by Helen Smith
Baby girl found in holdall outside newsagent, 5.30 a.m., Edmonton
6-month-old baby girl in derelict garden, Plumstead
Baby girl found in duffel bag in hospital, East London
3-day-old baby boy in box near King’s College hospital
Baby abandoned in Bedfordshire—father found through DNA testing, mother unknown
Baby girl found in alley in South London in supermarket bag
Newborn boy found in bin in Heathrow airport
Year-old baby girl abandoned at University of Hertfordshire
Newborn boy in ladies’ toilet in Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire
Newborn boy dropped into Thames, found near Battersea Bridge
Newborn boy abandoned in woods in Corby, Northamptonshire
Baby boy abandoned near golf course in Bridgend
The baby in the Thames is the only one that wasn’t alive when it was found.
‘I don’t think “abandoned” really covers it,’ Taron says. ‘It’s not as if the mothers leave them to die. It’s better than keeping them and neglecting them. They leave them somewhere they’ll be found. They want to save them.’
‘There is another word. People used to call them foundlings, didn’t they? That’s better.’
‘Yes, it’s better.’
We get bored watching the hospital. The pier is just over the road so we wander over to it to get some lunch. As we walk, we leave pennies on low walls we pass so that anyone low down or bent over like children, old people and disabled people will find them and collect them for luck. Taron’s got me involved in her long-term programme to improve the world.
‘Why are people so horrible to their children?’ Taron asks me suddenly.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I was on the pier in Brighton once and this woman was pushing her child along in a stroller. There’s a path you can walk on, made of planks of wood laid lengthways over the wooden floor, but they were walking next to it where you can see the sea in the gaps in the floor. The child was looking down and screaming in terror because it could see the sea beneath it. The woman just kept saying, “Shut up.” “Shut up, shut up.”’
‘I know.’
‘Why couldn’t she have just walked on the path, or told the child that she was safe and they wouldn’t fall in the sea? She just kept saying, “Shut up.”’
‘I don’t know.’
We get some chips from a café on the pier with tables covered in blue and white plastic-coated wipe-clean tablecloths. It reminds me of a story I can tell her to lighten the mood.
‘I was in a place like this years ago with a friend who was a feminist, who supported the miners’ strike and said all men were rapists, who scattered curses in her conversation and lectured, who drew attention to herself and said, “Let them look.” I used the sugar shaker instead of the salt and accidentally coated my chips in sugar. My friend made me eat the sugary chips because she was ashamed that I’d been unable to tell the difference between the salt and the sugar. She didn’t want me to order another portion of chips in case the people in the café thought I was middle class and lacking in credibility.’
Taron barely glances at me as we eat our chips. Her thoughts are with the frightened child in Brighton.
As we amble back along the pier in a subdued mood, we pass a gypsy caravan with a fortune-telling sign outside. Taron catches my hand and makes me follow her inside.
We sit, buttock to buttock, on a stool in front of a pleasant-looking woman with longish blonde hair and smoker’s teeth.
‘Is it both of you, then?’ she asks. ‘That’s extra.’
‘We’re looking for something,’ says Taron. ‘We need to know if we’ll find it. We need to know where to look.’
I take out a notebook and pencil. ‘Are you with the press?’ she asks sharply.
‘No.’ I’m secretly flattered. I’d always wanted to be a journalist because I was good at English at school, but the teachers said I wasn’t pushy enough. I sometimes feel I should have stood my ground, as I would have enjoyed the lifestyle. However, to appease the gypsy I spend the rest of the interview with my hands gripped together in my lap as if posing demurely for a school photo.
‘You’re very spiritual,’ she says to Taron. ‘Take some time every day, visualize what you want, you’ll make it happen. You have the power.’
The interior of the caravan is small and cosy, decorated as you would expect with lacy curtains and some knick-knack painted granny flowery things. There are pictures of her with celebrities who have taken time out from playing the summer season or pantomime in the local theatre to consult her.
‘Will we find what we’re looking for here?’ Taron is asking.
‘Yes.’
‘Really?’ I’m surprised by such a direct answer.
‘You have a lot of anger,’ she tells me. ‘You use it as a screen. Be careful, you’ll drive away the people you love.’
To Taron she says, ‘The sea will restore what you have lost.’
Taron is very impressed and sort of skips all the way back to the hotel, but I’m not impressed. I’ve never really thought of myself as an angry person, but I’m acting all angry now that she’s mentioned it. The thing that’s making me cross is that, although I don’t believe in her claptrap, I would have liked to ask her about the government buildings, just to see what she’d say.
Our work is done for the day and we decide to have some fun. When we consider our options this means eating something, going to the pictures or going to a bar. ‘Did you bring any drugs?’ asks Taron, in a gasp of horror as if she’s forgotten to switch the bath water off.
I have not brought any drugs so Taron tips her handbag out on my bed and pats everything carefully to see if she can harvest any drugs from the fur and screwed-up bits of paper it contains. She finds an E in a piece of silver paper that she waves at me with joy without looking up, and a few strands of spliff and tobacco mixed with fluff that she discards as being unusable.
‘Maybe we can score some spliff from the soldiers. The army always has drugs,’ she says hopefully.
