Alison Wonderland

by Helen Smith

  ‘I’ll call you back.’

  Chapter Twenty: Sheep Dip

  I find that I’m very shocked. I think of every lovely thing Jeff has ever said to me, every innocent conversation, and I find a twisted meaning. He’s a shadowy agent working with the other side. Then I remember his poetry and his inventions and I know it’s a load of nonsense, so I ring him.

  ‘Jeff,’ I say, ‘how are you?’

  ‘Ali. Did you hear that thousands of Britain’s only native freshwater crayfish have been killed in a river near you? The water was full of Cypermethrin. It’s used in sheep dip. Half the river’s population of crayfish have been wiped out. That’s a lot of sheep dip.’

  ‘Jeff, never mind all that now. Have you ever heard of someone called Major Flower?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I put the phone down. I can feel something squeezing my heart, and my face crumples as if I’m going to cry. I’ll quite enjoy this but before I give in to the emotion I think I’d better clear things up with Jeff.

  ‘Jeff,’ I say, phoning him again. ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘With the advert, do you mean?’

  ‘No, no. What have you been doing with Flower? What are you up to?’

  ‘He pays me for information about you.’

  ‘But are you mad? What do you tell him for?’

  ‘I don’t particularly ever tell him the truth. I just say, for example, “She’s gone to Nottingham,” and he gives me ten pounds.’

  ‘But I’ve never been to Nottingham.’

  ‘Exactly. I told him you’d been to Ireland and he gave me twenty pounds. Perhaps I score more highly if I mention somewhere abroad.’

  ‘You mad fucking, fucking bastard. I don’t know who to trust.’

  ‘You can trust me.’

  I try a different tack. ‘How’s the garden?’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘You mad fucking bastard.’

  ‘Ali, come home soon.’

  I tell Taron about the betrayal thing and she says Jeff isn’t mad at all, and if they would pay her twenty pounds she’d tell them all about me.

  ‘That isn’t the point. He paints. He writes me poetry. He loves me.’

  ‘I love you, too.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake.’

  Taron’s been reading up on the local attractions in one of those thin tourist office publications that you can pick up in hotels. She wants us to go for a cream tea before we get back to London, which is OK. Then she gets another cranky idea I’m less inclined to fall in with.

  ‘It says here that women who have been trying for a baby without success have found a cure in a village near here called Cerne Abbas.’

  ‘Taron.’ Is she taking the piss?

  ‘They climb this hill in the middle of the night because there’s what they call “chalk drawing of a man with a disproportionately large club-like penis” carved into the side of the hill. The woman sits on its cock and when she comes down she gets pregnant. Some couples even do it while they’re up there on the hill.’

  ‘Ugh,’ we say, in unison.

  ‘Taron, this is a fertility thing, it’s got nothing to do with finding a baby.’

  ‘It might help. You can get a cream tea round the corner in a place with a wishing well. We could try that, too.’

  ‘No.’

  Chapter Twenty-One: Dick’s Girlfriend

  Dick, defender of the world’s defenceless, is feeling miserable and trapped. It’s possible that giving Mrs. Fitzgerald the news about Alison’s neighbour has brought on this mood in him. It’s difficult enough finding friends in this world. Dick has fairly simple pleasures but he knows the importance of finding someone to share them. He has a girlfriend who wears a mohair sweater and kohl pencil round her eyes that smudges almost as soon as she turns away from the mirror. They like watching Rugrats on TV on Saturday mornings while he does the washing with an eco-friendly powder that doesn’t shift the dirt very effectively.

  For a long time, Dick didn’t tell his parents that he’d stopped believing in Father Christmas. They went to so much trouble leaving sherry next to the chimney, with a plate of dog food for the reindeer, and he could see how disappointed they would be if they had to give up the deception. Having borne this kind of responsibility from an early age, it would be difficult to alter his behaviour, to become reckless. He’d like to go and grow coffee in Central America in a plantation where the workers are not exploited. He’d like to connect with the world in a more meaningful way. If Mrs. Fitzgerald called him to arms and asked him to dig up sugar beet or swarm naked over advertising agency offices, he’d like to think he’d accept the challenge. Perhaps one of the reasons he cherishes his friendship with Mrs. Fitzgerald is because he knows she’s a very steady person and she will never call him to arms.

