Alison Wonderland

by Helen Smith

  The next song that plays on the CD player in the car is ‘You’ll Never Know’ by Hi Gloss. We join in, surer of the chorus than the verse—but still investing the words with meaning as we sing along.

  Taron and I don’t like the pincushion liquorice allsorts sweets with the aniseed jelly in them, so we leave them in the bottom of the packet. We like the coloured sandwich ones and the plain liquorice. The round orange or pink coconut wheels with liquorice in the middle are very pretty but they’re not our favourites. ‘How hungry would you have to be before you ate one of the bobbly jelly ones?’ asks Taron.

  ‘I don’t think they’re supposed to satisfy hunger.’

  ‘Well, how desperate to eat something sweet?’

  ‘It’d have to be in the middle of the night somewhere on a stakeout.’

  ‘Like in a marsh in a makeshift hide watching ducks?’

  ‘I was thinking more about being in a car and watching a suspect.’

  ‘I’d eat them for a dare.’

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘Go on what?’

  ‘I dare you to eat one.’

  Taron nibbles at the tiny, crunchy blue bobbles on the outside of the sweet and then sucks at the jelly, drawing out the agony as if she’s performing a supremely difficult and heroic task. She hands me a pink one and I chew it a few times and then swallow it. They’re not too bad, actually.

  We open the Wagon Wheels and eat some. They taste slightly metallic, with a gritty texture. The imagery on the packaging is reminiscent of the seventies when it was cool to be a cowboy. Wagon Wheels, large, round and roughly hewn, as you would expect from the name, are misaligned biscuits coated with milk chocolate, sandwiching a marshmallow filling. I’m glad the manufacturer didn’t fall into the trap of introducing jam into the product. Whenever I go to the supermarket, I find it impossible to resist the offer of a pack of fifteen individually wrapped Wagon Wheels for the price of twelve. I feel a tremendous empathy for the product. I’d like to meet the women in the factory who make the things. I feel as strongly about Jaffa Cakes. We eat them next. I like the elegant mix of dark chocolate and gelatinous marmalade, but also I eat them because the Jaffa Cake is the Robin Hood of the snack world, outwitting the tax man by using a potential product defect—the not-crisp base—to fight in the courts against classification as a biscuit, avoiding VAT and triumphing on behalf of the Jaffa Cake–buying public.

  ‘Jeff and I read in the papers the other day about a rare eating disorder. The sufferer becomes obsessed by fine foods following damage to the front of the brain,’ I tell Taron.

  ‘We’re safe, then,’ she replies, unwrapping another Wagon Wheel.

  As we get closer to Weymouth we drive through villages with thatched houses, past farms with homemade signs advertising duck eggs or honey or manure for sale. We smile and read the signs to each other. There are unmanned roadside stalls selling strawberries on an honour system, where you leave the money in a box. ‘What happens if you don’t pay?’ asks Taron.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  We rumble behind tractors on narrow roads as straw-haired youths with Walkmans, kings of the road, lead a Pied Piper trail of saloon cars and caravans between dual carriageways. Taron and I don’t care about slowing our pace. We’re on holiday. It’s Hi Gloss again: ‘You’ll Never Know.’

  Have we only brought one CD with us?

  We’re surprised to find ourselves suddenly enter a military zone. Two huge tanks with cannons are coming towards us, driven by youths wearing DJ earphones to protect their ears. The only time I’ve seen scenes like this is in the publicity shots from the eighties when Mrs. Thatcher was allowed to drive a tank in a field. A camouflaged lorry is behind us, catching up fast. Mild panic seizes me. Is the danger bigger than I realized? Has the British army been sent after us? The lorry overtakes us; the tanks pass by on the other side of the road. We’re safe.

  ‘All the land around here belongs to the army,’ I remember, wanting to appear calm and rational in front of Taron, who is waving out of the window at the soldiers as if we’re spectators at a pageant. ‘There are so many unexploded shells near the firing ranges that you can’t walk anywhere and it’s been turned into a nature reserve.’

