Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

  ‘No, that’s fine.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Okay. Blow your nose.’

  ‘Yes.’ Honk.

  ‘Yeah. But, you know what, if you’re ready we should let the boys back out, they’ll be worrying. And you know what? You really do need to listen to this track they’ve done.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not saying a word. Wait and see. It’s okay now,’ she calls, much louder. ‘Your mum was just a bit upset over the state your dad’s in.’

  Marcus and Lucius are back as fast as if they’ve been hiding behind the curtains. She hopes they haven’t.

  ‘Poor old Ma,’ says Marcus.

  ‘Poor old Ma-in-law,’ says Lucius. ‘It’s like, some things,’ he adds sagely, ‘they just build up, don’t they? You don’t know how upset you are till all of a sudden, you’re really upset, innit?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, and she finds herself embraced on both sides by gracile male beauty.

  ‘Thank you, thank you. Thank you both,’ she says. ‘That’s very nice.’

  ‘Isn’t it just,’ says Val.

  ‘You dirty old woman,’ says Jo.

  ‘I’m an antique fag hag,’ says Val. ‘I’m not ashamed.’

  ‘What’s this about some music I should listen to?’

  ‘Well!’ says Marcus, detaching himself with the air of someone who needs to make a formal speech. ‘I was over here going through the vinyl, you know, looking for samples, and I found this cardboard box—’

  ‘I don’t remember this,’ says Jo.

  ‘You were out,’ puts in Val.

  ‘—with tapes in. Really old tapes, reel-to-reel stuff. And I thought, oh, interesting, because you can get some lovely lo-fi sound off magnetic tape, hiss and stuff, so I took them back to ours, and Loosh worked out how to play them, and Ma, there’s—’

  ‘Oh no no no …’

  ‘—whole songs on them. By you. You never said you did your own stuff.’

  ‘Well, it never got anywhere. Look, you shouldn’t bother with that. It’s all so old.’

  She’s feeling an anxious embarrassment, not on her own behalf, but for the past self who hoped for things she didn’t get, and may be horribly exposed, horribly laid bare, in whatever the boys have found. Some fear too. She half-remembers what’s on those tapes: work, it seems to her half-memory now, all bound up with the long decay of her and Ricky, all compounded therefore with false hopes and disappointments. Considering the poison that just now stirred in her, it seems perverse to wake any of that again. No more drops of blood to feed the ghosts tonight.

  ‘That’s, like, kind of the point?’ says Lucius. ‘That it’s, like, a time capsule?’

  ‘But none of it worked out! None of it went anywhere.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean it wasn’t any good, does it?’ says Marcus. ‘Did you ever listen to any of it again?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Didn’t want to; too miserable. Look—’

  ‘But you kept it, though.’

  ‘Yes.’ Equally unbearable to play or to throw away. And then the technology moved on, and she couldn’t have played it if she did want to.

  ‘The thing is, we did listen to it, Ma, and we liked it, and we thought, treat this right, it could be very now.’

  ‘Which is weird, yeah?’ Lucius says. ‘In a good way.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Jo.

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ says Marcus. ‘I hoped you would. Obviously we won’t do anything you don’t want.’

  She looks at him, and she sees the first sign of the careful resignation with which Marcus has always handled the world not welcoming his projects. Not petulant; dignified. Oh hell, she thinks, trapped by motherly compunction.

  ‘I think you’ve got to, sweetheart,’ says Val, reading her like a book.

  ‘Okay, okay. Go on, then. Hit me, maestro. Maestros.’

  The smiles return. She sits down in the vacated lawn chair, but anxiety brings her straight back to her feet, and she’s standing as the track begins, making its way outside from the sitting room speakers.

