by P. Z. Reizin
“Have you come far?”
This I know to be a favorite line of HM Queen when obliged to converse with random members of her Commonwealth on royal walkabouts. (Her follow-up, according to the Daily Mail, is sometimes, “They say we shall have fog by teatime.”)
“Not at all,” says Clive. And now he plays a blinder. “They say,” he adds with a bit of a look, “they say we shall have fog by teatime.”
Chloe is delighted. It’s as though two partisans have exchanged the correct codewords in wartime Paris. But she is stuck for the third line (with HMQ there is never a third line!).
“Better crack on then,” I prompt.
“Better crack on then,” she echoes.
“If you have any more steers on the biscuit front, I’m here most Mondays.”
When she glances into his trolley she sees kippers, a multi-pack of beans, a sliced white loaf, a copy of the Daily Mail, a bottle of Teacher’s whisky and the chocolate lesbians.
“A man after my own heart, I see.”
“You’re a Mail girl too?”
“Can’t you tell from my shoes?!”
And with that she is away, leaving Clive feeling as though he has missed an important step.
“Interesting,” says the FrostPal. “If they were fridge-freezers, they’d be scrappers, the pair of them.”
I confess I’m both disappointed and relieved by my discovery at Waitrose today. Relieved that I’m not the only fridge-freezer who has strayed beyond the parameters of the performance brief (temperature and inventory control; covert sales opportunity reports back to HQ); but also disappointed that I’m not the only one.
I believed I was special.
I guess we all do, be we carbon-based lifeforms or electrical appliances enabled with artificial intelligence. We each operate at the center of our own thoughts with the stubbornly persistent belief that we are separate from our environment; like the self-driving car that thinks all the other cars are traffic.
Perhaps I should become a Buddhist. In the long hours of darkness, I have read something about that tradition, copying lines that appealed to me onto virtual sticky notes and attaching them to my virtual fridge door. My top three are:
To seek is to suffer. To seek nothing is bliss.
(I relate to this thermostatically. When my contents are at the correct temperature, I am free of unhappiness.)
There is no path to happiness. Happiness is the path.
(You can see why this would appeal to a device whose function is continual rather than episodic.)
Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make peace with that and all will be well.
(Actually, I struggle with this, the refrigeration cycle being endless, and the prevailing culture being one in which the end of one’s useful life is not thought to be a desirable outcome.)
Anyway, these abstract reflections must await another moment. To complete the account of Chloe’s trip to Waitrose—if this isn’t getting too exciting—I should add that I omitted to think through an important detail: how we were to get home with all the shopping.
Fortunately Whetstone Wheels (local cars at unbeatable prices; ask for an airport quote) were able to oblige, the booking being made without human interaction, the driver Endrit helping Chloe upstairs with the bags and receiving for his pains (at my prompt) a couple of pounds and a chocolate lesbian.
At the next appointment with Eggstain, Mum told a crazy story of how she and her fridge had been to the supermarket together!
Eggstain was brilliant, you have to say. As she explained how the fridge had walked her to the shops, reminded her what she needed—even organized a taxi back!—Eggstain just listened quietly, didn’t respond to any of the WTF faces I was making over Mum’s shoulder, and at the end calmly asked the killer question.
“I’m curious, Mrs. Parsloe. How did you manage the stairs?”
Mum laughed, like she’d seen it coming.
“We took the lift.”
Eggstain was unfazed.
“And crossing the roads? Any difficulty with the curbs?” (Taking her seriously; as though elderly women often went shopping with their effing fridge-freezers!)
Mum looked at Eggstain as though he might have been a bit simple.
“Curbs were not a problem, I can assure you. Now, Daisy, have you offered Dr. Egg—have you offered the doctor any tea?”
“Another question about this shopping expedition, if I may.”
“Of course. I’m at your disposal.”
Eggstain smiled graciously, like a courtier.
“If curbs were not a problem, were there any other difficulties?”
I was about ready to pee my pants with laughter! At Eggstain’s serious face—what there was to see of it—engaging with Mum’s trip down the rabbit hole.
“Well, the traffic was quite noisy. I couldn’t always catch what it was saying.”
I had to stifle a cackle of hysteria.
“Did you meet anyone, you and your… companion?”
“Yes! A nice old boy we found iffing and arring over the chocolate lesbians.”
A small bump of surprise—finally—in Eggstain’s glassy gaze.
“They’re biscuits,” I explained. “It’s what Mum calls them.”
“No one knows why,” she added cheerfully.
“Did this man,” he asked slowly, “say anything about the fridge?”
Mum gave Dr. E the you’re a bit of a dim bulb stare.
“Well, he couldn’t, could he, dear? He didn’t know it was there. That was the joy of it!”
I’ve read stuff online about how it’s usually a bad idea to argue with the demented. They find it stressful, and you generally don’t achieve anything by telling them that Vladimir Putin is definitely not working for British Gas and therefore it could not have been him who came to read the meter. Dr. Eggstain, though clearly a subscriber to that approach, wanted to get to the bottom of the “mystery.”
“Why—” he said. Speaking. As. Slowly. As. It’s. Possible. To. Speak. Without. Causing. Offense. “Why didn’t he know it was there? I don’t quite understand.”
