Requiem (6 page)

Alice was travelling fast. Daisy hurried to intercept her before she reached the agrochemical stand.

She didn’t seem surprised at the sight of her. She even managed a faint smile. ‘Oh, hullo, Daisy,’ she said, stepping neatly past her and continuing her onward progress.

‘Mrs Knowles – Alice – look, are you sure this is a good idea?’ Daisy said, hurrying to keep up.

She didn’t slow down. ‘Well, something’s got to be done, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes, but …’ Eyeing the reporters, Daisy dropped her voice. ‘What about our press release? What about the evidence and the meeting with the man from the ministry? I thought we were going to wait, like we agreed.’

Alice narrowed her lips and said firmly: ‘Can’t wait any longer.’

‘But why now, Alice? Why so suddenly?’

She snorted and shook her head. ‘Got a letter from the government safety people. Told me I was talking rubbish.’

‘But, Alice – one letter.’

‘Four years’ hell and the blighters aren’t even listening,’ Alice retorted. ‘Can’t wait any longer.’

Daisy took her arm and whispered: ‘I know how you feel, Alice, but listen – people aren’t going to understand something like this … It might actually put them off, you know. They’re going to think – well, that you’re overdoing it a bit.’

‘Oh?’ Alice Knowles stuck her chin out. ‘Well, we’ll see, won’t we?’ Her hair, normally grey and bouncy, was plastered darkly over her forehead. Rivulets of water ran down her cheeks and hung from her nose in droplets. With her square face and jutting jaw, she looked like a bull terrier, small and very determined.

‘Alice – I really don’t think this is the best way.’

‘If Jane Fonda can protest and get her picture in the paper, why can’t I?’

Oh my Lord, Daisy thought, there’s no answer to that. About the only thing Alice Knowles and Jane Fonda had in common was their age.

‘Alice – ’

But Alice wasn’t listening any more. Having given her face an abrupt wipe on her sleeve, she was tackling the wrapping on her parcel, which looked uncomfortably like a placard.

‘What’s the story?’ a reporter murmured in Daisy’s ear.

Where did one start? Tragedy sounded trite when reduced to a few sentences. Instead, Daisy fumbled under her jacket and pulled out one of her press releases.

‘Thanks.’ The reporter skimmed through it. ‘Can this be proved? I mean is it certain that this stuff killed her husband?’

‘Depends what you mean by proof,’ Daisy said. ‘We’ve got two doctors’ opinions. Aldeb was found in his blood and body tissue – ’

‘But is that proof? You know …’

She knew all right. He meant, was it signed and sealed and agreed upon by the entire scientific community, the whole medical profession and all the various government departments. The answer was, of course, no. In fact: no, no and no. Not one body or group agreed on anything. Quite the opposite in fact: many so-called experts would rather die than admit to the possibility of agreeing with other experts in their own field.

‘As much proof as one can ever get,’ she said truthfully.

‘Oh.’ By the sound of his voice, he had lost interest and would probably have slipped away if the action, such as it was, hadn’t been about to start.

The wrapping was off what was indeed a placard. Alice Knowles turned to face her audience, which consisted of the small knot of reporters and photographers, and a group of unsuspecting show-goers sheltering from the rain. She clasped the placard against her body, message inwards, so that no one could read it until she was ready.

She cleared her throat and began in a fierce emotional voice: ‘I’ve come here today out of desperation. I’ve come to make myself heard because no one’ll listen …’ The show-goers began to shuffle imperceptibly backwards, as if this sudden burst of sincerity and passion might be dangerous. ‘… I couldn’t let this thing go unchallenged any more. I have already lost my husband. Now I’m in danger of losing my son …’ The crowd had stopped shuffling and was now rigid with amazement. ‘… They were both perfectly healthy men, nothing wrong with them, never been to a doctor in their lives. Not until they made the mistake of believing wholesale lies. Not until they made the mistake of believing the totally meaningless assurances they were given by the manufacturers of Aldeb and the Ministry of Agriculture …’ The listeners weren’t sure about that; nor, for that matter, was Daisy.
Too much, Alice; too strong, too moralistic.
The onlookers began to exchange glances and dive off into the rain in search of fresh shelter.

