Being Light 2011 (4 page)

Time is the one thing that is endless in Heaven, stretching forward into infinity. It is impossible to imagine beginnings or endings. The days are long, uncluttered by work, unpunctuated by television or radio, by visits from friends or trips to the supermarket. Time is a luxury but it is also awesomely powerful and endless. Every day that ends promises another just like it tomorrow. There’s a sense of power in being able to change the day just by doing some small thing differently, by preparing something different for dinner, by starting a conversation on a new subject matter, by walking in a different direction to the sign on the wooden fence. Waking up in the morning and looking at the blank canvas of the day, for Roy, is like looking at the ocean and contemplating the infinitesimal changes and understanding the timelessness and the not-sameness, the endless variations on being an ocean. Perhaps the physical limits of the Heaven that Roy and Sylvia inhabit are restricted because restriction enhances the ability to comprehend infinity.

Sylvia pads about comfortably and talks only when she needs to communicate something to
Roy
, she isn’t a chatty person.
Roy
isn’t surprised that Sylvia speaks English, or if she doesn’t speak English, that in dying he’s been given the facility to understand the language they speak in Heaven. Roy doesn’t talk to Sylvia about Heaven or what it feels like to be here. The one thing he’s curious about is what kind of life she used to live.

‘In my old life, I trained animals for film and TV work. My hero was Rolf Knie, the humane animal trainer. He taught elephants to ride a scooter, climb stairs on their hind legs and use a typewriter. He made history in 1941 by training an elephant to walk the tightrope. He was so famous that Princess Margaret was in the audience when he brought his elephants to
London
in the early 1950s.
 
My dream was to train an elephant to walk the tightrope. I was always kind to the animals but I know now that it’s wrong.’

‘Why is it wrong, if you were kind?’

‘Because we were displaying the animals for entertainment. It was wrong. I read a report about it a few years ago that completely changed my life.’

‘Well, I used to do something similar. I used to work in a kennels where we bred and trained dogs. They lived like kings. They had everything. There was no cruelty, it was all done on reward. Mrs Latimer was very careful about that.

‘Mrs Latimer ...?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mrs Latimer, who controls the supply of performing dogs to the film and circus industries?’

‘Yes.’

‘
Roy
, I don’t think we should talk about our other lives, before we came here.’

Although there are no other human people in Heaven with Roy and Sylvia, she has been joined by some of her friends from the animal kingdom. Maybe Sylvia doesn’t need to talk about her old life because she’s surrounded by mementoes. An elderly dog lives in the house with her and an elephant sleeps in one of two hangar-sized barns in the garden. The other barn stores the elephant’s supply of hay.

Roy
has looked around for his old dead friends, in case they’ve been waiting here for him. There’s no-one and it’s made him realise that he didn’t really have anyone. He thinks sometimes about whether his wife will turn up one day but it makes him uncomfortable. How would Sylvia deal with the situation?

Possibly he’s over-estimating the likelihood of seeing Sheila again. His wife was always very fond of the theatre, perhaps she’ll go to a thespian Heaven. It seems strange that, now it turns out there is an afterlife, he might not spend eternity with her. If there had been nothing after death, he could have accepted it. But this scattered eternity... At least he recognises there’s no point in arguing with Sylvia.

‘OK,’ he says. ‘Let’s not talk about it.’ Having come to terms early on with the theological difficulties of making love to an angel, Roy takes Sylvia’s hand and they go to bed at the end of a day that promises another just like it tomorrow.

Brian Donald’s wife has sent him round to the flat in Brixton after work this evening to see if Sheila Travers is alright. Brian’s wife is at home looking after her bedridden mother so she can’t go herself. She’s worried because she can’t get any answer from Sheila on the phone and Sheila hasn’t returned any of her messages.

Brian has always been a bit wary of Sheila. She is a quiet person, with a determination and depth to her personality that he has always shied away from, associating that kind of quiet certainty with people who suddenly become born-again Christians.

Brian and his wife and his wife’s mother saw a local news item recently about a man whose solar powered roof panels generate more than enough electricity for his own house so that he has been able to sell some of it back to his local Electricity Board. The story reminded him of Roy and Sheila. They formed a happy unit together, as if they didn’t need anyone else. They were so solid together and generated so much happiness as a couple that Sheila persuaded Roy that they had more than enough for themselves and should give something back, which is why they helped out with fundraising at charitable events.

Brian’s wife wondered sometimes why Roy and Sheila had never had children but it was not the sort of conversation Brian would have been comfortable having with
Roy
. He couldn’t see a gap in
Roy
and Sheila’s lives that would have been filled by children. His own son, twenty years old and incapable of doing his own laundry, is still living at home.

Since
Roy
’s disappearance Brian and his wife have been wondering about the dark secrets
Roy
and Sheila’s life must have held. They turned the television off so they could spend the evening discussing it. Brian himself saw Roy float up on the bouncy castle. It couldn’t have travelled far. Roy has either had a bump on the head or he staged the whole thing and he’s run off with someone else. Brian’s mother-in-law suggested that Sheila’s capable manner hides a sexual coldness that drove
Roy
away. Brian’s wife thought
Roy
might have gambling debts. Brian wondered whether
Roy
had fled the country to be a sexual tourist in
Thailand
.

Brian will ask Sheila if he can have a look at
Roy
’s passport, which will put to rest whether or not he has gone abroad if she can’t find it. Brian’s wife told him to buy Sheila a bunch of flowers to cheer her up but he hasn’t bought any in case she isn’t in.
 
Also, Brian has never been alone in her home with Sheila before. He feels a bit uncomfortable about it under the circumstances, especially if she is sexually cold. He can always pop out and get the flowers later.