  ‘The military turning over the countryside to the wildlife. Cool.’

  ‘Well, not really. It sounds like post-rationalization to me. They stole the land and used it to practice for World War III, and now they’re saying it’s OK to keep it because of the animals.’

  ‘I wonder what animals they’ve got.’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought for a moment that those soldiers were after us.’ My voice is shaky with the absurd confession but Taron is unfazed.

  ‘You’re just stressed out. It’s good we’re getting away. I drove with a girlfriend once from Key West to Miami with half an ounce of coke in the car and we were stopped three times by the police for speeding. We were completely bombed because it’s real cocaine in America, not baby powder and laxatives like you get over here. We bought an ounce because we thought it was the smallest unit you could buy in America, not like here where you can get grammes because we’ve gone metric. An ounce is about twenty-five grammes, and we used up most of our spending money. You can get grammes, of course. If we hadn’t been so concerned about trying to look like we knew the score we could have found that out.

  ‘We danced until morning in some dodgy club, and because we’d bought more coke than we wanted it became this enormous problem in our minds. We only had three days left in America, which means we’d have to have taken seven grammes a day to get rid of it. We were carrying so much we kept worrying that the police would think we were dealers if they stopped us. The fear of being stopped began to press on us so much that we bundled straight into the car from the club and drove back to Miami and into the worst storm in years. The sky was black and the rain was so heavy that we only had twenty feet visibility. The other girl was driving, and she kept herself going with espresso and more hits of coke. She’d hidden most of it in a panel in the car, and she wouldn’t tell me where so I couldn’t incriminate myself if we were arrested. Then we began to think that the police were following us. My friend was so wired she drove as if the devil were behind us and we were stopped and fined three times for speeding. Every time we were stopped they must have radioed on to the next traffic cop over the next border. I thought we’d never get home.’

  ‘Do you think you were being followed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I had a friend once who took three purple ohms—have you ever had one?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They’re acid, but you could dance on them. He took three of them and was so off his head that he had to get out of the club he was in. He took a taxi, directing it on a wild goose chase, ‘right here, left there’, that eventually got them back to his house. He could see so many bright lights that he thought he was being followed by a police helicopter and he thought he was on News at Ten.’

  ‘What were the lights?’

  ‘Nothing. Just headlights, lampposts. He was off his head.’

  When we get to Weymouth we decide to check into the grandest hotel in town, which is on the seafront and isn’t very grand at all. I leave Taron watching MTV so I can go and take a look at the place Project Brown Dog is so suspicious about. There’s no point involving her as she’s not political at all and has no interest in current affairs. She thought a spin doctor was a new name for a club DJ and the allusion was all about ‘spinning the wheels of steel’ until I put her right.

  ‘Have you got the map?’ I ask. ‘Or is it in the car?’

  ‘Do you mean the road map or the mental map?’

  ‘What’s a mental map?’

  ‘It’s like a wish list, but it’s an actual picture of something you want to happen.’

  ‘I mean the road map.’

  ‘It’s in the car. Do you want to see my mental map?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The mental map is like a
primary school art project. She has made a collage by gluing a photo of herself, a photo of me and a picture of a baby cut from a magazine onto an A4 sheet of paper. We’re floating together in a disembodied group, superimposed on a view of Weymouth’s seaside taken from a tourist leaflet.

  ‘Is this like those Athena Starwoman spells? I’ve seen one of her books, and every spell begins, ‘First take a bath, or a shower.’ I thought it was maybe a tricky way of getting teenage girls to wash more often.’

  ‘This isn’t magic, it’s just using the power of the mind. You visualize something and make it happen. If you believe, you’re halfway to making it real.’

