by Helen Smith
Venetia is thinking about the money Sylvia took from her. She had shown Sylvia the grey suitcase filled with money that she kept in the safe for emergencies and contingencies, and she had shown her the safe combination. Sylvia was a very open and unaffected person, she didn’t shy away from intimacy or confidences. Venetia always felt she could truly be herself in front of Sylvia – truly an idiot, in the case of the suitcase full of money.
Sylvia let her do little things for her, which Venetia enjoyed. Sylvia said it reminded her of the way the girls used to take care of each other in the circus. Venetia washed Sylvia’s hair for her, and she plaited it sometimes, deftly and tightly as if preparing a horse for a show. Venetia painted Sylvia’s fingernails, she helped her with her tax return, she made sure Sylvia had custard to go with her puddings in the evenings if she wanted it. There was no part of Sylvia’s life that she didn’t care about.
Venetia would like to recover the elephant Sylvia stole from her and she would like to recover the money. She would like to open the suitcase and then destroy it in front of Sylvia, burning it or tearing the £20 notes into shreds, scrunching the pieces and letting them run through her fingers to show that it wasn’t just about the money after all. It was about something else she lost when Sylvia ran away.
I must work through the pain, thinks Venetia Latimer. She breathes in very deeply once, then again, to activate her brain with oxygen. I must make my mark on the world and leave it a better place. She turns to her Usefulness file.
On a personal level, Mrs Latimer’s quest to turn the useless into the useful extends its reach into her son Joey’s life. Miss Lester’s dating agency literature and Taron’s phone number are listed in Joey’s section of the Usefulness file. She would like to prevent Joey from working in the City and she would like to find him a girlfriend with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes. Someone with lots of eyeliner and an unconventional attitude to life. Someone like Taron. Although she is currently focussed on finding the right girl for Joey, Mrs Latimer would be equally enthusiastic about finding him the right man if he ever were to ask for her help in this area. She only wants to save him from a life of well-cut suits and conservatism. However Mrs Latimer belongs to a generation who associate gay men with wide lapels and saucy double entendres and she might be appalled to discover that homosexuality and conservatism are not mutually exclusive.
Among the other Usefulness projects, the performing mink are coming along well. Venetia has also recently written to the Head Teachers of all the local primary schools in the area suggesting that, since pre-teen children are reportedly concerned about the environment and particularly about litter, they should be provided with small sized rubber gloves made from recycled materials and asked to collect a bag of rubbish each on their way to school. She doesn’t know that children don’t walk to school any more. Their mothers drop them at the school gates in their Volvos.
There is another, still nebulous, project which Venetia has been formulating. It could benefit men, and in turn all mankind, but it is unlikely it will come to fruition in her lifetime. However it may be something she can use to advance the plans she has to ruin Mrs Fitzgerald. Venetia Latimer dwells for a moment on vengeance, which, like her projects for usefulness and like time, will heal her wounds. Then she goes to meet Mrs Fitzgerald.
Ella Fitzgerald is waiting for Venetia Latimer in a small café near Clapham Junction, where they have agreed to meet. Small pieces of other people’s food crunch underfoot as Mrs Fitzgerald takes her place at a table near the window and looks around. The siren smell of bacon cooking apparently induces the regular customers to eat whatever is put in front of them in spite of the unhygienic surroundings.
Mrs Fitzgerald flicks a very small fragment of a previous occupant’s charred bacon from where her hands rest on the table to a cosier spot between the tomato sauce bottle and the sugar shaker. She orders a large cappuccino and an apricot Danish, and she settles to watch the people around her.
Almost everyone else in the café is a solitary diner, catching up on their calories, lost in their thoughts. There is something – perhaps it is the harsh, hospital lighting and the plastic seats, or the way that the café’s occupants pour over the Sun newspaper rather than connecting with each other – that makes Mrs Fitzgerald feel very lonely. If there were a waiting room where people took their places to turn mad, it would look like this; the table tops smeared with ketchup; the people sitting close to each other but apart, drinking no-brand cola and eating black pudding with chips, wearing layers of jewellery fashioned in thinly beaten gold, as if to pay a Stygian keeper of the gates of madness. The café is comfortable, warm and smelly, but to Mrs Fitzgerald, it is a staging post on the frontier between sanity and madness.
