Alison Wonderland

by Helen Smith

  Reviews for Alison Wonderland

  “Only occasionally does a piece of fiction leap out and demand immediate cult status. Alison Wonderland is one…Smith is at the very least a minor phenomenon.”

  The Times

  “Made me sigh and throw it to the floor in a fit of envious pique.” Julie Burchill, Guardian

  “A fantastical Thelma and Louise meets Agatha Christie adventure story. The dialogue is smart and the deadpan humour is perfectly judged.”

  The List

  “Smith’s strength comes to the fore when she’s drifting, observing the incidentals of life…this clean, seemingly effortless voice gives Alison Wonderland an impressive edge.”

  Amazon.co.uk

  ALISON WONDERLAND

  ALISON WONDERLAND

  HELEN SMITH

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright ©2011 Helen Smith

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by AmazonEncore

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN: 978-1-935597-75-9

  This book is for Lauren

  Contents

  Chapter One: The Crayfish

  Chapter Two: Taron & Jeff

  Chapter Three: The Agency

  Chapter Four: Infidelity

  Chapter Five: Covent Garden

  Chapter Six: Dick, Flower & Bird

  Chapter Seven: The Shig

  Chapter Eight: Surveillance

  Chapter Nine: Taron’s Mother

  Chapter Ten: The Raid

  Chapter Eleven: The Psychic Postcard

  Chapter Twelve: The Dogs

  Chapter Thirteen: Alvin

  Chapter Fourteen: The Bank

  Chapter Fifteen: The Drive

  Chapter Sixteen: The Gypsy & The Club

  Chapter Seventeen: The Runes

  Chapter Eighteen: The Hangover

  Chapter Nineteen: Betrayal

  Chapter Twenty: Sheep Dip

  Chapter Twenty-One: Dick’s Girlfriend

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Spiders

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Hotting Up

  Chapter Twenty-Four: The Giant

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Finding Phoebe

  Chapter Twenty-Six: The Abduction

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Disagreement

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Jeff in Captivity

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Rescue

  Chapter Thirty: Phoebe’s Mother

  Chapter Thirty-One: Flower’s Wife

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Phoebe’s Ceremony

  Chapter Thirty-Three: The Ace of Clubs

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Come Fly with Me

  Chapter Thirty-Five: The Duel

  Chapter Thirty-Six: The Database

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Records Clerk

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: You’ll Never Know

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Chapter One: The Crayfish

  My name’s Alison Temple and I used to have this line when people asked me if I’m married. I’d say, ‘I’m waiting for Mr. Wonderland and when I find him I’ll get married. Until then I’m staying single.’ The kind of people who need to know whether or not you’re married don’t see the humour in a joke like that.

  I was married once, for a while. I thought my husband was cheating on me. Sometimes he was late home and I’d stand at the bedroom window and watch the street. I’d lean against the window frame and press my forehead against the window in despair and I’d wonder, Who do you love more than me? In darkness, in silence, I’d wait until I saw him turn the corner on his way home. Then I’d go and lie in bed—waxwork, expressionless features; heavy, bloodless limbs. It was like one of those hospital nightmares where you have enough anaesthetic to stop you moving or screaming, but not enough to stop you feeling pain. I would just lie there, closing my eyes to stop the giddy feeling that I supposed was anger but was really relief that he was home at all. I was never sure which of us I hated more. Nothing tied me to him—not money, children, or even much of a shared history. Just a sunny day and a white dress. I stayed because I didn’t want to leave, but I hated him for not loving me more than anyone else. I stood at the window and I wondered, Who do you love more than me? I never asked the question out loud.

  I thought if I knew he was seeing someone else, then I’d have to leave. I wouldn’t need to lie there anymore, waiting until he was asleep to touch his skin to see if it felt different, if someone else had touched it. I was twenty-four and I felt debilitated loving someone who didn’t love me enough. I didn’t want to leave him over a suspicion, but I didn’t want to stay. I waited for a sign, something that would settle the matter for me.

  One morning as I looked through a local paper while I was waiting for the kettle to boil to make myself a cup of coffee, I saw an advert for a female detective agency, and that’s how I found this place: ‘Fitzgerald’s Bureau of Investigation. Discretion assured.’

  I hired someone to follow my husband for two weeks, and I felt comfortable that a woman was doing it; I thought she’d understand. Was he unfaithful? I suppose I knew the answer in my heart a long time before it reached my head. I didn’t hire the agency to prove that he was cheating; I wanted them to show me I was wrong. Yes, he was unfaithful.

  The woman who had him followed was called Mrs. Fitzgerald. A tidy, authoritative woman in her late forties, she has slightly curling hair, cut severely short at the back in an old-fashioned crop. She calls her glasses spectacles. They’re on a chain that she never puts round her neck. She waves them around or sets them down on the desk in front of her. Mrs. Fitzgerald has small, dainty feet and a large bosom and bottom. If you overheard a conversation about her in a butcher’s shop, you’d catch a note of admiration when the men behind the counter called her a ‘big woman.’

