Alison Wonderland

by Helen Smith

  Bird inspects the sticky tape he pulls off Jeff’s wrists before balling it up and throwing it away. Some hairs have come away from the skin. He strikes Jeff very hard on the face with an open hand.

  ‘Now, tell me about Alison Temple.’

  In the background the phone rings, insistently.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Rescue

  I want to find Jeff and free him. Taron surprises me by coming up with a solution.

  ‘Have you met my friend Derek?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The one who drums for his masculinity?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He drums with all these different people. It’s a way of getting in touch with your energy. Derek drums for his masculinity but he knows a lot of people who drum for peace.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I used to know him from the clubs. He was a DJ. He told me about the Buddhist monks in Battersea Park. Have you heard the story?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘One hundred Buddhist monks drum for peace under the Peace Pagoda in Battersea Park in shifts, round the clock.’

  ‘I’ve never seen them.’

  ‘Exactly. They’re an urban myth, like the MI6 underground prisons, but I’ve seen them.’

  ‘Which, the monks or the prisons?’

  ‘I’ve seen both. You can get to them from the clubs in Vauxhall. Derek and I found them once. Everything’s linked. There are tunnels—disused sewers or maybe something to do with the Tube. It’s a maze.’

  ‘Taron.’ She’s astonishing. ‘Let’s go tonight.’

  I’m very keen to take action. Anything is better than doing nothing. I ring the agency and ask Creepy Clive to tell Mrs. Fitzgerald where we’re going; then we put on dark clothes and find a torch. In addition to the torch, we take pretty much the same things we take when we go anywhere, which is: chewing gum, toilet paper, keys, money, and cigarettes for Taron. I’ve stopped smoking since we found Phoebe. We’re going to take her with us as we don’t have a babysitter. We assign her a cover. Taron rings the club promoter and tells him I’m her girlfriend and we’ve adopted a baby and we want to get the adoption blessed by the monks as we’re Buddhist. The promoter tells us the monks don’t exist but agrees to let us into the club anyway, for old time’s sake. Perhaps our matching black outfits—even Phoebe wears dark colours—convince him that we’re lesbian Buddhists because he wishes us luck as we disappear into a passageway leading from the club’s storeroom.

  Phoebe is asleep, slung between Taron’s breasts in one of those baby carriers that are supposed to do your back in if you use them too much. As the door from the club closes behind us I feel frightened, and I want to turn back. We’re in total darkness and it’s quiet. It isn’t emptiness I’m afraid of. Darkness isn’t empty for me, it’s the opposite of emptiness. There are layers and layers of the darkness, and strange patterns of coloured lights give depth and texture to it. A room can be empty with the light on, but darkness fills the space, wrapping it up and making a place where the things you’re scared of can hide. I remember to turn on the torch, and that makes things better.

  Taron’s friend’s club isn’t open tonight but others are open nearby. As I adjust to our surroundings, I begin to hear music very faintly and I think I can even feel the vibrations of the bass. We edge forward.

  ‘Which way?’ I hiss to Taron. I’m leading because I’ve got the torch and she’s got the baby.

  ‘Just keep going. We turn right eventually. Follow the music,’ she says in an ordinary-loudness voice that makes me jump in the quiet.

  ‘Shhh, you’ll wake Phoebe,’ I say, annoyed. But it isn’t that, of course. I hate the way she seems to be taking this in her stride. We creep forward slowly. At first I’m bent over as if I’m afraid I’ll hit my head, but gradually I straighten out. The tunnel is quite high, at least ten feet, and maybe six feet wide. It’s dry and smells earthy and cold, no worse than a cellar. The torch sweeps over the brickwork as we walk. The music gets louder.

  ‘The music’s getting louder,’ I say to Taron.

  ‘If we take a wrong turn we’ll walk in on an S&M club,’ she giggles. ‘I think “Leather Sex” is running at the Dungeon tonight.’

  We carry on in the same direction but the music starts to fade. ‘Not long now,’ says Taron. We reach a tunnel dimly lit by electric light. ‘Here,’ she says, triumphantly, as we see three red doors in front of us.

