Being Light 2011 (8 page)

‘Hey, keep up. That uptight white stuff was so early-nineties-single-woman. Things have moved on. You only had colour in your garden when I met you. It was symptomatic of your empty life. Now you’re enriched and fulfilled and there’s colour everywhere. I think we should celebrate that.’

They lick the backs of their hands, sprinkle some salt, lick it, pour the tequila, pour the champagne, swirl, swirl, cover the glass, bang, bang, bang, drink the liquid, suck the lime.

‘Aren’t Tequila Slammers a bit of an eighties drink?’

‘Alison, some things are evergreen. What’s it really like, then, bringing up the baby?

‘Say you buy a Volkswagen Golf,’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t expect to come home and find it’s extruded into a Volvo and you can’t park it anywhere.’

‘That would take a bit of getting used to.’

‘Exactly.’

Alison composes a poem to send to Jeff.

                                       
Colours

Colours are wrapping me up in my living room

Coming in from the garden

Climbing the walls of the nursery

Red trucks in the corners

Yellow plastic crockery in the sink

Green elephants in my bed

Taron says it’s a sign of my coming of age

But I’ve never believed

A single thing

She’s said

‘You’ll be sent to Poet Hell on judgement day to suffer eternal punishment,’ Taron tells her, and signals the end of the night by lighting up the last cigarette in the packet.

The psychic postman brings a small package in a brown Jiffy bag for Alison the next morning. It contains a present of cherry lip gloss from Jeff.

‘My sister-in-law had a baby last year. She stopped going out or taking an interest in herself. A visit to the hairdresser, a bit of lipstick, you’d be surprised how much better she felt when she made a bit of an effort with her appearance.’

A hand-written poem falls from the package as Alison opens it.

Cherry Lip gloss

Cloudy colour

Sticky flavour

Slicks your lips

Temporary

It slips away

With the first lick

Alison goes into the kitchen to make some lunch. A
Sunday Times
colour supplement feature on economical natural beauty techniques comes to mind. Standing at the hob, stir-frying things to a pulp in a wok, she slicks her fingers with olive oil and runs them through her hair and traces them over her dry lips. She mashes an avocado, spoons half the quantity into Phoebe’s mouth and smears the rest on her face. The postman is probably right. She needs to get out more.

Sheila Travers had no idea how much she depended on
Roy
until she lost him. She was always the strong one, the one who spoke for both of them and made all the trivial decisions about their daily lives. He didn’t seem to care about anything much except her, which was one of the reasons she liked him. He fixed his brown eyes on her and watched her wherever she went in the house, like a faithful hound. Now that he has gone, her world is crumbling and she spends hours scouring the press and the TV and radio for clues to his disappearance.

The police haven’t found his body. The only explanation for his continued absence that Sheila can come up with is that
Roy
is alive but he isn’t free. Friends seem to feel that another explanation is much more likely.

‘A woman? Why would a woman want to keep
Roy
from coming home?’ Sheila asks them, puzzled. It’s considered old-fashioned to differentiate between the genders but surely people still concede that men are more likely than women to commit crimes against the person?

‘Are you saying he has simply been plucked from the air?’ counter her friends, despairing.

Sheila, queuing in the newsagents to buy a newspaper, fire-lighters, bin liners and a packet of Twiglets, looks at the range of magazines with their incredible stories to tell. She has some understanding of the way that journalists work, having watched a docu-soap on the subject last year. Each one of the stories will have been carefully verified by the editor before going to print.

‘My mother stole my boyfriend.’ ‘I spent the night in a space ship.’
Are you saying he has simply been plucked from the air?
The mist clears. Sheila, wearing her favourite earrings, receives another message. Roy has been taken away. He hasn’t come home because he can’t get back. He is being studied or held to ransom by aliens.

When Sheila telephones the police, they are willing to consider a wider spectrum of possible explanations. ‘An affair?’ They suggest. ‘Another woman? Another man? A mid-life crisis, a joke, a hoax, a fraud of some kind?’

Looking out at the sea from where he stands on the high wire platform next to Sylvia’s house,
Roy
wonders what would happen if he jumped from here, instead of trying to walk on the wire. Would it hurt? He cannot die, if he is dead already. If you die in Heaven, do you go to Hell? Do you drop to some other circle of Heaven that is less comfortable? Roy would rather stay here. He thinks about Sheila, as he often does, unreachable because he is dead and she is alive. If only there were some way of letting her know that he is all right. If only he could go back, like Alan Rickman in
Truly, Madly, Deeply
. Roy remembers walking Sheila home from the cinema after she’d been to see it with her sister, holding her as she sobbed. She said it was heartening the way someone with a big nose can get a starring role in a film and the woman was very convincing when she cried. It made her proud to be British. What was the name of the actress? Sylvia refuses to talk about her previous life but sometimes Roy slips in a reference to some cultural event to estimate how long ago she left Earth.