‘And what would we say to the man on the gate?’
‘No, I don’t mean we should go to the army base. Just look out for people with short hair in town and see if we can score off someone in a bar tonight.’
My definition of a bar would be somewhere you can sit down, where women are welcome and where you can buy soft drinks and coffee as well as alcohol. Weymouth only has pubs. We tread squeamishly on the richly patterned carpets, ducking under nets and those round, coloured bowl things that are something to do with lobsters and that have been tacked to the ceiling. We inspect the ice bucket on the bar and see that there are only two pieces floating in a lot of water.
‘Two Stoli and cranberry, please,’ announces Taron loudly.
‘We’ve only got Vladivar on the optic,’ admits the barman, whom I note with alarm has short hair. ‘Do you want vodka and orange, vodka and tonic, vodka and grapefruit?’ We settle for two halves of lager before she can get pally enough to enquire about the local drugs scene.
‘Cranberry juice is very good for cystitis, it’s a wonder they don’t have it,’ muses Taron.
‘I don’t think this is the kind of place where they care if it burns when women piss,’ I tell her.
The signs are that we should call it a night and save our London appetites for London, but Taron is on a mission to find some spliff. Seemingly this means we should get wasted first. ‘Go on,’ she says, holding a chip of white tablet out to me.
‘No.’
‘Go on, it’s only a half.’
‘No.’
‘Go on.’
We wash it down with the lager and leave. We don’t expect much from the local clubs but we’re pleasantly surprised.
There are no queues outside the clubs in Weymouth. I hate waiting outside. Even when you’re on the guest list you usually have to wait for a few moments while someone checks it. I suppose I’ve waited
to get into a club in summer when it’s warm and not quite dark, but I can only ever remember waiting when it’s freezing cold in winter, listening to the music coming from inside the club and watching the lasers sweeping the sky through an open door. It’s like queuing to get into the future. Huge black men guard the doors wearing jackets that look like expensive anoraks but are probably called something different. The people queuing are runts. Their physical stature has been affected by too much queuing, too many fags, too many Es. Their teeth are chattering and they’ve already taken the drugs they believe they need to make them dance. It’s great never to walk into a club straight. The angles look strange, it’s a long way from one side of the club to the other, the music sounds good, everyone is dancing. In Weymouth we don’t have to queue and we’re not straight when we go in, so we’re already doing something right.
The other thing I hate about clubs is when they have too few girls’ toilets. Two girls are always skinning up in one of them, talking bollocks. One girl is puking in another, and the rest of us are queuing for the last one. The dance floors are full of glamorous, half-naked dancing princesses but the harsh lighting in the queues for the toilets transforms them into very pale, sweating scarecrows with straggly hair, dilated pupils. Most of them are jiggling, either because they need the loo and they remember that jiggling helped when they were little girls on long car trips or because the drugs they have taken to make them dance can’t discriminate between the flaky-paint interior of a toilet and the rammed, pulsating dance floor.
There are no queues for the toilets in the club in Weymouth because no one else is in the club. We automatically check them out anyway. That’s all you have to know when you’re in a club—exit, toilets, meeting point. Taron finds us a table. ‘If we get split up, we’ll meet here,’ she says, and then we laugh forever because it’s absurd. When you’re off your head you take very great care of each other. You tell each other when you’re going to the toilet and remind each other to drink plenty of water when the heat takes over, or the drugs. It’s curiously comforting, a reminder of being a child with a mild fever. Your mum is coming up the stairs with a drink of warm Ribena and life is in a kind of limbo because there will be no school tomorrow.
We go to the bar. ‘Let’s get pissed,’ says Taron. This is a good idea because the drugs are coming up really strong and alcohol will take the edge off the rush. I look over at her and she’s chewing gum very rapidly with her head thrown back, like a wild pony. I cling to the edge of the bar and breathe very deeply. I can feel sweat in the creases of my palms and a light tingling at the back of my neck and the top of my right arm as if someone’s brushing my skin very gently with a feather. I swipe at my arm in case it’s not the drugs and there’s an insect there, crawling on my skin. There’s a list of cocktails at the bar but I don’t think I can tolerate tonight’s special ‘Malimoo’, which is Malibu and milk. I would puke. I’d like vodka and cranberry and grapefruit, strong and pure and clean tasting to temper the rushing and fluttering caused by the drugs. ‘Two Sea Breezes and two bottles of water,’ I say urgently and sort of snog the drinks with pleasure when the barman finds the ingredients to satisfy us.
It’s pub chucking-out time and the club is filling up. We whirl and wiggle to a collection of hits from the seventies, eighties and nineties that I haven’t heard since I went to a wedding reception. The playlist includes:
Diana Ross, ‘Chain Reaction’
The Weather Girls, ‘It’s Raining Men’
Abba, ‘Dancing Queen’
Wham! ‘Club Tropicana’
It’s great fun. Our hands are in the air, bottles of water held aloft like sacred chalices as we dance. The atmosphere reminds me of Gay Pride. From time to time Taron and I hug each other, clinging on. ‘Love you,’ she says. ‘Love you,’ I say.
