Alison Wonderland

by Helen Smith

  ‘Why didn’t they use anaesthetic? Or why didn’t they just get dogs that were already injured? There are loads of them on Animal Hospital.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Evidently, I have said the right thing. ‘Do you know the significance of the code name Brown Dog?’ My silence indicates that I do not, but I’m reluctant to admit it and spoil the mood of mutual understanding I have created with the Animal Hospital quip.

  ‘The Brown Dog died at the hands of vivisectionists in University College in 1903. He’d been subjected to experiments for two months, handed from one vivisectionist to another. His treatment caused public outrage. There’s a statue commemorating him at the edge of a shady path in Battersea Park. I’d like to think we’ve learned our lessons from 1903 and moved on so that we treat animals ethically, with dignity and respect, but I know it doesn’t happen.’

  She slaps a last photo onto the desk, a picture of a pinched-faced woman in her forties. ‘Miss Lester, director of services at Emphglott. My client would like to know what Miss Lester is up to in some supposedly abandoned government buildings in the West Country, and so would I, Alison.’

  I have never seen Mrs. Fitzgerald so impassioned. Well, whatever floats her boat. It’s interesting when you find out what someone cares about. I stare at her for a bit until she catches me, then I look away.

  Chapter Five: Covent Garden

  Clive is sulking because Mrs. Fitzgerald has asked him to pop out and buy some stationery. He travels all the way into the West End, as if there are no pens and paper to be had in Brixton. He’s exasperated by the lack of respect he gets at the agency and is on a mission to get it elsewhere, which usually means anywhere you part with a great deal of money, like a betting shop or indeed any kind of shop in Covent Garden. He goes into Jigsaw in Floral Street to buy a zippered cardigan, attracted by the firm fishermen’s knit stitches and suede trim of the garment in the window display.

  The shop assistant notices he appears to be seeking advice about the cardigan from someone as he walks out of the changing cubicle to check his reflection. The two men are alone in the shop as it’s still early morning. ‘What do you think?’ says Clive, pulling the hem of the cardigan down at the back, adjusting the line so it sits well on his shoulders. He’s startled by the murmured, half-hearted flattery from the young assistant, whose advice he had not been seeking. The assistant couldn’t know that Clive brings invisible companions from the spirit world to provide critical advice and support on shopping expeditions. Sometimes they help out by switching the price tags, but Clive doesn’t think it’s appropriate on this occasion. The cardigan is such a handsome item of clothing that the price seems justified. ‘I’ll take it,’ he says. The assistant takes some tissue paper and a paper bag from under the counter and begins to wrap. His features arrange into an expression that could be read as pure concentration, or as respect.

  Chapter Six: Dick, Flower & Bird

  Dick Masters sits at his desk with his clippings, pasting another story into the scrapbook. It is quite a laborious process because newspaper cuttings discolour and fade after a while, so the trick is to take a photocopy and paste that in, discarding the newspaper original. Dick supposes there is an irony in this process and experiments with inventing or converting aphorisms to suit the task. Discard before discolour, he tries, as he dabs at the paper with Copydex. He doesn’t really like that one. He’s never understood why anyone would choose death before dishonour. The preservation of human life is paramount. He formulates another.

  Out with the old, in with the news, he thinks, as the newspaper, leaf-like, drifts from his fingers to the bin. The work is boring, but Dick finds he can absorb himself in it if he runs a mental commentary. This is to make up for the office banter he imagines would surround him if he worked with other people all day.

