The Ministry of Love

by O'Mahony, Jason

  Julian’s assistant in the lab was a short, rotund and balding scientist named Barry Barry. Aside from having parents with either a lack of imagination or no sense of the ridiculous, Barry was to women what Cheryl Cole was to constitutional reform, with specific emphasis on the separation of powers between parliament and the executive. Two different worlds. Julian felt sorry for his aide particularly as Julian never had any difficulty with women — being a tall, blonde, slim (although slightly lanky) and handsome millionaire scientist who was rapidly becoming a national celebrity had an advantage. His personality, which was essentially kind and compassionate, seemed to activate an almost maternal feeling amongst potential girlfriends and so a string of beautiful partners paraded in and out of his office and lab. They never stayed on the scene for long as they realised that Julian, generous and wonderful and surprisingly skilled in the bedroom as he was (like everything else he did, he studied it and identified the optimum route to maximising female sexual pleasure and certainly applied it well) he was nevertheless married to his work, and was very unlikely to settle. They all parted amicably with him, remaining friends and still caring for him, smiling knowingly as the latest incumbent attempted fruitlessly to become Mrs. Julian Tredestrian.

  It was a Friday night when Julian decided to do something about Barry. It was the Tesco bag, leaning forlornly to one side under Barry’s desk, boasting a Chicken Korma and rice for one and a box set of season 18 of Last of the Summer Wine that triggered it. This, Julian decided, would not stand. He would direct his talents towards a solution for the loneliness of his friend.

  He was a realist. He knew that within the confines of the university it was highly improbable there was a budding supermodel wannabe with a soft side for folically challenged scientists with the physical attributes of a bag of spuds. But if she was there, he was going to find her or at least work backwards until he ran out of women with a pulse.

  Considering that both undergrads and postgrads were itching for an opportunity to put him on their CVs, he easily recruited a collection of statisticians, psychology students and computer scientists to start assembling the infrastructure to the idea. It was in devising this new project that Tredestrian not only found his dear friend a woman who would sleep with him without the exchange of a roll of used twenties, but in the process created a system for helping lonely people find their partners.

  The idea wasn’t new — as online dating had proved — but he wanted to go further than that by devising a system that actually identified not what people said they wanted but what they really wanted. There were, for example, plenty of men out there who would never admit to finding certain types of women attractive and yet would be quite happy if those women somehow ended up in their lives.

  Six months later, with thousands of student and local resident volunteers making up their test database, Barry Barry was dating a slightly plump but pretty librarian who lived with her aging mother and Julian Tredestrian was reviewing data which was telling him that this thing had serious potential.

  As a result, he’d been pleasantly surprised to get the call from Downing Street and had made his way up from Cambridge on the train although it had to be said he didn’t get that thrill people should get from saying, “Ten Downing Street, please” to taxi drivers. Not out of any nonchalant attitude but just out of the fact that he was so immersed in his thinking that a lot of other stuff didn’t register.

  The armed police all gave him the once over twice, after which he was greeted by a young, thin and curiously daintily dressed male civil servant who seemed to glide 5mm above the surface of the carpet who led him to the ante-room outside the Prime Minister’s study. In five minutes he was shown in. Fairfax, in an old-fashioned three-piece suit that looked like it had been slept in a few times, got up from his desk and welcomed him warmly.

  Julian liked the PM, although he seemed to be one of the few. Fairfax always struck him as been curiously unspun, the sort of man that voters always say they want just before they vote for the shallow media creation running against him. He could see from the tired face and eyelids valiantly battling gravity that this Prime Minister was feeling the pressure of his unpopularity.

  Fairfax, after dispatching a request for tea and a few of those nice biscuits that come in orange tinfoil, opened the discussion by mentioning his young aide’s reading of the article which he had now read himself.

  “Fascinating concept, young man, absolutely fascinating. A bit Orwellian, if you don’t mind me saying, and not normally the sort of wheeze you usually come across. Too many of my predecessors have been eager to have the government sticking its nose into the private lives of the citizenry, if you get my drift. But this thing did catch my eye I’ve got to admit. I’m being bombarded with statistics about loneliness. People desperately alone, just looking for the right lad or lass to come along, you know, someone to share a Marks and Spencers meal for two in front of a Morse re-run on the telly? So I thought I’d like to have a chat with the young fellow who thought it up.”

