Authors: Helen Smith
‘Why don’t you ask her what’s going on yourself? The agency’s only down in Brixton. I’ll give you the address if you like.’
In Sainsbury’s in
Clapham Park Road
, Ella Fitzgerald is approached by a tall, cadaverous blonde woman wearing wrap-around mirrored sunglasses that barely disguise the sappy bruises on her face.
‘Can you help me get some food?’ The woman refuses the two pound coins Mrs Fitzgerald offers her. ‘I’ve got money. Can you help me buy the food? I don’t know what to get. I haven’t eaten for three days.’ The woman sways unsteadily on her feet. Her words are beautifully enunciated in a deep voice, like Joanna Lumley’s.
‘A sandwich?’ suggests Mrs Fitzgerald, moved by the woman’s helplessness and her perfect diction. ‘Tuna and sweetcorn? Cheese and pickle?’
‘I’m vegan.’
‘An avocado, then. Bananas.’ Mrs Fitzgerald steers her round the fruit and vegetable section, loading a small basket. ‘Bread rolls. Do you have any cutlery? Do you have anything to eat the food with? Crisps? Some chocolate for energy?’
‘I’m macrobiotic.’ The woman’s arm shoots out suddenly and grabs a bottle of white wine on special offer, clutching it close to her chest while Mrs Fitzgerald struggles with the basket.
The woman produces a £10 note at the till.
‘Have you got a Reward Card?’ asks the check-out assistant.
‘No.’
‘Would you like one?’ The assistant, avoiding eye contact, hasn’t seen the oozing bruises or the urgency with which the woman plucks the wine bottle from the conveyor belt.
‘I’m in a hurry.’
Unaccustomed to driving in Brixton, Jane nevertheless quickly adapts to the local custom that permits those travelling in a moving vehicle to change road position without signalling. Until evolution grows a third hand on Brixton car drivers, they are fully occupied with one hand clamped to the mobile phone at their ear, while using no more than two fingers of the other hand to lightly steer past the dented saloon cars parked along the high street. If they are eating a sandwich while talking on the phone, they sometimes have to steer with one elbow, which takes a great deal of skill. As well as being unable to signal, there is little opportunity for Brixton drivers to change gear when their hands are occupied, and consequently they aim to maintain a constant speed in third gear.
All the most convenient parking positions in the bus lanes are already taken by the time Jane arrives in the high street. Cars and vans are parked along the red route and the double yellow lines on
Coldharbour Lane
, reducing it to a single duo-directional lane of traffic. Jane leaves the car in Tesco’s car park and walks the short distance to a doorway past McDonald’s, from where she can observe Mrs Fitzgerald’s office window. It’s an uncomfortable place to stand in the middle of the morning as the young mothers with pre-school children are out in force, bumping their children’s legs on the pushchairs and slapping them without warning, presumably to prepare them for the pain of separation once they are old enough to be handed over to a state education.
Somewhat shaken by the encounter in Sainsbury’s, Mrs Fitzgerald crosses Brixton High Street hurriedly, raising her handbag to hide her face as she tucks into the doorway leading to her first floor office, where she calls Alison over to the window.
‘Do you see that woman near McDonald’s?’
‘The tall blonde with sunglasses?’
‘There seems to be a plague of pallid blonde women in the area. Will you hand me the binoculars?’
‘She’s looking this way. Do you think she’s watching us?’
‘I thought it might be the woman from the supermarket but it isn’t. She’s dressed more smartly and she’s less damaged.’
‘Do you think she’s part of some counter-surveillance operation?’
‘She has a pair of binoculars trained on our window.’
‘Maybe she’s interested in the dinner dating agency? Miss Lester seems to be courting publicity for it.’
‘Alison, I’d like to avoid exposure to any kind of publicity.’ Mrs Fitzgerald shudders as she folds the strap of the binoculars and puts them into their case. She thinks of Gazza and Tony Adams MBE and Paul Merson, struggling with demons caused by the pressures of being in the public eye. She thinks of poor Tara Palmer-Tomkinson.