  Dick is collecting evidence about the madness and evil orchestrated by the world of commerce. He pays attention to minor infractions of civil liberty as well as the terrible injustices inflicted on the poor and the disenfranchised. When he reads about people being poisoned, choked, starved, experimented on and stopped too often for driving a fancy car, he puts the story in his scrapbook. When he reads in the newspapers that convicted drunk drivers are being targeted in a direct mail campaign by businesses offering tailored services that fit their crime (cabs home from the pub and DIY breathalysers), he makes the connection that someone in the justice system has sold a list to someone in business, and he cuts the story from the newspaper. It feels amateurish and painstaking but it gives him a picture of what is happening in the world. Dick sees conspiracy wherever he looks. He believes that someone, somewhere is in charge of the bad things in the world. If he can find them and stop them, he will make everything all right. But even wicked people are stumbling around just trying to get along. They aren’t involved in an interdependent network. If you cut one of them down, another will come along.

  Most people think only of beauty when buying a bunch of flowers. Dick worries about the chemicals used in flower production in Colombia which cause miscarriages and premature birth. Most people think they’ve got a bargain when they buy a cheap T-shirt. Dick worries about the children missing school to operate the looms. Having a social conscience is quite burdensome and it doesn’t leave Dick much time for a social life, even though he’d like one.

  Dick cares about civil liberty and human rights violations around the world, the misuse of political power and intrusion on privacy. For fundraising purposes, he spends a lot of time researching the mistreatment of animals. His organization relies on donations and subscriptions to newsletters to run its operation and animals pull in a lot of money.

  Dick has a large, round head with short hair. He looks like a Kewpie doll, although he doesn’t know this. He is intelligent enough to get a job that would earn him good money, but too clever to want one. The organization he has joined has very few operatives, so he outsources a lot of their work. The surveillance work is handled by Mrs. Fitzgerald’s female detective agency in Brixton.

  A teenager has given birth to a baby at a high school dance in America, put the body in a rubbish bin, then returned to the dance floor. The first anyone knows of the incident, according to the newspaper report, is the next day when a cleaner empties the bins. Dick is less interested in the question that appears to be troubling the reporter—whether the baby lived for a while after being born—than what was in the baby-mother’s mind as she painfully delivered the enormous, bloody thing. Dead or alive, what difference does it make now? And what did the cleaner think, doing a nasty job, mopping up the teenage vomit, the smouldered roaches from the joints smoked in the toilets, the splashes of piss from careless boys? Dick imagines the cleaner has been thinking that nothing could be worse than cleaning the detritus after young people have been having fun. Then the arresting experience of something unfamiliarly heavy among the paper towels in the bin—something lifeless and gory like the bag of giblets when you’re making an effort for Sunday dinner. What made the cleaner investigate rather than incinerate? Perhaps the faintest hope that it could be something nice in there, heavy in the bin. Dick does not collect this story; it sheds no light on the murky corners of the world he is researching.

  For Dick, the world of commerce is a place in which people subsume their personalities to an organization in return for money, an organization that makes them work too many hours a day and sends them on ‘personal development’ courses to reengineer their personalities. Dick doesn’t know that people quite enjoy living like this, having their goals written and evaluated for them by someone else, attuning the rhythm of their lives to commercial banking hours rather than daylight and night-time, summer and autumn.

  Dick would like to free them from the comfort of their daily routine, their guaranteed income, their pleasant, light offices and their flowering and failing office romances. He’d like to throw open all the windows of the offices in London so their inhabitants can fly away and be free. He’d push them from the crowded windowsills.
‘Be free’ (splat), ‘be free’ (thud, splat). He doesn’t see they don’t have wings. Only the more junior members of such organizations would be spared, the ignominious ground floor desks and windowless offices proving to be their salvation. Even so, even though he is obsessive and misguided, Dick has a point. There are companies who collect and exchange information about their staff and use it to make decisions about hiring or promoting them. They set up help lines and monitor them; they install nurses in their buildings and analyse their employees’ urine. Agencies provide the companies with information about the parking tickets their staff have collected, petitions they’ve signed, who they slept with as a student, who their wife sleeps with.

