Alison Wonderland

by Helen Smith

  ‘That’s one point six millimetres an hour,’ comments Jeff. He’s smiling. He reminds me of the picture of Jesus in my bedroom, except that his teeth are crooked so he looks roguish when he smiles. Jesus isn’t smiling; he’s looking enigmatic and gentle as you would expect from a man who will soon die for the sins of the world. The other difference is that Jeff doesn’t have a beard. Jeff and the Jesus in the picture are probably about the same age, which is twenty-nine years old. Another connection is that they both have a mission to save the world, although Jesus had more potential for disappointment (‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’) as the scale of his project was more ambitious.

  ‘Jeff, what else are you working on?’ I ask, to underline the difference between the two men in my own mind.

  ‘I thought I might try adapting a time-controlled cat feeder to help people on diets or giving up smoking spliff so the lid pops open at intervals to reveal a Mars bar, or a ready-rolled spliff.’

  ‘I think whoever invented the coating for Peanut M&M’s must feel very proud. They never melt, even when you eat them in the summer. I remember when I was really little I used to leave Smarties at the bottom of the garden for the fairies, and the colours would smudge and fade in the rain.’

  ‘They have blue ones now.’

  ‘I know.’

  Chapter Three: The Agency

  Ella Fitzgerald sits at her desk with her hands folded on a buff-coloured file marked ‘Project Brown Dog’, considering its contents. She breathes evenly, and her plump, smooth hands are still, her handsome features composed. Momentarily distracted from Project Brown Dog, Mrs. Fitzgerald wonders whether you are supposed to be able to feel something when you’re thinking.

  She’s aware of a distinct tingling sensation when she concentrates. She’s able to pinpoint a physical process starting simultaneously at either side of her head just at her temples, corresponding to the place where the muscles attach to her jaw and which she can feel moving when she clenches her back teeth together or when she practices the teeth sucking noise of disrespect that black people make. When she focuses and thinks hard, Mrs. Fitzgerald reflects, the sensation seems to move from the sides to a central position high in her head.

  She’s outwardly at ease with herself, which is why young, troubled women like Alison find her presence reassuring. Mrs. Fitzgerald has the appearance of being able to deal with any matter, domestic or business, with equanimity. There is no Mr. Fitzgerald. A solicitor who specialized in representing the underdog, he died prematurely, leaving his young wife with a small office in Brixton and a network of left-wing contacts in the investigative world. Mrs. Fitzgerald never remarried. She has carefully audited her life and found she has no requirement for a husband.

  The office is warm, perhaps a little stuffy. The light isn’t quite right; the windows are small and nearer the ceiling than the floor, so the sunlight entering the room leaves dark corners and shadows that aren’t corrected by turning on the overhead light. Ella moves her right hand across the file on her desk, then moves her right hand across the top of her left, recording the difference between touching something and simultaneously touching and being touched. There is a difference, she notes, between the sensation of touching in each case, apparently caused by the distracting messages that being touched sends to the brain. A more scientific way of approaching the problem would be to compare the sensation of touching her own hand and touching someone else’s hand. It is important to compare like with like in such cases, but the opportunity does not present itself to Mrs. Fitzgerald in her office, and her professional relationship with Alison does not permit her to approach her with the problem in the next room.

  Project Brown Dog is an operation for which Mrs. Fitzgerald has taken personal responsibility. ‘You can be assured of my personal attention,’ she told the client, ‘as chief investigator.’

  Alison’s imminent involvement is part of her strategy. Alison looked with interest at the folder on her desk when Mrs. Fitzgerald permitted her hands to flutter from its surface so that Alison could read its title. The ‘Top Secret’ stamp in the corner is an uncharacteristically frivolous indulgence. It is important that Alison should want to work on the project with her, that she respect the client’s need for total confidentiality. Initially the work will be routine, but Mrs. Fitzgerald suspects that Alison will be flattered enough by the invitation to work with her, and her enthusiasm will carry them even if things get nasty. And they could get nasty.

  Mrs. Fitzgerald’s brother Clive haunts the office on days when he can find nothing else to distract him. He monopolizes the phone and spends too long in the toilet, disturbing the comfortable, female environment. Linda, whispering just within earshot, explains him to newcomers as ‘Creepy Clive.’

  There are copies of Vogue, Elle, Cosmo and Marie Claire in the reception. Mrs. Fitzgerald knows she could pick up a copy of Cosmo and read ten ways to tell if your lover is cheating, ten ways to improve your sex life, ten ways towards a new winter wardrobe, but never ten ways to tell if you are mad. Mrs. Fitzgerald secretly fears that she’s being claimed by madness, as her brother is. For the moment, she’s troubled by nothing more than fanciful thoughts, but she has taken a number of measures to avoid the next stage. She does not mention Clive’s aberrations to anyone else; she even seems to fail to notice them. People wonder if the usually perceptive Mrs. Fitzgerald is blind to her brother’s faults. Even if they hint that Clive is a little strange, she gives no sign that she has noticed. She believes that the way to combat her own descent into the void is to deny that her brother has any problems, as if something is only real if you believe in it.