  She handed me a colour photo that answered the question I’d never dared ask out loud.

  ‘Do you really think he loves her more than me?’ I peered at the photo in Mrs. Fitzgerald’s office. From my experience of detective movies I’d expected it to be in black-and-white, but of course it’s much cheaper and quicker to use colour film and get it developed in Boots.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose so, she looks rather bony and ordinary to me.’

  That settled things for me. I just packed up and left him. I could have clung to him and wept, charmed him, fought with him, tried to hurt him or save him, if he’d been captivated by a bewitching, superior beauty. Perhaps the photo didn’t do her justice, but I was rather disappointed in this thin girl he was fiddling about with in the evenings. Apart from a fleeting impulse—which I resisted—to call his girlfriend with some hair and makeup tips, I chose to ignore them both and faded spectacularly out of my husband’s life.

  That’s not the whole story, of course. I wanted to get a can of red spray paint and write, ‘You ruined my life, you bony bitch’ all over the walls of her house and the place where she worked. I wanted to shred his clothes and castrate him. I wanted to call the police and get him into trouble. I mean, I really wanted someone to tell him off so he’d be sorry. I walked round and round town crying with shock and self-pity while I considered these options. In the end I compromised. I took half the money from our bank account, I bought a can of red spray paint and I went home. I packed everything I wanted from the house (not necessarily the things that were mine, just the things that I wanted, like
his records), and then I put my wedding dress on the bed and I sprayed red paint on the bodice and I left a note by it: ‘You broke my heart, you cunt.’ He’s never approved of women swearing. I didn’t want him to feel sorry for me, I wanted him to be angry. Then I faded out of his life.

  I work at the agency now. I’ve stopped waiting for Mr. Wonderland. I don’t need him anymore.

  One of my first jobs was for a woman who was worried that her husband was having an affair. They’d been married for years and they loved each other but they started having money troubles. He’d become withdrawn and secretive, going out in the evenings without telling her where he was going or who he was meeting. He’d come home late at night smelling of a brand of soap she didn’t recognize. She thought he must be having sex with another woman and showering at her house before he came home.

  I followed him to Clapham Common one night and tracked him as he sneaked through the men who gather there after nightfall in the hope of meeting a stranger, in spite of or perhaps because of the danger. They, like me, were warned as children never to talk to strange men, and now they want to meet them on the common and suck their cocks. They shot me furtive, guilty glances as I passed them, but I wouldn’t meet their eyes in case they thought I was judging them.

  I hung back in the trees as the unfaithful husband met a younger man he appeared to know. They greeted each other brusquely and moved away from the cruising area towards the pond. An island in the middle of the water is dedicated to the preservation of wildlife. There’s a heron in Battersea Park, but the most exotic bird I’ve ever seen in Clapham Common is a Canada goose, which I believe is classified as a pest, along with grey squirrels.

  The water is surrounded by concrete. There’s a paved lip from which parents with toddlers persevere in throwing stale bread, even though they must know it will choke and constipate any delicate-stomached ducks that might stop here en route to more glamorous locations. I’m not sure what the alternative is to feeding them bread. You’re supposed to give hedgehogs dog food, but I can’t see it working for wildfowl. Perhaps sunflower seeds, or perhaps, as the notice in the pond advises, you should leave them alone.

  As far as romantic locations go, I’ve seen better. Swirls of greenish goose shit decorate the concrete surround of the pond. Ugly fish breed in the black water. Crayfish whose parents were plucked from a tank in an upmarket restaurant and released into a downmarket freedom here, where there is little else to do except feed and multiply, sit on the mud and open their mouths to let the plankton trickle in, oblivious to the sexual charge in the nearby cruising area.

  The unfaithful husband and his boyfriend strode towards the ponds. Intrigued, I stood behind a tree and watched as they crouched at the water’s edge. The foliage that hid me masked their activity but the urgency of their movements was unmistakable, so I moved closer. They were removing crayfish to return them to restaurants in the West End at market price. They worked quickly, stacking them in baskets in a dark blue van parked on the public road that runs through the Common along the edge of the pond. They need a permit to do this, and they didn’t have one, which is why they met in secret. The husband washed the traces of pond and crustacea from his body at his friend’s house before he went home to his wife so she wouldn’t know the shameful things he’d been doing to make ends meet.

  As I was new to the detective game I found the story quite touching, and I didn’t charge the wife for the time I spent following him, although she insisted I take the £7.99 it cost to get the photos developed. I still keep a picture of a crayfish in my wallet as a reminder that not everything is what it seems.

