Being Light 2011 Read Online Free PDF Page B

dreams. Sometimes they appear as they were in their heyday, strong men and women in their sparkly costumes performing one more time for her benefit. More often than not Sylvia sees them as the active elderly people they grew into before departing the temporal world for their final destination.
            They come in to the dream all together, grey-haired and limber, dressed gracefully in loose-fitting jersey and cotton leisure-wear. Their hands are linked and their arms extend from their sides, forming a vee with each other. They dance, forming a chain, pointing with the left foot, bending their knees and kicking up with the right heel, heads turned, smiling, hair flying all in the same direction with the motion of the dance. Then they come back again, pointing with the right foot, kicking with the left.
    Sylvia tries to recognise them as they pass. There is Judith Gordon Innes who died aged 87. In the thirties she topped a human pyramid on a high wire as the only British member of The Great Wallendas. There is Joseph Hodgini who died aged 102. His wife Etta Davis is next to him. She had a high-wire and knife-throwing act with her twin Rita before marrying Joseph and joining him in his comedy riding act.
    When he has been dancing in Sylvia’s dreams in Paradise , Joseph Hodgini sometimes finds his way to where Venetia Latimer is sleeping in her house in West Sussex . He is Venetia ’s favourite animal trainer. She chose her son’s name as a tribute to him. As a boy Joe Hodgini rode horses bareback in German and Russian circuses as Miss Daisy, a female impersonator. In the fifties he worked with a dog troupe, the first man ever to successfully train Dachshunds for the circus. Venetia Latimer’s dreams are male-dominated, as the profession of animal training tended to be in those earlier years. It is not something that troubles Venetia , she has never yearned for female companionship. She would rather enjoy the company of Jack Smith, unrivalled trainer of big cats and bears, the man who prepared the lions for their role in the film Quo Vadis, as he trades circus gossip with Poodles Hanneford who, in an earlier era, delighted audiences with his comedy riding turns.
    Venetia Latimer never sees herself in these dreams but it is enough that her heroes are there, chatting as informally amongst themselves as if they were guests being treated to a fork supper at her house in Sussex.

    In Brixton, every one of the twelve hundred dancing bears in captivity in India parades through Mrs Fitzgerald’s crowded, horrible dream. Helplessly, she watches them twisting their tortured bodies to earn a few rupees for their owners. Even in her dream she knows she’s too far away to help them slip the chains attached to their nostrils by rings sunk into the tender parts of their flesh.
    From Spain , herds of stampeding bulls thunder into Mrs Fitzgerald’s dream, blood spraying from the puncture wounds in their slippery, sweating hides where they have been speared and stabbed deep into the muscle underneath. Flecks of foam fly from between their bared teeth. The doses of strychnine they have been given have dulled the pain, not the fury. Their eyes are wild. As Mrs Fitzgerald watches, they start to tumble, front legs buckling first, then the hind legs, animal piling on top of animal as they fall.
    She turns, restlessly, half awakes, then falls back to sleep. There is no respite. North America ’s diving mules rain from the skies in her dream. Tempted by as little reward as a carrot, they risk death or serious injury by jumping from high platforms into shallow pools below, urged on by the showmen who make money from their recklessness. Mrs Fitzgerald watches them come down, splayed hoofs splashing as they hit the water, jaunty straw hats floating away as they scramble to the edge of the pool, ready to jump again for another meagre reward.
    When she wakes next morning, Mrs Fitzgerald sets to work early, redoubling her efforts to help the