by Liz Jensen
The phone rang.
– Customer Care? answered Hannah.
– It’s me, said Tilda. Have you chosen yet, or aren’t associates allowed to?
Immediately, Hannah’s thoughts contracted and she began drawing small, tight squiggles next to Dr Crabbe on her pad. It looks so unprofessional, being phoned at work by your mother. If someone came in – someone like Wesley Pike – it would be embarrassing.
– I’m just about to, said Hannah.
– I did, first thing, said Tilda. And they were round an hour later with the most gorgeous bunch of flowers – they’re giving them to all their VIP Customers, to say thanks. And I got a box of chocolates! Tilda couldn’t hide the pride in her voice. So are you coming to St Placid? Better hurry up, before I’ve eaten my way through them.
– Yes, sighed Hannah. While other departments worked overtime, staff in Munchhausen’s had been given a half-day off. She had promised Tilda a visit.
– I’m on my way. I’ll be there by lunchtime. Must go now. Got to choose.
Unlike the customers heading for the malls and parcs today, Hannah preferred to do her admin electronically. It saved time, and it saved bumping into people. She typed in her password, and the questions appeared on screen.
A. Do you want Atlantica to continue being serviced by the Liberty Corporation for a further ten years? There was a box you could click on.
Keeping human error out of people-management, was their Festival slogan. Actually, Hannah’s memory of the time people called ‘the bad old days’ was pretty fuzzy. Strange, the way history had become a bit of a blur, and you needed TV documentaries to remind you how poor the island had been, how full of violence and despair, how similar to the frightening, other world you thought of simply as ‘Abroad’. Strange, the way the past had just sort of stopped being a factor.
Perhaps that’s what happens when you’re finally in safe hands.
B. Do you want Atlantica to slide back into the control of a potentially corrupt political system, run by ambitious but flawed men and women? Another box.
Swiftly, she clicked A, then switched to the news, where the angel-faced commentator, Craig Devon, was talking facts and figures.
– The latest Festival polls show the choice for Libertycare is 95 per cent in Harbourville itself, with 93 per cent of Groke also choosing yes, and Mohawk and St Placid, 97 per cent.
He was pointing at some graphs. Craig Devon was one of Atlantica’s most trusted pundits. Tilda said there used to be a boy who did soap commercials who was his spitting image. She’d like to have had a son like him.
So a resounding victory for Libertycare’s customers, I think it’s fair to say at this stage, said Craig Devon. And although a Corporation spokesman stressed earlier that they’re not being at all complacent, it would be a surprise to us all, I must say, he blahed, if the no choice were to increase by any significant …
More blah. Hannah switched channels. Here they were doing vox-pops; there were Shop ’n’ Choose promotions in the malls, with fifty extra loyalty points if you polled.
– Yes, I’ve been very happy with them, especially the complaints procedure …
– I remember what things were like before. That documentary the other night reminded me – I mean the corruption was just so rife …
– The way they’ll send back a whole lorry-load of produce if it’s sub-standard – little details like that really make you respect it as a system. We’ve certainly benefited as a family from some of the special offers …
– The thing I like is the way the rest of the world’s had to really pay attention to us in recent years, and the loyalty scheme really does …
Hannah flicked channels again; more news. This time there was an item about the US response to the Festival of Choice, featuring a taxi driver from Michigan, called Earl. He’d been popping up on TV quite a lot recently, as the leader of a new campaign to get the Libertycare system servicing the United States. The clip showed a man in his fifties, in a blood-red shirt and checked golfing pants.
– OK, so call me a mug, said Earl. His supporters jostled around him, grinning and waving banners. – Or correct me if I’m missing something important. The camera panned in on Earl’s earnestly perspiring face. – But it isn’t communism we’re talking about here. It’s capitalism. And I like what I see over there on that island. And I’m thinking, heck, that could be us! We don’t want another asshole President! We don’t need all that human error bullshit! There were cheers.
Hannah switched off.