Venetia Latimer takes her place across the table, ready for the showdown. Mrs Fitzgerald signals for the boy to take her companion’s order, then plays it straight.
‘I’ve been investigating your organization.’
‘I know.’
‘You’ve been feeding a prototype veterinary drug called Serum 10 to your animals. Emphglott, your sponsor, supplies you with all your food and the serum.’
‘You’ve found no evidence of maltreatment or illegal activity.’
‘No maltreatment. Your work with Emphglott is unethical. Your relationship with them is not good business practice.’
‘You’ve found nothing. I’m sure you feel your methods are thorough and yet you’ve found nothing.’
‘I have found two areas of concern and that’s why I’ve asked to meet you. Firstly, can you explain the disappearance of an elephant? Secondly, can you explain why you’ve also been feeding Serum 10 to your employees?’
Mrs Latimer swirls her teaspoon in her tea and looks at Mrs Fitzgerald for a moment.
‘I have a proposal for you. The animals in my care are well loved and well looked after. That is your main concern and you agree that I have met all your standards?’
‘Yes.’
‘While you’ve been investigating me, I’ve been investigating you. I like you, Mrs Fitzgerald, and I have nothing to fear from you.’
‘Very well.’
‘One of your investigators has been working for the wife of one of my employees, trying to trace him since his disappearance. I’ve been paying the bills so you’ve been working for me indirectly. You may know that already.’
‘Yes.’
‘I would like to hire you to trace another missing person, which is linked to the disappearance of the elephant, Sorrel. If you accept, I will tell you about Serum 10, on the understanding that any information I give you must be protected by client privilege, as rigorously as if information were passing between a solicitor and a client.’
‘Very well. In that case let me set out my position clearly. Any information you may give me that falls within the remit of my original investigation into the welfare of your animals, I will act upon. I will respect the confidentiality of any other information, unless it is illegal or unethical, in which case I will use my judgement and act accordingly.’
‘I respect your judgement. Here’s my story: My business relationship with Emphglott is very rewarding. They supply me with dog food in return for publicity. They sponsor the dog shows I enter and win. I win on merit, every time, but they are my sponsors nevertheless. The relationship is close, I accept that, but I’m doing nothing wrong by exploiting it.
‘Emphglott developed Serum 10 and had to abandon trials when they proved inconclusive. I agreed to continue to trial it, unofficially, together with its upgraded version, Serum 11. Serum 11 hasn’t been trialled anywhere so its presence won’t have been picked up by any lab you’ve asked to investigate it. Neither substance is banned in Britain. OK so far?’
‘Yes.’ Mrs Fitzgerald nibbles at her Danish pastry and signals the boy for another cappuccino.
‘I think it’s increasingly hard for men to find a role in society, don’t you agree?’
‘I’m sorry?’
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sp; ‘You and I, Mrs Fitzgerald, we’re successful business women. Everywhere you look, there are successful women.’ Mrs Latimer’s gestures, their theatricality restricted by the environment, take in a greasy youth reading the Sun and an elderly man eating scrambled egg from a yellow plate with cracked enamelling. ‘Men have nothing more relevant to offer society than inane commentaries on football, or a fight after a skilful of lager on a Saturday night.’
Mrs Fitzgerald, still nibbling, thinks of Jeremy Paxman, Tony Blair, Bill Gates, Damien Hirst and the Archbishop of Canterbury. She thinks of Gary Barlow, Ted Hughes, Stephen King and Quentin Tarantino.