  I go to the car, consult the road map then drive away from the coast for about five or six miles, heading for the buildings that used to house scientists making weapons to be used with nuclear submarines. The roads are crazy in this part of the country. There’s a roundabout every couple of miles, as if the road planners aren’t happy at the prospect of anyone getting from A to B in a straight line (‘none of your fancy London ways round here’). I reach my destination, dizzily, at the third roundabout.

  There are no streetlights, the roads are deserted. I doubt the buildings have been abandoned; they’re still very well protected. The offices, laboratories and what appears to be a block of stables on the land are surrounded by fences at least ten feet tall, with spirals of barbed wire on top of them. There is no way I can breach even such low-tech security.

  I’m resigned to making an inconclusive report suggesting that although the security indicates the buildings are still in use, I can offer no evidence about who’s using them or why. Then my eye is caught by a faint glow at a ground-floor window in one of the office blocks. I take out my night-sight telescope and peer very hard into the window.

  I can see a man naked from the waist down, his penis hanging like a long thin worm from his body. A woman moves into view and tugs at it with her mouth, like a chick hungry for a meal. It is my first sight of our enemy, Bird. I take the opportunity to photograph the only feature of his that strikes me as being birdlike, or having any connection to birds, which of course is his penis. The woman with him is his client, Miss Lester, director of services at Emphglott. It’s a relief that Mrs. Fitzgerald runs our agency along traditional lines, accepting only money in payment of fees.

  Chapter Sixteen: The Gypsy & The Club

  We go for a walk along the beach before breakfast. The sea is grey. So is the sky. So is Taron, groggy and miserable because she’s up so early. Taron collects pebbles and smooth pieces of glass she finds on the beach.

  ‘Why are you collecting the glass?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s glass in our world but in the shadow world it corresponds to diamonds.’

  ‘Right.’

  Weymouth without the sunshine is depressing. The town echoes as we make our way through it back to the hotel. Flags hang from the lamp posts; unlit fairy lights string along the promenade past the clock tower. The town is decked out like a party before anyone arrives, in that sensitive hour when you wonder whether anyone will turn up. We wander past the delivery entrance of Marks & Spencer, the narrow souvenir shops with jaunty striped awnings selling ice creams and shells. The smell of fresh bread is arresting as we pass a baker’s shop—the smell the only thing that seems alive in the town. We drift to a halt and peer in the window at the nutty brown loaves, the bloomers, the split tins, cobs and cream cakes. Not a ciabatta in sight. The loaf smell makes me feel a yearning; if only we could attach the smell to Jeff’s advert, we would hit all the senses except touch. As we turn away and make for the hotel, I feel desolate and out of place. It’s a feeling like homesickness.

  We don’t really have a plan for the day. I don’t feel like doing anything. I’m tired after the drive yesterday and snooping on Bird. After breakfast I go to my room and call Jeff.

  ‘How are you getting on with the advert?’

  ‘I’m giving up on it. We watch adverts on TV, Ali, and we critique them but we never buy the products. I’m not sure if advertising works.’

  ‘Well, what else, then? Why don’t you try inventing carton flaps that work?’

  ‘Contrary to what people believe, there’s no call for a new design of carton flaps, or at any rate no money in it and no glory in reinventing something. You need to invent something people didn’t know they needed. The only way to be sure of hitting the mark is to invent something useless, like virtual pets. You have to invent the need for it at the same time as you invent the product.’

  ‘Isn’t that the point of advertising—making people think they need a product they don’t need?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so, but in that case it would have to be product-specific, so I’d still have to abandon the idea of making one ad for lots of products.’

  ‘So what’s next?’

  ‘I’d like to create a clock that measures time in the same way people do. So it would speed up for boring things like school or work but give you long weekends and stretch the moments between sleeping and waking so you can have longer in bed. A biorhythmic clock.’

  ‘But wouldn’t everyone be on different times? Wouldn’t it be really confusing?’

  ‘Yes. You’d have to have a credit and debit account since people would want to gain and lose time in different ways so that you couldn’t cheat the system. Maybe it would be better to gain time by finding a way of translating the experience of moving west. Capturing the nature of westness.’