‘Imagine how it would feel to be watched all the time, Alison. I should hate to be famous. There is no rest from the intrusion. I have heard people say that if you desire fame then you should expect the press to spy on you and ambush you to take more photos.
‘It’s an argument that’s difficult to refute.’
‘There is no other job where if you commit a certain amount of your time to one kind of activity, for example having your picture taken or giving interviews to the press, that you are deemed to have somehow lost the right to stop doing that activity the rest of the time. It’s as spurious as saying that a woman who walks down the street in lipstick and a short skirt is “asking for it”, or that if a woman has sexual relations with one man then she should be prepared to be pestered for sex from other men. It is about control, respect and the right to privacy.
‘You’re right. If a ski instructor comes off the slopes at 6.00 pm people on skis don’t spend the rest of the night ducking in front of him shouting “what do I do now?”, trying to trick him into giving skiing lessons.
If an accountant is on a family picnic on a Sunday afternoon you don’t get proprietors of small businesses launching themselves from the undergrowth and insisting on having their books balanced.’
‘Exactly. If a person is famous, they don’t stop being a person. The fame should not be an excuse for anyone to be harassed, bullied and sneered at. We are all trying to get by in our own way, even famous people.’
A torn piece of a poster washes up onto the shore, wrapping around Sylvia’s flip-flop as she walks by the sea very early in the morning, before tending to the elephant.
‘Personne Disparue. Est-ce que vous avez vu cette personne?’
Some French people have lost someone they love. Sylvia pulls at the paper to free it from her foot and it disintegrates in her hands. She scrunches it up like papier maché, squeezing out the salty sea water and making the paper small in her hand. She thinks about the lost person – a son perhaps, or a daughter; the photo has long since been torn away and swallowed by the sea. Sylvia has never had a child and she envies the French people their child at the same time as she deeply pities their loss. Until Roy came along, Sylvia had never loved anyone except Jeremy, although she had been loved and had run away from it because it crushed her.
‘Est-ce que vous avez vu cette personne?’ It strikes Sylvia that there’s something pitifully inappropriate about the words that the sea nudges at her feet in this remote place. She never sees anyone except Roy, the elephant, the cow, the ducks, the chickens, the dog and the delivery man.
For the first time in a long while, Sylvia feels lonely as she goes to find the elephant and start the day’s chores.
‘Is it a bad omen if a magpie does a
shit
in someone’s garden?’ asks Alison.
‘A lone magpie?’ Taron turns to the window in alarm. ‘Doing a
shit
in your garden?’
‘I just wondered.’ Alison watches Taron guiltily. She tries to discover from the look on her face whether Taron turned round quickly enough to see nature’s black and white harbinger of ill fortune leaving its expressive message.
Harvey joins the men’s group held in one of the public meeting rooms available for hire in St Matthew’s Church in Brixton. ‘I think I need some help in coming to terms with identity,’ Harvey told an acquaintance of his, a man he knows from the gym, someone he feels he has made a connection with as they chatted in the sauna or dried off in the shower area. ‘I have this trouble with labels. It shouldn’t matter but it does. Do you know what I mean?’ The man, a little older than Harvey, with some hints of grey in his brown hair and soft, understanding green eyes, recommended Harvey check out the men’s group that meets in Brixton on the first Tuesday of every month.
‘We don’t have a leader, here,’ says the leader of the group, a pleasant hint of a non-specific North American accent in his voice. ‘We just use this as an opportunity to talk. This is a non-judgemental meeting. Jonathan, would you like to kick off tonight?’
Jonathan is a remarkably shy and inarticulate young man in his early twenties who grips the sides of his wooden chair as he talks. He looks as if he is testing its structural stability in case he wishes to straighten his arms and raise his body from the seat. Jonathan’s contribution is difficult to follow, although he appears to be prefacing any salient comment he might be about to make with a long tribute to the group’s role in helping him to face the difficulties of his life.