  A bright chap of around thirty-five, married with two children and a house in Surrey, might find an agency has sent a confidential report to a headhunter suggesting he is ‘an unstable homosexual with left-wing sympathies and links to animal rights groups’ because he went to a public school where it was not unusual for a boy to have a fling with another boy to take the edge off teen angst, because his wife has the Guardian delivered, because his children signed a petition at the Body Shop on a family trip hunting for antiques in Brighton. Companies often pay to find out more when they read ‘unstable’, it’s a teaser. The report-writers have justified it on this occasion because the bright chap had a poem published when he was at university and he has just applied for a very large mortgage.

  Dick’s activities are focused on damage-limitation, spoiler tactics and fact-finding. He is playing a dangerous game because of the money involved. Mrs. Fitzgerald is playing with him. Soon Alison will play, too.

  Dick picks up the phone to call Mrs. Fitzgerald. As a capable woman who is his ally in the fight against evil, Dick finds it reassuring to call her every now and then and hear her measured voice, her careful words. He would not find it helpful to know that as he rings, Mrs. Fitzgerald in her office in Brixton fears that she is being claimed by madness. Struck increasingly by fanciful thoughts, she cannot ask other people if they have the same experiences in case they, too, draw the conclusion that she is mad. Instead, she works hard at appearing controlled, considered, fair, sane.

  ‘Mrs. Fitzgerald?’ Dick is really surprised at how pleased he is to be speaking aloud to someone. He feels suddenly very lonely. Mrs. Fitzgerald is a great strength, his comrade-in-arms.

  ‘Dick.’ The sound of the phone ringing has arrested Ella’s fingers where they gently stroked the desk. Dick, she’d like to say, do you sometimes feel a heightened sense of self-consciousness to the extent that everything else seems unreal? Would you say that if you are part of a world that is unreal that you must be unreal? Do you sometimes feel that you are gripped by madness?

  ‘Dick,’ she says warmly, ‘I’m glad you called. I’ve just finished briefing Alison. She’s fully on board with Brown Dog.’

  Dick and Mrs. Fitzgerald are currently monitoring the activities of business intelligence agencies with names like Control Inter and LimitForce One that seem to have flowed from the pens of Thunderbirds script-writers and that have been designed to appeal to men who drive fast cars. They are fronted by two well-connected men who used to be in the army called Major Flower and Major General Bird and populated by shady former Metropolitan policemen who are not prepared to reveal their names.

  Major Flower likes to think he is in charge at Control Inter, but he has been hired because his title looks cute on company literature and because he is good-looking in an Ivanhoe kind of a way. He is also irrepressibly cheerful and enthusiastic about everything, so he is very popular with customers and personnel, especially the younger ones. Major Flower may not be in charge, but he earns lots of money. He has quite a bit of free time during the day, so every Friday he spends some of his enormous salary on a present for his wife and goes home early to take it to her.

  Major General Bird is in charge of his outfit, there is no doubt about that. He has a patrician nose and a stern demeanour. People sometimes say his nose is like a beak, but this is only because of his name. If the BBC commissioned another TV series about a grumpy, maverick police inspector, ran out of actors, and asked respected television news presenter Jeremy Paxman to play the lead, then the overall impression would be something like the one given by Major General Bird.

  He thinks he is a decent man, but in his career he has learned that you cannot trust the enemy; that you must strike first to be sure of winning; that there are nasty, hidden rooms under the Thames where a fine line is drawn between interrogation and torture. In this job, Bird thinks of Dick, Mrs. Fitzgerald and Alison as the enemy, and therefore if he were to hear they’d been sprayed with rubber bullets as they walked in Battersea Park one day, Bird would not have the crisis of conscience to be expected from the real Jeremy Paxman. Bird has a lot of international experience. When he was working as an adviser to the government in Indonesia, he introduced the idea of using snakes for crowd control and to obtain confessions from suspects.

  Flower and Bird’s organizations are information-intensive. This means they need lots of information to do their job properly. They collect it from a variety of sources and use poorly paid records clerks to record and sort it. While the main source of their income is information gathering, in some circumstances they are also hired to protect commercially sensitive information or assess the risk of it being leaked to someone like Dick.

