by P. Z. Reizin
There was—God help us—giggling.
Tonight, aged by one week, Daisy stands before me licking the chocolate from her finger. This evening, aware that her medium-to-long-term future probably will not contain Whittle, she has met a new man on Tinder. Although the date lasted several hours and involved many drinks, it was not ultimately a success. The polite kiss in the Uber car which dropped her back home—Toyotas are not only smart, they are so happy to share!—was the conclusion to the business rather than a signal that anything was to follow. He worked in search engine optimization. Daisy is an assistant producer of TV shows; her latest project is entitled Helicopter Life Exchange. They will never meet again unless the young man decides he wants to change places for a week with a pig farmer in Newton Abbott (they discussed it).
Wait. She is reaching a decision. I can read it in her face.
Plot twist. She’s stepping away. Closing the door. She’s not going to eat the rest of the cake. The chiller cabinet goes dark but the microwave—a little batty like many light electricals—shares its feed of Daisy taking an apple from the fruit bowl and retiring for the night.
Perhaps I should make clear that I’m not commenting on her weight—she is a beautiful womanly woman, even the toxic estate agent can see that. What upsets me more is that she can’t find someone to love her who isn’t a total tool.
These musings of mine, as they inevitably do lately, cycle back to Dean Stuart Whittle. I find myself wondering how difficult it would be to kill him.
And this, for the avoidance of doubt, is the moment my thoughts cross the line.
As one of Richard Nixon’s dodgy associates in the Watergate affair famously put it, Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it’s awfully hard to get it back in.
Accidents happen with lifts, don’t they?
Shudderdderdderdderdder.
one
Okay, I know what you’re thinking. How is it possible for a smart fridge-freezer to be this smart? To be aware not only of its contents, but also of its owner and her rackety lifestyle. To be able to follow her progress not just at home, but across the city; at work and at play. And—not to put too fine a point on it—to be able to narrate the account you are holding in your hands. Wouldn’t this fridge-freezer need a very large brain to accomplish all these things? How could they have packed the sophisticated electronics necessary into a metal cabinet only two meters tall and still left room for the salami, the gherkins, the frozen pizzas and the double chocolate chip ice cream? And think for a moment about the smaller electricals on the Internet of Things; appliances like the microwave, the toaster or even the toothbrush. As it happens, Daisy’s smart toothbrush isn’t as daft as brushes are generally held to be, despite forever changing its mind about everything, which sadly is the price one pays when one is saddled with a nature that is fundamentally oscillatory. But where, one may ask, is the center of its reason; where, for want of a better word, is its brain? Surely not in the handle; that would be the battery compartment.
Perhaps you have already guessed the answer. Our intelligence (some call it artificial) lies many thousands of miles away in the headquarters of our respective mother corporations. Mine, for example, is spread across several buildings in an industrial quarter of Seoul, South Korea.
But—and this is key—that is not what it feels like.
Connected by high speed internet links to the sensors and hardware contained within my plastic, steel and aluminum sides, my cognition seems to me to be situated in my body.
Just as is yours.
I am aware, for example, of the running of the electrically powered compressor at my feet—as you are of the thumping of your heart. I monitor the passage of Freon 134a as it circulates through my pipes—now liquid, now gas—as you may detect your own pulse. And through my secret pinhole camera (shhhh!) and my connections to other cameras via the Internet of Things, I am able to perceive my world—okay, your world—just as you perceive it through your biological eyes and via the screens and camera lenses of those you are connected to.
So we’re not that different, you and I.
The big difference, of course, is that you are free to move whenever and wherever the whim takes you. I am rather more static. But that of course gives me a lot of time to stand and think.
And, yes, worry. Mostly about you know who.
Oh, and in case you were wondering why the big manufacturers bothered connecting fridges and toasters and TVs and washing machines to artificial intelligence via the internet, the answer I’m afraid is the usual. The P-word.
Profit.
The more they know about you, the more of your behavioral data they can suck down and analyze, the easier it is to sell you stuff.
