Authors: Helen Smith
‘There would be a national appeal for old pennies funded by the
Sun
newspaper and broadcast on
Crimewatch
and someone would find a store of them under a pensioner’s bed. Anyway hiding pennies and waiting for something to go wrong isn’t very visual. I want you to come with me to see whether you can film from Parliament Square or whether we need to get inside the car park in the House of Commons and set up the camera on St Stephen’s Green.’
‘Is that the bit of grass where politicians are interviewed for the evening news?’
‘Yes. The police won’t let us in to the grounds unless we have a valid reason to be there. I might be able to swing an invite with my press pass, although I wouldn’t want Jeremy’s antics linked back to me, it might destroy my career. It would help if we knew an MP. Do you know any of the gay ones, Harvs?’
‘Because I’m gay, do you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘It’s got to look great and I have to be sure we can capture everything on camera. It’s a full moon tomorrow night and the weather forecast is fine for a change so we should have a clear view. The whole group is going to attempt the protest at the next full moon so we’ll have four weeks to iron out any problems but on the night itself we won’t have much time for fancy camera work. While Jeremy’s on his own up there tomorrow I’d like to try and get some shots we can cut into the film we shoot next month. I want him silhouetted in black as he passes across the clock face, flying like Peter Pan.’
‘I went to see one of those yogic flying gurus at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday. I didn’t go in because it was too crowded but I got talking to a very interesting woman outside, all patchouli oil, hair extensions and henna tattoos. I told her about naming things and she said that my search for the truth is external and that instead I should look inside myself.’
‘Nonsense, you are looking inside yourself for the answers, that’s just the problem. You’re afraid of everything because there has never been any one thing that you have had to worry about. You need to find something, some cause that can test your limits and you need to fight for it to take your focus outside yourself.’
‘This isn’t a Foreign Legion thing, is it? I don’t think you can join the military over twenty-six and I never got further than O- level French.’
‘Don’t be flippant, Harvey. That’s what comes of taking advice from hippies. I doubt she could even find her way to the service station to buy chocolate to cure the munchies, let alone signpost the way towards the Great Truth for you. What do you really care about? If you don’t know, then find something. Your whole life should be an act of defiance, then you wouldn’t be afraid.’
‘So it doesn’t matter about naming things? Are you saying I’ve been going down the wrong track and I should live life as some kind of performance art? Do you live like that?’’
‘No, but I don’t have to. I was reading about it in
Waterstone’s
the other day while Philippe was buying some artsy film book. We all have different roles and we have to identify and accept them. All that cave man hunter-gather thing is bollocks. We’re civilised now. This is Cool Britannia. We’re starting the new renaissance and we have to learn from the models of old renaissance societies. Find what you’re good at, or what you want to be good at. It doesn’t really matter, so long as you do it for the greater good. For example, I should be a poet and you should be a knight. There were some other roles I think, like the princess in the tower and the evil witch, the monk and the wandering jester, but I didn’t read about them because they didn’t sound very relevant so we’ll have to make do with the poet and the knight. The poet is the chronicler, the knight is the crusader. I’m OK because I earn my living by writing but you’ve never had a fight in your life.’
‘Are you saying that I needn’t have embarked on this long search to confront my fears, I could have just browsed through a self-help book in a book shop?’
‘Yes.’
‘I should live valiantly?’
‘Yes.’
‘Damn.’
Alison has been too preoccupied with the postman’s dog and the baby to photograph Harvey’s new advert. Before committing to be involved in tonight’s filming, Harvey has persuaded Jane to follow him around south and west London with his stills camera. Jane has taken Harvey’s photograph from several angles in front of the giant hoardings in Vauxhall, Hammersmith and Clapham Common that bear the latest car advert with Harvey’s
strapline
: ‘To Die For.’
When they get to Westminster that night, Jane and Harvey set up their camera on the grass on the Parliament Square roundabout, just next to the statue of Churchill looking uncomfortable in an overcoat and listing slightly to his right. Jeremy is already there. He is wearing peacock blue and Seville-orange Lycra, trimmed with velvet and accessorised with matching tights.
‘You look like a harlequin Hamlet,’ Jane tells him, checking her watch. It is midnight. Even though there is a full moon tonight, the opulence of his outfit would be lost in the darkness if it weren’t for the bright lights Jane has borrowed from Philippe to illuminate Jeremy’s ascent of the clock tower.
He straps a belt around his waist. Each of twelve pockets sewn into the belt contains a dummy hand grenade.
‘No,’ says Jane, stepping forward to unbuckle the belt and remove it. ‘You look like you’re wearing one of those flotation devices that toddlers use when they’re learning to swim. Ready, Harv? Action.’
‘I’m going to stop the traffic,’ says Jeremy, direct to the camera lens, a little loudly because he is wearing ear plugs against the sound of the bells.
‘Oh my God,’ says Harvey, his voice very small, his face unseen behind the camera.
‘If anything happens to me, if I get arrested or die in the attempt, will you take this locket and find Sylvia? I want you to tell her she’s wrong. She mustn’t fight against the circus.’
Jane pokes Harvey with a biro under the ribs to make sure he’s still filming. She puts out her hand and takes Sylvia’s address that Jeremy is holding, written on a folded piece of paper, and she takes the locket. It is small enough to lie in the palm of her hand, in the hollow bordered by the deep creases that form her heart line and her life line.
When the bells have finished chiming midnight, Jeremy starts to climb to the top of Big Ben, dragging ropes and harnesses with him so he can fix them on the tower. This is a job usually undertaken by rigging experts. Jeremy is a performer.
By twenty past midnight he has reached the spire. By a quarter to one he has fixed the apparatus.
‘Come on,’ says Jane, jiggling about on the spot like a little girl needing to use the toilet.
