insensitivity, ‘What’s it like fucking a machine?’
This time Taylor did punch Dick in the face.
CHAPTER 23
Sitting in the lounge a short time later with his colleagues Dick discretely nursed his bruised jaw. As relationships with your boss went, he wasn’t doing so well. So far in their brief relationship Taylor had kneed Dick in the groin and punched him in the face, but if Taylor harboured a deep-seated feeling of seething resentment towards Dick then this was currently well-concealed. He was as civil and as friendly as usual. Likewise, if Alice had been distressed about what had taken place earlier on the library table then she certainly didn’t show it.
The three of them, Edward and Susan were discussing the extraordinary news of the capture and likely execution of Benjamin Faraday. Taylor vehemently denied that Benjamin had been a member of the Resistance and that his arrest was as much of a surprise to him as it had been to Dick. By the strengths of his protests and those of his colleagues Dick was starting to believe that Taylor might actually be telling the truth. Taylor, meanwhile, was angry with himself that Benjamin’s anti-Party sentiment had not come to his attention earlier – and for not recruiting him. He wondered how many other people like Benjamin had slipped through the net; valuable additional members the Resistance so dearly needed. This was being discussed when, in an extraordinary coincidence, Grace rushed into the room with a copy of the London Evening Telegraph in her hand and an excited look on her face.
‘I think we might have found a potential new member!’, she said eagerly. ‘Look!’
Grace pointed energetically at the open paper. Dick joined Taylor, Alice, Susan and Edward in staring at the page.
‘New Indian tiger for London Zoological Gardens?’ Dick asked, pondering a) why they would recruit a tiger and b) how they would train it to such a degree that it would be useful to the Resistance, let alone cure it of its innate man-eating instincts.
‘No!’, Grace, exclaimed, pointing excitedly to the page again.
Dick tried to follow her finger but this was difficult as she was waving it about so frantically.
‘New Sewerage System for Manchester?’ If Dick had doubts about recruiting a tiger then enlisting the help of a sewage system made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Dick thought the whole notion was fraught with impracticalities, starting with the fact that they would need an unfeasibly large volume of perfume to hide its stench. Dick’s colleagues however, didn’t share his confusion.
‘Well spotted Grace’, Taylor said. ‘This is definitely worth investigating further’.
‘What an odd story!’ added Alice, which made Dick even more determined to find out what all the fuss was about.
‘What is it?’, asked Dick, the frustration evident in his voice.
‘This!’. Susan picked up the paper and thrust it in Dick’s face. She read out the headline of a very small story sandwiched between ‘New bandstand for Kensington Gardens’ and something equally un-newsworthy about a new iron ore smelting process.
‘Man Arrested For Molestation of Statue’.
Dick took the paper and scanned the story. According to the article a man had been arrested for being intoxicated and trying to have sexual relations with a statue of Queen Victoria in Regents Park.
‘So?’. Dick handed the paper back to Susan. Apart from a very slight comedic value in the story and a weak pun about ‘statutory rape’, he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.
‘So? So!’ said Taylor. ‘This is a great opportunity! Someone displaying anti-Party sentiments’.
‘What, being drunk?’, Dick asked.
‘No, being sexually repressed. Trying to have sex with a statue!’, Susan explained.
Dick still thought they were placing too much importance on the story. ‘The man was drunk and drunk people do lots of odd things’, he said. They’re sick in doorways, they start fights and they marry people they shouldn’t in Las Vegas. Just because he was humping a statue doesn’t mean anything!’
Taylor smiled. ‘But it does, Dick. You see the monthly injections are designed to suppress sexual desires, whether conscious or subconscious. The dosage is such that this sort of behaviour should not take place. How it even got reported is another matter. You can be certain that the story will be pulled from a later edition’.
‘What it means’, Susan explained, ‘Is that the man who did this had latent desires that even the injections can’t quash. All the alcohol did was temporarily allow these dormant feelings to rise to the surface’.
‘Think of it as a catalyst’, added Alice.
It was Edward’s turn to support this assumption. ‘We’ve seen it before Dick, the same sort of behaviour. Trust us. This man is a good candidate to join the Resistance’.
Dick looked at the four of them, all smug and self-satisfied in their suppositions. To him the man was clearly pissed. Nothing more and nothing less. If he’d been caught molesting a statue of Scarlett Johansson then there might be something in what they were saying, but it could only be intoxication, pure and simple, to make someone fake sex with a statue of the ugliest queen ever (and that includes Queen Dorete of Denmark, the wife of Eric VII, who had warts and a small moustache). It was one thing he thought, to use Victoria’s image for private arousal, but trying to have sex with her statue in public was definitely not the action of a sober man. As far as this newspaper article went, Dick felt his colleagues were reading far too much into it.
‘I’ve done some research and you know the most amazing thing about this story?’ said Grace.
‘This ordinary story about a drunk man?’
Grace ignored Dick’s sarcasm and dropped her bombshell. ‘He is a low-ranking member of the Party!’.
Taylor’s pipe dropped from his mouth. If Edward, Alice and Susan had been smoking pipes, then theirs too would also have fallen out in the exact same way. But they weren’t, so they just looked shocked instead.
Grace continued. ‘Out of interest I crossed referenced his name with our intelligence records and sure enough, found a match. He’s called David Parnell. He’s an assistant to the assistant under-secretary to the deputy joint executive in charge of canal digging!’
Dick was suffering from SUS, Severe Underwhelment Syndrome, a condition and a term he’d just invented but which seemed more than appropriate for this moment.
Taylor displayed an almost orgasmic level of excitement. ‘Don’t you see?’, he asked, ‘This is a man who has displayed anti-Party behaviour
‘Sure, if you want to find out all the dirt on canal digging!’, Dick added with an equal degree of cynicism and unhelpfulness, and a smug feeling about his word-play.
‘It doesn’t matter’, Taylor continued. ‘However minor his role, he’s a member of the Party and would be able to give us names, positions, news, rumours… anything like that is priceless’.
Edward concurred. ‘That sort of information, even if it’s seemingly inconsequential, helps complete our picture of the Party’.
‘Whatever’. Dick shrugged, still not convinced.
Taylor, Edward, Susan and Grace left the room in a high state of excitement to double check the records, leaving Alice and Dick alone.
‘You look jealous’, Alice said.
Dick frowned. ‘Me? Why?’
‘This new man, David Parnell. If we manage to recruit him he could provide invaluable information. Are you worried we might discover he’s actually more useful to the Resistance than you?’
Alice, apart from having full, firm breasts and the most squeezable ass Dick had seen in a long, long time had obviously been programmed with the kind of logic circuits to give her a woman’s intuition. He laughed out loud, the sort of false laugh that usually means you’re covering up for some sort of insecurity.
‘Me? Jealous? Come on!’ said Dick as convincingly as he could.
‘Why not?’ pressed Alice. ‘You told me before that you were jealous of Taylor and I. If envy is a weakness then it’s not so unbelievable that you’d be jealous about someone who might usurp your place and your role in the Resistance, is it?’
Dick laughed out loud again. More of a ‘guffaw’ this time, and just as unconvincing. Deep down Dick knew
