by Helen Smith
‘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.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven ~ Sylvia’s Flip-Flop
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.
Chapter Twenty-Eight ~ Cruising
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.
Chapter Twenty-Nine ~ High Wire Workout
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 t
he middle, spinning plates, looking at Sylvia.
From the very top of the Big Top, from much higher up than the point where Sylvia is looking in her dream, the daredevil acrobat starts to fall. His feet are tucked under his body, his hands grip his ankles. He turns over once in the air. He turns again. He will not be able to make another turn without smashing the plates, scattering the people. Sylvia wakes up before it happens. ‘Jeremy,’ she says. Two years ago, as soon as she learned it was wrong to put animals in the circus, she went to Jeremy and told him to leave, cutting him adrift from his life there. Now he falls from the roof of the Big Top in her dreams.
Chapter Thirty ~ Frozen Yoghurt
Jane and Harvey have almost finished their lunch in Old Compton Street. Jane is on the dessert course, which Harvey has skipped. He stirs his double espresso languidly with a sugar-crystal stirrer while he wait for the coffee to cool.
‘What is it that you see in Jeremy?’ Harvey asks Jane. ‘It can’t just be the sex. You must know there will always be another man along if it doesn’t work out.’
‘It isn’t just sex. It’s his passion for the environment.’
‘Oh please.’
‘It’s true. Most people can’t seem to get excited about anything but Jeremy cares about birdsong. I’d like to siphon off some of that passion for myself. And by the way great sex isn’t so easy to come by when you reach our age, Harvs, so even if it was only the sex I’d stick with it for a while.’
‘I dreamed last night that I was trying to give birth to a baby but it wouldn’t come out.’ Harvey tells Jane. ‘What does that mean? And don’t say it means I want to be a woman.’
‘Obviously you don’t want to be a woman, Harvs. It’s terrible being a woman. I think it means you are trying to give birth to some creative project but it’s blocked.’
‘Maybe. Yes, that’s very good. There is something.’
‘What is it? Tell me what it is? I can try to midwife it.’
‘I’ve been compiling my list identifying unnamed feelings. I’ve spent ages on it. It’s a long list and it’s starting to look quite comprehensive.’
‘A long list? I wouldn’t have thought you’d find that many. Why don’t you tell me what you’ve got and we can try to double-check if they really are unnamed. I’ll tell you if I can think of any word that matches the feeling.’
‘Really, do you mind?’
‘That’s how scientists work. They test their theories before they publish them. We have to apply the same rigour to your wordless feelings. So what have you got?’
‘Well, in the morning, the moment between dreams and sleep.’
‘Waking up.’
‘What?’
‘That is called waking up. Next!’
‘Jane.’ Harvey folds his piece of paper. ‘It’s not funny.’
‘Next!’
‘You are the most irritating person I know.’
Jane is laughing so hard that the scoop of low-fat frozen raspberry yoghurt she has just put into her mouth starts to melt and she seems incapable of swallowing it without choking. Slow pink dribbles stream from between her lips and run down her chin. A semi-solid dollop of yoghurt falls backwards off her spoon and makes a splash on her black trousers as she puts her hand to her mouth to wipe the yoghurt away. She tilts her face upwards and half opens her mouth, still laughing. Harvey sees a boiling cauldron of pink liquid in there, mixed by her tongue.
‘Jane’ he hisses but this encourages her more. She makes a honking noise and sprays a fine pink mist over a wide area. As Harvey watches, a small spurt of yoghurt forces its way from each of Jane’s nostrils and she wipes at her nose with the back of her hand.
Harvey walks away leaving Jane bent over, elbows on the table, eyes shut against the tears, trying to catch her breath, still laughing helplessly. The maitre d’ raises his eyebrows very slightly at Harvey as an attractive waiter sashays to the table with a linen napkin to dab at his dishevelled lunch partner.
Chapter Thirty-One ~ Laundry
In Paradise, Roy turns out his toes at a 45° angle, twisting his feet into the sand beneath the wiry grass near the sand dunes, like a ballroom dancer with a tray of talcum powder preparing a non-slip grip for the soles of his shoes. He remains where he is, leaning forward slightly into the wind. He brings up his arms, gracefully, until his elbows are level with his shoulders, relaxing his wrists so that his fingers hang downwards from his hands, casting feather-shaped shadows on the beach.
