Authors: Helen Smith
‘Reclaim
London
’ is written on home-made banners waving above the crowds. Mrs Fitzgerald has the sudden, icy fear that these are mad people, spilling out from Bedlam, reclaiming the capital city and taking her with them as one of them. Looking around the bus, she sees she’s quite alone on the top deck. There are enough people outside to pick up the bus and carry it along on their shoulders, Mrs Fitzgerald above them like some carnival queen of the mad people. Is it possible that they
know
? Is she so like them that they can sense that she sees the sun as silver? ‘The sun is yellow, the sun is yellow, the sun is yellow,’ chants Mrs Fitzgerald, seizing on the thing that will make her normal and different from them. ‘The sun is yellow, the sunny’s yellow, the sunnys yellow, sunnys yellow, sunnys yellow, sunnysyellow.’
The conductor lays a gentle hand on her shoulder. God, there are so many disturbed people on the bus these days, he should get a care worker’s allowance. The conductor’s fingers smell faintly of the grease from the roast chicken sandwiches he has been eating from their tinfoil wrapper a moment before. ‘It’s a demo, love. Anti-traffic, anti-vehicles. Bloody cyclists. They think they own
London
. You might be better slipping off the bus and taking the Tube. You can stay if you want, though.’ Sometimes they just like somewhere warm to sit.
Mrs Fitzgerald, dry-mouthed, cannot bring herself to reply. Outside, head and shoulders above the other demonstrators, a beautiful blond young man balances on the pedals of a unicycle. He’s wearing a dress. He holds his hand up to the bus driver through the open sliding door that gives access to the driver’s seat. The driver keeps it open against regulations because he thinks it looks cool. The demonstrator’s hand, palm up, loose at the wrist, looks like a foppish invitation to the bus driver to dance. He wakes up all his muscles at once and lunges from the unicycle, pulling the driver from his seat and taking his place in front of the wheel, the bus engine still idling.
Jeremy grips the wheel, his hands in position at ten to two, leaning forward slightly, mastering the great machine. He moves the gear stick on the shaft below the over-sized wheel into first gear and the bus edges forward, slowly. The protestors fall back, whistling and jeering, Jeremy clipping the pedals of the cyclists at the near side of the road as he adjusts to steering the unfamiliarly wide vehicle.
Routemaster buses are semi-automatic. There is no clutch. The drivers slip into neutral and rev the engine before changing gear. Jeremy fails to do this. The bus lurches and comes to a halt two hundred yards further down the road, where the driver pulls Jeremy from the bus by his hair and regains his seat.
The psychic postman stands at Alison’s door, patiently feeding birthday cards through the letterbox. Thirty years old. She hides from view, not feeling like talking.
‘Alison,’ calls the postman, his lips to the letterbox. ‘Are you alright?’
‘I’m frumpy, overweight, dog tired, smelling of milk, vomit, piss and Bonjela.’
‘Oh.’
‘But it’s OK. I’m slowly climbing out of the pit.’
‘It might be post-natal depression. You should see someone about it.’ A plume of his cigarette smoke reaches Alison through the letterbox. The postman’s concern is touching. She presses her thumb and forefinger into the inner corner of each eye, using pressure to stop the tears the way first-aiders stop blood seeping from a small wound.
Alison’s daughter, Phoebe, is around a year old now. She’s not sure of Phoebe’s exact age because she found the baby at the seaside last summer. While there is general sympathy these days for women who suffer from post-natal depression, Alison is aware there would be little sympathy left to go round for women who have found a baby and kept it.
One of Alison’s birthday cards is home-made. It has a pressed cornflower on the front and a cutting from a newspaper inside, telling the story of a young child with defective vision who saw tiny particles of dust in the air magnified many times and thought they were fairies floating in front of her eyes. Optometrists corrected the child’s sight by giving her rose coloured glasses to wear.
The card is from Jeff, Alison’s former downstairs neighbour. He’s moved a long way away in the hope of forgetting her. The card suggests he’s having some difficulty with this.
Alison takes out a postcard of one of Picasso’s portraits of a woman with a messed up head, bought on a visit to the
Museum
of
Modern Art
in
New York
, and writes a simple message to the return address:
My hands are rough, my lips are chapped. I’m 30, I feel old.
Help me.
Alison creeps up to the cot in the next room where Phoebe is having a nap. The child’s arms are thrown back and bent up at the elbow like a 1930s strongman, knees and toes turned out and her head turned to one side. Alison bends into the cot to watch for movement behind Phoebe’s long eyelashes and bluish eyelids as she sleeps. With a sudden deep, reassuring sleepy breath from the baby, Alison steps back and turns away.
Harvey
is sitting in his room in the fading light, hands tucked under his thighs, leaning forward, tensed. He looks like a track athlete practising for a new set of rules that require competitors to start each race from a sitting position on the sofa.
Harvey
’s eyes are closed, searching inward for his earliest memories of himself. He was a weedy child, popular with other children’s mothers because of his beautiful manners. Harvey remembers trying for the first time to grasp the meaning of the events that surrounded and involved him. It was while at school in the seventies, during an era when it was more fashionable to allow children to discover the great truths for themselves than to explain anything to them, that Harvey first tried to make sense of the world. He did this by paying attention to the labels given to everything and everyone by other people.
Harvey is examining memories of shivering in a purple cotton matching vest and pants set in PE at primary school, fighting among the scaled down toilets in the infant block, queuing for school dinners, winding string around pillow cases and leaving them overnight in buckets of coloured water, twisting elastic around his legs then jumping high and clear of it. All these activities were unfathomable.