Harvey looks around the group. There is a nice mix of men, black and white, gay and straight. The gay ones have something of the look of his friend at the gym, their well-cared-for bodies giving them an indeterminate age anywhere between late thirties and mid forties. They all have a kindness in their faces and a comfortable-in-their-clothes (or out) attitude. The straight ones are all rather awkward-looking. Harvey has cruised the room with his eyes and made assumptions about sexual orientation based on two things
i
) the gay ones have better grooming ii) the gay ones have all cruised him back.
Jonathan has finished talking and has collapsed back into his seat, rubbing the palms of his hands on his trousers and blushing with the effort of expressing himself.
‘Thank you, Jonathan,’ says the leader. ‘Mike, do you have a response to any of that?’
One of the gay men looks around the group and then addresses his remarks to Jonathan. ‘The first thing is to love yourself, Jonathan. We love you.’ There is muted applause. Harvey realises the men in the group are not meeting for a philosophical discussion about how they perceive the world, but to discuss how to deal with the way the world perceives homosexual men.
Out and proud since he was about twelve, Harvey uses the distraction created by the applause to pick up his bag and head for the door. As he leaves, he glances back and makes eye contact with a tanned man with mesmerising brown eyes and thick, cropped grey hair, so he will know him again if he sees him around.
Roy is near the end of his daily high wire preparation workout. He has been training himself to stand for lengthy periods on first one leg then the other, strengthening the muscles, and practising not falling over. Now he stands, feet placed hip distance apart, pointing forward, parallel to each other. The high wire balance bar rests on the back of his neck, gripped in both hands. Slowly he squats, keeping his chin up and pushing his bottom out as he bends his knees. Then he rises back up again, slowly, repeating the movement about twenty times. Roy puts the balance bar slowly down on the ground, shaking his arms and legs, then starts to stretch every major muscle. The routine finished, Roy goes and lies on the top of a sand dune.
A light wind stirs the grass around him and tickles his face. He feels very warm from exercising. He remembers a children’s TV programme he watched many afternoons ago during a tea break at the kennels. The presenter held two heavy weights in his hands for a full minute, then showed how his arms raised involuntarily when the weights were removed. Roy imagines every one of his aching muscles reaching upwards, lifting his body a few inches off the sand dune, high enough for the wind to reach underneath him and touch the flattened grass there. He breathes in slowly and deeply, pushing his stomach out to make room for the air in his lungs. As he breathes out he feels that his body presses less heavily on the grass and sand. He feels that he is becoming light.
Sylvia watches out of the window for him. She looks down the path towards the vegetable patch where he tends and modifies his model of her house. She searches farther, towards the end of her range of vision, and sees him lying on the sand dune. He looks abandoned, as if some other woman has finished playing with him and left him there to be picked up and brought home. He is so still that she wonders, just for a moment, whether he is still alive. He is too far away for Sylvia to be able to detect the slow, deliberate rise and fall of his belly under his hands. Then she reminds herself that this is a place of safety, so far removed from the real world that nothing bad ever happens. She watches him get to his feet, dust himself off and make his way back towards the house.
That night, asleep on the white cotton sheets, Roy’s arm around her, Sylvia dreams of her days in the circus. This dream starts, as it nearly always does, with her friend Pamela in an orange leotard, spinning plates.
Pamela, looking exactly as she did fifteen years ago, stands in the middle of the Big Top and stares directly at Sylvia. Plates spin on her foot, on her hands, on her forehead. Then the bendy acrobats in lemon bodysuits roll over and over in hoop shapes around her, their backs arched, heels touching their ears. Men in green sequins swing from trapezes. Children in red suits bounce above trampolines, then tumble back down again. Then the clowns come, big noses and big feet, pushing and shoving the others. Still Pamela stands in the middle, spinning plates, looking at Sylvia.