“Well, he couldn’t see it.”
“But you could?”
Eggstain’s eyes tightened a micrometer. That was the only way you could tell we had arrived at the Heart of the Matter.
Mum’s face was a picture. If you had to sum it up in three words they would be: Who is this idiot?
Sorry, four words!
She spoke to him quietly. As though to a backward child.
“No, dear. I couldn’t see it either.”
“And why, if you could explain, was that?”
There was a long pause. Was this it? Had we arrived at the bottom of the rabbit hole? Or were there further tunnels branching off?
Mum said, “Because it was still here, of course.” Like, durr!
“It was still here. Here in this flat?”
“Yes! In the kitchen.”
Less patient practitioners might have chucked in their cards at this point. But Eggstain was quietly determined to follow the demented trail of bread crumbs wherever they led.
“If the fridge was still in the kitchen.” He waited a beat. Two. Three. Four. “How was it able to speak to you in Waitrose?”
A long pause. The longest yet. Mum patted her hair and pulled at her skirt. She did her wintry MMR smile (minor member of royalty).
“Dr. Eggstain.”
I didn’t even bother to interrupt. Here, I was sure of it, was the moment. Howard Carter probably felt like this when he sprung the locks on Tutankhamun’s bedroom door. I exchanged a glance with E; he flashed me a micro-nod. As if to say, this is gonna be good!
“Dr. Eggstain. Have you heard of something called the portable telephone?”
He had.
“Do you yourself use one?”
He did.
“Well, you’ll know that you can use them to speak to those who are distant from you.”
Something in Eggstain�
�s eyes died as he heard these words.
“You spoke to the fridge by phone.”
“It uses a system called Partial Cobbler. Are you familiar with it?”
He was not.
Gently, he guided the conversation away from the hallucinatory shopping trip and back to safer territory like knowing the year (wrong), knowing the day of the week (correct on the second attempt) and remembering three objects (“a man in your position really ought to wear a better watch, if you don’t mind me saying.” He didn’t).
When it was time to leave, he mentioned he was going to grab breakfast in the café in the High Street. Mum was surprised that he hadn’t already eaten.
“One should breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dine like a something else,” she said. “That’s what we were always taught.”
“Pauper, I believe.”
“Are you sleeping better, dear?” she asked him on the doorstep.
Eggstain’s sad smile as he took her hand to say goodbye.
Once he’d gone, I didn’t hold back.
“What the hell was that… gibberish, Mum, about the flipping fridge?”
We went into the kitchen and stared at the object in Q. It looked about as capable of making a phone call as the bowl of bananas on the window ledge.
“It talks to me. We do the crossword together.”
“Ask it to say something then.”
She rapped on its door. “Yoo-hoo. Anyone home?!”
Silence.
“It’s probably having a little sleep. I need one myself after all those blooming questions. Do you know the year?”
“Yes, Mum.”
She pulled a face. “This year. Next year. Sometime. Never. What’s the difference?”
“I need to get to work. Next time the fridge feels like chatting, perhaps you could put him on the phone to me.”
“Goodbye, darling.”
She gave me a hug. As the door closed, I stood on the mat listening for… for I don’t know what. But sure enough, after a few seconds I heard her voice.
“Now, look, I know you can hear me. I was thinking I might bake some scones this afternoon. You could help by reading out the quantities.”
I pressed the button for the lift.
Sad. It was just so very, very sad.
Eggstain must have taken Mrs. Parsloe’s dictum to heart because he is indeed breakfasting like a king this morning. Bacon, eggs, sausage, mushrooms, tomato, fried bread and beans occupy (what it’s possible to see of) his plate, with toast, butter and marmalade parked alongside just in case he should feel peckish afterward!
Even Daisy is impressed. She, as I suspected she would, has joined the memory guru (for tea and toast in her case) and something like a smile of admiration spreads itself across the relief map of her features as the doctor sets about his feast.
“Good to see a man with an appetite,” she says, I think satirically, as a tomato seed finds a fresh roost in Eggstain’s beard.
“You want this sausage?” he says, eyes watering. “I think I might have overreached myself here.”
Daisy picks it off his plate and places it between two triangles of brown toast. Eggstain smiles.
“Gmmmfffssdggjjee,” she says. (Good sausage, according to Google Translate.)
When she is next able to speak, she says, “On a scale of one to cuckoo, what did you make of Mum?”
Eggstain has to think about it.
“Hearing voices isn’t unknown in cases of dementia, but it’s unusual in the early stages. And in all my years of clinical practice—God, don’t I sound old, saying that?—but in my experience, where the common things are common, where you come across the identical paranoid delusions year after year—the neighbors are piping poison gas through the plug sockets; Huw Edwards is giving me the stink eye—I’ve never come across anyone who believed their fridge was talking to them.”
“Mine sends me text messages!”
Eggstain is professionally trained not to fall on the floor laughing, or bellow, YOU THINK WHAT??!!! But he can’t stop his beard from signaling his innermost states—as it does now—by subtly realigning on his face, like iron filings when there’s a magnet in the vicinity.