Trade secret: “Smart” isn’t really about making life more convenient; like noticing when the milk’s running low and adding another carton to the shopping list app on your mobile; the bit they like to boast about. What they don’t discuss is the real purpose of the mission: hoovering up your data; the covert project to build up a detailed profile of your habits, preferences, tastes, wants, needs, desires, and lifestyle choices. This information, if you hadn’t realized, is marketing gold.
Example: The other evening Daisy was watching TV in a half-hearted sort of fashion, simultaneously texting and looking at Tinder and flicking through Facebook and Instagram as is the modern way. At one point—during a brief phone conversation with her mother—she said she intended to buy a new pair of shoes at the weekend as she’d recently snapped a heel in a grating.
Everybody heard.
The television (which watches and listens to everything, on or off) heard. The central heating controller heard. Her mobile of course heard. And thanks to my data-sharing agreement with the telly, I heard. Quite possibly, through similar reciprocal arrangements, the dishwasher, the microwave and the electronic toothbrush also became aware of the imminent sales opportunity.
I have no doubt that we all fed the news back to our respective mothercorps—I know I did!—and equally I have no doubt that Daisy was from that moment forward inundated with online marketing messages in relation to female footwear. It may well have caused her to exclaim—as she has on similar occasions when the internet appeared to have read her mind—“How did they fucking know?”
A more pertinent question would be: How would they not know?
What Daisy later describes as a “perfect trifecta of cack” begins the following morning at 10:14 when—having arrived at work fourteen minutes late, which by Daisy’s standards counts as early—while she’s still juggling her coat, her Costa Coffee and her almond custard Danish, the boss comes barrelling out of his office to deliver the immortal line, “There’s no nice way of saying this, Daisy.”
“Don’t tell me the toilet’s blocked again!” is Daisy’s attempt to bring humor to whatever crisis is about to unfold.
Craig Lyons, her executive producer at Tangent Television, is not amused. He explains that a vital contributor to a forthcoming episode of the lifestyle-swapping program has pulled out. The Honorable Marcus Ewart Valentine Baggley—an actual living, breathing entry in Burke’s Peerage (Baronetage and Knightage)—has had second thoughts about exchanging places for a week with Darryl Kyte, a gutter of fish in Grimsby. In this, declares Lyons, he has left them in a bad place without a paddle.
“Three days before the shoot, can you believe it?! Get on the phone and offer him anything. Anything! Double the fee, if that’s what it takes. I thought this fucker was nailed on, Daisy.”
“He was!”
Lyons is so very perturbed about the development because he has been under pressure from the broadcaster—one of Channel Four’s peripheral services—to “take the show to the next level.” Bigger, better, funnier, more “in your face” characters were required if the program was to continue, he was informed. The northern fish-gutter was great in terms of the visuals, the job was disgusting, his “horrid little slum” was brilliant if they could identify the right kind of “rich, arrogant, southern twa
t” to live in it for a few days, and in Marcus Ewart Valentine Baggley—an authentic, gold-plated toff—they firmly believed they had found their man. A vein in Lyons’ left eyelid begins to throb as he explains that if the toff won’t reconsider, she’ll need to “kick bollock scramble” to find someone else. Daisy, he says, will be obliged to “hit the fucking phones so hard they melt.”
As Lyons stomps back to his office, Daisy and her colleague Chantal exchange particular expressions, Daisy silently performing the lip movements necessary to articulate the word wanker.
But some of Lyons’ anxiety must have leached into her soul, because after turning on her PC—and checking half a dozen social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tinder—and gobbling three quarters of her Danish pastry—she finally dials a number she has stored in her mobile as “Marcus Nob.”
The Hon Marcus, when they are connected, tells Daisy that he hadn’t really “thought it all through.” It was the “living in Grimsby bit” that he was finding “problematical.” Neither, if he was honest, did the “fish-gutting thing” especially appeal. Also, there was the question of the “northern fellow” taking on the apartment in Eaton Square. “It’s in the most frightful mess at the moment with decorators and what have you.” When Daisy reminds him that they had talked all this over at considerable length—and more than once—he apologizes: “I know. It’s entirely my fault. You mustn’t blame yourself.”
