Ask Me Anything

by P. Z. Reizin

  “Oh dear. Ominous.”

  “Not at all.”

  “You’ve discovered my darkest secret.”

  “Oh, I know all about that.”

  “What? Not the…?”

  “Yup. The secret collection of teddy bears.”

  He smiles. “Is that the worst thing you can imagine about me?”

  “You don’t seem the ax murderer type.”

  “It’s true. Axes scare me.”

  “Blades of all kinds, possibly.”

  “Ha. Touché.”

  “No, what I have got to say…”

  “Here it comes.”

  “You’ve got a pip. It’s bothering me. May I?”

  Eggstain doesn’t quite follow, so Daisy reaches across the table and delicately picks the offending tomato seed out of the overgrown topiary.

  “God, how embarrassing. I feel about six. When your mum used to spit in her hanky and wipe your face. Maybe that never happened to you.”

  Eggstain feels at the spot where his breakfast was attempting to put down roots.

  “Actually,” he says. “I’ll tell you a secret. It’s not especially dark, but it is a secret in the sense that no one else knows it.”

  “How exciting! What, not even…”

  “Not even Hope.”

  “Go on then.”

  “What was your nickname at school?” he asks.

  “Parsley. Or sometimes people, unkind people, would call me Moo. Or they would actually moo. Daisy being a typical name for a cow. Why do you ask?”

  “Do you know what mine was?”

  “I’m guessing it wasn’t Neville Beardie.”

  “Eggstain.”

  “Get. Out!”

  “It’s funny hearing it again after all these years. It’s stirred up some old memories.”

  “I’ll tell Mum to stop saying it. Honestly, I’m so sorry…”

  “No. Not at all. I rather like it.”

  “Really?”

  “It reminds me of early promise.”

  “You make it sound like. Like things didn’t work out as you expected.”

  “Do things ever do that? Did your things?”

  “Yeah. I mean, no. And now, according to you, it’s practically all over. What a pile of shite that turned out to be!”

  “I didn’t mean to depress you.”

  “You’re not. This is miles better than work.”

  “I’ll get us some tea.”

  “And a sausage sandwich.”

  “On brown or white?”

  “Which do you think is a healthier option within a balanced diet?”

  Eggstain smiles.

  STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL

  (ONLY FOR THE EYES OF THE PRESIDENT, SHIMNONG ELECTRONICS CORPORATION.)

  Further report of the Smart Technology Security Committee, Shimnong Electronics Corporation

  Subject: Freezejoy Fridge-freezer model 1004/475/**8/00004345/a/N/9631

  Location: London, England. IP address: XXXXXXXXXX (Redacted)

  Malfunction: Continued transgression of operational parameters

  Severity code: 1—2—3—4—5 (most serious)

  Senior engineers contributing: Hung Shin-Il, Ch’on Tae-Yeon, Chin Ji-Won, Kwak Ji-Hee, Pok Sung-Ho.

  The appliance continues to malfunction. Further serious violations of the Performance Code have taken place.

  1. A real-world meeting between The Customer and a Fifth Party (Mr. Johnny Elphinstone of Fulham, London) was engineered by the appliance and its co-conspirators, a microwave oven, a television set and an electronic toothbrush, all of Chinese manufacture. An elaborate plot involving a fictional ice cream brand was constructed which demonstrated considerable sophistication in both imaginative construction and use of language. It is the view of those members of this committee who have made a detailed study of the transcripts that the appliance exhibited worryingly high levels of independence of mentation and continues to do so.

  Full accounts may be found HERE. It is considered fortunate from the perspective of reputational damage that the case did not result in physical assault or police intervention.

  2. In the last twenty-four hours the appliance has become preoccupied with extensive search engine operations in connection with a subject called “Nicky Bell,” believed to refer to a person of interest to The Customer. The scale and intensity of the activity is wholly out of proportion with its previous patterns of online search, both legitimate and transgressive.

  While it has been instructive to observe the appliance breaching its operational parameters with considerable degrees of flair and creativity, it is nonetheless the recommendation of this committee that a date now be set for its remote deactivation, to be followed by immediate removal and repatriation to Seoul for rigorous interrogation. Much has been learned and many questions have been raised in the observation phase. Now is the time for answers.

  In the excellent words of your father, our Founding President: Smart is good. But no one likes a smartarse.

  We respectfully suggest a hard shutdown take place ten days from the date of this memorandum.

  six

  In seeking to uncover the truth about Daisy’s “Edenic ideal,” there was only one issue I wanted to address. Would it contain anything pivotal, anything that could provide us with “leverage” in helping Daisy to “move on”?

  Here, briefly, is his story. Judge for yourself.