  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, encourages its members to contribute the details of their family trees to a centralized list. It is a fundamental tenet of their faith that those who didn’t have the opportunity to join the church while alive can earn its blessings by proxy, through the efforts of living relatives, while they wait in the afterlife. The list is a very useful resource for genealogists. Business intelligence agencies have a similar resource that documents the living, and if hell existed it might be a very useful first stopping point for interested parties from the fires of the underworld on a recruitment drive in the UK. This database lists all the criminals and their misdemeanours, all political activists, people who ring premium rate numbers for advice about sexually transmitted diseases, and people who write to newspapers.

  ‘Are you against racism? Would you like to sign a petition?’ Tall young men with good teeth and Socialist Worker badges pester people on the streets as they bump their shopping on their thighs on busy Saturdays before Christmas. These are usually amateurs working for organizations like Bird’s and Flower’s. They might even be Bird’s children, making themselves useful in a gap year before university. The petitions are not intended for influential MPs; they are sent straight to a central location for entry onto a database. The young people work on a piecework basis without much supervision, paid a few pence for each name they submit, so they sometimes employ underhand techniques more usually associated with high-pressure salesmen. They place adverts in newspapers and magazines: ‘Have you ever done something illegal? Do you have a story to tell? Call researcher in confidence.’ They run ‘whistle-blower’ phone lines and hack into advice lines to produce lists of ‘undesirables.’ One enterprising individual sent his younger siblings out onto his local estate with a sponsored swim form, and when they returned with the lists of names and addresses, he submitted those, too.

  This amateur information-gathering sideline is quite separate from the lucrative intelligence work done by skilled professionals. Professionals target suspicious individuals, watch them, search their homes, intimidate their families if necessary, then provide detailed reports on their status. They operate in cells, working independently from each other on a ‘need-to-know’ basis to minimize leaks and crises of conscience from employees.

  The custodians of the lists of names submitted by the amateurs and forwarded to the professionals are the records clerks, working in ill-paid isolation from other members of their organizations. For security reasons, they do not have access to sensitive information or the ability to interpret the data. Only the man at the top ever needs to know everyth
ing.

  Bird and Flower share information with each other sometimes. They have access to similar networks and buy secrets from the same people. Dick knows what they’re doing, and they know all about him. It can be a claustrophobic environment where lives criss-cross and business intrudes on family. Bird’s sister-in-law knows a girl who got drunk at a party and slept with Flower a long time ago, before he married his wife. Dick’s girlfriend went to school with Bird’s receptionist.

  Bird, his eyes on the photo of his muscular Boxer dog leaping to catch a Frisbee, picks up the phone to talk to Flower. Bird is an animal lover but finds it easy enough to square this with his work for Emphglott. After all, he only loves his own dog, not every mangy mutt in the world. He isn’t Rolf Harris, crying on Animal Hospital.

  As he listens to the hypnotic ringing tone of the phone, his eyes unfocus slightly and move from the Boxer dog to a crystal trophy in his glass-fronted cabinet. Two supplicating hands cup a carved flame. The trophy is usually only awarded to prize-winning dogs in the championship sponsored annually by Emphglott, but Bird was presented with a reproduction by an Emphglott executive who spotted the photo in Bird’s office. The picture is conspicuous because it doesn’t compete for desk space with photos of Bird’s wife or children. ‘The images of their faces are emblazoned on my heart; I don’t need pictures,’ he explains patiently to anyone who comments on the absence of family photos in his office. Most people are too shy to ask.

  ‘Flower, I need you to be on the alert for me. There are saboteurs who are attacking vegetable patches around the world. They’re dangerous terrorists and their vandalism is escalating. They’re very well organized. We know they have a list of targets. I’d like to get my hands on the list.’