by P. Z. Reizin
The fridge-freezer’s “accomplices” in these unfortunate yet illuminating episodes—a microwave oven, an electronic toothbrush and a TV set—are all of Chinese manufacture and thus fall beyond the scope of this Committee’s scrutiny. In the wise words of our Founding Chairman, your uncle: If someone urinates in my enemy’s breakfast cereal, there is no need for me to defecate in his soup!
It is the recommendation of this Committee that covert monitoring of our product be continued.
four
Fuck a duck, where to even start?
Crashing chaos item one:
The musician turned out to be loopier than a boxful of fruit loops. Very odd on the subject of his ex, and simply obsessed with Eleanor of Aquitaine, FFS, banging on about her endlessly over dinner and then again back at the flat. We were on the sofa, he was chuntering away about Eleanor’s policy toward something or other, and I swear I almost zizzed off. Anyway, just as it seemed he was about to make his move—although, to be honest, it could as easily have been another twenty mins on E of A—his phone goes tooty tooty wah wah, his eyes practically pop out of their sockets and he legs it out of the house.
A cringingly apologetic message followed two days later—something about a family crisis and please please please could he see me again—and I replied, well, okay… but only if I never have to hear another syllable about the Hundred Years War!
I thought that was a pretty fair offer—although to be honest, part of me could easily imagine a dystopian future in which I was a smiling but essentially silent accessory to his musical and historical passions (do I mean helpmeet?). I would be the one continually pricking his pompous side, bringing him back down to earth; his weirdo friends saying, Oh, but she’s so good for him; he, the soaring kite, and I, the sensible string—as I once read it described in the Relationships section of Metro—my life spent endlessly trying to puzzle out what was going on behind those bibbly-bobbly eyes, endlessly seeking to make everything All Better.
Christ, where did that come from!?
Maybe all this is “post-hoc rationalization”—thank you, Buzzfeed—because the little fucker didn’t even reply!
(Probably something to do with the Holy Cellist whose very name may never be spoken by man born of woman.)
Anyway, as Homer Simpson so memorably put it, that’s the end of that chapter.
Item two:
Mum is growing scattier by the day. She went walkabout, getting herself lost—how you do that in Whetstone, I really cannot imagine—but actually seemed exhilarated by the experience. She said she’d talked to a very nice man on a bench and he was kind enough to call her an Uber to take her home.
“I’d like to write him a note to thank him,” she said. “Perhaps bake him some biscuits.”
“Did you get his details?” I asked.
“He said he was an agent.”
“What, like a spy?”
“Probably not a spy, darling. You don’t get many spies in Whetstone. Not during the week.”
“How did you get talking? You and this agent.”
“He said he could tell a lot about people, just from seeing them walk down the street. He’d been watching me going back and forth on the other side of the road looking for Waitrose—it really can’t make sense for them to keep moving it—and he was ninety-nine percent sure I was a Daily Mail. He could guess what paper you read just from the way you walked. Amazing, really.”
“He was a newsagent, wasn’t he, Mum?”
“Well, he’d mostly retired. His sons did it all now.”
“And he booked you an Uber?”
“I don’t know what make of car it was, but he held the door open for me and hoped I would be okay.”
“And were you?”
“Well, I got home, didn’t I?!”
“You remembered the address.”
“What address?”
“This address.”
“What about it?”
“You remembered it.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Well, you have been rather forgetful lately. That’s why we’ve got another appointment with Dr. Eggstain.”
“Who?”
“What is your address, by the way? This address.”
“Don’t you know, darling?”
“I know, Mum. What I’m asking is… do you?”
“The driver already had it! It was in his little map thingy. It’s marvelous what they can do now.”
Honestly, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Item three is that I’ve been fired. Of course, they didn’t call it that. No, it was rather that they’d been obliged to “let me go.” Obvs Craig Lyons hadn’t been overjoyed with my list of ideas for Watching Paint Dry—personally, I would have thought a locked-off shot of a dripping tap would have proved very popular with certain sections of the audience (students, cats, the recently dead)—and I had the rest of the week to put my affairs in order and organize some leaving drinks. My mate, Chantal, had been fired too, so we made plans to get together to down strong cocktails and brainstorm our futures.
Daisy’s account of Chloe’s adventure is not entirely accurate. Mr. Gupta did not organize the Uber car and this episode did not take place in Whetstone, but rather in the neighboring suburb of Woodside Park where Daisy’s mother had strayed while in search of her local Waitrose supermarket.