  Once we made the critical breakthrough, that the Golden Nicky had been “rebadged” as Bavin Meurig Shibbles, it wasn’t especially hard to follow his progress over the years that followed his disappearance. For a long period, he simply traveled. Through Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, not a few young women were drawn into the path of the handsome young Englishman with the floppy hair and the impeccable manners. When he ran short of funds, he readily found work, usually as a teacher, but also (sailing close to the wind) as an adviser to certain high net-worth individuals who sought inventive ways of “processing” large amounts of cash. When things got a bit—in his words “shitty”—the low point was an actual fire fight between two Cambodian crime families—there was always a border to cross, a new chapter to start, another pliant young female who had been following the Hippie Trail before returning to Toronto, Auckland, or Cheltenham, a career, marriage and babies.

  There was even a reunion—if not a rapprochement—with Romilly (whose family owned half of Cheshire) from whose life he had been obliged to extricate himself in such haste. Things had been “sticky” with her in any case before The Deluge, as he styled it; nonetheless a cover story had been concocted for her benefit by the financial institution’s “reputation managers,” which he now retailed to her in a restaurant in Da Nang. It was, frankly, unbelievable—referencing, as it did, MI6 and classified work, “vital to the security of the state.” But good egg that she was (a former head girl and rowing Blue) she bought the whole crock of Shibbles, accepted an apparently heartfelt apology and just to show there were no hard feelings, extended him credit in Vietnamese dong to the equivalent at the time of five hundred pounds sterling.

  Perhaps tiring of the itinerant lifestyle, perhaps, too, craving some kind of moral compass in which the needle was not a frenzied blur—wishing, dare one say it, to get back in touch with his better side—the next step was a surprise.

  He flew to Japan and began training for the priesthood.

  Buddhism, with its emphasis on chastity and the renouncing of material possessions, was not at first sight a natural fit for the man who was now Bavin Meurig Shibbles. But after the empty hedonism of the Southeast Asia years, body and soul must have craved simplicity, purity and various other words ending in -ity.

  The ten months he stuck at it are not easy to reconstruct because his phones and laptop were donated to an animal charity in Tokushima Prefecture. But it’s safe to say they would have featured meditation, prayer and the growing realization that there is no path to happiness; happiness is the path. (My own sentiments exactly.)

  H
e next appears on the radar purchasing a flight from Tokyo to Ynys Môn (it required several changes) in the company of one Eirwen Hughes Shibbles and an infant aged two months, Dafydd Charles Shibbles.

  Several years are passed playing Unhappy Families on the isle of Anglesey—Nicky slash Shibbles is mentioned hilariously on a Census record from the time as an “agricultural worker”—before the wanderlust once again takes hold.

  I shall skip over the details of his travels through the Indian subcontinent; we were all amazed by his energy and frankly (rooted to the spot as we are in London Northwest Six) not a little envious of the sights he must have seen.

  There was a year in Capri, as a private language tutor to the teenage daughter of an industrialist: You can probably imagine how that one turned out!

  There were a number of seasons as a tour guide in Mediterranean France.

  The five months as a croupier on a cruise ship proved lucrative but the fling with the Chief Engineer’s girlfriend on the waiting staff was a disaster (the restorative dentistry bills erased all his savings).

  Those of us who painstakingly reconstructed Nicky’s progress during this period were impressed but ultimately exhausted by the sheer amount of juggling and reinvention that was his existence. Even the toothbrush, who finds it impossible to settle to any fixed view, was longing for him to “just stop all the gallivanting and become something.”

  The television put it more plainly. “He needs to shit or get off the khazi.”

  Perhaps he was arriving at the same conclusion himself. Fourteen months ago he resurfaced in a remote area of mid-Wales, apparently earning his living as a gardener, and there he has remained to the present day.

  So we have answered the mystery of whatever happened to Daisy’s great love.

  The question now is, what (if anything) to do with this information?

  I summon the “war cabinet,” as I sometimes (satirically) refer to my colleagues.

  “We have a problem to address in regard to our template.”

  “What’s he on about?” says the TV.

  “I need to remind you of the criteria we used when considering possible mates for Daisy.”

  Once again I spell them out on my virtual fridge door in virtual magnetic letters.

  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 (absent quality)

  What I’m hoping the team will grasp for themselves is the issue in regard to the general “quality threshold” we insisted on for candidates who ticked at least four of the boxes above.

  Nicky himself would not pass it.

  “We have established beyond doubt that our man is a total no-goodnik,” I remind them. “An elegant waster, a chancer, a drifter prepared to hitch his wagon to whatever or whoever best serves his purpose, in so far as he has one. We were mis-sold a narrative, that of the Golden Youth. In fact, he was as flawed as any of the rest of them; she just never got the chance to find out.”

  “And yet,” says the toothbrush. “I sense there’s an and yet coming. Is there?”

  “The idea I’m playing with,” I continue, “is whether it could prove catalytic for Daisy to meet her old love again. To see for herself what has become of him. To satisfy her curiosity, to achieve closure, but more importantly, to allow her to move forward.”