She had heard about this Earl character before, in-house. Leo Hurley reckoned he was a Libertycare initiative, an ambient plant, disguised as a grass-roots punter. But Hannah was less sure. A hypermarket model of people-management was fine for parcs, complexes, penitentiaries and small territories like Atlantica. But containability had always been at the heart of its success. There was no way you could apply the same software system to a superpower.
– So who d’you think’s behind Earl, then? Leo had asked her.
He’d been behaving oddly lately – jaded. He’d better watch it, Hannah thought. Personnel will pick it up on his next need-profile.
– No one, said Hannah. He’s an ordinary American. He’s seen us on TV, like everyone else on the planet. People are beginning to see the results. They’re impressed, that’s all.
Leo’s problem was cynicism.
As the tram slid out of Harbourville, the nerviness Hannah had been experiencing since her first glimpse of ground level became shot through with pure panic. It was six months since she’d left Head Office. It gave her a shuddery sense of inverse vertigo to be this low down, a stab of danger, as though the ground might chasm on you, suck you in: whoop, gone. Flushed down, like waste. A gaggle of elderly people at the front of the tram were chattering excitedly and waving scuba equipment. Members of the Harbourville Over-Sixties’ Feel Real Club, according to their sweatshirts. Hannah’s mother had toyed with the Feel Real Club, but decided her health wouldn’t allow it. She approved, though. It showed that you didn’t have to go to Florida, she said, to live high on the hog.
Hannah stared out at the flat farmlands. This was pineapple country, the fruit growing in spiky rows. When the tram passed an ostrich farm, a whole flock of flouncy-bummed birds scattered in panic on muscular legs. Their brains were smaller than a chicken’s. The nerviness wouldn’t flatten itself. Hoping for a distraction, she opened her laptop and trawled through the transcripts of a few more Munchie calls. There was a woman accusing her step-daughter of stealing her artificial nail kit. How had that got through? A man whose twin brother refused to enter into a timeshare, threatening fratricide. A crater worker complaining of skin eruptions and balance problems: Hannah marked it for referral. There had been a lot of those lately.
Mass hysteria again, like the geologists.
As the tram slowed, and the pineapple fields gave way to okra and lemon grass, the agoraphobia inched upwards, constricting her lungs and throat. She clasped her mask and applied it to her face.
– All right there, love? asked the tanned, dapper gent sitting next to her. He was clutching a wheeled caddy filled with golfing clubs.
Hannah nodded through the translucent mask that covered her nose and mouth. Breathed rhythmically. If she stayed that way, she wouldn’t have to talk to him.
– I chose this morning, first thing, he said eagerly. Cos I want to make sure they finish that golf course, I do! The thing that puzzles me is (he leaned closer to her, conspiratorially, and looked at her with bright eager eyes set deep in his tanned face) who are they, these people?
Hannah looked blank. What was he on about? What people? She tried to convey her question with an eye-movement above the mask.
– Who are they? he repeated. Who are this five per cent lot? The ones choosing B and not A?
She’d wondered herself, in an idle way, but knew she’d find out soon enough: Munchhausen’s would be processing their questionnaires, afterwards. They’d proba
bly turn out to be the usual suspects – the ‘difficult customers’ classed as Marginals. You can’t have winners without losers.
– Mystery, said the man, more to himself than to Hannah, and sighed. One of the seven wonders of the world.
He got off at the next stop, his clubs chinking.
Hannah took off her mask, yawned, and peered out of the window again. She could smell the lavender of St Placid.
– Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold, she murmured, echoing Wesley Pike.
Her boss liked to quote poetry. Outside she could see pylons, and the air-crystals glittered mauve.
Tilda was smaller than Hannah remembered. Hannah spotted her through the window, on the platform, scanning the carriages. Her tilted face was the narrow, questioning shape of a papaya.
– Hello, Ma, said Hannah, stepping out into muggy warmish air.