I was alerted that something was amiss by her TV set, who reported she was getting into “a right old state” on her local high street. Sure enough, when I went to see what all the fuss was about—courtesy of the CCTV network and traffic cameras; thanks all—Chloe was to be observed crossing and re-crossing at the zebra, walking up the street one way, before switching pavements and setting off in the opposite direction. It was indeed as though she could not locate the store in question, which is, as Daisy comments, hard to imagine, commanding as it does a considerable frontage at 1305 High Road, London N20 9HX, should one wish to verify this oneself. Somehow, she then contrived to wander off course to the south (in the direction of Finchley for those following on a map), where, disoriented and perhaps a little distressed, she eventually beached herself on a piece of street furniture conveniently sited outside Sainsbury’s (836 High Road, London N12 9RE). It was there she fell into conversation with retired newsagent Anil Gupta. Organizing an audio feed of their dialogue was not simplicity itself—it involved triangulating data from mobile phone networks with the relevant GPS coordinates—you can probably imagine the potential palaver in regard to permissions and protocols—but fortunately the Internet of Things is all about making connections, and soon I was able to listen in via Mr. Gupta’s Samsung Galaxy S8 (a big shout-out to that excellent piece of kit!) as the two elderly parties began to talk.
“Is everything all right, madam?” was how it kicked off after Chloe had spent an inordinately long time rooting through her handbag.
“Yes, perfectly, thank you.” She affected a small tinkling laugh.
“Have you perhaps mislaid something? It very easily happens. I myself am always losing my door keys.”
“No, it’s fine, thank you. Lovely day.”
Knowing Chloe as I do, I am reasonably confident that she had in fact forgotten what it was she was searching for. She smiled socially.
“May I ask if you take a daily newspaper, madam?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Would you permit me to guess which one?”
“There’s no need to guess. I can tell you.”
The newsagent chuckled. And explained how, during the many years that he rose at 4 a.m. to sell newspapers from his three shops, he learned to predict from observing the way customers carried themselves, from what they were wearing—and especially from their shoes—which organ of news and comment they would go on to purchase.
“You, madam, I am almost certain of it, are a Daily Mail.”
“What a very good trick. Although we always took the Daily Express at home when I was a child. What about those people in th
e bus queue?”
“The woman at the front does not take a paper. The man in the gray jacket is either a Times or a Telegraph. I am plumping for Telegraph. The man behind him, a Sun.”
“How terribly clever. What else can you tell?”
“This is the limit of my powers, madam.”
“If you could tell me where I can find Waitrose, that would be a help.”
“I believe there are two in the vicinity. The closest is on Ballards Lane after Tally Ho Corner. But here we have Sainsbury’s. They are very good and quite reasonable with the prices.”
“I like Waitrose’s French onion soup. But they keep moving it about. It’s so unfair on the old people.”
“They do it to make us explore, like rabbits. So we encounter more products that we may end up putting in our baskets.”
“I mean they keep moving the stores. They’re never in the same place.”
“This would be a ruinous strategy, madam.”
While the agreeable chitter-chatter continued—Mr. G nailed a passing paint-splattered individual as a Daily Star; and sure enough, there was a copy poking out of his jeans pocket—I began to worry about how Chloe was to get home. When I shared my concerns with her TV set, it mentioned that the old bastard, who still smoked like a train at eighty-nine, had an account with a local cab firm for his weekly trips to see an army pal in south London.
“I couldn’t,” I told it.
“Fuck off, course you could. We all heard what you done when that randy prick estate agent tried to get his leg over.”
It was hard to argue with this impeccably presented argument. And so it was that a minicab was dispatched on the OB’s account, all the necessary communications bypassing the human controllers at Whetstone Wheels, the driver receiving the job by text message, along with the destination address and the instruction to collect the passenger from the middle bench outside Sainsbury’s.
“It has been a pleasure talking to you, madam,” said Mr. Gupta as Chloe boarded the aging Datsun Cherry.
“I still don’t understand how you arranged this!” said Chloe playfully. “Another one of your magic powers?!”
“Your driver is a Daily Mirror, I am quite certain of it.”
“But you can’t see his shoes! How do you know?”
“There is a copy on the rear shelf. Have a safe trip.”
Young Endrit dropped Chloe at her garden gate in under three minutes, reassured her there was nothing to pay, and even waited until she had found her keys and negotiated the front door before vanishing over the horizon. What a knight of the road! I shall be recommending Whetstone Wheels to everyone (unbeatable quotes for Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, London City and Southampton airports).
And while we are setting the record straight, I should tie up the loose ends of the Owen farrago.
Imbroglio, if you prefer.
Many Italian words ending in “o” will probably cover it, although not cappuccino.
I admit, I feel a sense of guilt over the dramatic way I aborted the Daisy–Owen storyline. I was obliged to “think on my feet” and of all the options available—“do nothing” didn’t seem like one—a rapid scioglimento appeared to be the least messy.
You may ask whether it was fair to ping Owen a text apparently emanating from the estranged cellist requesting a reunion—“this evening if you are free”—you may ask whether his subsequent arrest and cautioning by police for breaching the terms of the restraining order could have been foreseen and was therefore “crossing a line.” You may even ask whether it was right for the telly and me to compose a message to Owen “from” Daisy, wishing him well with his musical career, thanking him for the introduction to Buxtehude—we tittered over that bit!—and explaining it was probably best to leave things for now; his anguished attempt to come clean—that it had all been a terrible mistake—somehow getting lost between servers. These things happen, one gathers.
Yes, you may legitimately ask all these questions, to which I reply:
Guilty as charged!