We drink loads and loads. Every time I drink, I piss, so I make friends with the girls in the toilets as I’m in there so often. Taron, beautiful and glamorous, dancing to Kylie Minogue’s ‘Better the Devil You Know’, is a magnet for the men. The world is our oyster and Weymouth is the pearl, for as long as the drink and drugs are in our system.
I imagine us finding a baby and managing to keep it. It’s as if the baby is with us now and we’re dancing to celebrate.
I wake up with a swollen tongue and dry mouth, needing a piss. I have pissed a whole ocean tonight. I’m lying on the very, very edge of my bed because there is someone else in it. Taron lies like a starfish under my covers as she sleeps, her eyes like soft bruises under the closed lids. There is a humming noise in my head, like the noise a fridge makes. Why is Taron sleeping in my bed? If I got off with her last night, I’d like to be able to remember it, at least. I’m wearing my bra and pants and my body bears no memory of sexual experience. I go to the bathroom and look in the mirror. I look great. One of the gifts I have been given by the gods is that no matter how outrageously I spend my time overnight, my makeup will still be intact the next morning. I have a piss and brush my teeth and my tongue; then I go back to bed. I turn Taron over on to her side with her back to me so I can cuddle her like a doll as I go back to sleep.
Chapter Seventeen: The Runes
Bird’s men have achieved a breakthrough. They have cracked the code used in the address book they still believe belongs to Alison. The implications are so alarming, so important, that Bird calls a summit meeting with his sometime associate, Flower.
‘I passed you some names, the other day. Thought you might find them of interest. Did you turn up anything?’
‘No, not really. I thought they were a bit of a waste of time.’ Bird, a Cambridge man, is not surprised. Flower does not have a very keen intellect. Even so, Bird is so tied up with the work for Emphglott that he will have to rely on Flower for some backup.
‘We’ve cracked a code they use that links them to the criminal destruction in the Republic of Ireland and elsewhere. Take a look at this.’
Bird takes a piece of paper on which a number of crude code symbols have been solemnly replicated.
‘These symbols are runes. Most of them match the symbols used to identify genetic test sites around the world. The g symbol appears often but we can’t match it to anything at the moment. I’m having someone hack into the immigration computer system to check how many of these people have been abroad recently. I expect it will tell us they have visited the sites to carry out acts of sabotage. This isn’t the list of target sites I’ve been looking for, but it’s just as important. It shows the extent of Alison Temple’s involvement with these people. I think they’re eco-warriors.’
Flower has only the vaguest idea of what an eco-warrior might be, although he watched Swampy on TV on Have I Got News for You. He peers pleasantly at the page and taps other symbols there. ‘What about these ones?’
They’re signs of the zodiac. We don’t know their significance in this case. I’ve called off all searches of these people’s property and I’d like you to do the same. I don’t want to proceed further until we know what we’re up against. We must go very carefully, very quietly. I believe I can persuade my contact in Fitzgerald’s agency to supply us with information. I need you to work with me on this. I can’t trust anyone else. We’ve searched Alison Temple’s house once and found nothing of value. She’s the key to this. I’d like you to go back and have another look around, talk to the neighbours, talk to the milkman, talk to the postman. Try and find out more about her and what she knows.’
Chapter Eighteen: The Hangover
There’s something nice about rehydrating a hangover, eating plenty of stodgy food and resting. We haven’t reached that stage yet when we wake up. We’re still at the bickering, foul breath, headache stage. Light sneaks in through a gap in the curtains, and I can see a bag of grass on the dressing table.
‘How long do you think we should stay here?’ I ask.
‘Dunno.’
‘Let’s give it one more day. I don’t think we’re going to find a baby. What would we do with it anyway?
We wouldn’t really give it to your mother, would we?’
Silence.
‘We haven’t got anything ready for a baby if we found one. We’d need blankets and things and a cot.’
‘It’s bad luck to have baby things in the house before you have it.’
‘I don’t think it counts when you’re hoping to find one.’
‘I had a good time last night.’
‘So did I.’
‘Let’s keep looking, Alison. I really felt last night as if we’d find a baby.’
‘So did I. That’s because we were off our heads.’
We laugh about the music for a while and how much we danced. Taron managed to score the spliff off the DJ, apparently.
The other thing we have to sort out is what we’re going to do about the names from Taron’s address book. If they’re on a database somewhere we have to erase it.
Chapter Nineteen: Betrayal
Mrs. Fitzgerald waits for Alison to call so she can give her the bad news. The world is a fickle, empty place. There is no one to trust in it. Mrs. Fitzgerald remembers the first time she had to break news of a betrayal to Alison, when she was a client. Mrs. Fitzgerald has to help many young women in this way, but it hurts her when her operatives are affected.
‘Mrs. Fitzgerald? I need your help. I need to get inside Bird’s organization and remove Taron’s friends’ names from his files. They must be on a computer somewhere. What do you think?’
‘I’ve just had confirmation that someone you trust is working with the other side, Alison. I think the news will surprise you, but perhaps we can use the situation somehow.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Alison, it’s your neighbour. It’s Jeff.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid it’s true. Dick, my client, is absolutely sure. Flower has been paying him.’