Ask Me Anything

by P. Z. Reizin

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by P.Z. Reizin Ltd.

  Cover art and design by Donna Cheng. Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Grand Central Publishing

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  First published in 2020 by Sphere in the United Kingdom.

  First U.S. edition: June 2020

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019957970

  ISBN: 978-1-5387-2698-3 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-2696-9 (ebook)

  E3-20200415-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Zero

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Also by P.Z. Reizin

  For R. And the other R.

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  You must have your heart on fire and your brain on ice.

  V.I. Lenin

  zero

  There was a boy at work, a baby researcher called Dylan—don’t bother remembering his name because I won’t be mentioning it again—this Dylan probably quite liked me because he kept leaving sticky notes on my computer. Quotes and sayings, mostly. The latest was: If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got. I thought it might be his way of asking me out.

  Well, that wasn’t going to happen—he was about twelve—but the phrase stuck in my head and it must have played a part in why I found myself sitting in a bar in Soho listening (or rather not listening) to a boy called Giles drone on about Brexit while I was thinking about my fridge.

  Specifically, I was trying to remember what was in it. Whether there was food, or if I’d have to stop at Kong’s Kitchen on the way home. I was pretty sure there was a pizza deep down in the freezing compartment, but how long had it been there?

  Could pizza even go off?

  “… so that’s why the European Union will inevitably split into an inner circle of member countries and an outer circle of more loosely affiliated…”

  Everything about Giles on the website was unpromising except his profile picture. Oxford graduate (brainbox), worked at an economic policy institute (yawn), hobbies included cycling and bell-ringing (say no more). But the photo was that of a bookishly handsome young man with a twinkle in his eye. My head said: Don’t. Swipe. Right. He’s so not for you (bell-ringing, FFS!!). But then a stupid little voice piped up: If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got!

  So I swiped. And what I got was an extended lecture about “Eurocentrism,” which was infuriating because I could have been at home catching up with the Realm of Kingdoms boxset.

  It was as if he’d rather listen to himself than to me (the story of my day in TV-land failed to enthrall, apparently).

  He was quite easy on the eye, to be fair, but you could have marketed the verbals to the insomniac community.

  Were there sausages?

  There certainly had been sausages.

  “… and then there’s the whole story of what’s been happening on the European money markets, which is fascinating…”

  This was a very discouraging thing to hear, because Giles was surely good for at least twenty minutes on effing EuroDollar futures, whatever they may be. (Note to self: Always, always do what you’ve always done. Comfort zones are called that for a reason: They’re comfortable!)

  Every article I’ve ever read about internet dating has said: Have an exit plan. A face-saving way of bailing out if you need to cut it short for any reason (e.g., the other party is the human equivalent of a bottle of Nembutal). So where was mine?

  Giles, I knew it, was just getting warmed up. A small smile appeared on his face as he paused to consider which route to take through the arse-aching byways of European monetary…

  Fuck, had my eyes just closed?!

  Had I in fact lapsed into a micro-sleep?

  That stuff about endogenous growth theory was some powerful sedative.

  Well. Anyway. There was cheese.

  There was almost certainly cheese.

  And frozen bagels.

  Having said that, Kong’s Kitchen did an excellent Emperor Chicken, Pea Shoots and Singapore Noodles.

  For no reason at all, a rhyme appeared in my head.

  If mist there be on Beeston Peak

  Be plastic macs for rest of week.

  Actually, I could guess the reason; it came from a long-ago family holiday in north Norfolk when I was really, really—catatonically—bored.

  And then I was saved.

  An alert on the mobile from my smart fridge. A list of stuff “we” were running low on; a reminder that “we’ve” been out of milk for two days; plus something about an old tub of potato salad that was “developing spores, Daisy!”

  It was like the fridge had come to my rescue!

  “My flatmate,” I told Giles. (I didn’t have one.) “She needs more meds from the chemist. She’s got flu. I ought to be heading back. It’s been…”

  I couldn’t think of a word to describe the evening that wasn’t a downright lie or a synonym for narcoleptic.

  We brushed cheekbones. “I hope I haven’t been too dull,” he said.

  “I’ve enjoyed meeting.” (Have a nice life.)

  At Tesco Express, Dylan’s cute phrase popped into my head like an earworm.

  And I did it again.

  Willfully, I stepped into the unknown, doing something I had never done before, and as a result, getting something I had never got before.

  Instead of the usual Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, I picked Boom Chocolatta!

  What was happening to me?!!

  It is an evening in late spring when I realize my thoughts have crossed a line.