‘Single parent families are the norm, these days. Women are perfectly capable of bringing up children alone. We need men to provide us with sperm, that’s all.’ Mrs Fitzgerald colours slightly at ‘us’. ‘Soon, in twenty years or so, we won’t even need them to breed. Scientists will be able to manufacture sperm. We need to find a role for men in the future. All this has a bearing on what I’m about to tell you, Mrs Fitzgerald.’
‘Why have you allowed your employees access to Serum 10 and 11?’
‘At first it was a mistake, of course. Some of the kennel lads have been experimenting with the animals’ drugs. It’s one of the hazards of modern working life. People who work in offices pilfer stationery and pens. People who work with animals steal their food and medication. It has some kind of psychotropic effect, heightening their awareness of colour. It stimulates the release of serotonin so they are very cheerful all the time. I noticed that it modified their behaviour. They are more pleasant, more docile and well-behaved. I’d like to find a way to manufacture it in large quantities and trial it only on men. I need to work with a woman I can trust, someone with business experience who also understands the way things work on, um, on the street. We could sell it at football matches and check its effect on crowd aggression. With findings as valuable as this, we could be famous.’
We? Is Mrs Latimer inviting Mrs Fitzgerald to join with her in dealing drugs at football matches as some kind of social science experiment? Mrs Fitzgerald, whose lifelong struggle has been to seek justice for people and liberty for animals, is being invited to participate in this …. madness.
‘You knowingly allowed your employees to experiment with these substances?’
‘It was amazing, given a period of time for the effects to develop. The men became more docile and obedient. Like pets. That’s my breakthrough. That’s the role for men for the future. We can keep them as pets.’
‘The differences between the species were blurred, so that the dogs became more like men and the men became more like dogs?’
‘Men need to become smaller, softer, cleaner, more docile. If they were to be kept as pets their world would shrink, possibly to the four walls of a single girl’s flat in town, with a walk in a park or an outing to a pub once a day, so they would need to be unquestioning of their surroundings.’
‘Men as pets?’
‘Remember, Mrs Fitzgerald, this is an extraordinary breakthrough. You must respect my need for discretion.’
‘Have you had any of your findings verified?’
‘It’s almost impossible. I haven’t measured the doses taken by the men. I haven’t documented what they were like before the changes – how do you measure changes like that? – I haven’t got a control. I know I’m doing it all wrong. All I have is the idea, a vision for the future. I do like men, don’t you? I’d hate to see a world without them. This is a way to help them survive the future.’
‘What was the original use for the drug?’
‘It was supposed to make the dogs more docile and more adaptable to their confined conditions and therefore easier to handle.’
‘Is any of this connected to your missing person enquiry?’
‘No. A woman who used to work for me stole £15,000 and the elephant from me. I want you to help me find her and recover the money. There’s a large bonus in it if you do so.’
‘I’ll take the missing person enquiry. Have you tried to find this woman before?’
‘Yes. When Sylvia first disappeared I hired a private detective but he couldn’t find her. That’s what happens when you ask a man to do something important, they’re useless. I’d do it myself but I don’t know where to start.’
‘I think, if I may say so, that the other detective merely approached this the wrong way. It can be very difficult to find one person among nearly sixty million people, especially if they don’t wish to be found. However, if we treat this as a missing elephant enquiry, everything becomes much simpler. Sylvia must be obtaining specialist supplies and medical care for the elephant and we can find her through that.’
‘That’s very astute. And you’re right about Sorrel. She will be eating up to forty pounds of hay and forty-five pounds of fruit and vegetables a day by now and unless Sylvia is growing these herself, she’ll be buying them somewhere.’
‘I have an operative who can get to work on it straight away. As for your other proposition, I’ll get back to you.’
Chapter Twenty-Three ~ Bandits
Taron and her friend Joey Latimer are crouching by the side of the road, surrounded by coloured plastic pails of water, handkerchiefs tied over mouth and nose, like bandits. Joey has pushed a hollow tube between the roots of a roadside tree and Taron is filling it with water to the top, watching the level slowly sink, then filling it again. They are absorbed in their task, like children making mud pies, their fingers grimy from the dust thrown up by the passing traffic. Hugo Fragrance, in his city suit in his lunch hour, stands awkwardly to one side, holding a bucket and a sponge as if between bouts at a boxing match.
