she’s soft and comforting. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Well, well, well. Welcome to
Paradise
.’

Sheila Travers reports
Roy
’s disappearance the next day, calling in to Brixton Police Station to file the information in person.

‘You have to wait forty-eight hours before you can file a missing person report,’ the desk Sergeant tells her.

‘It isn’t a straightforward missing person report. It’s an accident report. An incident report.’ Sheila picks at the bobbles on her coat, looking down. Then she looks the Sergeant straight in the eye. ‘Please, I need to know whether a body has been found.’

 
The desk sergeant checks his computer screen and reassures her that
Roy
’s body hasn’t been found.

‘What kind of man is your husband?’

The question seems a strange one. It strikes Sheila as being unnecessarily intrusive. It carries the implication that
Roy
’s personality could have some sort of bearing on the outcome of his freak accident, which is impossible. ‘
Roy
is a sensible man.’

The sergeant, following Sheila’s troubled reaction to his question in the frown lines on her face, seems relieved by the answer when she finally gives it. ‘Well, then. Wherever he’s landed, he’ll try to make his way back home. Why don’t you go back there and wait? I’m sure you’ll hear something from him soon.’

Sheila waits for him for over a week, starting at every sound outside her front door in case it is Roy without his key; lifting the phone receiver every so often to check the dialling tone; not eating properly; not going out in case there is some news; switching on the kettle to make tea and then not making it, switching it on again, letting it boil; switching every switch in the house and switching them all off again.

On the following Monday, with no sign of
Roy
and still no body found, Sheila decides she needs to enlist the help of all available agencies, including unconventional ones. She visits a clairvoyant in a pleasant, airy flat in
Josephine Avenue
, off Brixton Hill. The visit is a first for Sheila, although strictly speaking she is no stranger to the supernatural. When she was nine years old, she and her friends watched as a very bright, elliptical light hovered above their heads as they walked home from the school bus stop in the winter darkness. The likelihood of alien life forms drawing near to study the tiny figures in red and grey uniforms was debated in the junior school for weeks. It is the only other time in her life that Sheila has been prepared to believe that there might be more in this world than whatever she can see on the surface but the incident is half-buried in the mythology of Sheila’s childhood and she hasn’t thought about it for more than thirty years.

Sheila has never written to a magazine for advice, never taken part in a documentary for Channel Four, never believed in her horoscope (although she reads it) and never, ever turned to the spirit world for guidance. Now something outside the ordinary has happened to Roy and Sheila needs someone outside the ordinary to provide a clue to Roy’s continuing absence, as the police cannot. Sheila sets aside her misgivings and sounds the buzzer for the flat in
Josephine Avenue
.

       
The clairvoyant’s name is Dorothy. She’s in her late thirties, has badly bitten fingernails, an expensive feathered haircut and ever so slightly too-tight trousers. Her flat smells of air freshener but her manner is reassuring.

       
Dorothy takes the photograph of Roy being blown away on the bouncy castle, thoughtfully passed on to Sheila by Brian Donald, and rests her hands on it in her lap, closing her eyes. Seconds pass. Long seconds, running into minutes. Sheila is embarrassed and impressed by the silence, unsure whether to fill it. From the kitchen, she can distinctly hear the sound of Dorothy’s cat eating its dry food supplement from the plastic bowl on the linoleum.

       
‘I see him floating,’ says Dorothy at last. ‘I see him floating.’ She settles back, easing the pressure caused by sitting upright in the trousers, apparently prepared to let the matter rest. Sheila tries to pin Dorothy down to an interpretation of this information.

       
‘On a boat?’

       
‘Perhaps.’

       
‘On a river or on the sea?’

       
‘The sea?’ The inflection in Dorothy’s voice suggests participation in a parlour guessing game rather than the insight of an all-seeing oracle.

The minimal information Sheila gathers in this consultation with Dorothy strongly indicates to her that the wind has taken
Roy
across the Channel. What other stretch of sea could have transported him to a land mass quickly enough for him to have survived the journey? It is extremely fortunate that she has been collecting tokens from the
Daily Mail
to exchange for a ferry ticket to
France
for only £1, as this will enable her to travel inexpensively to look for him there.

‘One more thing, Sheila. I can see him standing on a platform, preparing to step off. It’s a very vivid picture. I don’t know what it means.’

Sheila spends Tuesday and Wednesday with a French dictionary, paper, pens, glue and scissors. By Thursday she’s ready to go to
Calais
to search for Roy, one of only a few foot passengers to make the trip. Most of her fellow travellers are bootleggers in cars or vans, making a round trip to
Calais
to buy bottles of Jacob’s Creek at prices which offer a considerable saving compared to current deals in British supermarkets and off licences.