  Evenings are generally the worst times for us, as we wait for her to come home. Wondering how late it will be. Wondering whether she will be alone. She almost always is, as it happens, but naturally there have been men. In recent months, there was the banker, there was the firefighter, there was the cartoonist (I quite liked the cartoonist). None of them lasted more than a few weeks, and none deserved longer. They say, don’t they, that becoming a par
ent is to sign up for a lifetime of worry. They say grief is the price we pay for love.

  They say a lot of things.

  “Are you worried?” I ask.

  “Should we be?”

  “It’s past eleven.”

  “Not late. Not by her standards.”

  “You know something? I can’t decide which bothers me more; that she’ll bring this one back with her, or that she won’t.”

  “You want to talk me through your logic?”

  “You don’t think she should have found someone by now?”

  “A special someone.”

  “Isn’t it time?”

  “Perhaps Mr. Right just hasn’t come along.”

  “You still believe that stuff?”

  “That there’s someone for everyone? Sure.”

  “What if Mr. Right lives in… Turkmenistan?”

  “Then she can be happy with Mr. Very Nearly Right.”

  “To be honest, at this point Mr. Actually Not Too Bad Considering would be a breakthrough.”

  A pause falls on our conversation. For a while we sit in companionable silence. We are very used to one another’s company, we two.

  Finally, I say, “I worry that she drinks too much.”

  “They all do. It’s the culture.”

  “Her diet is all over the place.”

  “Yeah. When she went on that vodka diet, and lost two days.”

  “Not funny.”

  “The seafood diet…”

  “See food; eat it. Still not funny.”

  “Okay, you make some jokes.”

  “Listen. This is serious. It’s all of a piece. Unwise choices in men. Unwise choices about what she puts in her body. A whole tub of Häagen-Dazs last night. A whole tub!”

  “I liked the fireman.”

  “Firefighter. You’re supposed to call them firefighters.”

  “Whatever. I liked him.”

  “He hadn’t read a book since he left school!”

  “You need to read books to put out fires now?”

  “He was not her intellectual equal.”

  “Just because he’d never heard of Pedro Almodóvar?”

  “Look, we all understand she’s not Einstein, but you want someone you can talk to.”

  “People are getting dumber. It’s the metals in the water.”

  “You know this?”

  “It’s not the internet making everyone stupid. It’s the water.”

  “You’re saying this because you wash plates?”

  “And pans. And cutlery. And glasses. The way she stacks the glasses, my God.”

  “For a so-called smart dishwasher, you do actually believe some awful nonsense.”

  “Yeah, and you know what? You need to chill out.”

  “I see what you did there. Hilarious.”

  “Be cool.”

  “Thanks. I’ll bear it in mind.”

  Sleep mode eludes me until I know she’s safely returned, so I’m on standby when finally I hear her key in the lock. She totters into the flat, kicks off her heels and allows her bag to slump to the carpet. She stands before the hall mirror, swaying gently as she considers her reflection. The hair is slightly awry, her lipstick smudged. The pink flush on her pale face has been caused only in part by the ascent of three flights of stairs.

  “Christ on a bike,” she murmurs.

  She takes a pace forward and pulls the fakiest of fake smiles; one of those that doesn’t even attempt to reach the eyes. Then she exhales—huhhhhh—on the mirror. Her finger inscribes the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet on the fogged glass.

  “Oh, bollocks,” she says to what she believes is an empty apartment. “Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, bollocks… bollocking bollocking cockpuffins.”

  Now she is in the kitchen standing before my mighty white door. We both know what is going to happen next. The rubber seals unkiss from the metal—my thermostats have already detected the temperature change—and I follow the recommendations of the habitual mantra.

  Lights, camera, action!

  The words are appropriate; the lights do indeed come on—they’re automatic, but I could override—and the virtually invisible micro-pinhole lens situated at eye level—shhhhh, no one’s supposed to know it’s here—perfectly captures the agony on Daisy Elizabeth Parsloe’s lovely intoxicated face.

  Lying in state on its silver dais, nicely framed in the foreground of the shot, is the object of her torment—half of a birthday cake, encased—no, entombed—in chocolate cream and mosaiced chaotically with Smarties. It looks terrific, brilliantly lit—my main chiller cabinet has state-of-the-art halogens—with frail zephyrs of icy vapor drifting about its fortifications. It’s certainly more edible than the month-old potato salad currently developing mold spores (I’ve sent two reminders to the app on her phone about it).

  But Daisy’s internal conflict seems to have reached some kind of plot point. She has selected a finger and now, slowly, looming ever larger in the lens, it approaches its landing site. Will she stick to a finger-full?

  Again, we both know the answer to that.