‘Who was in
Truly, Madly, Deeply
?’
Roy
asks Sylvia, going to find her where she is kneeling in the vegetable garden, pulling up weeds. ‘Julie something. Julie Walters? Julie Christie?’

‘Juliet Stephenson,’ she says, not looking round. So she was there somewhere, ten years ago or so, when he was walking home with Sheila. Would she have looked at him, if she’d walked past? He’d have looked at her with her bright hair and her pretty face. It is difficult to tell how she would feel about him under different circumstances because here he is one of a choice of one.

Maybe she was never alive. He likes to say to himself that Sylvia is an angel, although he doesn’t feel that he is an angel. Has she undergone some sort of transformation that he has not yet completed, or do angels begin as angels? Was she in a holding place somewhere in the clouds, in some other Heaven where there is a giant video screen where she and all the other waiting angels could watch the latest releases? She hasn’t been here forever because she has told
Roy
that the land was overgrown and ugly when she first arrived.

‘How old is that dog?’

Sylvia’s elderly sheepdog totters by. It is black with a white patch on its face and white paws. One green eye, one blue. ‘She’s sixteen.’

‘That’s old.’

‘Yes. She was nearly fourteen when she came here.’

The dog has continued to grow older even after it has died. This information is a bombshell for
Roy
. Horrible, horrible information. Will he continue to age while he’s here? He thought he’d done well to stick at 42 but he will grow older and older with no prospect of release, as there is on earth.

Miss Lester, zipping across town on a very small moped, is vibrating with excited nervous energy. She has never, ever been so happy. The cause of this happiness is Ella Fitzgerald, who has accepted Miss Lester’s business proposal to set up a dinner party dating agency, using her own offices as its headquarters.

Miss Lester had been feeling rather low since the failure of an affair. This coincided with her departure from a management position in the genetics industry, under circumstances which left her reluctant to seek alternative employment with anyone who might wish to take up references. However the rehabilitating effects of Mrs Fitzgerald’s trust and kindness have been remarkable. Miss Lester has thrown herself into the task of setting up the dating agency, compiling business plans, charts and projected returns on investment. She has equipped herself with an infra-red pointer pen, of the kind that have been banned in schools and provincial night-clubs, and she has made lengthy presentations to Mrs Fitzgerald and all her associates.

For the very first round of dinners, Miss Lester has pulled in some favours, filling some of the spare places with people who are not genuine love-seekers, just to get the evening going with a swing.

Speeding through
Soho
’s stationary traffic astride her moped that evening, like a winged emissary from the gods bringing happiness to
London
’s single professionals, Miss Lester is struck by a pale face staring at her from the shadows as she draws to a stop at a set of traffic lights. A man in a dress steps out in front of her, as if daring her to drive through him when the lights change, his eyes holding hers for a few seconds through the visor of her crash helmet. The malevolence in the gaze unsettles Miss Lester even after the man crosses to the other side of the road, continuing his journey without looking back.

As she arrives at the restaurant, Miss Lester sees that things have already gone slightly awry, with people moving the place cards and spoiling the boy-girl, boy-girl symmetry of the seating arrangements.

Mrs Fitzgerald’s associate Alison is sitting there with a scowl on her face. Alison’s best friend Taron is sitting on her left. Her friend and neighbour, Harvey, is sitting opposite. To Alison’s right is Hugo Fragrance, a stunningly handsome man who works in the City and can talk of nothing else.

Miss Lester, unaccustomed to wearing makeup, has selected a too-sticky lipstick that has already travelled over the edges of her mouth. She has the appearance of being made up of a series of interlocking triangles. Her face is an inverted isosceles triangle framed within the equilateral triangle of her hair. Her nose is a triangle. Even her clothes are triangular because she wears knee-length A-line skirts.

Miss Lester
                
Miss Lester - side view

 
Miss Lester has chosen to set up a dating agency because her research has shown it will deliver a high return on her investment capital. Miss Lester is perfectly competent when it comes to pointing at a flip chart with an infra-red pen and saying ‘our vision is to be the best dating agency in
Britain
,’ but she hasn’t got much grasp of how to organise a successful dinner party. Nevertheless, she has already obtained, from one of her guests, the phone number for renowned director Philippe Noir, with the aim of interesting him in filming a docu-soap about her company for Channel Four. One of the best things about being on TV is that she would hope to be able to repay Mrs Fitzgerald in some small way by ensuring the director gives her benefactor plenty of prime time exposure.