Fifteen minutes into the journey, Sheila starts to feel sick. Her weakened body is powerless to stop anxious thoughts crowding her mind. Where is
Roy
? What’s become of him? She clings to the hope that he’s alive. Sheila cannot and will not believe that
Roy
is dead. She holds tight to the rail of the ferry, pea green and sick, not with the motion of the boat but with the effort of disbelieving the evidence of his disappearance. He cannot be dead. He would not have left her. She must believe in him. Believing will give her the strength to bring him back, wherever he has gone, or been taken. Alone, sick, frightened, Sheila spaces her feet a little apart on the wooden floor of the deck of the ferry to keep her balance as the boat rocks with the movement of the sea in the middle of the English Channel. She’s determined to believe.

Sheila has a thin stack of home-made A3-sized posters with her, photocopied in the local newsagent’s, each with a photograph of Roy. The words ask for help from the French people in their own language:
‘Personne Disparue. Est-ce que vous avez vu cette personne?’

Standing on the ferry, attempting to create a reality in which
Roy
is still alive and trying to get back home, Sheila tries to transmit her belief in him to wherever he is, so that he will know and take comfort. She reaches into her nylon travelling bag and takes out the posters to look at his blurry likeness, enlarged and photocopied from a holiday snapshot. The wind tugs at the topmost poster and whips it out of her hands, flinging the paper against the rail before snatching it up again, toying with it and then dashing it down into the waves. Sheila stuffs the rest of the posters back into her bag, not watching.

Once she reaches
Calais
, Sheila glues the posters all around the town. The day is exhausting and disappointing. In attending to the detail of creating the posters and buying a ferry ticket, Sheila hasn’t paid attention to the overall strategy of the plan. Now that she has arrived in
France
, Sheila feels daunted by the scope of her search. She feels useless and frustrated and foolish. She has no idea how to generate leads or gather information. She walks round and round and tries to talk to people, without learning any news of
Roy
. At the end of a disappointing day, Sheila goes into the hypermarché to buy some cheese and some wine before catching the last ferry home. She hopes that shopping will provide some solace because it is normal and everyday but the lights in the hypermarché are so bright that they give her a headache and, as she takes a trolley from the rack, out of the corner of her eye she sees the doors of a lift close on a man who has been too slow to get out of it, trapping his arm.

The day after her return to
England
, Sheila visits the clairvoyant again.

‘I think he’s in a happier place,’ Dorothy tells Sheila, with tears in her eyes. Sheila pays the clairvoyant the money for the consultation but she won’t believe her. She goes back to the flat to wait for him.

Perhaps
Roy
is being held somewhere against his will, unable to get back home? A few days after his disappearance Sheila came across an advertisement in the local paper which she pinned to the notice board in the kitchen, although she hoped she wouldn’t need it:

Fitzgerald’s Bureau of Investigation

~ Discretion Assured

It seems that the time has come to seek help from these people. When Sheila telephones, it is Mrs Fitzgerald herself who answers. She sounds sympathetic and experienced. Sheila makes an appointment to meet Mrs Fitzgerald and another woman named Alison, who will be assigned to help her look for
Roy
. For the first time since he disappeared, Sheila feels that she has got some help from people who know what they’re doing.

Ella Fitzgerald is riding the buses again
.
She has found this an excellent opportunity to observe mad people, who ride around all day long on a Travelcard, mumbling to themselves. Today she has selected the 159, one of the few services that still uses the hop-on hop-off Routemaster buses with conductors. She has travelled from Brixton to Oxford Circus and is now on her way back home again.

Looking through the windows of the top deck of the bus, she can see a silvery, shimmery bright sun.
I must learn to see the world the way others see it,
she thinks.
There is something fanciful about the way I see things and I have to stop. Everyone knows the sun is gold or yellow. Even very young children know it, if you look at their drawings. I’ve always seen the sun as silver.
If I can learn to see that colour as yellow, I’ll be like other people. I’ll be normal.

Mrs Fitzgerald is thinking about madness. More than anything else, more than poverty or war or assaults from local teenagers, Mrs Fitzgerald fears going mad like her brother. What are the signs? She hopes to learn from her fellow passengers.

When she looks outside again, as the bus pulls out of
Lambeth Road
and turns right towards Kennington, the world seems to have gone wrong. Her position at the front of the bus on the top deck gives her an excellent 270
°
vantage point. There to her left, as it should be, is the
Imperial
War
Museum
, formerly Bedlam. In front of the bus, behind the bus, all around the bus, there is a sea of people as far she can see. Most are walking but some are on bicycles. It’s impossible to tell whether the atmosphere is jolly or menacing. It has something of a carnival feel, which usually means a mixture of both. Mrs Fitzgerald can hear booming music and the shrill, discordant sound from whistles strung round people’s necks on coloured strings, jammed in their mouths, blowing at full volume.