  But it’s outside sound already. Footsteps first, and faint traffic noise. Engines, brake squeal. Then crackle, a rubble of crackle as if charged dust were being stirred, were snapping thickly with sparks; and arising out of it, like crackle organised, a rattling drum break, dry as a biscuit but with reverb. BOOM-dubba-da-da!-da!-dah. BOOM-dubba-da-da!-da!-dah. Bassline threading through it, subdued in the mix so it’s like a shake in the ground, seismic. Earth shadowing the drum. Then tentative but reinforcing, building up in layers, swathes from a synth. Electrified air over the rubble. Not one of the smooth-edged imitations of a natural instrument you get now, but blatantly electronic, artifice that can’t hide the fact that it’s artifice. No doubt to the boys this sounds as ancient as electronica gets, but her ear pins it as a sound out of eighties electro-pop, after her time; in fact, not from the first but from the second geological age of the synthesiser, after the truly early Age of Moog. Somewhere far off in the mix, an ambulance goes by. Of course, it’s their sound-city she’s hearing, an audio-London as they’ve known it. So of course, when they want old they pick the sound of their own beginning, the eighties being as far off to Marcus and Lucius as Variety Bandbox on the radio is to her. ‘Geraldo and His Gaucho Tango Orchestra, coming to you from the Starlight Ballroom …’ Sound from the dawn, from the oldest just-remembered layer of experience.

  But then she hears the looped and sampled voice of a woman singing in the Hollywood Hills, and it’s her own history she’s travelling in, whatever the boys think they were doing.

  A love unknown.

  A love unknown.

  A love unknown.

  Next time.

  They’ve bitten off the cut, so the end of the sample comes with an audible rip and it’s really really clear this is an arrangement of fragments. All the same, even in fragments, there she is, live and aloud in some other piece of the present, singing into a four-track in a warmer, dryer night. Wasn’t there guitar? The guitar has gone missing. The song as it once was – as she never quite finished it – stirs in her mind, tries to reassemble itself, reaches (hooks searching for eyes, oh nearly, oh not quite) for what came after the sample. Comes after the sample, for it seems sure that the song is still there, on the tip of her mind’s tongue, if not quite in reach. Oh my. Oh my. Not embarrassing, not awful, not trailing toxic failure. That was an artefact of the backward look. This woman singing here, in some strangely nearby faraway, is bitter, yes; angry, yes; but wry about it, and self-possessed, making those sorrows into a thing, a thing not asking for pity. Also, the voice is pretty damn good, if she does say so herself. More of an American lilt to it than it had earlier or would have later; Sandy Denny crossed with Carole King. Nice pipes, lady.

  Pouring rain.

  Pouring rain.

  Pouring rain.

  Next time.

  Now how are they going to get to a conclusion, or even to anything in the nature of a chorus, an expression full enough to let you put it down and say the song’s been worked through? Perhaps it will all be dry bone-fragments of frustration, in this version, sliced-up yearning left unresolved. It’s clear that to the boys the song as it was had a lot of sentimental juice in it that needed squeezing out. They certainly have squeezed it. It’s implication and atmosphere now. They’ve taken the heart off its sleeve. They didn’t want a narrative, or maybe (the cynic in Jo suggests) they didn’t want a woman complaining to take up all that much space. They’ve turned a woman’s whole voice into a sample. But still, they have to make it move, they have to make it arrive somewhere. How—

  ‘We were going for a bit of a chillwave vibe,’ says Lucius, ‘but keeping it danceable, yeah, so like, still with some dubstep edge to it?’

  ‘Shut up and let her listen, man,’ says Marcus.

  Oh now, wait. They have done a gear-change, they have kept a cut-up or cut-down version of what she vaguely remember
s was the chorus. It’s just taken them longer to get to it than she expected, attuned as she isn’t to the infinite patience of the dancefloor. Up goes the tempo, forward comes the bassline from the drum break, snip-snip go the scissors of rhythm on the sound-swathes of the synth and the ribbons pick together into something resembling a melody; her melody, she thinks, nearly.

  Hanging on

  next time

  Depending on

  next time

  all because all because all because all because

  you left me singing left me left me left me singing

  solo harmonies

  With a massive endorsement of bass and synth together on ‘harmonies’. Transcendent, innit. And then a spool-back into yearning fragments, and a descent into rubbly static, the dryness of the drum break, static only. BOOM-dubba-da-da!-da!-dah. BOOM-dubba-da-da!-da!-dah. Crackle. Hiss. The unstaged wild-track of the real London night asserting itself, in the form of a plane overhead.

  ‘Do you like it?’ says Marcus, cautiously.

  She holds up a hand. If they want professional they can have professional. ‘Again,’ she says.