  Julian’s eyes lit up.

  “The National Love Database?” the young scientist gushed excitedly.

  “Is that your pet name for this? Well there’s a title assured to scare the crap out of the faint-hearted. Right, tell me Dr. Tredestrian, will this thing actually work?” the Prime Minister asked.

  Julian pulled his notes out of a scruffy leather bag. The notes were scruffy too, Fairfax noticed and he was nearly sure that was jam on a corner of one of the pages. The PM liked him already.

  “Prime Minister, finding a mate is like everything else. It’s all a question of variables; location, social class, availability, sexual orientation, solvency, cultural and ethnic compatibility, common interests and age. Dating agencies have known this for years and computers are allowing us to create more complex models allowing people to rate which variables are more important than others. Some people are willing to travel, some are willing to look outside their own age and income bracket. All this can be tailored in such a way to limit down the options to a number of suitable candidates. The truth is, sir, it’s amazing that, without this system, that anybody actually meets anybody. In fact, most people probably meet the wrong person.”

  “I’m sorry, what was that?” Fairfax asked, eyebrows bumping off the ceiling. Without noticing, he paused in mid dunk which had resulted in the chocolate from his biscuit melting into his tea and forming a greasy film on the milky liquid.

  “The odds of meeting the right person in a nightclub or a bar, or through friends, are actually quite slim. The selection pool is too small, and there are too many variables ignored. It’s all too random.”

  “And yet the human race somehow manages to survive,” the PM said.

  “That’s true. Mostly by settling. Most people marry the wrong person and just put up with it because it is, for the most part, better than being alone which terrifies people. But the reality is, Prime Minister, they will never have met the ideal candidate. We can now do that.”

  “We? Who is this we?”

  “The British government sir, although ideally it would make sense if the EU were to eventually get involved. Bigger selection pool, you see.”

  Fairfax had taken to fishing in his mug for the debris of his biscuit. He gave up forlornly.

  “Yes, I can just see the Daily Mail loving the idea of the EU regulating who gets their leg-over with who. Surely this isn’t government business, Dr. Tredestrian? Why not let the private sector just carry on doing what they’re doing?”

  “Because by continuing with the current system, we’re effectively corrupting the pool. The government, through the National Identity Database, can include the entire adult population while dating agencies only include a skewed segment of the population: the desperate and the coldly analytical people who are actively looking and who can afford to pay a fee. We can go after the lonely and the shy, the people who are more likely to need help with this.”

  The PM eased back in his seat, taking in the
eager young man.

  “The people who really need our help?”

  “Yes. You’ve mentioned the stats yourself, loneliness is a modern epidemic. We have millions of people living alone, ground down by media perceptions of the perfect life, living in what you could pretty much class as emotional despair.”

  “But come now, Doctor. Is it right for the government to be actually interfering in people’s love lives?”

  “I don’t propose that we meddle in the lives of anyone who doesn’t wish us to help them, sir. The whole scheme has to be voluntary, of course. As for whether it’s right, well, the government was once attacked for regulating as to whether children should work in coalmines. It was attacked for regulating quality of education. Then interfering in health provision to provide healthcare for all. But you know yourself it wasn’t interference, it was intervention — and now we look back and see that helping ordinary people in the workplace and schools and providing care for the elderly wasn’t inappropriate, it was civilization. This is no different. Government began to care about the physical health of its citizens, then their mental health. Is it really that crazy that government should now care about their emotional health? A large section of your people are desperately alone and unhappy. Now you could possibly do something about it.”

  “They’re not my people, Doctor Tredestrian. I’m not the president for life of North Korea. They are free citizens who I suspect will be pretty loathe at politicians interfering in their lives.”

  He paused, raising a hand to stop his own flow.

  “But, say we were to do this. Bring suitable people together. I can’t make them fall in love, Dr. Tredestrian. Can you?”

  Julian started rummaging through his bag again.

