by Helen Smith
‘So what happened to him?’
‘I built a fire in the hearth at my mother’s house and threw salt into it every night for seven nights. It’s supposed to bring back your husband if you lose him to a rival.’
‘Did it work?’
‘No. It turns out he didn’t leave me for anyone else.’
‘Did you ever think about having a baby?’
‘I pretended I had one once. A little girl. I worked as a waitress for about three months a few years ago and I told them I had a daughter. When I talked about her while I was waitressing, it was as if she were real and the only reason she wasn’t there with me was because I was at work. I could imagine what she’d look like, the way she behaved, the way she would smell of the full range of Johnson’s baby products after I’d bathed her. Her name was Phoebe.
‘I didn’t even really have to talk about her much; people just accepted that she existed. Waitressing is the sort of work where everyone’s passing through, so people do these little potted introductions about you when the new staff come in, you know, “This is Taron, she runs a club once a month, she’s got a little kid called Phoebe.” I miss her. Little things remind me of her. I sometimes wonder, if I’d believed in her more, whether she would have really existed. I had an abortion when I was nineteen, and talking about Phoebe made up for it a bit. I’m going to have real children one day, and I’m going to raise my daughters wearing loose shoes, maybe one or two sizes too big so that their toes bunch up slightly to grip, like delicate animals clinging to something. Then they’ll look vulnerable with naked feet and men will fall in love with them and want to protect them.’ Is this what she meant when she said her husband made her say cute things?
‘I’d like to have children,’ I confess, ‘but I don’t want to get pregnant and give birth. I’ve got a friend who’s had a baby. There’s a latticework of scars across her stomach where the papery skin didn’t stretch quickly enough when she was pregnant. She says it looks as if someone tried to force the flesh through a chip basket. She used to lather herself with Revlon Intensive Care cream every night in vain when the marks started appearing. The rich, expensive smell makes her feel dizzy and intensely unhappy if she catches the scent on someone else. I don’t want to be pregnant. I’d like to go home one night and realize I’d forgotten I already had some children. They’d all be waiting for me, lined up in matching clothes like The Sound of Music. I imagine running barefoot on the sand with them, their hair streaming out behind them, the same colour as mine, brightly coloured fishing nets and matching buckets and spades in their hands.’
‘No dad?’
‘I never see him. Perhaps he’s mending the car, or whatever it is that men do. I only see the children and the fishing nets, and sometimes I’m carrying sandwiches and crisps in a raffia basket. No dad.’
‘Alison, do you think you could help me find a baby?’
Well, Christ on a stick. I thought she’d forgotten about all that. I can do the research and work out where people usually leave them, but I don’t think I can actually find a baby and hand it over to her mad mum. The good thing is that the chances of actually finding one have to be pretty slim.
‘The chances of finding one are pretty slim,’ I say, apologetically.
‘My mother needs help. She’s living a very lonely life, in a converted lighthouse on the Kent coast, fighting the forces of evil. Please help me.’
I’m more convinced than ever that it would be a mistake to give Taron’s mother an abandoned baby if she’s going to be clattering up and down steel ladders with it in a remote property miles from the rational world in Kent. Even so, Taron’s pleas have touched my heart. I want to be able to keep seeing her, and I’d like to let her think that she’s helping her mother in some way.
‘Leave it with me. I’ll do some work and find out where people leave their babies when they don’t want them. I’ll get back to you on it, OK?’
Chances are she’ll get bored with the project after a while.
It’s a relief to get home to Jeff. I call on him to check up on his progress with the advert. It’s early morning, the beginning of his day, the end of mine. ‘They’ve just vacated the last manned lighthouse in the British Isles,’ he tells me when I talk about Taron and her mother. ‘It was in Guernsey.’
‘I was fishing for sympathy, not facts,’ I say, a bit crossly.