  I try the handle of the first one, very slowly, knowing it’s unlikely to be open. Astonishingly, it is. The door opens onto a clean, functional toilet. The second door is locked. The third opens onto a small room. Jeff sits in it alone. He’s on a kitchen chair but he isn’t tied up. There’s a bruise on his cheek and a cut on his lip. He looks very tired. I rush forward and put my hands on his face and then wrap myself round him and squeeze him really hard. ‘What have they done to your face?’

  ‘They slapped me.’

  I take his hand and pull him after me. I should go first because I’ve got the torch, but I want to hold on to Jeff so we shuffle about, and I give Taron the torch and let her go first. She’s the one who knows the way, anyway.

  We walk for about twenty minutes before I realize we’re lost. I’ve been rubbing Jeff’s hand in what I hope is a comforting way. ‘Are you OK, baby?’ I whisper to him.

  ‘Yes,’ calls Taron, then stops suddenly so we all bunch up in the tunnel. ‘Except that I’m not sure where we are.’ She rubs Phoebe’s head and I rub Jeff’s hand, and we stand there. As usual, I could do with a wee. I should have used that toilet while I had a chance.

  ‘They knew you were coming,’ says Jeff.

  We press on. We can’t hear the music from the clubs anymore but there’s another, roaring sound. ‘Is that the Thames?’ I ask Taron.

  ‘I think it’s the monks.’

  There’s a glow in the tunnels ahead of us. The glow comes from a window. It’s more like a serving hatch than a window. It’s a hole without glass between this tunnel and another one. We stop and peer through. About twenty monks in saffron robes sit in a circle in a round room lit by candles. They are drumming. The sound is soothing, tidal. They are drumming in a measured, gentle way. There is none of the urgency of men who slap bongos on street corners. You can be fairly sure they are drumming for peace, not for their masculinity. Next time I feel stressed and I want to visualize a calm place, I’ll think of this.

  We keep walking. There’s a room with a huge TV so the monks can spend their time in here watching Home and Away between shifts. The room is empty now, presumably because it’s very late at night and there’s nothing to watch except Get Stuffed and the adverts for Chatline 0891 21 21 21. You have to be on drugs to watch that crap. Believe me. The last room is a kitchen. A photograph of a glamorous, very light-skinned Indian woman pinned to the notice board turns out to be Princess Margaret on closer inspection. There are loads of monks sitting around eating Pot Noodles and smoking fags. They don’t seem surprised to see us.

  ‘We’re lost,’ says Taron. A monk with glasses waves at us to follow him and points us in the direction of a staircase.

  We climb up and find ourselves back above ground level again in the girls’ toilets near the children’s zoo in Battersea Park.

  ‘So that’s how they get down there,’ says Taron. ‘I’ve been round and round that pagoda looking for a way in.’ We look over at the pagoda, built of Portland stone and Canadian fir in eleven months in 1985 by a team of monks and nuns from a Buddhist order. The four statues of Buddha facing north, south, east and west and the windbells in the octagonal roof corners are covered in gold leaf. It was the seventieth peace pagoda the order had built, and it was presented to the Greater London Council in 1986. I’m not surprised Taron is so interested in the pagoda. The frantic efforts of the monks and nuns to bring peace to the world by building pagodas all over the place reminds me of Taron’s one-woman world-luck-improvement programme.

  I cuddle Jeff and rub him all over energetically, as if I’m a
midwife and he has just been born. Taron lights a fag and we set off together for home, startling some albino Wallabies who skitter and stare through the fence at us as we pass the zoo. The peacocks hear us coming as we get to the car park and they shriek accusingly, as if we’ve come to pull out their tail feathers.

  I take Jeff home and make him some tea and run him a bath. I’m feeling very guilty. He was abducted because of me. He bore the brunt of the danger Taron and I were running away from. I should have taken him with me to Weymouth.

  ‘They knew you were coming,’ he said again. ‘They left me in the chair and told me you were coming to find me.’

  ‘They must have had a tip-off.’

  ‘I was all right, I was never in any danger. They just wanted to know whether you knew anything.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said it was unlikely because you’re not very good at your job.’

  ‘No. You didn’t? You don’t think I’m bad at my job, do you?’

  ‘No, I just told them that.’

