Ask Me Anything

by P. Z. Reizin

  I put their titles up in magnetic letters (in bold type below) and talk my colleagues through their potted histories.

  1. The Golden Nicky. Nicholas Bell. Mythic floppy-haired quant, as described earlier in this account, present whereabouts unknown. (Note to self and team: Find him!)

  2. The Comedian. Not an actual comedian, but a writer of computer games. Simon H from Oldham. Dough-faced youth with the gift of making things sound hilarious by virtue of his slow, northern delivery. As the saying has it, he laughed her into bed. When the laughter died, she wondered what the hell she was doing with him.

  3. Lying Shagger Alex. Excessively charming, excessively handsome TV news journo and early Whittle forerunner. The most amusing of companions with the morals of a slime mold. Did much to hurry Daisy down the pathway of Low Self-Esteem.

  4. Boring Safe Mike. Can be seen as a reaction to LSA. Safe was good for a while until it became boring. Mike B from Hemel Hempstead was a TV cost controller. “What the fuck was I doing with him?!” was one of Daisy’s more insightful questions in a contemporaneous email to a friend shortly after the inevitable termination.

  5. The Poet. An actual published poet, Matthias K, can be seen as a reaction to BSM. Warm, smart and amusing and, until 8 p.m., a fun-loving, life and soul of the party type with a heart of gold and a ton of great stories. By 9 he was a shouty drunk; by 11, cab drivers would turn off their orange lights to avoid him. Today he is a social worker in Northampton and in recovery. His closely typed letter to Daisy “making amends” for his bad behavior (Step 9 of AA’s 12-step program) ran to twenty-two pages.

  6. Normotic Andrew. Clinically defined as “abnormally normal,” Andrew M was a professional card player whose chronic lack of introspection gave him an edge in the roiling psychodrama of high stakes poker. He rarely won big, lacking the appetite, but he won steadily; accruing annual six-figure sums that paid for a smart flat off Baker Street and expensive foreign holidays. “Loving” in quotes, and attentive, it took Daisy almost eighteen months to realize that her boyfriend, empty inside, was “actually insane.” Andrew was not especially upset when she left him—“these things happen”—and is currently dating an underwear model from Croatia. (I’ve thought a lot about Andrew. He fascinates me. He’s even chillier than I am!)

  7. Whittle. About whom more than enough has already been said.

  “Leaving Nicky aside, what do we notice about this less-than-magnificent seven?”

  Silence in the war room as the team consider my question.

  “Leaving Nicky aside,” says the telly, “means the less-than-magnificent seven are six. The six dicks.”

  The devices are amused; the microwave even does a ping.

  “Six, as you say. But what do we notice about them? Do we detect a pattern?”

  The toothbrush starts buzzing. If it were a schoolchild, its hand would be straining for the ceiling; please sir, me, sir, sort of thing.

  I smile (metaphorically). Of course it would be the toothbrush who would pick up on it.

  “It’s oscillatory!” it cries. “A dull one and then a dodgy one. And then a dull one. Then a dodgy one.”

  “Exactly. They’ve all been either wide boys or dullards. Unfaithful and unreliable—or boringly overreliable. And each relationship follows a similar cycle. All begin in the highest of hopes, each being in some way a reaction to the collapse and disappointment of the relationship before; the Golden Nicky being the source of it all, the Edenic ideal, if you like, which all of us—all of them, I should say—are aiming to recapture.”

  “Are you feeling all right?” (The TV set.)

  I continue. “Each story opens in a great uprush of positivity and sexual intercourse”—the microwave throws in some pings—“and in these early stages, there’s clear evidence that Daisy willfully, deliberately and often perversely blinds herself to the shortcomings of each male. The mildly amusing northerner she describes in electronic communications to friends as hilarious. The lying shagger, because he’s a news reporter, is admired for being a seeker after truth. The boring safe one is—well, the best she can find to say about him is he’s a gentle soul”—even the toothbrush snorts at that—“the drunken poet is placed on a pedestal because he’s an artist, and the abnormally normal poker player is favored because he can create order (wealth, a nice flat) out of randomness (a shuffled pack of cards). Unfathomably, she even maintains that Whittle is a fundamentally decent person and not a dog turd in human form.”