  It is fairly well documented that when schizophrenics hear voices they commonly describe hearing a middle-aged male BBC presenter. A less well-known fact is that mental patients often mistook Princess Diana for Moors murderess Myra Hindley when she visited them, which upset her. Clive’s world is crowded with ancient, wise ethnic minorities that no one else can see. This does not mean he’s disturbed, although Mrs. Fitzgerald finds it peculiar.

  Ella picks up the phone to call her brother, then reconsiders and places the receiver in the cradle. At this time of day he likes to commune with the spirit world from a church in Marylebone Road. He practised for many months before he was able to make meaningful contact with lost souls from the other side and was delighted when he eventually succeeded. ‘Pick a card,’ Clive said to Mrs. Fitzgerald one day, surprising her by brandishing a pack of playing cards in her office. ‘Pick a card,’ he insisted. He explained that he would be able to guess the card she held in her hand because a dead Red Indian was standing behind her and looking over her shoulder. Native American, Ella thought. If he’s there, he’ll prefer to be called a Native American. Clive got the card right.

  These days Clive keeps his new friends to himself, although occasionally Ella glances up and catches him looking intently off to one side, as if at some invisible presence. She suspects he’s just doing it for show, to draw attention to himself. He always had difficulty making and keeping friends. Why should the dead be any different? If they are contactable, why would they waste their time playing card tricks with Clive when they could be brokering world peace with presidents?

  Clive is a clever man but highly strung. He doesn’t seem interested in work and Mrs. Fitzgerald isn’t sure how he manages for money although he claims to have an income from investing in the stock market, and he bets on horses when he gets a tip from the spirit world. She hopes he’s luckier with that than he is with scratch cards. If she leaves him alone in the office, she often returns to little grey piles of dust on her desk where he’s frantically uncovered the unmatching boxes with a coin before discarding the cards in her wastepaper bin. If I had a pound for every one of those, Mrs. Fitzgerald thinks grimly.

  His family believed Clive was destined for greatness when he transcended his ordinary background to go to Cambridge, but he spent his time with other highly strung young men who cultivated rather than discour
aged his madness, and when he failed his foreign office entry exams he never really recovered. The young men who whispered nonsense together in 1960 have faded into middle age and are scattered across the continents in important jobs with the foreign office and the military, although Clive still hears from them and they still whisper together because Mrs. Fitzgerald catches him on the phone to them sometimes. If she knew the identity of the men he conspires with, she’d be very distressed.

  Mrs. Fitzgerald runs her fingers over the warm wood of her desk and thinks about giving up the agency and moving away from Clive and his ghosts. If I could live anywhere, she thinks, I would like to live in Torquay and grow palm trees. Palm trees might disappoint her with their slow rate of growth in genteel Torquay, the spiky foliage raising skywards almost imperceptibly year after year. She grows camellias, a magnolia, begonias, roses and fuchsias in her garden in Brixton, favouring fragrant or showy, fragile blossoms. She loves her garden. Late at night, when there is something troubling her in her mind, when the spirit world is awake and most of London is asleep, Mrs. Fitzgerald has occasionally seen a fox walking on the lawn in the moonlight. The fox, like Mrs. Fitzgerald, has adapted to urban living and is usually on its way to scavenge for the remains of a Marks & Spencer ready meal in her dustbin.

  Mrs. Fitzgerald has read somewhere that if you have fox or badger mess in your garden, then the only way to stop them using the garden as a lavatory is to deposit the faeces from a larger predator there. This she took to mean that you should defecate in your own garden to stop other creatures leaving their filth. It is not something she has ever been tempted to try. She has also read that if you plant lilies in your garden it will stop ghosts walking there. Red lilies, yellow lilies, white lilies, orange lilies shine their fiery full-of-life colours in her borders from July to September. If the charm works, her garden should be free of ghosts in the summer.

  Chapter Four: Infidelity

  I have a couple of cases on at the moment. A woman says her cat has been stolen by neighbours and tells me she’s seen it staring with what she calls a plaintive expression from their upstairs window. I’ve also got some infidelity investigations going.

  When I take a case where the man is having an affair, I always visit the wife in her home. What does she want from the investigation? If the case corresponds to an executive affair pattern—and it usually does—the wife only wants a risk assessment. There are always wifely photos of her in an Alice band at the side of a tallish man in a suit. When we meet, her hair is usually several shades darker than in the photo, her face thinner and slightly drawn, but she’s still dressed as if for a day at the office. We talk about how difficult it is bringing up three children under five years old. She’s usually buckling under the strain of the last one. She’s struggling with finding space for the car seats for three babies, with three different kinds of meals to prepare (plus something for him when he gets home), different sleeping patterns for the children, little sleep for herself. We talk, casually, about the difficulty of finding time for romance. The wife rarely cares, frankly, if he is shagging someone. It may even be a relief. A few more guilt presents, a little less physical bother at the weekends. If he’s no longer interested in fiddling about with her, it’s OK now to stick the baby in bed with them to keep it quiet.

