Being Light 2011 by Helen Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

Mum. It still all sounds vaguely insulting. And it’s not exactly Generation X or the Beat Generation.’
    ‘Jane, honey, what are you talking about? I was asking if you wanted to share a piece of this donut with me. Still, if you’re looking for a metaphor in your article how about Donut Generation? Does that sound better? Sugary and yummy-looking on the outside, an empty space on the inside.’
    ‘ Harvey , you’ve cracked it. That’s absolutely great. It’s too good to restrict it to an article about mango face packs. I’ll develop it and pitch it somewhere. Jane Memory writes wittily and pithily about the Donut Generation. Jane points out that we all look delicious but we are empty inside. Men purr, women purr, the standard of the literary style piece is raised to new heights, editors pay vast amounts of money. Stop pirouetting, Harvey .’
    ‘I wasn’t pirouetting.’
    ‘There’s a tea towel over there if you need to wipe the sugar off your trousers. I need to raise my profile in print journalism, and I’d like to get into TV.’ It is six months since Jane Memory gave her cold heart to TV docu-soap director Philippe Noir but so far he has failed to respond with a job offer. It is a sore point. ‘I’m really proud of what I’ve achieved in journalism but I want to go further. I’m terrified I’m not going to get the breaks.’
    ‘Terrified? What do you fear most in the world, Jane?’
    ‘Obscurity. At least it’s easier to fix than a fear of the unknown.’
    Harvey watches Jane scratching her coccyx with the blunt end of a ballpoint pen through her trousers. ‘Jane, what colour is “oyster”, would you say?’
    ‘Red, orange, yellow … gained battle in vain… green, blue, indigo, violet. It isn’t a colour at all.’
    ‘When I was a student at art school I worked weekends in the carpet department of a large furniture store. I handled telephone complaints. “They’ve delivered the wrong colour carpet,” customers would say. “I ordered oyster but this is too dark, it doesn’t look oyster-coloured at all. This is more of a gun-metal grey.” Or dove grey or slate grey. “But that’s the carpet you chose from the sample you saw in the show room,” I’d tell them, “oyster is just a label we use.” It happened all the time. Doesn’t that surprise you? People expected the carpet to match the colour that the name painted in their head, rather than matching the sample they’d chosen with their own eyes. They would actually call me up and argue about the name we gave to the colour.’
    ‘It doesn’t surprise me at all Harv, people will do anything to get a discount.’

    Mrs Fitzgerald sits on the top deck of a 159 bus as it waits at traffic lights at the square roundabout formed by Parliament Square in Westminster . The bus is in the one of the three lanes of traffic that is nearest to the Houses of Parliament. Mrs Fitzgerald looks down and to her right, where a policeman in a box with a pointed roof guards the entrance to the House of Commons car park.
    Mrs Fitzgerald looks at the statue of the crusader king Richard I, Coeur de Lion, riding his horse in front of the Houses of Parliament, his rapier sword raised in his right hand. He never did much for this country, plundering the gold reserves to pay for his wars against the Muslims (or Infidels, as they were known then). However he cut a very dashing figure, and his aggressive foreign policy did no harm to his popularity at home.
    A young man on the path catches Mrs Fitzgerald’s eye as the bus moves off slowly to the left. He is swinging his arms, taking long strides. The hem of his summer cotton dress brushes his knees as he walks. Mrs Fitzgerald turns completely around in her seat, rising up a little to catch a further sight of him but he has disappeared. If he was even there in the first place. She stares back through the rear window of the bus at Big Ben for a while, its façade familiar and reassuring, as the bus passes by