Magical Index
"shards of glass are one thing - but a marble, there's something to feed your dragons on."
Thursday
The Plague of Spies
Our town used to be coated – literally coated – in spies. When I screwed open the blinds in the morning three of them would dive behind our lavender bush. When I stood over the toilet I could always hear one sploshing around, examining the parts in the septic tank. If I wanted to eat toast for breakfast, sure enough, there was a spy clinging to the spring-loaded plates in the toaster and turning a delicious golden brown. They even got into the seat cushions in our car every morning until my mum stopped driving me to school and made me walk – herds of spies tailing me from across the street.
It was a living hell. A plague of spies. Fire and brimstone, boils and darkness, they all quailed beside the pestilential searching for intelligence. And that’s all they ever did – search for information. That’s what spies do, I suppose. But I had always thought they at least stopped to take romantic hiatuses in the Caribbean – or, at the very least, eat. Our torment was unremitting.
Like everything, I suppose, the plague did have its upsides. For instance, if I wanted to ask my mum, on the far side of the house, where the phone was, I didn’t have to raise my voice. Inevitably there were fifteen or sixteen electronic bugs hidden behind my DVD collection and a corresponding group of spies in every other room of the house listening on indiscreet speaker boxes to every word I said. It was like having the intercom we could never afford. You couldn’t turn it off, but then, you never had to turn it on either. And if I called James to see if he wanted to play cricket, I could guarantee Geoff and Bruce would show up too, having heard our conversation on the spies’ phone tap monitors. We made huge savings on our phone bill the first couple of months. But after that, the phone lines overloaded with taps and no one could get through to so much as their next-door neighbour. It hardly mattered: the oval, by that time, had almost completely transformed into a series of secret entrances to innumerable spy bases anyway. By the time you’d climbed the fence, inadvertently tripping every kind of secret switch ever devised, the oval was a honeycomb of potholes all leading to dingy, beeping war rooms.
My sociology exams scores also benefited at first. All I had to do was shake a spy out of my pencil case, grab him by the tiny collar on his miniature trench coat and demand the answer to question 27 (or whichever I was stumped on) and tell my teacher later that the little blighter had disturbed my concentration. Soon, however, the spies began taking interrogation resistance training and I had to use a safety pin to get results. By the end of the first semester they had started carrying microscopic lipstick guns which left a welt on the back of my hand and a few of them even drank poison to avoid being taken alive.
The irony in all this, of course, was that the spies eventually revealed everything anyway. Government agents will give their lives to protect information that, as everyone well knows, will be “declassified” in a year or two and become public knowledge – the sort of thing you might read on the twelfth page.
With our spies, it took six months. Everything they had unearthed in their relentless white-goods stakeouts and septic tank adventures in the early days of the plague promptly appeared on the community noticeboard at Safeway the day after school got out. Naturally, it took up the entire board and about thirty feet of the blank wall around it. In the following months, Safeway was forced to turn their entire back wall into a massive noticeboard and clear out all the ice machines, ATMs and guide dog money banks in order to make room for the flood of curious visitors – everyone in town.
We all found out that a lot more had been going on in our town than we thought: that Toby Jason, the school janitor, had been secretly involved with a feminist-communist-Maoist group that was using his knowledge of ammonia to deforest parts of Mexico. That my Mum and I had hidden detailed schematics for the construction of a satellite super-weapon. That the manager of Safeway had had a sordid affair with the state Premier’s wife in order to keep her quiet about a government coup he was organizing. And that Mrs Redding had developed plans for a surprise meal of Brussels sprouts on Mr Redding’s birthday to get him back for forgetting their anniversary. She vehemently denied it, of course, but no one believed her.
The plague of spies became a plague of information.
Everyone turned into an insufferable know-it-all. Safeway was the new internet. Everything the spies posted there became irrefutable, canonized, reverenced. And everything was posted there. From how many spoons of sugar little Delia Thomas put on her Weetbix Tuesday morning to the formula for the mind-control drugs the school principle had apparently been using on every student that came into his office.