Harvey
remembers the morning he and the rest of his class spent their time folding scratchy pieces of paper very small and snipping at them with scissors with rounded ends. ‘You’ve made a snowflake,’ the teacher told him. The information gave him some comfort, even though it was a palpable untruth. Once one of the activities had been named he could ask for it again, or avoid it, or measure it against other things with the same name.
It was only in his nightmares, or under the bed, or behind the curtains in the dark that shapeless frightening things remained, still unnamed.
A phone call brings
Harvey
back from the darkness and he opens his eyes.
‘Your advertising campaigns for cars are very successful.’
‘Well, thank you. I can’t really take the credit. I’m a hired hand - part of a creative team. I’m sorry, I don’t think I recognise your voice.’
‘Mine is a lone voice roaring in a concrete jungle.’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you know what cars are doing to this planet?’
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m the one who’s going to make you see that you’re wrong. I’m going to stop the traffic.’
Harvey
walks upstairs to Alison.
‘Do you know what cars are doing to this planet?’
‘The lead in the petrol makes children stupid. Cars clutter up the streets and knock cyclists off their bikes. The fumes from the exhaust turn the buildings black and they wither the trees at the side of the road. Ask Taron, she goes out morning,
and night to try and revive the trees.’
‘Do you ever feel like campaigning for a cause?’
‘No. Causes are for students, politicians and the childless.’
Harvey
lives in Alison’s basement. He likes to talk to her about the need to define and label everything in his life.
‘If something doesn’t have a name, how can it
be
?’ he asks. ‘If you’ve never heard something described or named, how can you know you want it? How can you be sure you’ve ever experienced it? Once you’ve given something a name, you’ve captured it and made something constant in an inconstant world.’
‘Like naming stars?’ asks Alison.
‘Naming stars doesn’t count. They’re intangible, too far away. It would be like naming particles of dust. It doesn’t contribute anything to our experience of the world.’
‘I think naming stars is cute.’
‘Yes, it’s cute, but it doesn’t affect anyone except the person who’s named it. No one would ever see the star and wonder what it was called. The whole thing is too remote from our normal world.’
‘What about feelings? They’re intangible.’
‘Describing feelings is different than naming stars. Feelings influence the way everyone acts and so they make the world the way it is. But I’ve often wondered, if you don’t have a name for a feeling, then maybe you don’t feel it. There’s a word in Welsh, hiraeth, that’s like homesickness but it’s stronger, it evokes a kind of national pride as well. I don’t think English people feel that word. The thing is, if the word existed in English, would it increase the range of people’s feelings? Would some people feel like that?’
‘Are you saying that if you don’t know about something then you can’t feel it?’
‘Maybe. If you don’t know a place exists, how can you know you want to go there? If you’d never heard about
New York
, if it wasn’t even called by any name, how would you know how exciting it was? Once a few people have come back and said, “You must go to New York, it is a city that never sleeps,” you know you will go there eventually.’
‘Maybe that’s why so many people feel so lost. There’s a place they should be, but they don’t know it exists or where it is or how to get there. Do you ever feel that you’re adrift,
Harvey
?’
‘Yes. I don’t know whether you should try to make sense of the small things around you or understand the bigger picture. I dither between the two approaches. I sometimes think the key is to try to convert every unknown thing into something I know and understand.’
‘What is it about the unknown that bothers you so much?’
‘I think I want everything around me to be solid to stop that drifting feeling you’re talking about. Maybe I’m just worried about missing out on something. Imagine if there’s life after death, for example. There could be a great big decadent party going on in Heaven and we’re all grimly clinging on to life, with scientists finding ways for people to live longer and longer.’
‘I know what you mean. I drove for ages on the A3 once expecting it to turn into the M3 and it never did. It’s that horror of being stuck on a dual carriageway when you could be whizzing along on the motorway.’
‘Yes. If I know as much as possible about everything then every choice I make will be informed. I just don’t know how I can go about making sure that I know everything. I’m not doing much about it at the moment. I spend my days going to the gym and hanging out with Jane Memory, in between doing a bit of freelance work.’
‘I wonder if we’re all just dribbling our lives away?’
‘No. Some people live valiantly. Someone called me up just now, someone I don’t know, and told me he was going to stop the traffic. I keep thinking about it. He sounded so certain that he could do it.’
‘You were contacted by a voice from the unknown?’
‘Yes.’
‘With some sort of plan that could change your life?’
‘Apparently.’
‘Do you think that was maybe your one chance to live valiantly?’
‘I didn’t see it like that at the time. I just put the phone down. Anyway I don’t want to live valiantly, I want to live knowing I haven’t missed out on the party being thrown by all the other people who are living valiantly.’
Roy
’s a little disappointed, although not surprised, to find that life in Heaven is similar to life on Earth. The air is purer, the scenery lovelier, the stars brighter but otherwise it’s pretty much the same.
Roy
thought Heaven would be crowded with all the other people who have already died but there are no buildings other than the one he lives in and no-one around except Sylvia, the angel who caught him as he fell. He wonders if Heaven is different for each person. He has plenty of time for reflection now that he doesn’t have a job to go to. Perhaps you get what suits you. On Earth, he wasn’t sociable, he was always happy just spending time with his wife. Here in Heaven he also has one constant companion - Sylvia.
Sylvia lives in a stone farmhouse with cool white sheets on the bed and a warm kitchen that always smells of bread. She keeps some chickens, ducks, a cow, a dog and an elephant. There’s a vegetable garden, a flower garden and an orchard. Roy walks out every day and explores his patch of Heaven. It is bordered on three sides by the sea. If he walks inland for about forty-five minutes, there’s a small white fence with a hand-painted sign that says ‘
Paradise
’.