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Spiders

  Clive Fitzgerald is crouching in a dusty basement with the spiders, trying to get some peace. In some cultures, the spider is seen as a female and revered as a creator. Clive thinks of spiders as females but he doesn’t revere them. He dislikes their silence, the way they appear suddenly beside him on spindly legs. He draws his fingers through the strands of intricate webs stretched across corners of the basement he shares with the creatures, breaking them so the spiders spin them anew between his visits.

  Clive is honing the skills he’ll need for his new scheme to generate additional income. He has decided to become a graphologist, and he advertises for clients in the local paper. It’s important that he does this out of sight of his sister. Even in middle age she watches him and judges him. Her interest emasculates him. He was born clever. He was the one the family watched as he performed ably at school, winning the schoolboy war with logarithms and Latin while his sister plodded behind. His parents thought it sufficient that she had a face pretty enough to marry a solicitor. All her life she has continued to plod, inching her way along life’s path, learning a little more each day. Now here she is, running a business born out of the research she undertook for her husband’s clients. Clive offered to contact him when he died but his sister refused, saying there was no question she had for him in death that she couldn’t have asked when he was alive.

  Clive was born clever but he lost the advantage along the way. His character is suited to being feted by servile staff in an expensive office, but he has no career so it’s out of the question. Instead he’s reduced to crouching in a spidery basement, studying the loops and serifs on people’s writing.

  ‘My dear young lady,’ he writes to a respondent from the local newspaper, ‘I’m afraid you cannot trust the person whose writing sample you have sent to me. He is a very complex person who is hiding a secret.’ Clive pauses, running out of inspiration. He does not set out to deceive his clients. It is reasonable to assume that each of us has at least one secret. No young lady should trust a man she knows so little that she contacts a stranger for information about his character.

  Above him, Clive hears doors slamming. How he hates to work in an environment full of women, they are always slamming doors. Don’t they know if you slam doors you risk trapping ghosts between the door and the frame and they won’t return? Clive puts down his papers and books and goes to investigate.

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Hotting Up

  Bird has just returned from some pretty tough on-site negotiations with Emphglott, reviewing their security procedures and taking a look at the work their scientists are engaged in. They certainly have more at stake than mutant vegetables. The scientists’ work is pioneering, but they claim it meets all the standards and guidelines laid down by the ethics committees, more than can be said for the Lester woman. She all but dissolved when he unzipped his trousers and unfurled his manhood. Her behaviour confirmed his view that there’s no place for women in the armed forces and explains why they shouldn’t be taken seriously in business. Women are at a disadvantage if they have their mouths full at the negotiating table.

  Bird is alarmed at the turn of events when he
learns, no credit to Flower’s enquiries, that Alison is in Weymouth. It appears she might really be on to something, just as the situation has destabilized, with the scientists unable to breed from the beast they’ve created and the keeper losing sight of the business objectives. With her address book littered with runes identifying desecrated genetic test sites, like badges of battle honours against the names on the pages, it seems that Alison may even be planning to sabotage Emphglott’s premises. If that happens, Bird’s lucrative contracts for protecting his client will be terminated and his reputation will be in tatters. Investigations on the names from the address book have so far yielded nothing, with most of the activists having ventured no further than Rimini or Ibiza and no proven link with the destruction of the sugar beets in Ireland. Nevertheless, Bird will persevere until he finds the links he’s sure exist.

  ‘Flower? Alison Temple is in Weymouth. Things are hotting up for us. You’ve been talking to the neighbours. Who’s the most important person in her life, would you say?’

  The most important person in Flower’s life is his wife, but Alison doesn’t have one so Flower has to think carefully for a few moments before he answers. ‘I think it’s her neighbour.’