Initially, the more exotic reports were hard to believe. But, even when it came to those plans for a real-life Death Star I supposedly had behind a false wall in my wardrobe, I was soon wracked by doubts. What if it were true? What if I was refusing to look into my heart? What if I had lied to myself all these years? Surely the spies were better at finding things out than I was. Before a week had passed I admitted it all.
“I was misled,” I bawled to anyone I saw in the street, “my espionage days are over. I swear. I swear on my grave!”
But I was wasting my breath – the rest of the town had already learned to live with their guilt, which quickly became a numbing, insurmountable weight. The only sure diversion was absorbing as much from the wall as possible and having as informed an opinion about other people’s conspiracies as anyone in town.
And the spies went on spying – declassifying – revealing – and the town went on soaking up the information. I was implicated in at least four other world domination schemes by the end of the year and every other detail of my – as things were turning out – sordid life were household facts. Not that I was singled out. Everyone knew everything about everyone else. Not in the way of a small town gossip chain, but of an encyclopaedia – the facts were all well documented, the images hard to refute, the source undeniably meticulous.
Safeway soon surrendered the rest of its walls to the spies’ burgeoning reports and our town surrendered to twenty-four hour punditry. People stopped asking questions – why should they? They could read the answer on the walls – and started giving opinions. And giving and giving and giving, until all the spies had to spy on was an endless series of opinions about other people’s problems. When the opinions themselves started filling up the declassification walls in the middle of the second year, people gave up talking all together and sat on the cold Safeway linoleum all day long, fervently reading lies about opinions about lies.
And that’s when the plague of spies abruptly ended. Because when locusts run out of grain to devour, they die or swarm to greener pastures. The spies ran out of information. There wasn’t the slightest bit of intelligence left to be gathered in our town – even made-up conspiracies wouldn’t hold water now that we were all permanently bustled up together in a supermarket. So the spies packed their miniscule bags, burned their top-secret orders and left us – a town of idiots with an abandoned honeycomb for a cricket oval.
Our town used to be coated – literally coated – in spies. When I screwed open the blinds in the morning three of them would dive behind our lavender bush. When I stood over the toilet I could always hear one sploshing around, examining the parts in the septic tank. If I wanted to eat toast for breakfast, sure enough, there was a spy clinging to the spring-loaded plates in the toaster and turning a delicious golden brown. They even got into the seat cushions in our car every morning until my mum stopped driving me to school and made me walk – herds of spies tailing me from across the street.
It was a living hell. A plague of spies. Fire and brimstone, boils and darkness, they all quailed beside the pestilential searching for intelligence. And that’s all they ever did – search for information. That’s what spies do, I suppose. But I had always thought they at least stopped to take romantic hiatuses in the Caribbean – or, at the very least, eat. Our torment was unremitting.
Like everything, I suppose, the plague did have its upsides. For instance, if I wanted to ask my mum, on the far side of the house, where the phone was, I didn’t have to raise my voice. Inevitably there were fifteen or sixteen electronic bugs hidden behind my DVD collection and a corresponding group of spies in every other room of the house listening on indiscreet speaker boxes to every word I said. It was like having the intercom we could never afford. You couldn’t turn it off, but then, you never had to turn it on either. And if I called James to see if he wanted to play cricket, I could guarantee Geoff and Bruce would show up too, having heard our conversation on the spies’ phone tap monitors. We made huge savings on our phone bill the first couple of months. But after that, the phone lines overloaded with taps and no one could get through to so much as their next-door neighbour. It hardly mattered: the oval, by that time, had almost completely transformed into a series of secret entrances to innumerable spy bases anyway. By the time you’d climbed the fence, inadvertently tripping every kind of secret switch ever devised, the oval was a honeycomb of potholes all leading to dingy, beeping war rooms.
