Ask Me Anything

by P. Z. Reizin

  In the war room, where we gather to plan our next move, the toothbrush is buzzing with excitement. Through its contacts in the toothbrush network—they talk to each other; who knew?—it thinks it may have discovered in the London suburb of Fulham, an eligible lookalike of the mythical Golden Nicky! His name, pleasingly, is Johnny, which, while not a perfect homophone of Nicky, does indeed share some fortuitous resonances.

  I repeat my mantra that we are not in the business of finding Daisy a mate. In the famous piscatorial analogy, I explain that we are not feeding her for a day by presenting her with a fish; we are nourishing her for life by teaching her to fish.

  Perhaps it would be more correct to say we are allowing one or two of the uglier bites on her hook to “get away.”

  Okay, the metaphor is out of control, but I can’t help it. I’m intrigued. After all, I’m only non-human!

  “What do we know about him?” I find myself asking (it seems to me, in the manner of a police detective in the early stages of an investigation. Possibly one of those rumpled loner types who don’t play by the rules, but who get results, despite having a shocking hangover and an unstable romantic history).

  “Quite a narrow mouth. But good brushing habits. A crown at upper right two from a rugby accident.”

  “May we see his photograph?” I inquire.

  We all agree the resemblance, while not literal, is powerful enough to be interesting. When we consider the images of Johnny and Nicky side by side—don’t ask me how I came by the Nicky pic!—Johnny has the requisite floppy pale hair, but is considerably more fleshly than the original golden boy. Part must be due to the aging process—Johnny is thirty-nine, Nicky only just in his twenties in the fading shot from an early camera phone—but part must also be temperament. Nicky was one of those classic wiry English youths who live for cricket and have twelve sisters and a farty old Labrador called Rags back home at The Cedars, Lower Bummington-on-Stour—to be honest, I may have nicked some of this commentary from a log of Daisy’s on the record remarks. Johnny, meanwhile, seems more like someone who lives for the tea interval. Not fat—that would be going too far—we can settle for well-covered! Solid, if you want to put a positive spin on the accretions of adipose tissue. But the look in the eyes, we all agree, is strikingly similar. A certain assuredness in the gaze. A sense of entitlement, would you call it?

  “In three words?” says the telly, who has lately become fond of this game. “Rich. Posh. Twats.”

  “Harsh,” is my comment. “From the upper echelons, doubtless. Some family money, very probably. But the Golden Nicky was a good egg.”

  Almost as an afterthought, the toothbrush mentions Johnny is divorced. There’s a daughter, eight, who lives with the mother, although she stays with Johnny every other weekend.

  “Problem?” says the toothbrush when we all fall silent.

  “Not ideal,” I am forced to admit.

  “Yeah, but what is?” says the TV set. “You see it all the time. Mixed families. Three kids by different dads. Bob’s your auntie. It’s the modern way.”

  “I suppose you can’t help watching too much television if you are a television,” says the microwave, and is so pleased by its remark it chucks in a ping.

  But the TV is undoubtedly correct. Modern life is complicated. Few things are straightforward. Ideal is for the birds.

  (It’s hard for me to accept this, and I struggle with it daily; the refrigeration cycle at the heart of my existence being so very simple, unvarying and, dare I say it, even a little bit beautiful. If the publisher of this volume has been too cheap to include one, there are many excellent diagrams available on the internet!)

  “He seems like an okay chappie,” says the toothbrush, “but here’s the thing. He likes ice cream. I mean he loves ice cream. He’s like a total ice cream fiend!”

  When no one says anything, it adds: “I can’t believe you’re not seeing this! It’s a match made in Häagen-Dazs!”

  We agree the idea of Daisy and Johnny has potential, and I must say, speaking personally, a relationship based on ice cream does make sense for a machine whose raison d’être is keeping things cold. However, we all recall the Owen debacle, so I do some heavy duty due diligence on the divorcé (the second failed marriage we have encountered in these pages. Yes, life is complicated. Life is complicated! Life. Is. Complicated).