Sensing the crowd’s restlessness, Alice faltered and seemed to lose her thread but then, fixing the reporters with her intense stare, she got a second wind and launched forth again. ‘I want to prevent this happening to other families. I want to make sure no one has to suffer as we have suffered. I want these dangerous untested chemicals banned, and not just to protect people like us, farmers who have to work with these poisons, but to save every man, woman and child in this country. To save everyone who’s eating and drinking these dreadful things and doesn’t realize it.’

She went on for a bit, talking about the unrealized menace of pesticides, their role in disease – she quoted almost every incurable disease in the book, though where she’d got those ideas from, Daisy couldn’t imagine – then, having repeated herself a few times, tailed off.

Daisy thought: Oh,
Alice
. It was a gallant little speech, bravely delivered but seriously misjudged. Daisy gave her a little cheer all the same. The pressmen looked less than bowled over.

Suddenly remembering the placard, Alice Knowles turned it round and held it up. It read: BAN DEADLY CHEMICALS – BAN ALDEB – BAN POISONS THAT KILL INNOCENT FARMERS.

A photographer dutifully took a picture or two. A local radio reporter advanced on Alice and pointed a microphone at her. Daisy handed out press releases. But it was no good, she knew it was no good. The popular press didn’t like one-woman demos any more than they liked stories about obscure chemicals, shadowy unseen things neither they nor their readers knew or cared to know about, not when there were good old bogey men like nuclear power to pick on, not when they had tear-jerking pictures of children with leukaemia, not when they had villainous substances that were certified guaranteed all-bad, things like PCPs, CFCs and leaded petrol.

Poor Alice. Husband dead of cancer. Only son fighting the disease. She’d believed that her evidence, with the opinion of two doctors, would be enough to get her some sort of justice; she’d imagined that the world would listen. Well, she’d learnt differently, and now she was going to be disappointed all over again.

Not that the event was over. The agrochemical merchants had finally woken up to the fact that someone was saying nasty things about one of the products on their stand. A small bullish man had shoved his way through the onlookers and pushed his face close to Alice’s. Daisy couldn’t hear what was said, but Alice drew back, looking at once nervous and defiant, then, rallying, pulled herself up to her full height, which wasn’t very much, and stood her ground.

Daisy stepped forward. ‘Can I help?’

The bullish man spun round. ‘She’s got to go, or I’ll have to call the police.’

Daisy was soothing. ‘She’s finished now, I think. Just making a point. Quite peaceably.’

But he wasn’t having any of that. ‘Off –
now
. This minute.’

‘Well, of course, if that’s – ’

Alice cut in: ‘I refuse to leave, I’m afraid.’

‘Right,’ said the bullish man, vibrating with sudden rage. ‘If that’s the way you want it, no problem. I’ll get the police to remove you forcibly.’ And elbowing his way past Daisy, he swept off into the rain.

Not surprisingly, the pressmen had changed their minds about going and were now waiting patiently for their police-remove-lady pictures. They weren’t disappointed. It was an ugly little scene, and Daisy felt a lurch of humiliation for Alice Knowles. Once the two policemen had established that she wasn’t going to go willingly, they took an elbow each and marched her towards the showground entrance. As Daisy set off after them, she looked back and saw the bullish man pick up the placard and break it across his knee.

It took quite a while to get Alice Knowles back into some sort of shape. Despite her brave front, she was badly shaken. She’d never experienced the police in anger before. Daisy drove her to a motorway café and fed her tea and biscuits for over an hour before deciding it was safe to take her back to the ground to collect her car.

They sat in the Metro for a while, watching the rain course down the windscreen.

Alice gave a deep sigh. ‘I suppose I’ve been a bit of an ass,’ she said.

‘I wouldn’t say that!’ Daisy said quickly. ‘A bit of an optimist maybe.’

‘I had to do something.’

‘I know.’

‘What next then?’

‘Well, I’ll have another go at the live wires in the ministry,’ said Daisy. ‘Beat them over the head, you know. Interrupt their tea break, remind them we’re not going to go away and give up.’

‘Do you really think they’ll listen?’