‘One thousand cars pass along the Limehouse Link every quarter of an hour when the traffic is at its busiest,’ Taron tells Hugo.
‘Have you heard about carbon neutrality?’ he asks Taron. ‘You can get someone to calculate how much damage you’re doing to the ozone layer and then you can buy trees to compensate. The theory is that the trees repair the damage, eventually.’
‘It’s like a penance,’ says Joey. ‘Like rich people buying prayers for their immortal souls.’
‘Really?’ says Taron. She removes the handkerchief so they can see she is saying it scornfully.
As Taron waits for the bus back home, her mother calls her on her mobile phone. ‘Are you feeling OK?’
‘Yes’
‘I feel terrible. I wonder if it’s the left-over chicken satay you brought round from that party the other night. It’s playing havoc with my psychic abilities. Whose party was it?’
‘My friend Joey’s mother’s.’
‘Is he your boyfriend?’
‘No.’
‘I keep seeing a man standing on a platform, high above the ground. I feel that he’s facing some sort of danger.’
‘Is it a diving platform?’
‘Let me think. No, I don’t think so. He’s got his clothes on.’
‘Who is he?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, it must mean something to someone, I’ll ask around. Thanks for the warning.’
In her flat in Brixton, Sheila is waiting in vain for another message about Roy. The Sky satellite dish installed outside the house, the forest of television aerials inside, the cutlery wind chimes above the phone, the sheets of tinfoil at the windows, all have had no noticeable effect for several days. Wearily, Sheila removes a tinfoil cap from one ear and reaches for the phone to call Alison. She tells her about the advertisement she has seen in the window of the newsagent’s shop on Brixton Hill:
Close Encounters Group
Share information about extra terrestrials
Meeting every Thursday 6.30 PM
When Thursday comes, Alison and Sheila are there. The meeting is held in a private room on the third floor in St Matthews Church in Brixton.
Alison and Sheila do not remove their coats, they sit on plastic chairs at the back of the room and try to follow the proceedings.
‘Dolphi
ns are much cleverer than humans,’ asserts a woman wearing a maroon cardigan. She emphasises all the nouns in her sentences as if worried that her listeners will be unable to follow the key points she is trying to make. The effort makes her drawl. ‘Dolphin speech patterns have been developed to communicate with aliens. They keep talking to humans because they’re waiting for us to catch up with them and understand what they’re telling us.’
‘Sounds like typical English tourists,’ whispers Alison, cheerfully.
‘Wherever there are dolphins, there is alien activity. That’s why there are so many of them in the oceans near California and Mexico. It’s also where the majority of space ships have been spotted, and where most abductions are reported.’
A man in a Nike sweatshirt and Reebok trainers gets to his feet. ‘We need to follow the example of our ancestors and attract the attention of extra terrestrials with diagrams and patterns large enough to be seen from their space ships. Did you realise that there are prehistoric stone formations in the desert that can still be seen from the air? If we want aliens to make contact, we have to be just as persistent as our ancestors. We have to let them know we’re here and we want to talk to them.’
‘The Millennium Dome would be a good place to hang out, if you wanted them to see you,’ offers a thin man in his twenties with a cowlick in his dark hair. He is also wearing sports clothing, although he favours Adidas. Everyone looks at him as if he’s an idiot, so he sits down again.
‘Does anyone have any questions?’ asks the woman in the maroon cardigan. Alison leans across Sheila’s lap and then leans back again without the need to speak, having satisfied herself that the woman is wearing jogging pants and trainers.
Sheila stands up, bends to place her handbag at her feet, then straightens and addresses the room. ‘If we were going to build a diagram to attract a space ship, where would we build it?’