Roy is wearing Sylvia’s shoes, which are size eight, and her clothes. In addition to her range of white and pink T-shirts and jeans, she has a selection of loose unisex and men’s clothes; work shirts and sweat pants or combat trousers. He turns up the sleeves and belts the trousers in tight, the material hanging off his skinny bones. Once or twice he has wondered why she has a whole wardrobe full of men’s clothes. Has she ever had another man here? He once asked her where she got the clothes and she shrugged and said, ‘I’ve always had them.’
Leaning comfortably on the windowsill above the radiator in the kitchen, enjoying a mid-morning break, Sylvia watches him. Unaware, facing out towards the sea, he remains motionless for fifteen minutes until the weight of his own arms is uncomfortable and he drops them to his side, shaking his hands so that his fingers clack together. Seeing that he has finished, Sylvia draws herself up, wipes a heart in the mist where her breath has condensed on the window, and goes to switch on the kettle.
Sylvia, with her collection of elephant, dog, cow, ducks, chickens and Roy, who has fallen from the skies, thinks of herself as their protector. They have the freedom to wander anywhere on her property. They have food and water and somewhere comfortable out of the wind and rain and the sun. So long as she does not earn money from them, as a zoo-keeper would, she feels she is doing the right thing by them. Any one of them is free to leave, although where would they go?
Too much attention suffocates Sylvia, she finds it intrusive. Living at Mrs Latimer’s was comfortable at first but after a while she felt she couldn’t breathe, as if she had her head in a feather pillow. Sylvia is scrupulous in attending to the needs of all her charges – she would never neglect them. But she likes to let them be, because that’s how she likes to live.
Sheila is in her flat in Brixton, hemmed in by all the accumulated metal objects that she hopes will bring her news of Roy, her tinfoil receivers in place on her ears. She remembers the time, once before, when she thought she had lost him. He was nearly forty and he had been quieter than usual for a couple of weeks, taking stock of his life.
‘I can’t go on’ he said one day, coming in to the kitchen. Sheila was crouched in front of the washing machine he had installed for her, sorting the clothes for a dark wash, pairing his vinegary socks before putting them in to the washing drum so they would not get separated. Her hand rested on a thin pair of his boxer shorts, the cotton softened by too much wear. She had been thinking she would need to replace them for him soon.
‘What do you mean?’ She had been terrified. She had heard of women flying into a rage when a man threatened to end a relationship, throwing back all the things the man had ever given them. What had Roy given her? She’d be hard pressed to think of anything that wasn’t bolted down except for a set of kitchen knives and a lampshade. His gifts to her were things that he constructed and nailed into place as if he thought, as she did, that there was no possibility of ever dismantling their home. There were the bookcases set into the recesses of the front room, shelves, cupboards, the fitted kitchen that he worked on all week while she holidayed in north Cornwall with her sister.
‘I want to leave my job. I hate commuting in to the West End, taking orders from that lightweight who couldn’t use a tape measure let alone a power drill but who has been given a managerial job because he can write reports. If I protect my pension I can retire early and we can live somewhere like Spain, where the cost of living is cheap and the climate is good. Until I retire I want something quieter, Sheila, where I am my own
boss.’ That was how he came to find the job at Mrs Latimer’s.
Sheila had forgotten that unfounded fear of losing him, in the planning and the excitement surrounding his new job. When she has an intense memory of him, or some flash of an idea about where he might be, Sheila thinks of it as a message. What does this one mean? There is the remembered fear that he was going to leave her willingly; his wish for a quieter life; his love of building things around their home; the vivid picture of crouching in front of the washing machine and thinking that her life was going to change forever. It could be a message about his laundry. He only has the clothes he disappeared in. Would the aliens have a washing machine? Have they perfected a kind of dry cleaning that allows Roy to remain fully clothed while they restore him to a pristine condition? Is he filthy and in rags? Is he naked, lying on a table with probes and scanners attached to his body while the aliens investigate his inner workings? The messages Sheila receives are becoming more intense but they are bewildering and upsetting. She finds that she is crying. It is unbearable to think that Roy is alone, without her there to help him. Sheila thought that she had no more tears to cry, but she does.
Chapter Thirty-Two ~ The Albert Memorial
It is Thursday night. Sheila has come alone to the Close Encounters meeting, where a discussion is underway about plans to visit the recently renovated Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens to try to reach out to extraterrestrials.