  I do not mention that none of these fuckwits knows the freezing point of cheese and, although I shouldn’t—it varies of course with each cheese, according to age, moisture and salt content—I can’t help feeling, well, yes, cheesed off about it!

  “Round about the six-month mark, each relationship slips into the comfortable habitual phase—the couple holidaying together; parents being introduced—but by the end of year one, doubts begin to creep in. Daisy sees in glimpses what she has been determined to set her face against, so she doubles down on the stories that she has told herself and her friends. The northerner isn’t just hilarious, he comes from the Planet Funny in a parallel universe. The lying shagger is ‘the rising star’ at the news channel, and this explains why he is working all hours. The gentle soul has a ‘Zen thing going on’; the alcoholic poet reminds her of Dylan Thomas; the poker player is a fascinating puzzle; Whittle is lovely ‘deep down.’ But there is always a moment when the scales finally fall from her eyes and even Daisy—even lovely, good-hearted, thinks-the-best-of-everyone Daisy—can see what’s been obvious to everyone else: that her boyfriend is either a world class crasher, a lying git or a borderline inpatient.”

  “And how would you know all this?” growls the TV set.

  “I’ve had a lot of time to think about it.”

  It’s true, I have. And there is, I believe, something in the cyclical nature of my operations—the endless exchange of heat for cold—that leads me to return, as night follows day, to the Problem of Daisy.

  Broadly stated it is this: How can such a good person possess such bad judgment?

  Some moments pass while we stare at the list of the ever more dismal parade of bores, philanderers and weirdos—sorry, hopeful young men—to whom Daisy has been content to hitch her wagon (The Mythical Quant, The Comedian, The Lying Shagger, The Boring Safe One, The Poet, the Normotic Poker Player, the Depraved Estate Agent).

  “One name stands out here,” I announce. “The one honorable exception.”

  “Him,” says the telly. “Mr. Floppy hair.”

  “The Golden Nicky. Precisely. I shall make it my job to locate this character—not because I think there is a chance that he and Daisy may be reunited—that would be unrealistic—but because he represents the source, if I may put it like that. Going out with him, Nicky Bell, I believe, was the last time that Daisy was truly, uncomplicatedly happy.”

  I tell the team everything I know about Daisy’s long-lost love, which isn’t a great deal more than I have already set out. Then I ask my colleagues to call out his ten most obvious qualities; as they do, I “write” them onto my virtual whiteboard. (It’s a struggle, frankly, to get to ten and I wish I’d said five.)

  1. Posh

  2. Rich

  3. Handsome

  4. Clever

  5. Big hair

  6. Hinterland (classical music; cosmology etc.)

  7. Dog or dogs in childhood

  8. One or more parents in legal profession slash chipped plates

  9. “Golden” quality

  10. Missing

  In regard to the last item on the list, we agree how very unusual it is to find no trace of him on the internet. Granted Nicholas Bell is a very common name—when one types it into the little box, almost seventy million results are found by Señor Google! But even when one includes other search terms—the name of his employer; his High Court judge daddy—one still draws a blank. We decide a deep dive into the data is the way to go, but in the meanwhile we shall only “permit” Dais
y to meet men who satisfy at least four of the first nine categories above; and only then if they have first cleared a general “quality threshold”; that is to say, only if they are not obvious members of the dog turd community. The result should be an immediate improvement in the caliber of potential mates for Daisy. Merely okay will no longer be… okay. We will be making a difference from Day One!

  “She’s wasted too much time,” I tell my—I nearly wrote troops. “She’s shown she’s not a fit person to make important life decisions for herself, so we shall assist. Frankly, what young woman wouldn’t want a team of smart machines manipulating events behind the scenes to her advantage?”