It was hard to explain to people like Alice just how obtuse and convoluted were the workings of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. MAFF had until a few years ago worked entirely on the principle that pesticide manufacturers were all frightfully good honest chaps, and should be allowed to run their own chemical safety scheme on a voluntary basis, administered by the ministry’s Advisory Committee on Pesticides. The safety scheme was now legally enforced, which was a step in the right direction, but that didn’t prevent the activities of the ACP from being secretive, and their findings unchallengeable. Worse, there was no proper watchdog in the UK, nothing like the USA’s Environmental Protection Agency, no one to re-examine the manufacturer’s safety tests to make sure they had been sufficiently thorough, no one to challenge the widespread official view that chemicals were all right until they turned round and bit you. Ludicrously, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food was meant to represent not only the farmer and the agrochemical industry – groups whose interests were often diametrically opposed – but also the consumer. And though consumers might have a number of vague worries about the amount of chemicals in their food, it was the farming and agrochemical lobbies that had all the clout. Outsiders, people like the Knowleses, found it hard to understand just how low consumer interests came in the pecking order. Getting information out of the ACP or MAFF was like extracting a tasty bone from the teeth of a fierce dog: almost impossible without a large stick and a lot of muscle. Catch had neither.

‘We’ll get to them in the end,’ Daisy said with a conviction she didn’t entirely feel. ‘There’s our tame MP, Jimmy. He’s had four shots at getting a question at prime minister’s question time. Might be fifth time lucky.’

‘But it’s no good, is it? Any of it.’

Daisy laughed. ‘Blimey, Alice, if I thought that, I might as well tie my ankles together and jump in the river.

Honestly, I’d give up tomorrow if I thought I was getting nowhere. It’s just
slow
that’s all. Like swimming through wet concrete. But we’ll get there in the end. I do believe that, Alice, I do, really, otherwise I wouldn’t be bothering.’

Alice was slumped in the seat. Her hair had dried into a grey frizz. She looked exhausted. ‘But they won’t even speak to us, will they? Won’t tell us anything. That’s not going to change, is it?’

‘Well – no, not for the moment,’ Daisy admitted. Incredibly, information on certain types of pesticides came under the Official Secrets Act because the chemicals had been developed from nerve gases. No good pointing out that almost every belligerent country in the world – and there were enough of them, God only knew – was well aware of how to produce nerve gases. No good arguing that information on this type of pesticide was freely available in the US. The British loved secrets. Correction: the British
Establishment
loved secrets – a different thing. The information that wasn’t protected by the Official Secrets Act was covered by that old stalwart of profit-making prevaricators – commercial confidentiality. MAFF and the pesticide manufacturers looked after each other very nicely, thank you. From the rosy picture the two of them painted, you’d never have thought there’d ever been a mishap, far less a disaster. No DDT, no 2,4,5-T, no dioxins. Very cosy, very frustrating, and very difficult to comprehend when all you wanted was the answer to a few simple questions like why and how, and can’t this be prevented from happening again.

Alice blew into a handkerchief with a blast like a ship’s siren, and shook her head. ‘Just what will it take?’

Daisy knew the answer to that. Cast-iron scientific proof in triplicate. A silenced agrochemical lobby (that would be the day). Further disaster.

‘They’re banning it in the States,’ Daisy reminded her. ‘It’ll get banned here in the end too.’

‘But when?’

Daisy sighed. ‘Good question.’

‘What will it take?’ Alice repeated, almost to herself.

‘Money, I’m afraid, Alice. Pots of dough. On a scale I don’t even dare think about.’

Alice nodded with weary resignation. She began to get out of the car. ‘I’ll send you a cheque when I can.’

Daisy’s throat tightened. ‘Oh, Alice, don’t. Keep your money. You’ll be needing it.’

Alice didn’t reply but climbed out and slammed the door.

Daisy wound the window down and called after her: ‘Sure you’ll be all right?’

Alice gave a small wave and got into her car. Daisy watched to make sure she got away all right, thinking that if only worthiness and dedication were enough, then the Alices of this world would keep Catch going for ever. But Catch ran on hard cash, and it took a shocking number of small cheques from the likes of Alice to keep it afloat. And that was without any wild notions about an independent research programme.

Put off by the rain, people were going home early and there were long queues of cars leaving the ground.

A research programme or two … And a proper press office, professional parliamentary lobbyists, a national membership organization, a glossy newsletter … Well, the list was endless. All it needed was what Catch’s accountant liked to call a healthy injection of cash. But then what campaigning organization didn’t need that? The few outfits that had managed to trap a tame environmentally minded millionaire kept good and quiet about it – and who could blame them – and those that hadn’t, which was an awful lot, sat like alley cats, waiting to pounce on a passing moneypots, fully prepared to scratch each other’s eyes out in the process. Green campaigning wasn’t quite the benevolent business people imagined it to be.