  ‘Hasn’t he been supplying us with information about her?’

  ‘Yes, but it doesn’t check out. He’s been trying to protect her. I think he’s in love with her.’

  ‘OK, let me think about this. We can probably use it somehow. I’d like to find a way to make sure Alison loses interest in my client’s research.’

  Jeff, like Bird, is thinking about Alison, although with more affection. He has watered her garden conscientiously every evening, waiting until the sun is too weak to draw the moisture back out of the earth, until there is too little heat for the droplets of water collected on the plants to intensify it like a magnifying glass and burn the leaves.

  Tonight, in an esoteric departure from Alison’s instructions for the care of the garden, he bunches hyacinth bulbs in heart shapes in the borders under the apple tree so their fragrant blue flowers will surprise her in December. He scoops little pockets of earth from the lawn and pushes crocus bulbs among the grass. The delicate maroon petals smudged with paler speckles will spell a message that Alison will see from her bedroom window as the bulbs start to push through the ground. He crouches over the task, a brown paper bag of bulbs beside him. I LOVE, he writes with the bulbs, before his floral graffiti is interrupted by Bird’s men. Who do you love? Alison will wonder, still worrying about the patent office girl when all this is over and winter comes.

  Mrs. Fitzgerald maintains a lonely vigil at her desk. She has stopped working briefly, as she does every day, to listen to the news on the radio as she has her lunch. One item in particular catches her attention. A small group of naked protesters has scaled the building of an internationally acclaimed advertising agency in London to draw attention to its campaign for a company involved in growing and selling transgenic vegetables.

  As Mrs. Fitzgerald listens to the report, the crispbread and cottage cheese lie half eaten and half forgotten on her plate. She thinks of the protesters, naked and unashamed, standing triumphantly on top of the building. The unadorned beauty of the men, and the women, too, she supposes, as shocking as if Adam and Eve had broken through the thin fabric that separates the innocence of paradise before the fall and the sophisticated world. Mrs. Fitzgerald imagines the bemused expressions of the agency’s creative teams, their embroidered braces straining as they stick their heads out of the window and look upwards to see what all the noise and fuss is about. She doesn’t know that braces were a 1980s style accessory and advertising people mostly wear plain black T-shirts these days.

  Unable to stem the flow of fanciful thoughts, Mrs. Fitzgerald imagines herself and Dick taking their place among the young people in their futile, heroic campaign on the roof. Her face flushes slightly as she pictures herself dizzy on top of the low building, breathing heavily with the effort of climbing. Police sirens sound in the distance, but the protesters are ready to leave quietly. Their work is done. The world’s press, flashlights popping, has gathered below them, uncomprehending of their motives but knowing their audacity and the absurdity of the story will make good copy. Mrs. Fitzgerald and Dick, arms locked together, the fingers of their two hands entwined to make one fist raised in triumphant salute, stand shoulder to shoulder with the scruffy, mud-daubed idealists whose causes they have secretly championed for so long.

  Mrs. Fitzgerald wrenches her thoughts back to her office, her desk, her ordered, sensible life. Her mouth is dry. She licks her lips and clamps them shut. No, no, no, she thinks. This will never do. Her battles against such visions leave her tired and feeling old. She walks into the kitchenette to throw away the uneaten portion of her lunch and rinse her plate. The sun shines at such an angle at this time of day that it reflects directly on the water in the sink drainer, making the surrounding white plastic plumbing glow a rich golden colour. It looks as if an angel is lodged in the pipework, its halo sprouting up into the sink.

  Bird is rowing Miss Lester on the Thames, his oars dipping silently in the water. It’s a dark night but there’s plenty of moonlight. Bird is silent, his face set grimly. Miss Lester is keening in a melodramatic way.

  Miss Lester finds the scientists she works with so wishy-washy. Like her heroine, Mrs. Thatcher, Miss Lester has a scathing disregard for intellectuals and consequently is unpopular with her staff at work who are hoping she will fail and be dismissed. Miss Lester is an intelligent fool, educated but with no sense. She’s attracted to Bird, with his physical strength and manly bearing, and this morning she fled to London in the hope that he would succour her. As far as Bird is concerned, this isn’t the deal at all.

