‘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 and who is actually a member of the Party. Recruiting him will be such a coup!’.
‘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 she could have a point. And even deeper down he knew she was right.
‘That’s crazy’, he said. ‘I think the whole idea of this guy making some anti-Party demonstration is ridiculous however in the unlikely event he is what you all claim, then that’s great. I’d welcome him with open arms — in a brotherly way of course, not as some precursor to any form of man-love that might lead to naked wrestling, touching willies or sodomy’. Alice was now staring at him. Dick shrugged and continued. ‘Sure I’d welcome him here. Any enemy of the Party is a friend of mine’.
‘As you say, Mr. Longg. As you say’. With that, an unconvinced Alice left the room, leaving Dick alone with his thoughts and a teeny weeny bit of jealously.
‘Anyway’, Dick said under his breath in an effort to comfort himself, ‘I bet he’s got a really small penis’.
Sure enough, that news story had disappeared from the later edition of the paper, giving credence to Taylor’s assumptions. Further painstaking research conducted the next day by Humphrey established that David Parnell had been arrested and taken to West End Central police station for questioning. Taylor thought that while there was a very small chance that the Party would make David Parnell ‘disappear’, it was far more likely that he’d be fined, demoted – and given an extra dose of chemical suppressants. Because the Resistance now knew where he worked, it was an easy enough task for one of the members to follow him home one night and note his address.
Everything moved very quickly after that. The same source in the Resistance who supplied Dick’s entire fake back-story manage to access David Parnell’s permanent record. This contained details of a series of minor incidents going back over several years that, when viewed in isolation, were just that; minor incidents: vandalism, drunken behaviour and public disorder. Nothing that demonstrated any real degree of dissent, but which definitely did hint at someone dissatisfied with the status quo. Under Taylor’s direction David Parnell was placed under detailed surveillance. Further investigations failed to throw up any questions or issues about his legitimacy or sincerity, and verified Taylor’s original assumption that he was a good potential resistance member. That being the case, plans were made to contact him.