  Chapter Two: Taron & Jeff

  The day I get the call that changes my life is a Thursday. Four or five years have passed since I followed the man with the crayfish. I walk down to the office to pick up my cheque and catch up on my paperwork. It’s April, the beginning of spring, with the watery sunshine and blue skies that make you look forward to summer. I’m not wearing a coat so I feel light and happy.

  I pass our postman, who is psychic. He often comments on letters he’s delivering. ‘Good news,’ he’ll say, popping something through someone else’s letterbox. I haven’t had the opportunity to test whether his predictions are accurate, as he’s never talked to me about my post. It’s possible the only reason he knows it’s good news is because he’s delivering those letters from Reader’s Digest which tell you on the outside of the envelope that you’ve won twenty-five thousand pounds. Even so, meeting him in the mornings always cheers me up. He ambles along, smoking a fag and stopping to talk to everyone he meets.

  A postwoman in America was sacked recently for walking too slowly on her round. Her supervisor followed her and the letter of dismissal complained, “Your lead foot was never more than one inch in front of the other.’ Our postman doesn’t even pick his feet up off the ground, so he’d never keep his job if he was working on the other side of the Atlantic. His uniform doesn’t fit properly, or else he’s customized it subtly, the way schoolchildren do, so that you know they’re individuals underneath their regulation clothes. I wonder whether it’s against the rules for him to smoke while on duty. It doesn’t make much difference, as he’s already in trouble for taking too much time off for the headaches caused by psychic phenomena. He has no post for me today as most of it goes to the agency these days, but he smiles as he passes me.

  Ahead of me as I walk, a flash of sunlight on metal catches my eyes. An old woman is bending over a drain cover on the pavement, flipping coins through the grille and making wishes as the coins tumble towards the water below her.

  The office is on the first floor of a red brick building, above a parade of shops. I cross over the road at the lights to get to it and look in through Woolworth’s floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows as I walk past. I like the wide range of ordinary, comforting things they sell there: Pontefract cakes, coloured thread, gardening implements, Tupperware containers.

  The call is from Taron, a dippy club chick I know vaguely who wants me to do some research. She used to run a club I went to sometimes in search of my lost youth after my marriage went down the pit. I gave her my phone number once when she admired the shoes I was wearing. It was an inappropriate response but the only one I could conjure at the time because the music was too loud to speak or think. Her saucer eyes were an indication that she was high and any attempt at conversation would be meaningless, anyway. She pointed with a finger tipped with pale tangerine varnish. ‘Great shoes, where’d you get ‘em?’ and I, flattered by this endorsement from the Queen of Clubs, gave her a business card with my phone number (Alison Wonderland, I wrote on it) and my enigmatic ten-candle smile. One hundred candles glowed back.

  I’m less surprised that she wants my help now than that she’s managed to keep my number for so long.

  ‘I need some information. Can you help me get it?’

  ‘OK.’ I’m opening my post but I have a pen and pad ready for the information she gives me over the phone.

  ‘I need some statistics about which part of the country babies are abandoned most often, what time of year, and where to find them—outside hospitals or police stations or under hedges or in phone boxes.’

  ‘Oh, OK. Yes, of course.’ I crumple the envelopes and the flyers I’ve opened and shove them into the bin under my desk; then I move the phone receiver into my left hand and hold it against my left ear so that I can make some notes. Mad cow, I write.

  I talk over her proposal with Mrs. Fitzgerald, who says I should take the case and charge twenty-five pounds per hour for the research. I like Mrs. Fitzgerald; I respect her. She has a reassuring presence. When I asked her for a job after I left my husband she told me to think it over for a few weeks.

  ‘Take as long as you need to get things straight,’ she said. ‘Then if you’re still interested, come and see me and I’ll take you on as an investigator.’ She spoke gravely, looking me carefully in the eyes to be sure I would understand that she was offering a professional opp
ortunity.

  ‘You’ve been to university,’ she said. ‘You could be valuable to the agency when it comes to doing research.’

  I didn’t really need time to think it over but I stayed away from the agency for a couple of weeks so that Mrs. Fitzgerald would know I respected her advice and would think I was giving the situation some consideration.

  She hired me and sent me out with a woman called Linda who showed me the ropes. There are three or four other women working full-time for the agency, but I don’t see much of them. Mrs. Fitzgerald is my focus and my muse. She gives me my assignments and writes my salary cheques at the end of the month, holding a Parker pen delicately between her plump fingers, the polished tips of her fingers and thumb close to the nib as she writes my name. The good quality, heavy gold rings on her two smallest fingers catch my eye as she spreads her smooth hands slightly to put pressure on the cheque as she tears it from her book. We smile at each other as she passes it to me across the desk. I’ve always thought I’m lucky to have found her.