An awkward moment followed: Hannah bent to kiss Tilda’s papery, powdered cheek but somehow bungled it because of the crush around them and it turned into a fumbling embrace which they both shrank from.
– I came under my own steam, said Tilda, taking a step back and smoothing her mauve shell-suit. She nodded in the direction of an electric buggy parked on the kerbside, its disabled sticker prominently displayed.
– How are you health-wise? asked Hannah dutifully.
– Well, the laparoscopic investigations continue, sighed Tilda. We’re coming up to the tenth anniversary of the start of that. I’ve got more keyhole surgery booked for March, but in the meantime the doctor who deals with my connective-tissue question is taking long leave. And d’you remember that polyp I told you about?
It was after Hannah was diagnosed with Crabbe’s Block that Tilda’s health problems came into their own. Internal organs, usually. Nothing visible. It was only when Hannah was head-hunted into Head Office’s Munchhausen’s Department that she realised her own mother counted as a classic seeker of attention. Munchhausen’s by Proxy, to begin with. Then the real thing. The Liberty Corporation, it dawned on Hannah, had known about her Munchie mother from the start. That’s why they’d recruited her.
She wasn’t offended. She was pleased to have been spirited away from home like that. Pleased to have been given a role.
As Tilda continued the story of her latest medical adventures – the scheduling of appointments seemed to be a key feature – Hannah looked round at the neat fuchsia’d borders of the tram station. The pressed rubber chips of the platform felt different under her feet, as though they were full of packed energy.
– Anyway it’s my kneecaps now, finished Tilda. The plastic’s fatigued.
– I don’t remember it like this, said Hannah. Something’s changed.
– Well, what d’you expect? Tilda ducked into her buggy and gripped the little steering wheel.
It made her even smaller, Hannah thought, like a toddler in a pretend car.
– St Placid’s had more makeovers than any other city, Tilda said proudly, starting the ignition. Even we can’t keep track!
But it wasn’t a makeover thing – it was something else, something less tangible than a revamp, Hannah thought, oddly aware of a springy feeling underfoot as she trailed her mother’s electric buggy on foot down the residential streets past rhododendron hedges, mail-boxes, and tidy lawns dotted with miniature wells, windmills, and bird-baths with plastic ivy. Water features were big this year, and lawn furniture with pop-up parasols. The lavender smell gusted out from the gas pumps. It seemed more potent than usual, as though it were fighting a competing perfume from a rival source.
Tilda’s ground-floor apartment comprised a box shape within the larger box of the block itself, which was painted in variegated pastel shades. Inside, Tilda had chosen lilac as a theme, to complement the lavender. Here the smell seemed more voluptuous and luxuriant, like a bath-house.
While Tilda fussed in the kitchen with her little percolator, Hannah glanced around the living-room. Her mother’s latest craze was for Japanese flower-arranging, and the occasional tables were cluttered with cut palm leaves, wires, secateurs, dried-out sticks and other Ikebana accoutrements. On the shelf by the CD rack was a hologram of Hannah as a child, clutching a Marilyn doll in one hand, and in the other, a plastic monster, a gorgon with multiple heads. The small face overwhelmed by glasses, the pale eyes not meeting the camera’s stare.
– You probably can’t even remember what it was like before, said Tilda, returning to the living-room with the coffee and re-arranging her flowers, a big bouquet of blue irises and orange tulips. See? They’re in Liberty colours. That’s a nice touch, isn’t it?
– What? asked Hannah. The heat in Tilda’s apartment was already making her sleepy and confused.
– You can’t remember politics. D’you still drink it black? You were barely an adult. All that incompetence. I can’t believe we put up with it. Look at the Americans. Look at the mess they’re in. Then she lowered her voice and whispered proudly – Have you seen how jealous they’re getting?
She reached for a plastic box, with twelve individual drawers. Pill time. She had labelled the little drawers neatly, in felt pen.
– You remember I phoned the Hotline when the neighbours were making all that noise with that idiotic mixing desk?