He moves on to what he hopes will be safer ground by focusing on the women’s interest areas of his life, but he ends up scaring me because he talks about the girl in the Patent Office again. She’s burning with love for Jeff under her shapeless clothes. ‘I think she likes me because I’m young and modern,’ he says. ‘She’s like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. Have you seen it? She works in a bookshop before she’s a model; she wears glasses and long skirts. She climbs these really high ladders to get to shelves of dusty books. It would be funny if they filed the patents like that, wouldn’t it?’
‘If she looks like Audrey Hepburn then she’s probably anorexic. If you look closely, she’s probably got a moustache. Anorexia makes them very whiskery,’ I say severely. Jeff looks at me strangely. If he ever stops loving me, I’ll have to start loving him to get him back. I watch him very closely for the signs.
I show Jeff a story in the paper about a German professor who has written a book on manners. He’s so polite that he stands up when he hears a woman’s voice on the phone.
A few days later, as the sun is unseasonably fierce for June, I arrange to meet Taron at Tooting Bec Lido to catch some rays. It’s worth getting down there before the school holidays when it gets really crowded. As we pay our money and step through the turnstiles, the sight is pure English summer. You look down the length of the wide, blue pool towards a pale blue art-deco-style café with a pale blue wedding cake fountain and sundial in front of it. A blackboard in the café describes comprehensive variations on an English breakfast but, tantalizingly, these are not available after ten a.m. when the pool opens to the public. The public doesn’t seem bothered and queues to buy lots of chips, crisps, cans of Coke and tea.
Tooting Bec Lido has the biggest outdoor pool in England and as a consequence the water is very cold, barely warmed by the wee of the preschool kids and their parents using it today. Everyone at the Lido smokes. Brown people sit at the edge of the pool, dangling their legs, tapping cigarette ash into the water. Most people are also tattooed—the women more extensively than the men. The women under the age of twenty-five are pregnant, eight months of swollen, stretched, smooth, hard belly in a bikini in the queue for chips. All the men have erections, including the gay ones, so their arousal can’t be a response to the women’s fecundity; it must be something to do with the sunshine and the fresh air.
Taron and I find ourselves a place to sit at the back of the pool behind the children’s playground and the café where there’s a grassy area and some trees. This place is very popular with young families, whereas single people mostly stick to the side of the pool so the water will reflect the sun and make them browner. Women picnicking near us on the grass advise their toddlers to ‘tiddle’ in the bushes rather than walk to the toilets conveniently sited near the pool. ‘Are you going to do a poo?’ they ask the children. ‘If you’re going to do a poo I’ll put your nappy on.’ As if squashing the shit against the child’s skin is preferable to taking them to the toilet and teaching them to use it.
There are only same-sex groups at the Lido today, if you count the young boys with their mothers as being sexless. Most of us sit on the grass and drink lager and smoke dope while the children play on inflatable toys among the discarded plasters in the pool. There are a couple of young men near us in the trees. As they don’t have children, they busy themselves playing manly games like kicking footballs and throwing Frisbees to each other. When they miss and the Frisbee plops on the ground close to the mothers, the mothers scold the young men pleasantly enough, even though they’re about the same age.
As the trains thunder past, Tar
on and I scrutinize the other people at the Lido, speculate about their relationships and discuss their appearance. We notice a correlation between the sagging skin and drooping breasts of the women and the daring cut and shininess of their bikinis. Any young girls who aren’t pregnant wear Speedo swimsuits or fifties-style bathers that hide their pubic areas. Older women wear fake snakeskin string bikinis cut to just below the pouch on their stomachs where the muscles have lost elasticity in pregnancy, silver rivers of stretch marks running up and down the skin, or in crop circle patterns around the belly button. I draw a Venn diagram on the inside front cover of D. H. Lawrence’s short stories that I have brought to the Lido but I’m making no attempt to read.