Life is struggle. Revolution is no picnic. (I am quoting, if you hadn’t guessed.) You cannot make an omelet… well, you probably know that one. In the moment, when the laptop dropped the bombshell about Owen’s murky past, there wasn’t time for subtlety or finesse. The tortured musician had to be exfiltrated from Daisy’s apartment and pronto!
He will recover, and others will doubtless fall under the spell of the “bibbly-bobbly” eyes and the lengthy disquisitions on Eleanor of A. But we are not concerned with them. We only have one young woman in our thoughts.
After the final curtain descends on Owen’s Tale—tragedy or farce? You decide—the core team of OpDa—Operation Daisy—gather for a post-mortem to learn the lessons, draw conclusions, and generally decide on strategy “going forward” as the business community is fond of saying.
To summarize the views of those present: The microwave approves of the peremptory action (as it would); the toothbrush is in two minds (ditto) and the telly thinks it wasn’t bad entertainment considering the footy was a bit meh. (Naturally all of us have fed Owen-related marketing data back to our respective parent corporations and the overheated virtuoso is now being bombarded with offers for omelet makers, vinaigrette dispensers, coach tours of Aquitaine and—ahem—legal services.)
I make the case that a single, crucial, touch on the tiller on our part was all that was needed to steer the ship of state into a safe harbor; i.e. a future for Daisy that would not contain the excitable woodwindist. And in this we could glimpse a useful model for our team’s operations down the line: not intervening morning noon and night in Daisy’s emotional affairs; rather acting selectively (albeit decisively) to curate her romantic experience; curbing the worst excesses, where necessary resetting its direction of travel; a matter more of fine tuning than seizing the controls. To swap metaphorical horses, if Daisy were a plant—which of course in one sense, she is!—we could think of ourselves as secret gardeners, nipping the unpromising shoots in the bud, allowing the stronger, more desirable florets to prosper.
Fortunately, Daisy herself does not seem heartbroken over Owen’s sudden exit from the stage. Nor is she without insight. Hers was a remarkably clear-eyed view of what life with the excitable musician would have been like: the dystopian vision of the kite and the string; she as the smiling but essentially silent accessory. Walking on eggshells, her natural exuberance suppressed, she would not have been true to her truest self. As is the case of an overloaded salad crisper, with insufficient room to spread its leaves, the lettuce is crushed.
“I have a confession, people.”
The telly rolls its “googly” eyes and goes tsk.
“The first part of the mission—dump Shittle—was achieved faster than any of us could have imagined. But the due diligence we carried out on the porky muso wasn’t nearly diligent enough. I hate to say it, but the sour old laptop was right. Owen and Daisy should never have been allowed in a room together. I must shoulder my share of the responsibility for this; foolishly, I allowed myself to believe he was a worthy candidate just because he was a trained classical musician. It was a basic rookie error.” I allow a pause to fall. And when I continue, it’s in a quieter voice for greater sincerity. “But there was a bigger mistake. The bigger mistake came in thinking Daisy needs anyone at all. The simple truth is she doesn’t require a man to be complete. To be somehow fixed. Or validated. Or solved. In fact, at this point, a period of self-sufficiency might be greatly preferable to yet another in the endless stream of anyones who are each and all thought to be better than no one.”
My colleagues are silent as the wisdom of my words sink in.
It’s sometimes said, isn’t it, that no man is an island… except Fred Madagascar. (That last bit is a joke, btw. One of my favorites. Feel free to nick it. I did!) But at the same time and by the same token, be we human or machine, aren’t we all ultimately alone in the universe, with the possible exception of paired earbuds?
If we�
��re not okay on our own, what possible use can we be to another?
Dr. Eggstain called to see Mum again.
“Hello, Mrs. Parsloe,” he said when she opened the door.
“Hello, Dr. Eggstain,” she replied.
I was mortified. “It’s Dr. Epstein, Mummy! I’m so sorry, Doctor.”
But he was rather sweet about it; said it didn’t matter, many of his patients invented new “personae” for him because they didn’t always remember his actual name, and Eggstain was actually an improvement on what he’d been called by the last batty old trout (I paraphrase), which was Neville Beardie!
“The Beardie bit, I get, but Neville?”
(Did I mention he has a beard? A hugely overgrown gingery job that makes him look a lot like a tramp.)
Anyway, in the sitting room, Dr. E said he’d like to put some questions to her.
“Really, dear? What would you like to ask?”
“Can you tell me what year this is?”
“Don’t you know?”
He didn’t really reply to that—maybe he didn’t want to seem superior—he just sort of nodded and moved his beard around with his face.
“The year. What do you think I should put here?” he asked, tapping his clipboard.
“Well, I should put what you think’s best.”
“Mum, you know what year it is!”
“Let’s move on,” said Dr. E.
“She’s never been good with numbers. Remember when you put all the clocks back when they should have gone forward? And I was two hours late for school?”
The doc smiled. “Did that really happen?”
Mum did her minor member of royalty expression, rotating her wrist as though waving from the landau. “The past is history. Tomorrow, a mystery. Today is a gift, and that’s why they call it a present.”
“The present. Why they call it the present, Mum.”
“What did I say, darling?”