  ‘Who was asking the questions?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was a middle-aged man with a big nose and a thin, drawn face.’

  ‘It could have been Bird. I wonder who told him we were coming to rescue you. The only people who knew were Mrs. Fitzgerald and the guy who owns the club.’

  Jeff looks very tired. ‘You were very brave,’ I say. ‘Were you frightened?’

  ‘Not really. He kept implying they were working for the government, and I kept thinking, This is England—they can’t do anything to me.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that. They’re always arresting black people and choking them to death.’

  ‘Thanks, that’s reassuring.’

  I put lots of foam in the bath and ten drops of an expensive mixture of lavender oil and hops to make him relax. I turn the central heating on and insist he keep the bathroom door open in case he’s in shock and slips beneath the foam, loses consciousness and drowns. When he emerges, pink and alive, I steer him into the kitchen to finish his tea while I take a quick shower myself.

  He looks vulnerable as he sits and waits for me at the kitchen table, wearing my dressing gown over his grey T-shirt and boxer shorts that I fetched from the airing cupboard in his basement. He stares at the pink rose I’ve brought in for him from my garden. He told me once that a rose with seven petals was the emblem for alchemists, the forefathers of modern inventors. I removed one of the petals from my rose in the interest of historical accuracy before presenting it to him.

  ‘Don’t go,’ I say as I step from the bathroom in my pyjamas. ‘Stay with me.’

  I’ll make him sleep with me in my bed and I’ll hold him in my arms and cuddle him, like Babes in the Wood. The sheets on my bed are fresh and clean because I’ve been sleeping at Taron’s. I light the candles in my bedroom, partly because it will be soothing, but also because I know the fuzzy light is flattering.

  His eyes are very dark and he sits obediently on the edge of the bed where I left him, like a child, watching me as I walk around the room putting the match to the candles. I give him a little shove over to the other side of the bed and pull the duvet around us. I’ll take care of him to make up for all the times I haven’t loved him enough. I prop myself on my left elbow and slip my right arm around his ribs and rest my hand near his shoulder blade. I touch my mouth to his face. ‘Baby,’ I whisper, as a prelude to stroking his hair.

  He rolls me onto my back, pinches my nipple, puts his tongue in my mouth, slides his hand over the silk pyjama fabric between my legs. You know the rest. It wasn’t what I had in mind at all. You can have sex with strangers or you can have sex with someone you love, but you should never have sex with your friends. It’s too intimate. I know that my face changes when I have sex; it gets softer, my mouth is squashy. I put the heel of my hand against my bottom lip and it is very soft, like a cushion. I try to bite my hand so I won’t make the sounds I make when I have sex, but he pulls my hand away. How can I read the newspaper to him and talk about inventions ever again when his body has been inside mine and I have called out his name in my bed? I say his name like a confession. His skin is very soft, his hair is damp at the back of his neck. Now I know what you look like when you make love, I think.

  ‘You’re lovely,’ I say.

  ‘I love you, too,’ he says, holding my hand as he falls asleep.

  Chapter Thirty: Phoebe’s Mother

  Taron, Phoebe and I are lying in Taron’s bedroom. Walls painted purple and red are hung with intensively embroidered cloths in threads of gold, orange, red, yellow, indigo, blue and black, stitched by Chinese or Indian hands, sought by Taron in imaginatively stocked shops in Covent Garden and side streets near Tottenham Court Road. Taron, Phoebe and I lie on the Emperor-sized waterbed, Phoebe in the middle, rippling on the gentle waves we make on the thermostatically controlled, non-saline sea that Taron has covered with a patchwork batik bedspread originally from Java. A vase near the bed is crammed with peacock feathers. The hippie womb-fest decor of the room makes me think Taron is over-compensating in case her own reproductive organs have been rendered useless by her lies and excessive use of drugs.

  She’s breathing very deeply, her eyes closed. Phoebe doesn’t stir. We’re here to try and conjure up a vision of Phoebe’s mother. Taron wants to know Phoebe’s real name and what her mother looks like. She claims to have thought of nothing else for a week. In pursuit of the vision of Phoebe’s mother, we rock in a watery lullaby on the monstrous bed, floating and bobbing with every slight movement made by one of us. It’s starting to get on my nerves.