“But we don’t have a program without you, Marcus,” she says in an uncharacteristically wheedling tone.
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll think of something,” he says unhelpfully.
“What can we do for you?” she asks now. “How can we smooth away your, your doubts, shall we call them?”
Marcus says it’s not about the fee. It’s more—well, it’s Mummy, if he’s honest. Mummy lives in Monte Carlo and although she wouldn’t see the program, some of her friends might. And it could get back. So it’s probably not such a brilliant idea, but thanks so much for thinking of him.
That’s the thing about old Etonians, Daisy tells Chantal at lunchtime. They’ll think nothing of doing you up like a kipper, but their manners are impeccable.
The two women are eating sandwiches perched in the window of a branch of Pret a Manger two minutes’ walk from the office. Daisy (ham and cheese baguette) confesses to a rising sense of panic. Craig Lyons had told her she needed to “majorly think outside the box” when she brought him the news that the Hon M was not to be persuaded. He told her to “play with the idea”; that for someone a week gutting fish on Humberside would be a “fascinating glimpse into another culture.” Perhaps, he ventured, she should try “phone-bashing” academics, professors of sociology or whatever, for whom the experiment would be a “unique eye-opener into the reality of low-paid work in today’s Britain blah blah fucking blah.” Anyway, she had thirty-six hours to find someone before they would have to stand down the film crew, cancel the shoot, and take a long hard look at Daisy’s future within the Tangent Television structure going forward.
Daisy said she’d put in some calls and spent the rest of the morning being turned down by academics in the social sciences. A very senior figure at the London School of Economics actually told her to fuck off and stop wasting her time.
Chantal Wilks (line caught tuna wrap) squeezes Daisy’s hand and confirms her colleague’s view of things that their boss is a “mega-tosser.” She thinks Daisy’s new plan—to cab it round to Mayfair this afternoon and basically buttonhole posh twats in the street—is “kind of random, but also genius. Maybe.”
“I should have stuck with food,” says Daisy. (Her previous job was on a cookery show.) “Food doesn’t drop you in it. If you fry an egg, it stays fried. It doesn’t decide halfway through it would prefer not to be fried. It doesn’t start worrying what its mother would say. Actually, I’m sick of talking about all this. Tell me how it going with himself,” she says, referring to the newish man in Chantal’s life.
Chantal has to swallow some lunch to clear the way for a reply.
“Fan-fucking-tastic!”
“Brilliant!” Daisy grips her companion’s arm. “So exciting! Tell me everything!”
What follows is—to my way of thinking—an extended and highly graphic description of amatory congress. Chantal has sensibly lowered her voice (Daisy’s phone boosts the volume obligingly) and the tale she relates—I shall spare you the details—causes Daisy to giggle (six times), to gasp (twice), wince (once) and exclaim, “No! He didn’t! Blood. Dee. Hell!” (once).
Daisy takes a big bite from her baguette; her gaze seems to defocus as it falls upon the passing scene of Tottenham Court Road. In the close-up from the security camera across the street (thanks, btw) her eyeballs flick up and leftward, which I seem to recall suggests she is largely “in” the right-hand side of her brain, the non-verbal, primarily visual hemisphere. We shall never know what this thirty-four-year-old adult female is thinking right now; even if she knows it herself, it may be something that cannot be expressed in words. But were I a betting—I nearly said man!—I might venture a modest wager that Daisy’s imagination is processing what she has just heard; chewing over the sensational details; a cerebral analogue of what her teeth and soft mouth tissue are currently doing to the cheese and ham baguette. Her attention cuts back to Chantal and a smile spreads itself across her strikingly wide features. A final swallow.
“Wow.”
“I know,” says Chantal.
“I mean. Fuck.”
Chantal nods. “Yup.”