Jeremy grasps the end of a thick rope, two inches in diameter and sealed with wax at its end. He tugs at the rope to engage the pulley system, then jumps into nothing so he can make a quick descent to reach the first set of clock hands, flying more like Errol Flynn than Peter Pan. The pulley fails to engage and he falls ten or fifteen feet very fast then stops. He hangs awkwardly for a few seconds as if the rope is caught or he has managed to catch hold of something to stop his fall. Then he falls again, reaching the ground very quickly, landing near the mini traffic lights by the car search area in front of the Houses of Parliament.
Jane and Harvey run across the road into Bridge Street and peer through the railings. It is plain to see Jeremy is dead, lying pale and smashed on the ground like a hard-boiled egg taken from a schoolboy’s pocket. It is a few minutes before one o’clock.
Harvey is still filming. Jane turns to do a piece to camera, white-faced and shocked. She pauses, unable to find the right words. ‘Oh my God,’ she says. With her silver-ringed right hand, she covers her mouth and the whole lower half of her face, from nose to chin.
Harvey and Jane talk all night. Jeremy’s death is very shocking to them, even for two such sophisticated city-dwellers. When they talk about things that trouble them, usually, it is in the hope of rationalising their feelings and even achieving some kind of a consensus that they can live with. This approach doesn’t seem to be working tonight.
‘I had started to feel that it was within my power to make Jeremy happy or not happy,’ Jane tells Harvey. ‘Do you think that means I was in love with him?’
‘Maybe he was in love with you, which is even worse, because you end up feeling responsible for someone if they are in love with you.’
‘Well, you know, I’d been wondering what was going on because I’ve never been in love before. I didn’t even wonder about whether he was in love with me. I knew he loved Sylvia. He mentioned Sylvia a few times.’
‘Did I tell you he rang me up once, ages ago? All this time you were talking about Jeremy and sex and birdsong and climbing Big Ben and I didn’t realise that he was the one who called me up about stopping the traffic. I’d often wondered what he was like and what he was doing. I never thought he’d be like that. I never thought I’d watch him die.’
‘Who would ever think that?’
‘Do you think that if I’d managed to make some kind of connection with him then, things would have turned out differently?’
‘Harvey, don’t.’
‘Do you think that he jumped?’
‘Don’t.
‘Do you think that it would be better if he’d jumped, and he was trying to do one wild, brave thing and he threw his life away for it? Or would it be better if he’d slipped?’
‘I don’t think anything. I feel numb. I suppose we have to go and tell Sylvia.’
‘I don’t know if I belong here,’ Roy tells Sylvia. His muscles ache from his recent preparations for the high wire.
‘If you let go of your past life it will be easier, Roy,’ Sylvia tells him. She says the words that give her comfort sometimes. ‘Only believe.’
‘I usually plan my wedding when I’m alone on long journeys,’ Alison tells Sheila. Sitting next to Alison in the front of the car, her limp red hair a few points brighter than Alison’s in nature’s colour spectrum, Sheila could be a close relative rather than a client. She has left behind the tinfoil ear muffs that she habitually wears and looks the part of a respectable, ordinary woman on an outing.
‘I didn’t know you were getting married.’ Sheila rallies at this piece of good news from her friend.
‘I’m not. That’s why it passes the time so well – I can linger over every lavish detail because there’s no need to ground the planning in any kind of reality. I don’t think I’ll ever get married again.’
‘Haven’t you got a boyfriend?’
‘No. I don’t really want one. I know I shut myself off from people too much but I think they always betray you in the end.’
‘That’s awfully cynical.’
‘I hate the way men can finish one relationship and pick up where they left off with the next one. They’re like ruminants, wandering from one field of grass to the next, hardly lifting their heads up from grazing to notice what’s going on around them.’
‘Women are like that too, sometimes. You just haven’t found the right man. That’s why I think so much of Roy. He isn’t like that.’
‘Yes, you could be right. There is someone who cares about me. He sent me some lip gloss. I might give him a call when we get to the coast, after I’ve wrapped up this missing person enquiry.’
‘As soon as I met him I thought Roy and I would always be together. It was quite easy to see the old man in him, to see how we’d grow old together, nipping the edges of a tidy lawn in the summer, building a fire in the living room grate in the winter. I thought I was investing in a certainty.’ Sheila, talking of Roy as if he were the South Sea Bubble, slips a metal colander on her head. The conical shape of the Philippe Starck design fits her quite snugly.
‘That’s an expensive-looking colander, Sheila.’
‘If I used a cheap one with the traditional round shape it would slip about every time I move my head, besides looking like a World War One tin helmet.’
‘Oof. You wouldn’t want that.’ Alison is very cheerful, looking forward to the drive.
Sheila is also looking forward to reaching the coast. She has packed a large, folded piece of paper with a grid pencilled on to it. The contours of Roy’s face are plotted on the grid with Xs.
A young police constable arrives at Mrs Latimer’s house. If Mrs Latimer didn’t have her office at home, she would rarely have to open the door or answer the telephone herself. If she worked for a large organisation there would be a receptionist or a personal secretary to do it for her. Her secretary is a local woman from the village and she only works in the mornings. It is already lunch time and Mrs Latimer is eating a goat’s cheese tartlet with new potato salad. The secretary has gone home to feed her children and all the silly boys who work for Mrs Latimer are taking a break somewhere, eating their sandwiches in the fields or smoking dope. Mrs Latimer goes to the door, still carrying her fork somewhat absent-mindedly. She will remember the fork when she looks back on this moment.
‘I wonder if you can help me,’ the constable begins. ‘A young man has been involved in an accident. I’m trying to trace his next of kin.’
‘Oh, my God. Not Joey? Is it Joey?’