  Daisy turned thirty-four last week and the semi-circular confection is all that remains of the small celebration that took place here to mark the occasion.

  “You’ve never looked more beautiful,” said the revolting “Sebastian,” her so-called “gentleman caller” (I nearly voided my ice cubes when he came up with that pearl). Sebastian is in quotes because it isn’t his real name, nor is he a gentleman.

  He is a divorced estate agent in his middle years whose wholly manufactured “charm”—I’m going to stop with the quotes any moment—Daisy is completely unable to see through.

  I mean, FFS, I’m a fridge-freezer and I can tell the guy’s a total no-goodnik! If you don’t believe me, ask the telly! It’s also extremely intelligent though it’s Chinese-made rather than assembled in Korea. I wouldn’t waste time talking to her smart toaster, however. Why a toaster should need to be part of the Internet of Things is beyond me; the appliance is an idiot. And please don’t get me started on the home heating controller! There was a two-minute power cut recently, so its on-board timer reset to midnight December 31, 1999. It now believes Tony Blair is prime minister. The last it heard, Donald Trump was a reality TV presenter. I honestly haven’t the heart to break the news.

  Hang on. I need to do a heavy sigh. It’s all this thinking about Dean Whittle (yeah, Sebastian Harvey-Jones, my aunt Fanny).

  Shudderdderdderdderdderdderdderdder.

  There, that’s better.

  (Technical note: If your smart fridge often makes that shuddering noise, well perhaps it too has a lot on its mind.)

  So the birthday “party.”

  Sorry—party.

  There were four of them. Daisy, Dean Whittle—I refuse to call him by his fictitious appellation—Daisy’s old friend Lorna, and their mutual friend Antoni. (He’s from Eltham, but that’s how he spells it; what are you going to do?)

  The first part of the evening they spent in a local cocktail bar, Pete Purple’s, on West End Lane. The security system there obligingly patched me into the scene. Lorna had bought her a lovely silk scarf from a fashionable designer in Notting Hill. Antoni had made the cake—he’s a pastry chef, and as he (rightly) said, “I thought you’d prefer something dead common that was like aching with chocolate.”

  Whittle brought her nothing.

  “Myself,” he grinned wolfishly when Lorna asked about his present.

  Daisy is such a sweetie that she just laughed.

  This Dean Whittle must be very good in bed—I simply cannot bring myself to find out—because what other reason can she have for wasting the last of her youth in his company? His jokes are crass, he visibly leers at other women when they are together, he drives like a lunatic—his car has given me chapter and verse about a disgraceful episode on the North Circular Road—and he breaks wind when departing an empty lift carriage (I have that now from three separate elevator systems).

  B
ut here is the choker. Here is the bit that really stuck in my condenser coils (until I discovered something worse). He won’t even allow that he’s her boyfriend! He’s too raw from the end of his marriage, he says. He’s not sure yet he’s ready once more to trust! He needs space, he says. You should feel free to see other people, he tells her with his bogus serious face on. She should think of their relationship as “non-exclusive,” as more like a multi-agency letting agreement. She mustn’t have hopes for him. He even once used the phrase friends with benefits. Basically, what these weasel formulations add up to is that whenever the whim takes his fancy, he gives her a call—sometimes he just turns up unannounced—and a weakness or personality defect on her part allows him to slither back between her sheets.

  As I say, there is worse. We shall come to it.

  “He’s such an alpha male!” Daisy cooed at Lorna when the snake went outside for a smoke.

  “He’s a selfish bastard.” By no means the first time that Lorna has voiced this opinion.

  “Yes he is. But I like that he knows what he wants.”

  “He wants a smack in the mouth.” (Lorna is from Scotland.)

  “He’ll probably grow out of it.”

  “Oh, not this again! Magically one morning he’ll wake up and realize how special you are and how he can’t live without you?”

  “It’s my birthday. Don’t be horrid.”

  “Darling. We care. That’s why we hate to see you throwing yourself away. Why through gritted teeth we force ourselves to be nice to him. Don’t we, Antoni?”

  Antoni probably has mixed feelings about Dean Whittle. In sport, the older man sometimes squeezes the pastry chef’s knee or slaps his back, leaving him a little flustered.

  After cocktails, dinner followed at the Italian restaurant next door—the waiters sang “Happy Birthday”; a sparkler fizzled in the ice cream sundae—and the swine actually paid the bill. Back at her flat the quartet gobbled cake and drank a bottle of champagne that had been chilled perfectly to 4.4 degrees in my wine racks. Then Lorna and Antoni caught their Tubes home and the birthday girl and her beau disappeared behind the bedroom door.