Hannah forced her eyebrows to make a questioning shape.
– Gone.
Tilda arranged a row of five pills before her, then poured a glass of spring water. She gulped the first pill, swished it down with water, and covered her mouth to give a small ladylike burp.
– Gone?
– Transferred. The second and third pills. – The rep was on to it straight away. Next day, literally, they were gone. They were borderline Marginals, he said. He said you were right to call us, Mrs Park, it’s people like you who enable us to do our job, and on behalf of all of us at Libertycare, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you personally.
Hannah recognised the wording. The Hotline used it.
– I’m a satisfied customer, I told the rep, Tilda went on. You can guess how I’ll be choosing!
Through the triple-glazed window, a clutch of fit seniors jogged by in masks and pastel track-suits, goldfishing laughter.
– HRT trash, snorted Tilda. That’s my tax dollar. I’ll fix us lunch, shall I? I ordered the Gourmet Special, two minutes in the microwave. They do me a daily delivery, with my knees.
It was a platter for two, with plastic knives and forks: something white with plenty of fat and carbohydrate, and sprinkle-on vitamins from a sachet. Comforting.
– Breaded turkey escalopes, Tilda said after they’d finished it. With cauliflower dauphinois.
Hannah pictured a bird in the shape of the country called Turkey, flattened like a lumpy pancake.
– Can they fly? she asked Tilda abruptly.
– I think they’re like ostriches, said Tilda, after a moment. Talking of which, Chunky Choo-Choo on tomorrow’s three-thirty at Mohawk. Fancy a flutter? You can borrow my code. You need to watch her form though, she laid an egg on the track last season!
She laughed, throwing her head back, then looked at Hannah and stopped smiling. She sighed – a small, pained exhalation. In the silence that followed, Hannah had a sudden, sinking sense of what was coming next. She could almost see the words forming themselves in her mother’s brain.
– I don’t know how someone like you ends up as a psychologist.
Hannah folded her arms, pulled back from the table.
– I’ve told you before …
– Well, I don’t understand the difference. Psychologist, statiwhatsit. You need to know about people for that, don’t you? Don’t you? And you’re hardly what I’d call a people person.
There was no real point in replying. Slowly, Hannah pulled at one of the elastic bands on her wrist, then let it snap sharply against her skin. It hurt.
– Industrial psycho-statistician, said Hannah.
She looked away from her mother, out through the window at the rhododendrons and
the camellias. Go, she thought. Go now. Escape. Out. Clouds freighted with the beginnings of rain.
– You don’t need people. I’ve told you. It’s all on paper. Or on screen. Or on CD ROM.
She took the elastic band off her wrist and swiftly scrunched her wispy hair into a little ball. With the elastic around it, and bits sticking out, it sparkled like nylon hay.
– So what are you working on now then?
– It’s confidential, said Hannah, reaching for her mask. Using the inhaler was a tactic she’d adopted in childhood, to gain – quite literally – breathing space. Sometimes the need was genuine, and urgent, but often, with Ma, it was more complicated.
– You could give me the gist, Tilda reproached her plaintively.
Hannah felt a flash of anger. Her mother always did this.
– Just Hotline duty, she said reluctantly.
– Oh really? asked Tilda, smiling. It’s a lovely service! I get special rates.
Hannah felt the annoyance mounting.
– Do you realise that when you ring up it’s a machine asking you the questions? she blurted. Then instantly regretted breaking protocol.
Tilda flushed deep red.
– Well, they’re very clever, aren’t they, these computer programs, she said finally, twisting in her seat. A good sight cleverer than real people, I reckon. They’ve done an excellent job.
But she looked slapped. A small itchy silence.
– Nice arrangement, tried Hannah, indicating some red sticks emerging from a flat vase on the television cabinet.
– It’s not finished, said Tilda defensively. It needs pods. She pulled off a fluffy slipper, laid it on her lap and stroked it like a cat. Her lips puckered into a knob.
