Being Light 2011 Read Free Page A

slowly. The protestors fall back, whistling and jeering, Jeremy clipping the pedals of the cyclists at the near side of the road as he adjusts to steering the unfamiliarly wide vehicle.
    Routemaster buses are semi-automatic. There is no clutch. The drivers slip into neutral and rev the engine before changing gear. Jeremy fails to do this. The bus lurches and comes to a halt two hundred yards further down the road, where the driver pulls Jeremy from the bus by his hair and regains his seat.

    The psychic postman stands at Alison’s door, patiently feeding birthday cards through the letterbox. Thirty years old. She hides from view, not feeling like talking.
    ‘Alison,’ calls the postman, his lips to the letterbox. ‘Are you alright?’
    ‘I’m frumpy, overweight, dog tired, smelling of milk, vomit, piss and Bonjela.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘But it’s OK. I’m slowly climbing out of the pit.’
    ‘It might be post-natal depression. You should see someone about it.’ A plume of his cigarette smoke reaches Alison through the letterbox. The postman’s concern is touching. She presses her thumb and forefinger into the inner corner of each eye, using pressure to stop the tears the way first-aiders stop blood seeping from a small wound.
    Alison’s daughter, Phoebe, is around a year old now. She’s not sure of Phoebe’s exact age because she found the baby at the seaside last summer. While there is general sympathy these days for women who suffer from post-natal depression, Alison is aware there would be little sympathy left to go round for women who have found a baby and kept it.
    One of Alison’s birthday cards is home-made. It has a pressed cornflower on the front and a cutting from a newspaper inside, telling the story of a young child with defective vision who saw tiny particles of dust in the air magnified many times and thought they were fairies floating in front of her eyes. Optometrists corrected the child’s sight by giving her rose coloured glasses to wear.
    The card is from Jeff, Alison’s former downstairs neighbour. He’s moved a long way away in the hope of forgetting her. The card suggests he’s having some difficulty with this.
    Alison takes out a postcard of one of Picasso’s portraits of a woman with a messed up head, bought on a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York , and writes a simple message to the return address:

    My hands are rough, my lips are chapped. I’m 30, I feel old.
    Help me.

    Alison creeps up to the cot in the next room where Phoebe is having a nap. The child’s arms are thrown back and bent up at the elbow like a 1930s strongman, knees and toes turned out and her head turned to one side. Alison bends into the cot to watch for movement behind Phoebe’s long eyelashes and bluish eyelids as she sleeps. With a sudden deep, reassuring sleepy breath from the baby, Alison steps back and turns away.

    Harvey is sitting in his room in the fading light, hands tucked under his thighs, leaning forward, tensed. He looks like a track athlete practising for a new set of rules that require competitors to start each race from a sitting position on the sofa.
    Harvey ’s eyes are closed, searching inward for his earliest memories of himself. He was a weedy child, popular with other children’s mothers because of his beautiful manners. Harvey remembers trying for the first time to grasp the meaning of the events that surrounded and involved him. It was while at school in the seventies, during an era when it was more fashionable to allow children to discover the great truths for themselves than to explain anything to them, that Harvey first tried to make sense of the world. He did this by paying attention to the labels given to everything and everyone by other people.
    Harvey is examining memories of shivering in a purple cotton matching vest and pants set in PE at primary school, fighting among the scaled down toilets in the infant block, queuing for school dinners, winding string around