  Johnny, it turns out, is an antique dealer. That is to say he has a half-share in an antique dealing business. From what it’s possible to gather—the finances are somewhat opaque—his business partner Jamie (they met at school) spends much of his time in Suffolk breeding racehorses when he is not in Devon racing his powerboat or in Switzerland visiting his money.

  Honestly. What are they like? These rich, posh, twa—Englishmen!

  When I drop into the showroom in a backwater of Chelsea for a “live read” as the poker players have it—and cheers, btw, to the security system for the entrée—Johnny is to be found alone at the back of the shop with his feet up on a desk leafing through the property porn in Country Life. In reverse order, the apparel is as follows: brown suede shoes, yellow socks, burgundy cords, lilac shirt, navy blue blazer with shiny buttons featuring anchors, no tie. It seems to me to be the uniform of a much older man—but then I am a fridge-freezer and not Signor Gucci.

  Now a heavy sigh escapes his lips. He must be reasonably confident there are no customers in the house because what happens next is startling.

  Closing the magazine and climbing to his feet, in a loud voice somewhere just short of a yell, he exclaims: “Oh… pissflaps!”

  And then he adds, perhaps just to underscore the sentiment, “Sodding, bollocking, buggering, cunting, pissflaps!”

  The formulation is so strikingly similar to bollocking cockpuffins that—I know it’s a daft thing to say—a small shiver runs up my pipework.

  I realize you cannot build a lifetime of happiness on a penchant for ice cream and a tendency to pottymouth, but it’s a start, wouldn’t you say?

  A spin through the electronic trail—thanks are owed to phones, laptops and an almost obsolete BlackBerry—reveals a more nuanced picture: Johnny had a conventional upper middle-class upbringing in the home counties followed by a minor public school, before dropping out of Bristol university in favor of running a nightclub in that city, the first of several joint ventures with Jamie the moneyed classmate. There was a wine club, some internet start-ups and an on-demand housekeeping service for busy yuppies (as they were then called). The pattern was broadly that Jamie put up the money and took the lion’s share of the (slender, if any) profits or (more commonly) absorbed the losses while Johnny’s role was to glad-hand the human assets, be they investors, computer geeks, or suppliers wondering when their latest invoice would be settled. The two friends did nothing illegal, so far as one can tell, their activities falling into the general category of “commerce” in the early years of the twenty-first century.

  Romantically, a similar picture emerges from the record. A series of respectable ventures, all entered into with good faith, it would appear—no restraining orders or police involvement of any kind—until Caroline captures his heart and they are married in a Norman church in Hertfordshire (Jamie is the best man) followed by a honeymoon on the Amalfi coast of Italy, where Hayley, their only child, is conceived behind a hedge in Ravello. (Remarkable what one can find between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Gmail!)

  Today Johnny lives alone in a two-bedroom flat in Fulham (the second bedroom is for Hayley’s fortnightly visits). He is no stranger to the commodification of romance—indeed one of the early internet ventures was a dating site for toffs—and while there has been some success finding females in the target demographic, nothing has lasted more than a few weeks.

  It’s rather as if his heart isn’t in it.

  We agree, when I present my findings to my colleagues, that Johnny has cleared the notional “quality threshold” (“Yeah, only just,” says the TV). I repeat my “health warning” that it
is not for us to find a man for Daisy; that in many ways a break from the sexual battlefield might be a good idea for her; that above all she needs to learn to love herself before she can properly offer herself to another.

  This last point causes the TV set to manufacture a snorting sound effect and comment that I have been watching too much daytime telly.

  But in Johnny, I continue, ignoring the television’s satirical remark, we have a character of merit whose life experience and feeling for his daughter might just map successfully onto Daisy’s biography. All we need now if we are to bring the two young people together is a brilliant wheeze.

  But the toothbrush—who I am beginning to feel I have underestimated—has a plan.

  The single most obvious quality they share (it argues)—aside from a taste for salty language—is a weakness for the pleasures of the table, and in particular for gelati. Each is perfectly capable of demolishing a 500 ml tub at a sitting, a personality flaw that the toothbrush’s scheme exploits to ingenious effect.