  “I think I can help you there too, Prime Minister.”

  • • •

  The police had closed off the street, and were struggling to keep various elements of the media in check. The forensics team, emblazoned with CSI: Leeds on their jackets had arrived earlier, and erected a tent around the body. One of the younger members of the team had identified the victim as Sammii.

  “I remember her. She was so deep,” he told his supervising officer.

  Chief Inspector Switzerland rolled his eyes at the young man’s observation. Switzerland, despite not yet being forty, was definitively old school when it came to investigation technique. Dates. Research. Facts. And none of your touchy-feely nonsense. He was also well versed in pretty much every joke and variation of joke about his surname. No, he was not cuckoo. Yes, he did work like clockwork. No (and most surreally) he did not engage in hiding stolen Nazi Gold. Among his younger officers, he was regarded as a bit odd because he read books that weren’t about celebrities and hardly had any photos in them at all. He bought them himself too, which was considered a bit rude. Weren’t books supposed to be bought as Christmas gifts?

  Switzerland asked what the young officer meant, which pretty much used up all the younger man’s available vocabulary.

  “She was just, you know, really deep. You know.”

  It amazed him that his younger officers, who were all very technically capable, had almost no sense of intellectual curiosity or grasp of tangibles. Everything was emotionally based. They formed opinions based on the visual and the emotional. Deep was not a place they visited often.

  The victim had been stabbed a number of times, and a note pinned to her bloodied sweater announced that she had been killed for disrespecting Allah and the Prophet Mohammed. The Chief Inspector frowned at this. It was quite chilly, and she was well covered, so it wasn’t her appearance.

  The junior officer, a sergeant named Thompson, returned.

  “Sir, I have the Imam from the mosque on Doyle Street. He said that these were distributed throughout the Muslim community three days ago.” He handed over three identically covered DVDs, all with black covers with ‘Muslims: Watch This’ printed in red.

  The CI put one of the DVDs in the laptop. It ran for five minutes, initially showing Sammii dressed in respectful Arabic attire before stripping off into some very disrespectful clothing, all the while badly reading off incredibly offensive anti-Muslim dialogue including a long monologue questioning the sexual preferences of the prophet.

  “Wow. She looked hot!” the young officer said. Switzerland shook his head.

  “Why would she have said all this? I wouldn’t have thought she would have been interested in this at all?”

  “She probably didn’t even know what she was saying, sir.”

  Switzerland’s temper flamed.

  “What? How could she not know? This stuff is on the news every night.”

  Thompson looked at his superior as if he were explaining something to a child.

  “Sir, she was a celebrity. Why would she need to watch the news?”

  CHAPTER 2

  ---

  SEBASTIAN SPENCE: POLITICIAN MOST VOTERS WOULD LIKE TO COVER IN M&S CHOCOLATE SAUCE, REVEALS POLL — Daily Express

  ---

  Steve, Davey, Lee and Rich all stepped into the lift together, subconsciously taking up the pose that Mr. Fletcher’s choreographer Eduardo had drilled into them.

  Steve, the clean-cut leader of the band, always stood to the right, head tilted. Lee, ‘the rebel’, which he was because Mr. Fletcher told him to be, slumped to the left, face in a sneer and with a thumb slipped into his waistband and subconsciously pointing at his crotch. Mr. Fletcher’s market research told him that the pose drove their target audience, 18 year-old gay men and 11 year-old girls, wild.

  Davey ‘the sensitive’ stood at the back, dressed slightly more conservatively then the others, his face at rest a picture of peaceful gentleness. The plan was that he would also be the gay one and end up marrying a Finnish giant named Jakob who resembled Dolph Lundgren when he was famous. Davey didn’t know he was gay because Mr. Fletcher hadn’t told him yet.

  Rich was ‘the spare one’, blandly good looking and ready to be moulded into one of the others if they got stroppy and did a Robbie. He was also the only one who was a classically trained singer, had a subscription to The Economist and knew where Tikrit was. Mr. Fletcher told him to keep his “fucking mouth shut”. BOYZMEAT didn’t need to have its image sullied by someone who read things.

  The lift shuddered to a halt. All four looked at each other.