  Footsteps, cityscape, static, drum break, synth. Sample. This time round she knows what’s coming, she expects the joins. She is developing a view about the details of the mix, another about the pacing, another about the slightly obvious nature of the long-withheld melody. She will have notes to give them later. But at the same time she feels it more, this time around, with the anxiety gone. Next time, next time, says the young voice, singing to her from some other point on the great continent of time, passing her a bitterness awakened into a tune across thirty years; and the voice singing believes in no replacement for what it lacks, not being able to imagine how at later times the lack was filled; and here she is, old, hearing it, and not possessing time enough any more for many next times to happen in, though she can still be surprised, as she is surprised by this new thing turning out to have the time to happen, right now. It ought to be ironic. But it isn’t. She hears the time go by, four beats to the bar, ninety beats to the minute. She hears the song, her song, and it’s still a song of wanting, of losing, of missing. Only now it is the song of missing what you still possess; what, for a little while longer, you have and hold, but must presently relinquish to the dark, into which will go her song, and all songs; Val’s guilt and Val’s wisdom; Claude’s energy and Claude’s madness; Ricky’s voice and Ricky’s leopard-skin trousers. A stage draped with waterlight like jewels. A baby in arms. A red forest in green sunlight.

  One more thing to add. She always meant to put in a second voice, she remembers – to be her own backing singer. Now she can duet with herself across thirty years. As the chorus comes around, Jo throws her head back, straightens the soft tube of her windpipe, and harmonises. Solo harmonies for two. Her voices soar, Marcus laughs out loud, and her brown-and-silver song winds away into the night, over the roofs of Bexford, past the scarlet light on the unmoving crane, past the grand houses of the Rise and the hipster coffee shops on the hill, over the burger joints and the takeaways, between the towers of the Park Estate and out over the treetops; voice and bassline and drum break chasing leaves and fried-chicken wrappers, echoing from the surfaces of brick and concrete on which love makes its always temporary claim; from which we constitute a home, we who lift our voices and pass through, pass through.

  Ben

  Ben’s room in the hospice has a window onto a small court of straggly grass. Two-storey brick walls surround it, and the sun only shines directly down into it in the middle of the day. Otherwise it is a shady place, with a neglected square green pool, and a twisting stumpy sculpture gone to moss. But out of sight of Ben, there must be a path into the courtyard and therefore a chink at the corner of the enclosing walls, because sometimes the early light comes raying briefly from the right, low and level. It is doing it now, and the grass has dew on it. All along the line of the sun, a brilliant sea of tiny beads, a million filaments trembling with light.

  People say the world gets smaller when you’re dying: but there it still is, as astonishingly much of it as ever. It’s you who shrinks. Or you who can grasp the world less, who can take hold of less and less of it, until you’re only peeping at one burning-bright corner of the whole immense fabric. And then not even that.

  Under the sheet a tube goes into his arm and a little pump sends morphine down it automatically. He can press a button for more if the pain gets too much. It doesn’t, mostly. But time blurs and moves in jumps. People come and are suddenly gone, he blinks and night has become day or day become night. He loses the thread in the middle of talking, then searching for the next words finds he has left the conversation far behind, hours or days ago. He pursues his thoughts slowly, across great discontinuities, like someone chasing a bead of mercury that constantly tries to split and roll away.

  Marsha and Ruthie and Curtis and Cleve and Grace and Addie are just putting their coats on to go. A nurse feeds him a mouthful of Fortisip and suddenly they’re gone. ‘Is that the MP?’ says the nurse. ‘Mm-hh,’ says Ben. Swallowing is difficult. Yes, it is; Addie Ojo, member of parliament for Bexford, herself and in the flesh. ‘And are they all your children?’ says the nurse, a slight but polite doubt in her voice, for obvious reasons. ‘None of them,’ says Ben. ‘All of them,’ he adds. But did he manage to say that part out loud? Suddenly it’s night.

  Sometimes he’s frightened. Sometimes everything seems to be shaking to pieces, idea from idea, bone from bone, matter all flying apart into a broken heap, and then he thinks he can hear a huge sound, a rattling rolling crash he has somehow been living inside.