  ‘Like travelling on a plane?’

  ‘Yes. But is it the physical journey that matters? To all intents and purposes you just sit in the same place without moving, although of course the aeroplane is moving. The most important thing is that when you get to the new place you agree with the local people that x equals local time.’

  ‘So maybe it isn’t important to translate the experience of travelling west or east?’

  ‘Maybe the important issue is the concept of local time. If two or more people agree on the time then that is the time. Local human time couldn’t vary too greatly from real time, and we’d have to use the sun as a guide, of course. Luckily the elliptical nature of the sun’s course around the earth means that we accept variations between the winter and the summer performance of the sun. It would be fairly easy for people to grasp the concept of local human time.’

  I wonder if Jeff is stoned. He once said he gets a lot of his inspiration when he’s done drugs. I’ve got to hand it to him, most people’s approach to time management is to suggest people make lists and be more organized. His is more creative.

  I’m still thinking about Jeff when Mrs. Fitzgerald calls me. ‘Do you know where your mobile phone is?’ she asks me.

  ‘Taron’s got it. Hers was stolen in The Raid.’

  ‘No, she hasn’t. A man’s just called me to say he’s picked it up on the sand.’

  Taron had the phone with her in her bag. It must have fallen as we walked on the beach, the thud as it hit the sand too soft to be within our range of hearing. The man used the first number stored on my phone and got connected to Mrs. Fitzgerald. He gave her his address and we’ll have to visit him to collect the phone before we start looking for babies. I don’t tell Mrs. Fitzgerald about my visit to the Project Brown Dog premises because I want to wait until I have something significant to report. I know Bird is involved in some way but there’s no point in me telling Mrs. Fitzgerald that; she’s the one who told me about it in the first place.

  I ring Taron in her room and tell her about the phone. ‘I can’t think how it happened,’ I say. ‘Perhaps someone came up behind us and sprayed us with gas, like a Batman villain, and removed the phone from you as we stood frozen on the beach. There’s no other explanation.’

  ‘Oh, Alison. Don’t be mean. He could be a good contact.’

  ‘A contact?’

  ‘Or he might fancy you. Perhaps it’s fate. He could end up being your boyfriend.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He might make a nice boyfriend for you.’ Ther
e’s no point pretending you don’t hear what she’s said when Taron is being disagreeable, because she just repeats it for you more clearly.

  As it turns out, he’s a posh, grey-haired, married man with children who lives in a house that used to belong to George III’s mistress, connected by a once-secret tunnel to the hotel in town where the king used to stay. The man and I don’t fancy each other, although he’s keen to tell us about the tunnel before returning my phone. He’s flattered by our interest in the tunnel (‘How romantic,’ we coo) and offers us a Welsh cake from a Tupperware container. The Welsh cakes are dry, flat little scones with fruit in them. I take one but Taron smiles coyly at him in the smug ‘No, I couldn’t’ way thin people do when they have just been troughing hotel porridge with prunes.

  We take the car and drive to the maternity hospital, which is in a quiet road off the seafront. We don’t really talk about what we’re doing here, but I suppose we hope that someone will walk through the hospital swing doors with a baby they don’t want anymore and hand it to us through the car window.

  Taron puts The Chimes’ ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ on the CD player but I ignore the provocation.

  ‘I like pregnant women,’ says Taron as we watch them come and go. ‘They’re so rounded but they’re really vulnerable. Look how slowly they’re walking, as if they’re worried about falling over.’

  Some of them press on the lower part of their belly, as if they’re holding the baby in. ‘It must be heavy,’ I say. ‘It must be uncomfortable going around like that all day.’ The women don’t look serene, but they all have a similar brave expression on their faces. There aren’t many men around. Those that do come along look like the proverbial spare prick at the wedding.

  I take out my list of recently abandoned babies: