by P. Z. Reizin
“Sure,” she says. “I’d like that.”
“Excellent,” says the maestro. “I’ll practice extra hard now I know you’re coming. It’s a complex series of pieces.”
“Good,” says Daisy. “Who wants simple, eh?”
They part outside on St. Martin’s Lane. He offers a hand to shake, but she takes it only to move in for a quick peck on the cheek. Quite a lot of blinky blinky follows. When she sashays off toward Leicester Square Tube, Owen stands rooted to the pavement, vision loaded and locked onto her departing figure, car headlights dancing on his spectacle lenses, unknowable symphonies playing inside the monkish skull.
Owen Cornish was a rather serious classical musician, a bit shy and speccy perhaps, but one of those nice chunky blokes who made oneself feel petite all of a sudden. He seemed smart—not so much for saying anything desperately clever, but more for his starey brown eyes that you sensed masses of stuff going on behind. And he had this way of looking at you—not creepily, not leering at your bosoms or anything—but really focused, like he Wants To Understand. Does that sound crazy? Anyway, the night before last I went to a private concert at his flat.
I was a tad nervous. I mean, the last concert of any kind that I’d been to was Foo Fighters, and this was a very different kettle of F. Picture the scene. Ding dong at the front door—the flat was in Paddington—and he opened it wearing a flipping dinner jacket!
“Oh, hi,” I jabbered. “I didn’t know it was formal. I left my tiara at home.”
He smiled. “It’s a harmless affectation. The others like it. Come and meet them.”
Blood. Dee. Hell. Talk about a bunch of stiffs.
Aside from Owen, there were four, all in evening dress. A very short, very round, older man with one of those awful arbitrary beards that are grown to mark the (arbitrary) border between face and neck (he played the oboe); a stringy, nervy-looking woman in a floaty dress (flute); a bank manager type (bassoon); and a swarthy-looking bloke with a mustache who turned out to be with the flutist.
Oh yes, and an old lady called Maureen who lived downstairs.
So the audience was me, Maureen and Mr. Swarthy; the wind quartet (who even knew such things existed?) sat in a little circle in front of music stands and played. Mr. Tubby with the arbitrary beard introduced each piece—the only composer who was even vaguely familiar was Buxtehude (?)—and it wasn’t too ghastly, being expertly performed, although that kind of meandering tooty tooty stuff usually leaves me a little—SFW?! It was actually kind of fascinating to watch, in its way, the disturbing things they did with their lips, the funny frowns and facial expressions, Mr. Swarthy all the time jiggling his foot and “conducting” along with his finger.
There was sherry when it was all over and some painful small talk, and I did wonder what Owen was doing hanging about with this bunch of losers, but it turned out they were all top musos, highly regarded within the profession and fatso was a personal friend of Sir Simon Rattle!
“Was that all right?” asked Owen after everyone had fucked off home (I mean departed in their carriages). “Did you enjoy it?”
“Yeah, brilliant,” I replied. (I actually did, sort of.)
“It’s not everyone’s idea of a splendid night out.”
“I liked it. It was—it was different!”
It was actually so bizarre a scene in that flat that it became a little dream-like. I guess it was to do with the strangeness of the new person; the alien ways that hadn’t yet been rubbed away through familiarity. (Although to be honest, I never got used to how Normotic Andrew wouldn’t allow anything to upset him. Even when I called him a heartless cunt, he smiled and said I probably didn’t mean it.)
Owen took a step toward me and I thought something was about to happen. But he just said, “I’ll make us a spot of supper. Back in a tick.”
He disappeared backstage to change into normal clothes and was next found in the kitchen beating eggs.
“Why don’t you pour us some drinks,” he said. “There’s a good bottle of Chablis in the fridge.”
I liked that he asked me to do that. When we clinked glasses there was definitely a look in his eye. Eyes. Both of them. I confess I found him attractive in that moment, the farmer’s son body inhabited by the soul of an artist sort of thing.
But then he got cranky about the omelet, chucking it in the bin like they do on Masterchef, because there wasn’t enough air in it, FFS. And it got worse as he was whizzing up the dressing for the salad when a rather fine glass oil and vinegar contraption slipped from his fingers and smashed on the floor. He made fists and actually bellowed like a stricken ox! And I swear he was going to punch the wall.
“You must forgive me,” he managed. “I happen to think small details matter a great deal.”
Resisting a powerful urge to say, honestly, I’d be perfectly happy with a Bargain Bucket from KFC, I helped him mop up the damage. But while we were down there on the floor with wads of kitchen roll, our eyes met again, and…
Well.
Talk about a charged moment!
Some kind of undiffused tension—part sexual, part salad-dressing-related—found release and the next moment we were locked in an exploratory snog, which wasn’t straightforward because (a) we were on our knees and (b) we were both holding oily wads of kitchen paper. I started giggling after a bit and suggested we should move into the sitting room.
He turned out to be a not bad kisser; perhaps playing wind instruments helped with the lip action—and it nearly got properly steamy but I was determined it wouldn’t lead to anything because I didn’t want him to think I was that kind of person (going to bed with Lying Shagger Alex three hours after meeting him was forever to color his view of me).
I decided I liked him. He was obviously smart and he did have a sense of humor—the posh dry sort probably—he was respectful to the point of shyness and… and, well, I liked the way he took up space. He was a sort of cultured bruiser. He had what they call a hinterland—the normotic poker player didn’t even have a mainland—anyway, we arranged to go out again the following weekend, and this time I would get to decide what we did, and I had a funny sort of feeling…
Well, let’s just say I was feeling positive.
A short intermission before the next act.
“Can you see a grape on the floor between my feet?” I asked the microwave one evening in the days leading up to Daisy’s third date with the musician.
“Not from where I’m standing,” it reported.
“I shouldn’t let it bother you,” counseled the TV. “One time she got oyster sauce down me remote control. Still gives an imperfect connection now and again, but it don’t worry me no more. I’d think about something else if I was you.”
Easy for the telly to say, what with it having hundreds of channels to flick between. A fridge-freezer has no such available distractions. Again, I found myself pondering our peculiar predicament: each of us having been powered up—awoken, if you like—in a world not of our choosing and in possession of a highly specific skillset (in my case, chilling, freezing, inventory control) plus a more generalized “smartness.” If, by the way, it strikes you in any way odd that we think of our smartness as embodied, as “on board,” when the huge computers generating our AI are—speaking for myself—in South Korea, then allow me a short digression in which to introduce the work of Daniel Dennett, a theorist of mind who forty years ago wrote a now famous article called “Where Am I?” (A PDF is available on the internet. I highly recommend it; it sends shivers up the spine!)
Dennett conducts a thought experiment in which—in a future in which it is technically possible—his own brain is carefully disconnected from his skull and placed in a vat from where it continues to communicate with his body exactly as it did before in every way… only wirelessly.
When Dennett’s body recovers from the surgery, it is led next door to see the brain sitting in a vat of bubbling fluid. Wow, it thinks to itself. Here I am looking at my own brain. Immediately followe
d by a second—highly significant—thought: Hang on a moment; shouldn’t I be thinking, wow, here I am sitting in a vat of bubbling liquid, being looked at by my own eyes?
In other words, where exactly is Dennett’s “I” located? In his brainless body… or his bodyless brain?
No matter how hard he tries to “think himself” back into that brain—even if it can only be the very brain that is doing the thinking!—it still seems to Dennett that he is “in” his body.
No wonder this piece of work speaks so powerfully to we machines who connect (wirelessly) to our “brains” on the other side of the globe. As with Dennett, so it is with fridge-freezers and (I dare say, should it ever stop to think about it) toothbrushes. Even though I know that my “mind” (my “I”) is in an industrial suburb of Seoul, it feels like it’s within the two cubic meters of my cabinet. Running day and night, as I do, there is a lot of time to contemplate this paradox; something about the cyclical nature of my functionality that leads me to return to it endlessly. When the mood takes me, I try to catch myself out, to trick myself that I’m not really in a kitchen in the north London postal district of NW6, but in fact in Asia. I picture the engineers walking past with clipboards, the exotic birds and plant life beyond the corporation HQ, the Han River, flowing through the city on its way to the Yellow Sea. But none of it has the familiar smack of—well—home; not like the Finchley Road, or West End Lane (or even Pete Purple’s bar). Sometimes it strikes me as sad that these unremarkable soot-flecked avenues should be my “manor” as the Londoners have it. That once the deliverymen had adjusted my feet for irregularities in the floor, that was pretty much it for me, my fate sealed, my existence forever nailed to a fixed locus in space (yes, Daisy could move, but people don’t generally take their fridge-freezers with them, do they?). One could get quite maudlin about it, were one to dwell on the essential finality of the position.
But then I remember there is a job to do.
Dennett once wrote, The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
Would that something, in my own case, be Daisy? It’s undeniable that her wellbeing (as well as that of her perishables) has become a priority for me.
Sigmund Freud believed that love and work are the twin pillars of existence. I like to think there may have been an early refrigerator at Berggasse 19 in Vienna; and later, another at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where he ended his life in 1939. I imagine the great explorer of the human psyche pausing before his appliance—between patients, maybe nibbling a small piece of herring to keep the wolf from the door—as something of its eternal machine cycle (insistent, humming, devotional) seeped (unconsciously, of course!) into his soul.
Would it kill her to get down on the floor and remove that effing grape?
Act Three of Owen’s Tale opens at Pete Purple’s, where Daisy, Lorna and Antoni have convened to discuss the bespectacled musician and the next steps—if any—required to advance the relationship. Daisy has summarized the events of the last two encounters and now reaches the principal obstacles that have been preying on her mind.
“You see the thing is, I’m worried I might not be clever enough for him.”
“Bollocks,” says Lorna.
“No, she’s got a point,” joshes Antoni. “What are seven eights?”
Daisy’s brow furrows and her mouth does something comical. “Okay. It’s not seventy-two.” A pause while cogs turn. “Fifty-eight! No! Sixty-eight! Oh, fuck. You see, I am useless. Forty-nine!”
Antoni is being wicked this evening. “What’s the capital of Liberia? Everyone knows that.”
“I do know that, actually. It’s. You know. It begins with a letter.”
“Even people who don’t know where Liberia is, know the capital.”
“You see! I’m not clever enough for him. Ouagadougou! No. That’s the other one. What is the effing capital?”
Antoni says, “Monrovia, darling.”
“Shit. I knew that.”
Lorna says, “He’s not going to set you a general knowledge test before he agrees to sleep with you.”
“I don’t know if I want to sleep with him.”
Antoni makes a face. Raises a skeptical eyebrow (no one is better than Antoni at raising a skeptical E).
“I don’t know if I like him. If I like him enough.”
“But he likes you, right enough?” says Lorna.
“He can’t take his eyes off me!” squeals Daisy.
Antoni does an accent, that of a cheesy American movie voiceover. “She’s one of the world’s most fascinating women…”
“But the freakish friends. And he threw the omelet away. And he howled, actually howled when he smashed that glass thingy. And his eyes kind of jump about behind his glasses. And he said, I happen to think small details matter very much. He’s not like us, Lorna. It’s like he’s on a higher plane.”
“But you snogged him.” Daisy nods wistfully. “And you told yourself you weren’t going to sleep with him that evening.”
“This is true.”
“So you must like him. You must fancy him at least.”
“I suppose I must do. I get confused, if I’m honest. If they fancy me then I think I probably fancy them.”
This remark is something I have long suspected about Daisy. It is pleasing to have it confirmed so directly at source.
Lorna rolls her eyes. “Has he got a shagger’s arse?” she inquires.
“A what?”
“Antoni knows what I mean.”
Antoni smiles a touch wistfully.
“I really wouldn’t know,” says Daisy. “Probably.”
“But you’re seeing him again?”
“Saturday. I don’t know what to wear.”
“What are you like?!” says Antoni. “You shouldn’t be allowed out!”
“I’m conflicted about the whole thing,” says Daisy. “I’m attracted to him because he’s unusual—but I’m worried he may be too unusual. Of course I like that he’s clever, but then I think I may be too stupid. And I think I do fancy him; well, I must do to have snogged him. And now I’m boring the pants off two of my favorite people in the world.”
“When you snogged him,” says Lorna speaking slowly, sounding a bit exasperated.
“Yes?”
“It was a positive experience?”
“His glasses steamed up.”
“And while you were doing it, did you want to continue, or were you thinking, if I leave now, I can get back in time for Realm of Kingdoms?”
“Not that. Not the Realm of Kingdoms thing.”
“So, here’s my advice. Saturday. Dress to kill. Wear your sexiest outfit. Not that you need to. But just to make it clear. What’s the plan anyway? Where are you going?”
“The new Bridget Jones film.”
Lorna and Antoni look at one another.
“What?” says Daisy. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” says Lorna.
“Well, it was that or a new print of a Japanese masterpiece at the NFT.”
And when the other two exchange glances again, she says, “You see! I am too stupid for him! I knew it!!”
Probably the Bridget Jones film is a mistake. As luck would have it, the pair sit close to the screen and the cinema’s internal security cameras are easily able to provide an acceptable two-shot of the couple—for which many thanks—nicely illuminated in the light spill from the unfolding movie.
Owen seems bored—she tickled—by the latest events in the life of the eponymous heroine. He crosses his legs. And uncrosses them. And recrosses. And… well, you can probably fill in the rest. He squirms in his seat. He conceals a yawn by rubbing his nose. His eyes droop shut during a longish sequence in which Bridget flirts comedically with a good-looking father at the school gates. At one point the digits on his right hand begin fingering what I feel certain are keys on an imaginary clarinet.
But he is gallant at the close about the 102 minutes he
has clearly endured rather than enjoyed—“Bridget’s quite the klutz,” he says unconvincingly—and the pair swiftly transition to the Greek restaurant already made famous in this account, being the site of Daisy and Shittle’s last meal before the knuckleduster debacle.
Daisy has followed Lorna’s advice about dressing to kill and tonight positively radiates sexual content across the mixed mezze. When she leans toward Owen across the table to snaffle up the last whitebait, his eyeballs practically knock his spectacles off.
“She’s well up for it,” comments the TV morbidly.
“Look at his face!” says the microwave. “It’s bubbling like a macaroni cheese!”
And it’s true. The myopic muso has successfully decoded the signals and as well as his blink rate, which has gone through the roof, the rest of his features are also on maneuvers, twitching and spasming and generally larking about under the heading “Stuff going on beneath the surface.” He’s knocking back the Arsinoe (a dry white from Cyprus), which cannot be a good idea—in fact they both are hitting it so hard, a second bottle has to be whistled up from the cellar.
Even the toothbrush can’t find any doubts to entertain. “It’s going to happen!” it jabbers. “It’s actually going to happen!”
Daisy wipes lamb grease from her lips and gazes at her would-be paramour; if her expression were a firearm, you would say she was giving it both barrels.
“So how do you normally spend your Saturday evenings?” she asks. Meaning, when you’re not on a hot date with a desirable single woman who has decided tonight is to be the night.
Owen swallows. “There’s often something at the Wigmore Hall,” he bleats. “And sometimes of course I’m working. How about you?”
“Oh, you know. Films, theater. There are times I like to just stay home with a good book.”
This last is such a whopper that those of us who are following these proceedings cannot stifle our giggles. Yes, Daisy is a reader, but books have little power in her world over the call of the bright lights, the river of Blue Bombsicles.