Being Light 2011 by Helen Smith Read Free Book Online

with it. Roy is frightened and excited by the sight of the van, wondering what it portends. Perhaps it has been dropping off another of Sylvia’s animal friends, newly demised and recently arrived from Earth? Perhaps it was collecting something? Roy decides to rush back to the house but then to say nothing, giving Sylvia the opportunity to explain in her own time, in case it’s something sensitive.
    She’s sitting in the kitchen eating chocolate, day-dreaming. The suspense is too much for Roy . ‘I saw the van.’
    ‘Yes. Deliveries.’ When Sylvia eats chocolate she sucks each piece until it dissolves, rather than chewing it. Apparently it is not so fattening if you eat it that way.
    ‘Delivering what?’ Is Sheila here? Another elephant? His friend Brian Donald? A whole host of performing dogs?
    ‘Delivering provisions. We were running out of things to eat, Roy .’ She gets up very slowly from the kitchen table and switches on the kettle. ‘And some paperwork I’ve been expecting.’ She waves a brown envelope. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
    Roy is shocked and frightened by the emotions stirred by the possibility of the death of his friends and loved ones. Death is usually associated with loss but in this case it would involve a gain of some kind. In fact he’d be gaining more than he could cope with, if faced with the arrival of Brian Donald or Sheila or Sylvia’s animal friends. But he’d like to see Sheila again. The thought makes his head spin. What would happen if Heaven and Earth met somehow?
    Roy thinks about Sheila, so far away and impossible to reach. What is Sheila doing now? Is she weeping and helpless with grief, or is she coping as always, briskly getting on with things, organising volunteers for the next hospital fundraising day?
    Roy walks outside to his scale model of Paradise, removing a few of the faded blossoms and leaves that have blown onto it from Sylvia’s flower beds, adjusting the angle of the twig fence, raking the earth with his hands. Then he walks off to the seashore, carefully pacing the distance.

Chapter Ten ~ Convenience

    Sheila goes to the newsagent in Brixton Hill to buy a one-day Travelcard. The people who own the shop stand a foot higher than their customers on a platform behind the counter, smiling with infinite good humour. Theirs is the only local convenience store for a radius of two miles in which the people serving in the shop are prepared to engage in eye contact with the customers during any transaction. In every other shop, the young men who work there talk incessantly on mobile phones, punching the price of the shopping into the till with a very off-hand manner, as if the work is beneath them, which it may very well be, as they all drive expensive jeeps which they park outside and watch jealously through the windows.
    Sheila takes a bus from outside the newsagent’s to Clapham Junction and then takes a train on the West Sussex line to Mrs Latimer’s house, as Roy used to do on the days when he worked there, cheating one of the disadvantages of living in London by taking a twenty-five minute journey against the commuter traffic.
    Venetia Latimer, wary but sympathetic, receives her missing employee’s wife with kindness and a cup of tea in the kitchen. She has had a little while to prepare for the meeting as Sheila’s worried face showed up on the closed circuit TV system when she first entered the land surrounding the estate and it tracked her progress until she reached the kitchen, at the heart of Mrs Latimer’s empire.
    ‘I think he’s alive.’ Sheila tells Mrs Latimer. ‘But I don’t understand why he hasn’t found his way back. If he were free, he’d find his way back home to me.’
    Mrs Latimer understands. Sheila is talking about love. Mrs Latimer sympathises enormously but there is nothing she can say to make Sheila feel better. There is never anything anyone can say in these circumstances. Everyone is unreachable in their own private hell.