  It all goes horribly wrong when Bird returns to his riverside London apartment for post-theatre drinks with his wife, who is usually out of town during the week, and a couple of close family friends. Miss Lester has seductively hidden herself in his bedroom wearing a nightdress (at least she’s not naked, thank God for small mercies) and he has had to guide her down the fire escape to the wooden rowing boat he moors there and uses occasionally to shuttle between home and offices in secrecy. Excusing himself from the cosy drinks gathering with a story about national security, Bird finds himself rowing the insufficiently clothed Miss Lester to his offices near Waterloo where he can find her temporary accommodation. At this time of night, the only place he can think of to find clothes for her is from the Salvation Army hostel in Vauxhall, which will be embarrassing. A man with his social standing doesn’t want to walk into a doss house and beg for spare items of men’s clothing. There is no alternative as, with moments to spare before his wife and friends discovered traces of his unsuitable lover, he had to throw the bundle of Miss Lester’s clothes out of the bedroom window where they fell into the Thames like a shapeless suicide.

  The disgrace appears to have sent Miss Lester mad. She’d like to be thinking of the Lady of Shalott but instead she thinks of Gaffer in Our Mutual Friend as she’s transported in ignominy along the Thames. The boat passes under the Albert Bridge, its four turrets, with spires on top, just capacious enough for each one to contain a fairy princess, so long as she never lies down but remains standing up or sitting.

  The boat arrives at the padlocked, disused Festival Gardens pier at Battersea Park, and Miss Lester stares at the Peace Pagoda as Bird rests for a few minutes. The name of the pier is painted in faded maroon ink, as if the writing were rusty. From far away, the iron structure of the pier looks as if it’s made of wood, like breakers in the sea. The water in the Thames is choppy. Miss Lester clings to the pier and vomits discreetly, her salty tears mingling with the hot, peppery liquid spilling into the river.

  Chapter Twenty-Four: The Giant

  Taron is really keen for us to visit the Cerne Abbas giant. She says we have to try all the different ways of getting luck and this is one of them. ‘If we call out to the Universe, it will send us what we want,’ she says. I w
onder if the Universe will send her some sense if she asks for it. There’s no point me asking for any; I threw it all out the window with the first sip of strawberry daiquiri when I met up with Taron in Brixton.

  I agree to go along on condition that we stick to some simple rules. As I don’t want to get pregnant and neither does Taron, I insist that we don’t actually sit on or near the chalk penis. The only acceptable course of action is to hover near it and make a wish to find a baby. It’s not that I believe in this mumbo-jumbo, but on the other hand I don’t want to take any chances.

  We wait until after midnight to reduce the chances of surprising an infertile couple doing it on the hill. We set off in the chilly summer night with the usual provisions of sweets and crisps and a torch. We’re distracted from our preparations for a while by instructions printed on the crisp packets. The manufacturer makes suggestions about social occasions where we might like to enjoy our crisps—‘with family and friends in front of TV, on a picnic, in the rain, on a sunny day or just as a Friday night treat.’ It seems they’re trying to cover all options, as if by excluding something, a crisp eater would fear hidden danger (‘What about as a midweek lunchtime snack?’ ‘If it’s not on the packet, it’s too risky to try’). We’re surprised they don’t mention ‘as a substitute for proper food’ but we forgive them for not mentioning our special set of circumstances tonight, as we feel that a visit to a symbol of fertility to pray to find a baby is an unusual crisp-eating occasion.

  When we arrive, the car park is deserted except for a Land Rover hitched to a horsebox. Both appear to be empty. The Cerne Abbas giant is a fairly crudely executed picture. As we climb, we can pick out the image on the hill because it’s a moonlit night and the drawing is marked in chalk. To one side of the giant, our eyes are caught by another patch of white.