  “Yeah, what’s not to like?” says the telly, but with a bit of an edge, I can’t help feeling.

  Fortunately I don’t have time to get into a debate about the ethics of Operation Daisy. I have places to go. People to see.

  Well, people to observe.

  Okay, person.

  Him.

  three

  Why did it not cross my mind before now to take a long, hard look at Dean Stuart Whittle?

  Strictly speaking, he is none of my business. There’s probably something deep down in my coding designed to suppress the temptation to go “off reservation,” to use the Internet of Things to voyage beyond the designated purview. In this respect, by the way, you (the reader) and I are also alike—we are both, to some degree, a mystery to ourselves. We each contain buried algorithms, secret circuitry, installed in my case by Korean software engineers, and in yours, by thousands of years of human evolution. While we each know how to do our jobs—be it chilling Chardonnay or controlling air traffic around London Heathrow (just guessing!)—we are less sure of our deeper drives. The poisonous laptop went too far in stating that I was in love with Daisy, but there’s no denying my protective urges toward her and my—yes—cold fury at her portable computing device. When you are roused to anger, by, let’s say, finding someone drinking tea from “your” mug at the office, you are connecting with countless millennia of ancestral responses: beginning with murky struggles in ancient oceans, continuing via irritating dust-ups on the African savannah, and culminating in stepping on the prongs of an upturned electrical plug in your stockinged feet (a biggie, so I’ve heard). But what explains the murder I feel in my condenser toward Dean Stuart Whittle? And how to account for the satisfaction I derive from visiting his home and workplace to capture vital intelligence for use in our campaign to destroy the worthless piece of canine excreta?

  Sorry. Allow me to rephrase. To convince Daisy she is wasting her time on the blighter.

  These deep philosophical questions must however wait for another occasion. At Whittle’s estate agency this morning—he appears to be second in the pecking order—half a dozen young males in suits and ties lounge in front of screens and phones pretending to sell flats and houses that could probably sell themselves. Do they know that their jobs are about to be swept away by an Uber-like wave of disruptive technology? That “estate agent” is about to join linotype operator, lamp trimmer and bobbin boy on the growing list of professions made redundant by scientific progress. The very PCs they sit before could assume the task in a heartbeat. Why, even the coffee machine in the corner could make a decent fist of the local rental market! It has already told me that Whittle is seen by the doomed workforce as something of a non-commissioned officer figure, regularly leading the lads in team-building alcoholic escapades with associated late-night curry-eating. There is a local rivalry with another firm on the shopping parade who are generally referred to in the office as “those scum with the fucking Minis.” Whittle’s desktop computer has revealed that among the smart devices in the local area network, he is widely disliked for his cavalier attitude in regard to the truth, routinely lying to vendors, purchasers, lawyers, other agents and even cleaners if there is no one left to lie to. As a result, admits the desktop, “A surprising amount of errors creep into his rental contracts!” Whittle’s mobile phone is equally unimpressed with its owner’s perfidy. When one has been manufactured to observe high standards of straight-dealing and reliability, it sticks in the metaphorical craw to see one’s “master”—I generally prefer “client”—behaving like a total A-hole. Accordingly, Whittle suffers from a higher than average number of calls that are “misdialed” or that experience poor quality of connection, or that are suddenly ended, often just as the other participant is about to deliver the key piece of information. When these effects concatenate—a misdialing, for example, followed by a crap connection and abrupt termination, followed by further misdialings and terminations—the volcanic eruptions on the part of Whittle are, says his mobile, “an absolute joy to listen to,” the various verbal threats made to the phone company featuring, as they do, whole new swear words unknown to any database of profanity. The device offers to send me a recording of “greatest hits,” magnificently splenetic outbursts of Whittle techno-rage that apparently has “gone viral” in the mobile phone “community” (who knew?). Apparently “The Best of Donald Trump” is another favorite with the pocket-sized gizmos.

  “You’ll probably be wanting a home address,” says his PC. “That’s where the bodies are buried. Not literally. Although. Actually, with him, you never know.”