  Then Taron is up and scrabbling about for the half-smoked spliff in the ashtray by the bed. ‘I think her mother’s about our age, very pale and pretty with brown eyes, and shadows under them where she’s tired from crying all the time. She lives in a tower near the seaside, in a lighthouse. Maybe she’s tired from staying awake all night to make sure the light’s working in the storms, to keep the passing ships from running onto the rocks.’

  Taron’s grasp of modern radar techniques and even of electricity seems hazy. What does she think illuminates the lighthouse—a stack of non-drip candles from the Conran Shop? Is Phoebe’s mother exhaustedly tending a swarm of fireflies imported (like almost everything in Taron’s room) from Bali?

  ‘Even though she lives in a tower, she’s got short, very dark hair. Her lover has to walk up the stairs when he wants to visit her, as she doesn’t have a plait for him to climb. During the day, she lies in her circular room on top of a bed with white embroidered sheets and lacy white pillows. Her bedside table is covered with white coral, conch shells and mother-of-pearl her lover has brought her. She’s too tired to get inside the sheets so she lies on top of them and rests—and anyway, the sunlight from the windows all round the room makes it too bright for her to sleep. There are tears on her face. Maybe she’s crying because she’s given away her baby, or maybe the sunlight is hurting her eyes. She has tiny red lines on her legs where the veins were damaged when she was pregnant, and silver scars on her stomach where the skin stretched. Having the baby made her very tired. She doesn’t eat enough fresh fruit because she lives in a tower above the sea and rarely goes out. Her eyes would sparkle if she had more vitamins, and she wouldn’t feel so tired.’ (This is a favourite theme of Taron’s.)

  ‘She works too hard keeping the light burning in the tower. She’s only really happy when her lover comes to visit her. His skin is very dark, and when she kisses him he tastes salty and smells of the sea. He always brings her a present when he visits.’ (Another favourite theme.) ‘She doesn’t know whether his eyes are green or blue because they change colour with the light. She thinks he’s a merman. His arms are very strong. He pulls himself up the tower’s stairs using the winding metal rail fixed into the wall because his legs are weak and hurt when he walks. He hasn’t come to see her since she had the baby. She wants to call his name, she wants to call the baby’s name…’

  ‘What name
?’ I ask, urgently. ‘Fuck’s sake, what’s she called?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Of course, this is just a story. ‘Well, what’s his name then?’

  ‘I don’t know, it would be a fish name but I can’t think of any fish names.’

  ‘So, is Phoebe a mermaid?’

  ‘Well, half a mermaid.’

  ‘What’s her mother’s name?’

  ‘I don’t know. A name to suit her elfin features. Elinor. I don’t think she’ll live very long. She hasn’t recovered from having the baby. Blood soaks the white sheets when she lies on them, and every day she removes the sheets and she washes them in seawater.’ Perhaps she, like me, was taught in home economics at school that cold, salty water is good for removing bloodstains. I could never see the use for the information unless you were a mass murderer or a butcher until I realized they were telling us so that we could launder the crotch of our knickers in case of accidental leakage during a particularly heavy period.

  ‘Phoebe’s mother washes her sheets in icy seawater and hangs them out to dry on poles sticking out from the windows that go all round the tower in every room. Then she lies down on her bed, freshly made with a spare set of white sheets, and haemorrhages and thinks of her lover and her child.’

  ‘Fucking hell, Taron.’ I thought the detail was off the mark, but the distress Phoebe’s mother was feeling is likely to be real enough. ‘Don’t you think we should try and find her and let her know that Phoebe’s safe?’

  ‘Well, maybe her mother isn’t really dying of a broken heart in a tower. Maybe her father isn’t even a merman. It’s just, when I think about Phoebe’s mother, that’s how I think of her.’

  Taron conceding that this garbled nonsense may be fantasy?

  ‘Yes, but whoever she is, she’s probably missing Phoebe. She’s more likely a young girl who was scared to tell her family, but she must wonder if Phoeb’s OK. She’ll probably spend the rest of her life wondering whatever happened to the baby. She might think she’d been washed out to sea and drowned.’