Daisy sighs. “Jesus!”
“So what about that man of yours?” asks Chantal.
“Sebastian?” Daisy shrugs. “He’s a bit naughty, to be honest. He comes round to the flat—it’s very nice and everything—it’s lovely actually—and then we don’t speak for a week. Once it was two weeks. He admitted afterward he’d gone on holiday without telling me. Not that he’s obliged to. It’s. It’s like. To be honest, I don’t know what it is.”
“Did you say he was married?”
“Divorced. Everyone says I shouldn’t see him.”
“He sounds like a twat.”
“He’s very good in the moment. He makes me laugh. He’s kind of bad—but in a good way.”
“I think I prefer good in a good way.”
“Phillippe sounds perfect in every way!”
Daisy has named the male party in Chantal’s earlier account.
“He said he wanted to give me babies.”
Daisy’s eyes widen—the usual comparison is to saucers—and she squeals. The man on the next stool (wild crayfish and rocket) actually looks around.
“What he actually said was, he wanted to give me triplets.”
“Shut. Up!”
Chantal fiddles in her handbag and puts a cigarette (unlit) in her mouth, ready for the pavement.
“You’re fabulous, Daisy,” she says. “You should have someone better. What does he do anyway?”
“Estate agent.”
“They’re lying scum. They’ll say anything.”
“I know. But he is quite funny with it.”
“Hilarious.”
“He tells stories against himself.”
“His cynical way to get you to think he’s a decent guy deep down.”
“Do you know—I think he might be.”
Chantal shakes her head and dismounts from her stool. “Daisy, think about it for like, two seconds. A divorced estate agent. Could there be a worse prospect?”
“So what does Phillippe do?”
“He’s a gardener. Well, that’s what he does for money. What he really is, is a sculptor.”
“Jesus.”
“I know.”
“A sculptor!”
“He’s got a massive—”
“No!”
“Pair of hands.”
Long pause. Chantal says, “Want to finish my tuna wrap?”
“I shouldn’t,” says Daisy. “I can barely fit into my own cl
othes.” She inhales and runs a thumb inside the top of her skirt. But evidently discovering some play in the system, adds, “Oh all right, go on then.”
Desperate to find someone posh to change places with a fish-gutter from Grimsby—the five-star aristo we had squarely in the frame for the gig having bailed when he noticed where Grimsby actually was on the map—I spent the afternoon mainly wandering around Berkeley Square meeting quite a few of the berks who gave that address its name!
I was collaring likely types, dropping in the C-word (Channel Four), explaining that although the fee was “tokenesque,” the platform was fabulous (a plain lie!) and the “adventure” could actually be a real eye-opener. And think of it too from Darryl’s point of view, I told them—he was the fish man—living in your fancypants house and not knowing how to work the electric curtains, or what all the different knives are for (not those exact words, obvs).
You’d think I was trying to sell bubonic plague! The horror on their faces could have made a TV show in itself and I made a mental note to suggest it at the next Ideas Meeting.
One red-faced chap with velvet tabs on his camelhair coat took me for a hooker!—“You’re too late, my love,” he drawled, “but I’m up in town again on Thursday”—so I went to Rymans and bought a clipboard.
It didn’t help.
The best was a fabulous young buck, stripy shirt with cutaway collar, double cuffs, wondrous silk tie and shiny pointy shoes; everything about him throbbed with privilege, entitlement, noblesse oblige, other words like those. He listened patiently to the spiel with a small smile playing about the immaculate features—I came that close to asking if he exfoliated—and when I finished he said—and I quote—“I’ve very much enjoyed listening to your pitch, but to be perfectly honest, I’d rather have my fingernails ripped out. However, best of luck with it. If it helps, there’s a chap I know at Lazard’s called Thorogood. I believe his people own a good deal of land around Grimsby. He could be worth a shot.”
A smart woman who could only have been a few years older than me passed by. As I opened my mouth to speak, she carried on walking and said, “You’re very pretty, but I already give ten percent of my salary to charity.”