Brian rings the doorbell. When there is no answer, he shouts her name through the letterbox. He’s not sure whether she would hear him as she lives on the second floor, but at least he can tell his wife that he tried. If Sheila is not in, he can use the £10 his wife gave him for the flowers for something else. If he puts it on a horse and it wins, he will take his wife out for the evening. Their son can look after his grandmother for a change.

Sheila can see Brian Donald from her window. She has nothing whatsoever to say to him. He is well-intentioned but he would have nothing to say that she would want to hear. He would rattle the coins in his pockets, rise up and down on the balls of his feet and stare at her breasts. Sheila does not answer the door.

Jane Memory is scratching the inside of her right nostril with the rubber on the end of a pencil, briefing the stylist on her mobile phone. ‘The theme is empire builders. I need a great photo to go with this piece. Hold on to empire. See what you can do with it.’

Jane Memory knows lots of people and phones them all the time to maintain her network. She’s popular because she’s funny, although she has a very critical eye. Every time she attends a dinner party in an unfamiliar house she murmurs a style-
mag
appraisal of it without stopping to think whether she’s offending her host. Jane is hungry all the time and the hunger makes her irritable and sometimes rather unkind. She’s hungry because she’s very thin, it’s her thing. She doesn’t even take slimming pills, she relies on willpower to resist the foods that pile on the millimetres.

Venetia Latimer sits where the stylist has left her, on a wooden kitchen chair in the middle of the photographer’s studio. She has a maroon silk turban on her head, with a cameo brooch clipped on to the front, keeping its shape. Her body is swathed in emerald silk fashioned into an extravagant fifties-style dress, the plunging neckline edged in seed pearls exposing the cleft of her bosom. Two Dalmatians stand very still against her glimmering skirt while the photographs are taken. There are so many bracelets on her arm that after careful study of the contact sheets the next day, the photographer will fancy he can still hear them chiming.

Roy
would come back home, if he could. It is the one unarguable fact in Sheila Travers’s life. Why would he not come back? She has an unshakeable faith in
Roy
’s compulsion to find his way home, as if he were a spawning salmon and south
London
a sparkling stream. She is alone in this; even her own family are beginning to doubt she will see her husband again soon.

‘Sheila, maybe
Roy
has lost his memory? Or perhaps,’ Sheila’s sister faces the inevitable on her behalf, ‘perhaps he’s not alive.’

‘I’m sure he’s alive.’

Given that
Roy
’s will to come back is a constant, everything else Sheila has ever believed is negotiable. Sitting in her finery in the upper circle of the Palace Theatre with her sister, trying to take her mind off Roy’s disappearance, Sheila receives a message about him.

‘Do you mean someone passed you a note?’ Sheila’s sister is bewildered when Sheila tries to explain as they sip their pre-ordered interval drinks. ‘I saw nothing.’

‘It wasn’t a note. It was a message that went directly into my head.’

‘The voice of God?’ Sheila’s sister’s lips are drawn very tightly over her teeth and her eyes are small. She disapproves of religious experiences very strongly indeed.

‘Oh, it wasn’t the voice of God. I’ve always expected that to be like an announcement over a tannoy system, very loud and slightly distorted. It was more like telepathy. I didn’t hear words, even. I just reached an understanding.’

‘Which is?’

‘He’s been abducted. He can’t come back because he isn’t free. Someone has taken him.’

Tickets for West Ends shows are expensive. Sheila’s sister bought them as a treat to try and cheer her up. The two women sit through the rest of the play. Sheila’s sister is furious because Sheila distracts her, sitting and fiddling with her earrings as if tuning them in to some Mayday frequency from outer space. ‘Come in, Lieutenant Uhuru,’ she says when she recounts the story to her husband that night, mimicking Sheila to make him laugh and relieve some of the tension she’s feeling.

Back at her flat with a cup of tea, Sheila wonders whether there was something special that allowed the message to get through. Were her earrings acting as some sort of aerial?

Sylvia Arrow is humming
It’s raining men
as she
kneads
the day’s supply of bread. Sylvia was a high wire artiste in her youth, but her hips and thighs broadened as she reached her twenties. She has the kind of body that will always be strong and flexible but she became too heavy to perform professionally. Sylvia remained with the circus for a while, the only life she knew, grounded but content, knitting spangly bikini costumes for the other girls using very fine gauge needles.

When she grew tired of the performers teasing her about her doughy limbs and pinching her arms and legs to make red dots in the white flesh, Sylvia ran away from the circus. She left behind the only person she’d ever loved, a boy whose superficial resemblance to herself meant Sylvia treated him like a brother, whispering him stories from where she sat knitting in her deckchair as he rested between performances as an acrobat in the big top.

For five years Sylvia worked as a croupier, salting away the pay and dreaming about the circus. For five more years, Sylvia trained animals, working for the undisputed expert in the field, Venetia Latimer. Then she ran away from that life too. Sylvia’s name is a reminder of the very early days; she chose it for herself when she went into show business. As she flew in the air, spinning above people in the big top, Sylvia had a vision in her head that she was shining and metallic and swift and hard like a silver arrow. The other reminder is the high wire and the net she stretches in the garden sometimes, just to practice, just for old times’ sake. It was as well for
Roy
she was feeling sentimental the day he flew overhead because the net probably saved him from breaking his neck as he fell.

In her twenties, Sylvia sometimes thought she didn’t need sex if she could eat fresh bread every day instead. In her late thirties, with cupboards full of flour and yeast, the time and patience to bake every day, and a man who has dropped from the skies to be her companion, Sylvia is pleasantly surprised to find she doesn’t even have to choose any more.