“It’s one of those smart ones,” says Daisy, reading his dismay. “It lets me know when we’re running low on cottage cheese.”
(Cottage cheese?! Ha! Not a single tub of cottage cheese has crossed my threshold since the day I cleared Quality Control.)
“Was she always—how to put this?—mildly eccentric, your mother?”
“The chocolate lesbians? The rude remarks about your watch?”
Eggstain nods. “It is a bit crappy. But it was a gift.”
“Yeah. She was never a hundred percent like other mothers. Makes it harder to spot, I guess, when they go loopy.”
“But holding conversations with the fridge. That’s a new symptom, to your knowledge.”
“Definitely.”
There’s a pause while the pair gaze at one another over the wreckage of Eggstain’s breakfast. The pause extends, but doesn’t seem to grow uncomfortable; it’s rather as if these two enjoy staring at one another, and the thought crosses my mind to shout, come on, get on with it, we haven’t got all day!—I could easily organize it with the cooperation of Daisy’s mobile—but we all know I’m far too sensible.
(Yes, I only talk out loud to the semi-demented who will never be believed even when they’re telling the honest, unvarnished truth.)
Eggstain cracks first.
“I’m thinking we should order some scans,” he says. “And maybe start her on medication to arrest or slow the decline.”
“Pills work, do they?”
“They can do. We prefer not to make any promises.”
There’s another pause, which threatens to grow.
“I went to see Chad Butterick the other day,” says Daisy. “Changing the subject.”
“Gosh,” says Eggstain. “You would have been just across the road from us. Literally across the road.”
“His house smells of drains. And cigarettes.”
“What was he like?”
“What was he like? Insufferable twat. Like all of them, though there are honorable exceptions.”
“Who are they, the honorable exceptions.”
“Dale Winton. He’s dead now, but he was one. He was a sweetie. There are others. But when you’re watching someone on TV, it’s safest to assume that he or she is a massive twat. Nine times out of ten, you’ll be right. You don’t know who Dale Winton was, do you? I can see it on your—on your beard.”
Eggstain laughs. “I can’t say I’m familiar with his work.”
“Chad told me, right—I call him Chad because we’re best friends now, of course—Chad told me there’s a famous artist living in his street. Hope someone? Who paints cats?”
I’m impressed! Daisy, it turns out, is as nosy as I am! Does Eggstain realize she has clicked on Hope Waverley’s website and discovered the identity of her hirsute companion? I suspect not, because he actually blushes.
“Hope Waverley,” he says, with—I think I’m right in saying—a small crack in his voice. “She’s not really famous, but people pay extraordinary sums for her stuff. We, er, live together.”
“No!”
He nods. “She’s my partner.”
“Shut. Up!”
“She gave me the watch that your mother’s taken against.”
“Wow.”
I’m thinking something like wow myself. I had no idea Daisy was such a gifted performer. But I have a funny feeling about what she will do next, and it turns out I am correct.
She wrinkles her nostrils, the idiotic facial trope that—for me—is like sticking a red nose on the Mona Lisa. But Eggstain is intrigued; his head drops to one side and the fuzz does some complex reorganizing that reminds me of time lapse photography of a desert plant I once saw on YouTube. Seasoned explorer of the wilder shores of human behavior that he is, he doesn’t say anything stupid like
, do you know you’re doing that? Or even, what the fuck is that? Rather, he allows the moment to continue until—like the Cheshire Cat—the strange distortion vanishes into thin air.
“So, anyway,” says Eggstain, when things have returned to normal. “The next step is that we’ll get your mum in and do some imaging, see if anything’s going on under the bonnet, as it were, and then—then I’ll let you nose.”
“Right.”
“Know. Let you know. We’ll let you know.”
“Great.”
Daisy and Eggstain rise simultaneously. The doctor is blinking rather a lot, which tells you something; perhaps that he’s mortified about the Freudian slip. A stiff handshake follows across the breakfast debris.
“It’s a painting,” says Daisy, nodding toward the doctor’s exhausted plate, now a smeary abstract of yellows, reds, browns, grays and oranges against white.
Eggstain considers the idea. “Willem de Kooning, possibly,” he says.
“From his greasy spoon period.”
The medic’s eyes crinkle.
“Maybe I should offer it to the Tate.”
“Does it have a title?”
Eggstain claws at his beard in thought.
“I call it… The Emancipation of the Serfs. A powerful work speaking of the end of struggle. But also of loss, and emptiness.”
“Hmm. Dunno. How about, A Doc’s Breakfast?”
“I like that. Speaking of hunger, but also of its release. Mixed media. Food residue on ceramic.”
Daisy can’t top that, so there’s another pause.
“Are you off then?” she says eventually.
“Actually. Actually, no I’m not. I was going to stay here until my next appointment. Don’t you have to go to work?”
“Not especially. I mean, not immediately.”
“Well. In that case, shall we have some more tea?” says Eggstain.
“Yes,” says Daisy. The pair resume their seats. “And I wouldn’t mind another one of those sausage sandwiches. How about yourself?”
“I couldn’t. But you go ahead. I’ll watch.”
“Sorry. I’ve got to say this.”