Authors: Helen Smith
‘How long has this been going on?’
‘Two weeks.’
‘Two weeks? We were at Miss Lester’s dinner party two weeks ago.’
‘Well, ten days. Listen, Alison, drugs are just a fast track to some kind of excitement you recognise because you’ve experienced it before somewhere. It’s like using a microwave instead of conventional cooking. Whether you’re using drugs or not using them, you’re still trying to get to the same place. All I have to do is remember how to get there the slow way.’
‘Are you drunk now?’
‘A bit. I feel pretty weird, actually. I think I’d feel toxic if I went anywhere near any more drugs. I’ve done so many over the years that one more little grain of anything might tip me over the edge. I may as well chew on pencil lead.’
‘That won’t do you any harm. They use graphite now. You’d have to lick tin soldiers in an antique shop. Was Joey at the party?’
‘Yeah. He’s really cute, he seems very fond of me.’
‘And do you like him?’
‘I’ve kind of taken him under my wing.’
‘Under your wing? Where would that put him? In your armpit?’
‘Alison. I thought you wanted me to go to the party so I could report back to you about Mrs Latimer. There’s no point being rude or I won’t tell you anything.’
‘Well, did you find out anything about Mrs Latimer?’
‘She loves me to death and there’s something weird going on with her animals.’
‘What kind of weird?’
‘Have you ever seen a dog typing and smoking a pipe?’
‘Like Ernest Hemingway?’
‘They’re like really bright undisciplined kids. They paint and chase rabbits and ride bicycles. There was a Doberman on the couch who looked as if it was reading a newspaper.’
‘Is chasing rabbits necessarily a sign of weirdness in dogs?’
‘No, but it is in children. I saw a programme on TV once about some posh kids who were allowed to do what they wanted at school and they chased a rabbit and killed it.’
‘So what’s happening with Joey? Are you going to start seeing him?’
‘No, nothing like that. He’s just going to help me out with a few of the projects I’ve got on at the moment. What about you, Alison? Why don’t you get yourself a man?’
‘Men are like cigarettes. I only want one when I’m drunk.’
Watching the street outside their flat in vain for
Roy
’s return, Sheila suddenly pulls up the sash window and leans out, looking up. She wouldn’t be able to say why, if anyone had been there to ask her. Perhaps she was tired of breathing her own warm breath in the flat and she wanted to take in the cool, smoky
London
air for a change. Above her, hanging among the drifting clouds in the sky, is a very bright, ellipse-shaped light.
Sylvia likes to sleep naked in
Paradise
, drawing the pillows around her in her big bed as if to cushion herself against a potential fall while asleep. A family in
England
recently searched all night for their missing teenage daughter before realising she had been safely tucked under the covers in bed the whole time. Roy would never make such a mistake with Sylvia, the curves of her body accentuated under the patchwork counterpane in the places where she props pillows around her body. She slips one arm under the pillows at the head of the bed, hugging her face to them. She keeps one pillow at her back, cuddles another at her side under the crook of her arm, another under one bent knee, or between two bent knees. She is lying on her right side, watching the doorway.
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.
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.
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 through 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.’