  The wife wants to know, what’s the girlfriend like? Is she common, available, dispensable? Or is she a younger blonde with an Alice band? Does she make him happy or is she after his upmarket sperm and an expensive house to breed it in? Will he stay or go? I don’t mean that the wife doesn’t love him. She does, usually. She’s had to make some concessions, though. He might work long hours and bring more work home with him. Perhaps he travels abroad every month, or every week. He’s losing his hair or getting a bit fatter. Of course she loves him. It’s like buying something you like very much in the shops, an antique dresser or a very pretty necklace, but once you’ve got it home the shopkeeper keeps coming round and saying, ‘Actually, I know I said it was a hundred and twenty pounds, but I’ve decided I’d rather have a hundred and thirty pounds. Can you give me another ten pounds?’ And then another ten pounds and another ten pounds. So when you first find your husband, it’s OK that he works long hours; it seems that his love is worth the price of seeing him sometime after nine o’clock at night. But then someone takes his weekends, his hair, his sense of humour. Now there is a knock at the door and someone else wants to take away the sex, or make you share it with them. The wife loves him, the puny man in the suit, even though he’s not worthy of her. She only hopes he has found someone who is ordinary and common to suck his cock, rather than a soft-looking blonde in an Alice band whose womb is twitching because she’s pushing thirty. They forget that he has aged as much as they have, that he’s lucky to get anyone to do it with him, no matter what their hair-style. But then I’m forgetting that men often get lucky. I forget that I’m pushing thirty and would probably fuck their husband if he fancied me, even though I know it’s a sin to sleep with a married man.

  In different cases I meet later versions of the same women. They’re still paying their ten pounds for something that has long since lost its value. It is the same concept as women on council estates who buy from catalogues and are still paying twenty-two pence a week for something they bought so long ago that it is broken or has been nicked. By now they are paying the metaphorical ten pounds for the children. The children do hard drugs and smuggle them. Sometimes they demonstrate the contempt for women they’ve learned from their mothers by beating their wives.

  My investigations often involve going undercover in the company where the husband works. I get quite a lot of work through personal recommendation so I explain to the wife that on no account should she discuss my methods with her friends or family. One day they may need me to help, and how can they do that if they’ve told their husband how I work?

  One growth area in our industry is vetting neighbours for potential house buyers now that the housing market is supposedly picking up again. Over the past seven years there have been seventeen suicides and murders in Britain because of noise disputes, so it’s not as crazy as it sounds.

  Mrs. Fitzgerald is heading up a surveillance and research operation code-named Project Brown Dog and she’s asked me to work with her on it. She’s being mysterious about it. We don’t usually have code names for the work we’re doing.

  ‘Women operatives in this industry have to prove themselves more than men,’ she tells me sternly. ‘Do you remember the McLibel case? The young woman investigator had an affair with the man she was watching. It was the same with Deborah Winger and Tom Berenger when she was supposed to be investigating racial-hate murders. The public’s perception is that women are weak and easily seduced. I’m proud that my organization is not seen like that.’

  I’m not sure where this preamble is leading us. Does she think I’m likely to have sex with one of the people we’re watching? Men hardly fall over themselves to get to me when I’m undercover. The whole point is to avoid drawing attention to myself. Sometimes as I walk to work early in the morning, men in vans make it clear that I only have to say the word and they’ll do it to me. But I don’t think that really counts as I’m never in the mood, and anyway I think they shout out to all the women they pass on their route. ‘Lovely tits,’ one of them shouted this morning. Or was it ‘Low tits’? When I thought about it I realized I didn’t care.

  ‘We have been assigned a very sensitive task,’ interrupts Mrs. Fitzgerald. ‘We have been asked to investigate some suspicious activity on the southwest coast. It may be nothing, but signs indicate that something unethical or illegal is happening. An old enemy of mine has been hired to put up a ring of misinformation around this activity and monitor security leaks. That usually means something pretty serious is going on.’

  ‘Your enemy?’ I picture Mrs. Fitzgerald duelling at a waterfall, like Sherlock Holmes with Moriarty.

  ‘Well, he’s not my enemy, technically. He’s an investigator like
us, although he calls his organization a business intelligence agency and traditionally accepts the kind of work I won’t touch, and so we find ourselves on opposing sides.’

  ‘Who’s hired us?’

  ‘I can’t tell you. If I told you, it might put you in danger. You need to know more about the kind of people we’re up against, though. Did you know there’s an agency that has earned around three million pounds taking photographs of the Newbury Bypass protesters and compiling dossiers of information about them?’

  Mrs. Fitzgerald’s ethics do not permit her to get involved in such malarkey. She would take money from the protesters if they had any, but of course they don’t. She takes a pile of labelled photographs of two men from the folder in front of her and peels them off one by one, slapping them face up in front of me on the desk as if she’s dealing tarot cards. ‘Flower,’ she says, ‘and Bird, my old adversary. Their services have been retained by Emphglott, a pharmaceutical company that specializes in vivisection and genetic manipulation in animals. They recently broke the legs of thirty-seven beagles without anaesthetic to test a new drug that’s supposed to heal broken bones.’