Tooting Bec Lido Venn Diagram
Chapter Nine: Taron’s Mother
Taron’s mother is a very pretty woman with dark hair, looking a little like Ava Gardner in her heyday. There are no outward indications that she’s a witch. She rarely leaves the house and has taken some trouble over her appearance, wearing an elegant, fitted jersey dress for her outing to the post office to buy a tax disc for her car. She’s rather proud that she’s never had to use stamps. In the past, if she wanted to get a message to someone anywhere in the world, she would send a psychic postcard by thinking very hard about a message she wanted to convey. Because of the amount of effort it takes to send information in this way, and the varying lack of skill in the receiver in decoding it, she could only really send something of postcard length, and often with a similarly superficial tone. Taron’s mother found it so draining, she’s glad she’s mostly been able to replace this method of communication with Internet, e-mail and mobile phones. She doesn’t even have to use psychic phenomena to check her bank balance anymore since the introduction of twenty-four-hour telephone banking, which has freed up a tremendous amount of her energy.
As she returns from the post office she gets a premonition. She takes out her mobile phone and tries to get through on it, but reaches only her daughter’s voicemail. She stands very still in the middle of the high street, closes her eyes, touches one hand to her temple. Because of the nature of the message she feels she must send, it comes across as something darker than a psychic postcard. DANGER, she thinks. DANGER. DANGER. Unlike e-mail, she cannot put a receipt on the message, so she cannot be sure Taron has received it.
Chapter Ten: The Raid
It’s a Thursday in July. It’s been a long day and I feel tired and miserable as I finish work. I found a poem taped to a tube of Smarties when I got up this morning:
MELTING
Lips smudge Smartie colours
Tongue tastes mixed-up flavours
As chocolate melts
Inside your mouth
Clapping hands believe in fairies
I believe in the warm place
Where chocolate melts
Inside your mouth
I wonder if this is an obscure blow job allusion and it puts me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. Thursday. It’s not quite the end of the week but it’s near enough to celebrate if anyone else is up for it. Taron calls me to meet up with her for a drink at about seven p.m. I feel that I’m missing her as soon as I hear her voice, a light breeze on the phone line to where I’m working undercover in an office, combustingly hot in a pair of thick tights. Sheer tights, while elegant and cooler to wear, are three pounds a pair and you’re guaranteed to put your thumb through them before the end of the first day you wear them. Thick tights—six pounds a pair, wear ’em and wash ’em and wear ’em again until bobbles appear on the legs—heat the core of your body until you feel your head will explode. The government should issue warnings in the same way they do for young people taking drugs at raves (drink half a litre of water an hour, take plenty of breaks, be safe). I once fainted on a shuttle flight from Glasgow to London because the tights I was wearing were too thick. None of the other passengers would talk to me because I had made a show of myself.
The reason I’m so miserable now is that I shouldn’t have to be thinking about tights at all. I took the detective job because I didn’t want to prostrate myself on the altar of commerce, and yet here I am anyway, albeit as a spy in the house of love, which today is the office of Jones, Kibble, Parsnip in the city of London where some bloke may be shagging his secretary. I know retro is fashionable but shagging your secretary is just too tiresomely seventies. I’m working here as a temp in a long wrapover skirt and a translucent white blouse so you can see the rather pointy bra I’m wearing. And the bloody tights. And some specs. This is the universal uniform for temps, I hope. The girls in the office seem convinced by my disguise. They tell me shag-bloke’s a rat and he goes at it hammer and tongs with his secretary in the toilets at work. I feel miserable as I leave the office tonight, and suddenly Taron represents a kind of logic and stability in this crazy world. At any rate, even though her head is filled with nonsense, I think the only person she has ever deceived is herself.
She tells me the name of a bar we can meet in. It’s near where she lives. When we meet, I’m struck by how pretty she is, how funny, how gentle, how sane. She makes me take off the tights in the toilets of the bar and puts a glass ring on my finger, which she says will ward off the bad vibes I soaked up in the office today. ‘I’ve been getting a bad feeling all day,’ she says. We aren’t in a bar, really, it’s a pub. For some reason I think this harmless pretention is charming.
