Being Light 2011 (18 page)

‘There is a cause that you should champion.’ The clairvoyant holds her hand up, palm forward, as if to signify a Native American peace greeting. Harvey takes it as an instruction not to speak. ‘I can’t tell you what it is. Once you identify it, you will find fulfilment.’

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.”

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.

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.’