  D and J would each receive a communication purporting to come from the manufacturer of an exciting new range of ice cream products. Your spending patterns have been analyzed (they are told) and you have been identified by powerful algorithms as a lover of frozen desserts. However, even more importantly, we think you are that rare and special thing, an opinion former, a maven among your cohort and we are confident that once you have tried our yummy new brand you will want to spread the good news to all your friends. Indeed we are so sure about this, that, as part of our stealth marketing campaign, we will give you a year’s free supply—delivered weekly—and all you have to do is turn up at a particular place at a particular time, sign a document, and prepare to have your taste buds blown away!

  In the war room, we are all a little knocked out by the toothbrush’s plan. Yes, it’s crazy, we agree, but very possibly just crazy enough to work.

  We like the fact it’s based on an appeal to human weakness. An insidious cocktail of fats, sugars and greed make it difficult to resist, we believe, and in any case, what do we have to lose? If they don’t bite, no one is any the wiser.

  Much fun is had in the creation of the tempting email. In the spirit of Häagen-Dazs, which, if you didn’t know, is a totally made up name, we call our brand Schmaltzgruber.

  “I love it!” says the microwave. “It’s so wrong, it’s right!”

  “Sounds like a central defender for Borussia Mönchengladbach,” says the telly, but I think it too has a funny feeling about this one.

  We create a logo—the letter Z does some useful swooshy stuff—and we ping off the email to the two unsuspecting parties. The half-timbered hut in the middle of Soho Square is deemed to be the (nicely public) gathering point for the “lucky fifty specially selected undercover ambassadors for our brand.” We choose a Saturday evening at 19:00 as zero hour, on a weekend when Johnny does not have his daughter to stay. The only stipulation is to wear something pink, the Schmaltzgruber “house color.”

  And then, as they say in old war films, we wait.

  Meanwhile, something—someone—has been preying on my mind.

  The original Golden Nicky.

  I’m no cyber-Sherlock, but when a person proves so very hard to run to earth, that has to tell you something.

  It tells you that they are either no longer in the land of the living, or they do not wish to be found. (That they’re somehow “not on the internet” is no longer a viable excuse.)

  The Golden Nicky does not feel to me like someone who would be dead. And of all the Nicholas Bells who have indeed hopped the twig in the relevant timeframe, none would appear to be our NB. At which point one begins to detect the distinct aroma of fish.

  In the long watches of the night, I have spent literally hundreds of refrigerator-hours combing the web for traces of the elusive quant. I’ve tried every variant of his name, combining them with the widest spread of search terms, including those of finance houses, hedge funds, cricket teams, even that of his old school.

  There is a lovely reference to Nicky Bell of the Lower VI who scored “a memorably flamboyant half-century against Oswestry before being caught at second slip off an unexpected popper from an otherwise undistinguished bowling attack.”

  In a Facebook group, there is a telling exchange between former university friends trying to organize a reunion:

  David Briggs: Anyone have any idea what happened to Smoothychops?

  Jon Cleverly: Nicky Bell? Went sailing after uni. Dolly’s dad’s yacht.

  Andy Watson: Banking, I believe.

  Kim Chin: Ask Mad Martine. She’ll know!!!

  David Briggs: I’ve tried her. And the banks. It’s like he’s vanished off the face of the earth!

  Martine Priest: He still owes me a hundred quid!

  There is a Nicholas Bell who robbed a bank in Eugene, Oregon, escaping capture by coolly stepping on a passing bus dressed—after a lightning change—as a woman. There is a Professor Nicholas Bell who is an international expert in the behavior of a particular species of wasp. There are hundreds, if not thousands of examples of the wrong Nicky Bell. And the longer one looked, the clearer it became that the right one would not be found among them.

  Now I had a decision to make. To dig deeper, to go beyond the protocols of regular online search, raised the possibility of calling undue attention to myself. On the other hand, we had been breaking the rules for weeks, and nothing had happened. Chancing my luck that no one would notice, I did a little fancy footwork among the email servers of the world wide web, if a fridge-freezer of two cubic meters in volume can be thought capable of such delicate choreography!

  Here things got really interesting.