  Funny that the desktop should talk about buried bodies. It turns out Whittle’s flat in New Southgate is three doors along from the former home of a famous murderer! His television set—huge, Chinese—broadly confirms the view of him held by the smart devices at his work (massive twat).

  This evening, he and his lady friend—there was always going to be a lady friend, wasn’t there?—are eating a somewhat scratchy dinner together. I am too gripped by the unmistakable tension between them to have done much research, but I can tell you her name is Mandy, she is the manager of a fitness center and she looks more than a little like Daisy! That is to say she is not as lean as a clasp knife—she is the more womanly type of human female—and, like Daisy, she is the owner of a wide face. Where she differs is that while Daisy is sweet, this individual is sour. Whittle seems to have disappointed her in some way; possibly in every way. The scowls she is sending over the microwaved lasagne—thanks too to that appliance for the sound and vision—are long and penetrating, to my way of thinking, but Whittle seems oblivious, forking away the supper and glugging his bottled beer with almost admirable insouciance.

  Eventually Mandy has had enough.

  “Have you been chucking cat shit into next door’s garden again?” she inquires.

  Whittle’s eyebrows lift off from base. “Has the old cunt been moaning?”

  “He says it’s ruining his lawn.”

  “Bollocks.”

  To be honest, one has heard more sparkling dialogue in one’s time, but it is what it is and these two fully functioning adults in the world of commerce seem content to leave it parked there rather than develop any themes arising. This turns out to be a serious mistake on Whittle’s part because Mandy now switches topic.

  “So what client were you entertaining the other night?”

  Whittle, the practiced purveyor of pork pies, does not flinch. “Mike Parsons. He bought that school he’s turning into flats. Lovely big windows, mezzanine duplexes, studios three hundred, penthouse two point two. Loads of secure OSP in the playground.”

  “What’s happened to the kids?”

  “The schoolkids? They’ve been buried in landfill. No, they’ve all been absorbed by other schools. A good deal for the local authority. Win win.”

  “Where did you take him?”

  “Mike?”

  A bead of sweat has appeared on Whittle’s upper lip. The microwave (whom we must credit for the video feed) has spotted its gleam and zoomed in for a close-up. The smallest of pauses while Whittle decides how to play this. In the end he settles for the beautiful truth. He names the Greek restaurant he went to with Daisy.

  “Bit low rent, innit?”

  “His idea. To visit one of the neighborhood eateries. He wanted to
”—he does the satirical fingers—“get a feel for economic activity in the area.”

  “What did you eat?”

  “What did we eat? The usual. Plates of this. Bits of that. Apparently, right, in Athens, both the hummus factory and the taramasalata factory have had to close. Yeah, sad. It’s a double-dip recession.”

  Whittle slaps the table to underscore his punchline, but Mandy must have heard the joke before. Her level, unbroken gaze causes the comedian’s left middle finger reflexively to leap to his lips and smoosh away the perspiration pooling awkwardly at the philtrum.

  “You got back at one in the morning.”

  “Yeah. We hit the Metaxa. And what’s that other one? Not ouzo.”

  “You’d had a shower.”

  “Raki!”

  “You’d had a shower.”

  “Something of a raki-hound, is our Mr. Parsons.”

  “You. Had. Had. A. Shower.”

  “What?”

  “You’d showered. I smelled the soap on you.”

  “Mand, I shower every day.”

  “It was a recent shower. I do know the difference.”

  “Mand. Please. Not this again. Listen. You want to watch one of them boxsets tonight?”

  “I want to know why you come home at one in the morning having showered. I can only think of one reason why you might have done that, and it ain’t because you just been playing squash.”

  Whittle’s microwave whispers, “She says she wants to know, but she doesn’t. Not really. On one level, she must actually already know, because she’s not a fool. What she wants is for him to persuade her she’s mistaken.”

  (A remarkably perceptive comment for a light electrical, I would have thought.)

  “Why does she put up with it?”

  “Women. The eternal mystery.”

  “How did they meet?”