My sociology exams scores also benefited at first. All I had to do was shake a spy out of my pencil case, grab him by the tiny collar on his miniature trench coat and demand the answer to question 27 (or whichever I was stumped on) and tell my teacher later that the little blighter had disturbed my concentration. Soon, however, the spies began taking interrogation resistance training and I had to use a safety pin to get results. By the end of the first semester they had started carrying microscopic lipstick guns which left a welt on the back of my hand and a few of them even drank poison to avoid being taken alive.
The irony in all this, of course, was that the spies eventually revealed everything anyway. Government agents will give their lives to protect information that, as everyone well knows, will be “declassified” in a year or two and become public knowledge – the sort of thing you might read on the twelfth page.
With our spies, it took six months. Everything they had unearthed in their relentless white-goods stakeouts and septic tank adventures in the early days of the plague promptly appeared on the community noticeboard at Safeway the day after school got out. Naturally, it took up the entire board and about thirty feet of the blank wall around it. In the following months, Safeway was forced to turn their entire back wall into a massive noticeboard and clear out all the ice machines, ATMs and guide dog money banks in order to make room for the flood of curious visitors – everyone in town.
We all found out that a lot more had been going on in our town than we thought: that Toby Jason, the school janitor, had been secretly involved with a feminist-communist-Maoist group that was using his knowledge of ammonia to deforest parts of Mexico. That my Mum and I had hidden detailed schematics for the construction of a satellite super-weapon. That the manager of Safeway had had a sordid affair with the state Premier’s wife in order to keep her quiet about a government coup he was organizing. And that Mrs Redding had developed plans for a surprise meal of Brussels sprouts on Mr Redding’s birthday to get him back for forgetting their anniversary. She vehemently denied it, of course, but no one believed her.
The plague of spies became a plague of information.
Everyone turned into an insufferable know-it-all. Safeway was the new internet. Everything the spies posted there became irrefutable, canonized, reverenced. And everything was posted there. From how many spoons of sugar little Delia Thomas put on her Weetbix Tuesday morning to the formula for the mind-control drugs the school principle had apparently been using on every student that came into his office.
Initially, the more exotic reports were hard to believe. But, even when it came to those plans for a real-life Death Star I supposedly had behind a false wall in my wardrobe, I was soon wracked by doubts. What if it were true? What if I was refusing to look into my heart? What if I had lied to myself all these years? Surely the spies were better at finding things out than I was. Before a week had passed I admitted it all.
“I was misled,” I bawled to anyone I saw in the street, “my espionage days are over. I swear. I swear on my grave!”
But I was wasting my breath – the rest of the town had already learned to live with their guilt, which quickly became a numbing, insurmountable weight. The only sure diversion was absorbing as much from the wall as possible and having as informed an opinion about other people’s conspiracies as anyone in town.
And the spies went on spying – declassifying – revealing – and the town went on soaking up the information. I was implicated in at least four other world domination schemes by the end of the year and every other detail of my – as things were turning out – sordid life were household facts. Not that I was singled out. Everyone knew everything about everyone else. Not in the way of a small town gossip chain, but of an encyclopaedia – the facts were all well documented, the images hard to refute, the source undeniably meticulous.
Safeway soon surrendered the rest of its walls to the spies’ burgeoning reports and our town surrendered to twenty-four hour punditry. People stopped asking questions – why should they? They could read the answer on the walls – and started giving opinions. And giving and giving and giving, until all the spies had to spy on was an endless series of opinions about other people’s problems. When the opinions themselves started filling up the declassification walls in the middle of the second year, people gave up talking all together and sat on the cold Safeway linoleum all day long, fervently reading lies about opinions about lies.
And that’s when the plague of spies abruptly ended. Because when locusts run out of grain to devour, they die or swarm to greener pastures. The spies ran out of information. There wasn’t the slightest bit of intelligence left to be gathered in our town – even made-up conspiracies wouldn’t hold water now that we were all permanently bustled up together in a supermarket. So the spies packed their miniscule bags, burned their top-secret orders and left us – a town of idiots with an abandoned honeycomb for a cricket oval.