  Intriguing and cryptic references show up from Romilly (whose family own half of Cheshire) in regard to Nicky “going AWOL” or “doing a bunk.” In one message she writes: Things hadn’t been brilliant between us for a while, but the way he disappeared was still a shock. The overnight flit. Like one of those spies who defected to Russia in the sixties.

  His mother informs a friend in Australia, Our son continues to elude our inquiries after his wellbeing. Postcards from various hotspots arrive—usually with insufficient postage—containing supposedly reassuring words but never anything concrete. Once in a blue moon he actually phones—more often than not it’s a terrible signal from some noisy environment—and the conversation runs along the lines of: “Are you all right?” “Yes, are you all right?” Jonathan says Nicky was always slippery around the truth and no good will come of him. I am forced to agree with the first part of his Judgment, and must hope he is wrong about the second.

  Perhaps the most tantalizing clue of all comes from Nicky Bell’s email account.

  There isn’t one.

  I’ve checked all the relevant possibles, and there really isn’t.

  No Gmail. No Yahoo. No Hotmail. No nothing.

  There isn’t even one that’s been lying dormant; an account he had been using and then ceased using when he did his disappearing trick. Rather, it’s as if all traces of his account or accounts have been deleted.

  Actually, it’s worse than that. A deletion usually leaves a marker, according to those who know about these things.

  It’s more like his account/s never existed.

  At this realization, I began to feel a bit weird. We fridge-freezers don’t have heads, fortunately, but if we did, it would have been spinning. To calm myself, I switched on my halogens and converted all the barcodes I could see in the main chiller cabinet into musical notes, muddling them around until they became formless meditative jazz. One can’t go on for long because of the heat build-up, but as a way of cooling anxiety, I totally recommend it. (Top tip: Sainsbury’s Frascati, Pilgrims Choice Mature Cheddar and Nutella (400 g jar) combine to produce a wonderfully noodling atonal suite; and yes, I have told her there’s no need to keep blinking Nutella in a fridge!)

  Conclusion: In looking for Nicky Bell, I have been searching for the wrong name.

&nbs
p; He is now called something else.

  The small building in the Tudor style at the center of London’s Soho Square has an interesting history; details may be found online for those who care to dig further. Suffice to say here that it was erected in 1925 and today contains gardening tools.

  Our excitement has been building steadily as we realize both Daisy and Johnny are actually falling for the ice cream ruse. Each has mentioned it to others in the preceding days (Johnny in jokey texts to his daughter; Daisy in conversations with Lorna, Antoni and Chantal). On Saturday afternoon, we have watched them getting ready in their separate apartments, although in Johnny’s case this doesn’t amount to much more than taking his eyes off the rugby every now and again to check the time. Soon they are making their way to their respective Tube stations (West Hampstead, Fulham Broadway), he in a pink polo shirt, she in a pink chiffon scarf. Who knew to what lengths people would be prepared to go for free ice cream? I feel we have discovered a dirty little portal into the human soul!

  They each approach Soho Square from the south, having made their exits from the Underground at Leicester Square. And a few minutes before 7 p.m., they are both on parade at the appointed spot. Camera coverage is extensive in central London so we have a grandstand view of the pair as they casually circle the hut, clearly clocking but pretending to ignore each other’s pink “flag,” before finally—somehow mutually—deciding to break cover.

  The moment is almost lost in a chorus of pings and buzzing.

  The toothbrush brings off a well-deserved “Yess!”

  “You here for the ice cream too?” chuckles Johnny, and we settle back to enjoy the fun.

  I realize you probably haven’t got all day to plow through the opening dialogue. There will be jobs to go to, errands to run, all manner of calls upon one’s time, as is the modern way. So I’ll cut the boring bits of chitter-chatter and supply only the beef.

  At first, the pair seem a touch puzzled by one another. Perhaps she cannot imagine why a solid-seeming chap like him would trail into the West End of London for something as essentially trivial as a year’s supply of ice cream. Perhaps he is wondering why she, an attractive woman in her mid-thirties, would be wasting her fast-disappearing youth in such a frivolous pursuit. They agree they can’t really understand why they have been chosen because neither thinks of themselves as especially influential in their “cohort.”