  Rich impatiently jabbed at the floor button again. Nothing happened.

  A voice came over the intercom. It was English and well-bred.

  “Good morning, gentlemen. Now, you don’t know me, but I know you, and it seems that your little pop group is regarded as quite the social influencer with the young people. Role models, as the phrase goes. As it happens, I think that’s all a bit silly. But, there’s no denying, you do set a certain tone for what is acceptable. That got me thinking: Do they deserve it? Should the young people of our country be permitted to have their opinions influenced by these guys? After all, do they know anything?”

  They looked at each other. Rich stepped forward to speak into the microphone at the panel.

  Steve grabbed his arm.

  “Whaddya doing?” he whispered aggressively.

  “I was going to answer.”

  “Don’t be daft, this is a wind up. It’s a skit or summat. Don’t start going all posh!” Steve’s voice wasn’t in a suggestive tone. Rich felt the rise of irritation, not as much at Steve’s overbearing nature as much as the fact that everything which even hinted at a world outside of the Celebsphere was ‘posh’. To Steve, reading a book or a newspaper was ‘posh’. Watching the news was ‘posh’. Even eating sodding sushi was, in Steve’s micro-worldview, ‘posh’. Hell, so was the word Celebsphere. Rich would shake his head at his fellow bandmembers’ pride in ignorance about the wider world. It was almost Ministry of Truth Orwellian, except that that was all ‘posh’ too.

  The well-spoken voice came on again.

  “Alright, how about a little incentive. I have wired your lift with an explosive device, so you really sh
ould take this a bit seriously. Let’s start with an easy one. Who is the leader of the Labour Party?”

  Lee stepped in beside Steve, backing him up.

  “Don’t open your mouth, ya fucking ponce. You start showing our fans we know anything about all that politics an’ shit an’ they’ll drop us.” Rich rolled his eyes. If Steve was Jean-Paul Sartre, then intellectually Lee was a rotting badger corpse on the M2.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Rich hissed.

  Lee gripped Rich’s arm hard.

  “I’ll fuckin’ have you.”

  Rich wasn’t in the humour to fight. He wouldn’t even live to regret it.

  Steve struck his best pose, and stared up at the camera dome attached to the ceiling of the lift.

  “We’re don’t know any of that boring politics shite. No one cares about all that stuff.”

  Lee nodded in agreement, striking his best Fuck-The-System pose. This would look great on their fan site.

  The voice sighed.

  “I’ll tell you what. How about a song? You are singers, after all. Show me you are as talented singing live as you can in a micromanaged studio. What’s your latest hit? ‘Girl, I Was Only With Your Mum Coz’ I Love You’ How about that? BOYZMEAT Unplugged, as it were.”

  They looked at each other. It was Mr. Fletcher’s golden rule. Never, ever sing in public without the full support of the organisation. There’s a reason why it costs so much to produce a BOYZMEAT album, he said.

  Lee stared into the camera, sure that this was a piss-take. Some DJ wanting to getting footage of them making prats out of themselves.

  He flashed an extended finger at the camera, accompanied by a leering smile.

  “Wrong answer, boys.”

  The explosion was felt throughout the entire multimedia content building.

  • • •

  Triscuit placed the report on the table. He had received it after Dr. Tredestrian’s first visit to Downing Street and had read it if only to humour the Prime Minister. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t enough to do, as campaign director for the coalition, which involved keeping Labour and Lib Dem spokespeople away from each other’s throats (the Lib Dems had problems with policies in the manifesto, whereas the New Labour people were obsessed about the colour of the manifesto cover giving off a negative energy. They also felt the joint campaign headquarters had the wrong feng shui) at least until after polling day. The job had been likened to herding cats, which he felt was slightly incorrect. Cats at least pay attention out of a sense of self-preservation. This was like herding dead cats. Yet, despite the distraction of the general election, he’d read the report anyway because his best mate the Prime Minister had asked him to, and he knew enough after thirty years of friendship with Alec Fairfax to know that beneath that friendly slightly scatty exterior was an intellect as sharp as a diamond cutter’s diamondy-cutting thing.