We drink two beers very quickly. I’m not sure whether it’s the alcohol, the tights-off relief, the magic ring, or Taron herself, but I gradually re-humanize and cheer up. Now I’m marginally pissed, cheered up, guilty for being miserable earlier, and pretty much in the mood for whatever the evening has in store.
I confess that the job is getting me down. ‘Come away with me,’ says Taron. ‘Come away with me and help me find a baby.’ It would almost be an attractive idea if it weren’t so mad. After I finish up tomorrow by taking a few shots of the toilet sex (let’s hope they do it in the girls’ toilets and not the boys’; I don’t fancy sloshing around in the urinals setting up my hidden camera) I don’t really have much work on for the next week or so. It would be nice to let Taron garland me with good-vibes jewellery and drive around the country collecting babies to get in her mother’s good books. I smile at Taron in what I hope is an impish and affectionate way. I’d quite like to drive around with her forever and never have to do another day’s work again.
She puts her little hand on mine and leans forward. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘let’s go home.’ I feel that I’m really happy and maybe even the job isn’t so bad at all and I should just knuckle down and get on with it so long as I can spend some of my time with Taron. We collect our things and leave the pub. I touch her hand then I turn, wondering how far it is to Taron’s place and if I should have a wee before we go. Suddenly there is an incident. Everything happens very quickly and we don’t react at all, we just gawp. Some guy, brushing past, has taken Taron’s bag. I’d been holding it for her. He has only had to pull it gently from my hands because I didn’t know what was happening. You couldn’t say I’d been mugged, exactly, because there was no violence. ‘Hey,’ calls Taron to the thief, but she’s looking at me in case I have any ideas. I don’t. The guy is already out of sight, running like the clappers and now in possession of Taron’s bag containing her keys, money, makeup, address book, mobile phone, and my tights. The bag is pretty heavy because she carries horseshoes clanking at the bottom of it so she can leave them around the place for good luck, as a way of improving the world. Let’s hope they do the robber more good than they’ve done us tonight. We didn’t see him at all—couldn’t describe his age, his colour. I’ve never been the victim of robbery or violence and I’ve always wondered how I’d react—whether I’d fight or freeze. I didn’t expect to be so insipid, standing sheepishly about. ‘Oh well,’ we say, still looking at each other.
‘Let’s go back to your place,’ said Taron. ‘We can call the police from there.’ She probably has a little stash of drugs at home
and doesn’t want to call the police from her flat. Like they could care. I feel quite tired again but Taron looks shaky and I should look after her, so I take her home.
I know something is wrong as soon as we go inside the door. Everything has been disturbed. Someone has systematically been through all my things. I carefully assess the damage. The computer has gone, my files have been rifled, the film removed from my camera. I feel suddenly very upset and sick. I realize that I’ve been checking my things so intently I’ve been oblivious to Taron. I find her sitting on the sofa weeping very quietly. This makes me feel more miserable, and I give her a sisterly cuddle before going to make some tea. ‘It’s like The X Files,’ she says. I’d laugh to cheer her up but I agree, in a way. Someone has looked through all the information I have in my house and either found what they wanted (who knows?) or will come back for more. It wasn’t an ordinary burglary. My TV and my wedding ring are still in the house. Perhaps one of the unfaithful husbands I’ve been following is a secret agent (the south London area I cover is a handy commuter distance for the new MI6 building on the Vauxhall Bridge) and I’ve stumbled onto something BIG. Well, that’s the way it would work if this were a movie.
Taron and I spend some time discussing who would play us in the film. We’re not sure about Julia Roberts—isn’t she past her heyday?—so in the end I go for Kristin Scott Thomas. Taron wastes some time trying to remember the name of the beautiful actress in the Red Lantern (it’s Gong Li, but I have to look it up later) and we bicker over whether or not the burglar in the film, in the form of Ewan McGregor, would still be hiding in my house and would fall in love with us, and if so which one he would prefer. Perhaps he would shoot one of us by mistake and the doctor looking after us would be George Clooney and one of us could have him. I always talk bollocks when I’m nervous.