  He tries to put his thoughts in order but the mercury runs this way and that. The different parts of his life: how they seem not to fit together but, he is sure, really do. Really did. How he went round and round in Bexford, one life and then another different one in the same places, the buses and then the café, the horror and then the joy, his sister and then Marsha. Always on the same streets. Only not in a circle, more like round and round in a spiral, rising in place, because didn’t he in the end prove to be going somewhere?

  Oddly, after all the years when happiness meant not being able to remember what the fear was like, he can now call it to mind again easily, but without being afraid. The crystal floor to his mind is gone but it’s all right. He sees the fearful years alongside the good ones, taking their place in the spiral.

  An idea is in his head, the mercury consenting to be chased slowly to a standstill. Who knows if it’s true. But if the different bits and pieces of his life, rising, lofted as if by a bubble of force from below, are arranged in a messy spiral of hours and years, then mightn’t it be the case, mightn’t there be a place, mightn’t there be an angle, from which you could see the whole accidental mass composing, just from that angle, into some momentary order you could never have noticed at the time? Mightn’t there be a line of sight, not ours, from which the seeming cloud of debris of our days, no more in order than (say) the shredded particles riding the wavefront of an explosion, prove to align? Into a clockface of transparencies. This whole mess a rose, a window.

  It is morning. It is night. It is morning.

  ‘Ben?’ says Marsha, holding his left hand, ‘Grandpa Ben?’ says Ruthie, holding his right hand, but not as if they expect an answer. ‘Olorun a de fun e,’ says Marsha. Her lips on his forehead.

  Praise him in all the postcodes, thinks Ben.

  Praise him on the commuter trains: praise him upon the drum and bass. Praise him at the Ritz: praise him in the piss-stained doorways. Praise him in nail bars: praise him with beard oil. Praise him in toddler groups: praise him at food banks. Praise him in the parks and playgrounds: praise him down in the Tube station at midnight. Praise him with doner kebabs: praise him with Michelin stars. Praise him on pirate radio: praise him on LBC and Capital: praise him at Broadcasting House. Praise him at Poundland: praise him at Harvey Nichols. Praise him among the trafficked and exploited: praise him in hipster c
offee houses. Praise him in the industrial estates: praise him in leather bars. Praise him on the dancefloors: praise him on the sickbeds. Praise him in the high court of Parliament: praise him in the prisons and crack houses. Praise him at Pride: praise him at Carnival: praise him at Millwall and West Ham, Arsenal and Chelsea and Spurs. Praise him at Eid: praise him at High Mass: praise him on Shabbat: praise him in the gospel choirs. Praise him, all who hope: praise him, all who fear: praise him, all who dream: praise him, all who remember. Praise him in trouble. Praise him in joy. Let everything that has breath, give praise.

  The sun is overhead. The sun is shining straight down. The grass grows bright with ordinary light. Ben sees the light, and the light is very good.

  t + ∞

  Come, dust.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This one-ounce weight blew onto the keyboard of my laptop because, for the last twelve years, I’ve been walking to work at Goldsmiths College past a plaque commemorating the 1944 V-2 attack on the New Cross Road branch of Woolworths. Of the 168 people who died, fifteen were aged eleven or under. The novel is partly written in memory of those South London children, and their lost chance to experience the rest of the twentieth century. You can find their names among the other known victims of the rocket in the Deptford History Group’s 1994 oral history Rations & Rubble. But Alec, Vern, Jo, Val and Ben are invented souls. They do not correspond in whole or in part to the real dead, any more than Joe McLeish ever played for Millwall or you can find the London Borough of Bexford on a map.

  I owe thanks and love for this book above all to my in-laws. To my mother-in-law Bernice Martin, sociologist and soprano and quilter, who came with me to Glyndebourne and provided a critical reading of every chapter as I finished it. To my brother-in-law Jonathan Martin, novelist and Millwall fan from the seventies on, who took me to the Den and measured the book against his memories. To my other brother-in-law Magnus Martin, musician, for briefing me on whole-class teaching. To my other other brother-in-law Izaak Martin, for grace under pressure and heroic good humour. To my wife Jessica Martin, priest and scholar, without whom not, in every way: books, life, body, soul, family, art, clear shining after rain. With thee conversing I forget all time. I couldn’t have written a book in which music figured so large without borrowing from all of them, and being connected to all of them.