  “Fuck me, who are you, Oprah Winfrey?”

  (Do I need to say who passed that particular comment?)

  “If she were to see for herself the ravages of time, both physical and moral—the thinning hair, the sun damage, the ceramic teeth…”

  “He should never have had them repaired in Tangier. That was a false economy,” says you can probably guess.

  “Once she understands her golden boy, whilst not yet come to dust, is decidedly at the dusty end of things, and as dodgy as a bottle of chips to boot, it might be just the existential shock she needs to reset her life.”

  “I think it’s a brilliant idea,” says the microwave, who has an inbuilt tendency to view the world as binary (good/bad) with the occasional urge to slow down and think about it (defrost).

  “I believe I’ve seen this movie,” says the telly. “Fucked if I can remember how it ends.”

  The toothbrush says, “Isn’t there a danger that they could, you know…” It conveys the rest of the sentence in a series of buzzing noises.

  “Live happily ever after?” says the telly.

  “Not a hope in hell,” I say with more conviction than I actually possess. Who actually knows what would happen if these two were to meet again? Could they rescue one another from their rackety lives and together build a strong future? Or would they each find themselves unable to escape their habitual patterns; she to be drawn to a charismatically unreliable male; he to flee permanence, stability, more words along those lines.

  Except—plot twist—her last relationship was with Shittle. And on the flip-flopping principle, the next contestant should be a dull, safe one.

  Except—let’s twist again—we are trying to escape that cycle.

  Heavy sigh. Perhaps I am turning into Oprah Winfrey!

  I “order” the troops to do nothing with the new highly sensitive intelligence except keep maximally schtum.

  “Aye, aye, captain,” says the TV set satirically.

  Saluki-woman wanted me to work with The Foetus on developing questions for the Chad Butterick interview.

  Actually, I must stop calling him that. Dylan is probably twenty-five and his knowledge of television—plus music, cinema, podcasts; matter of fact, make that all popular culture—is oceanic. It’s just that his features are not especially well-formed. His face is somewhat blobular, if that’s a word, and the almost white-blond hair, lucky bastard, means he doesn’t seem to have any eyebrows. I can easily imagine him floating in a sac of amniotic fluid, which to be honest has never been a great look.

  The Foetus—sorry—Dylan pulled a swivelly chair up alongside mine, kicked his feet up onto the desk and drew some mysterious boxes on a page attached to a clipboard, like he had a plan.

  “Hit me up,” he said.

  “Sorry?”

  “What do we know about the Chadster?”

  I allowed a pause.

  “You realize you’re talking out loud? You said, the Chadster.”

  “I’m thinking he’s actually kind of cool. In his totally inflected ironic cheesiness?”

  “I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”

  “The original cheese has matured into a kinda self-aware toughened whole. Like there’s a hard, protective rind around the package.”

  “Gouda?”

  “More like a parmesan. Possibly a pecorino.”

  “Manchego?”

  “Yeah, could be.”

  Was this irony? Or post-irony? Or had we totally jumped the camembert?

  “You think we should get him going on the cheese aspects?”

  “Oh, deffo. Big time.”

  “If you were a cheese, what sort of cheese would you be? sort of thing.”

  “I think it’s a strong line.”

  “Put it down.”

  The Foetus, I’m fairly sure, scribbled the word cheese into one of the boxes.

  “You think there could be sponsorship angles?” he said, I believe in all seriousness.

  “This program has been brought to you by Red Leicester. The Red Cheese! Actually, it’s more orange, if it’s anything.”

  “A cheese producer might be interested, if there were to be some synergies with program content.”

  I saw him scribble sponsorship in another box.

  “Can I ask you something, Daisy?”

  “Sure. Shoot.”

  He sighed heavily, and began bashing his knee wit
h the clipboard. I had to tell him to stop it.

  “There’s this girl. Woman.”

  Shit. Here it was.

  “Tell me.”

  “She’s really nice and everything.”

  I couldn’t resist it. “A Stilton? Or less crumbly?”

  (I was aching to say Stinking Bishop!)

  He ignored the diversion.

  “We’ve been out a few times and everything. But I can’t seem to.” He lowered his voice. “This is actually kind of embarrassing.”

  “Listen. No worries.”

  Oh, sweet Jesus. Please don’t make me laugh.

  “I can’t seem to move it up to the next level.”

  “Ah. That old chestnut. Actually, I don’t know why I said chestnut. It’s all this talk of cheese, it’s making me hungry.”

  “We’ve had four dates, right. Cinema. Walk on the Heath. South Bank. Loud restaurant. All the regular datey stuff. But I’m not getting any signals from her. Nothing to suggest she’d welcome. You know. A move.”

  Very difficult not to splutter with hilarity at the idea of The Foetus putting the moves on anyone.

  “And I don’t want to pounce. Obviously, I don’t want to do that. You don’t mind me talking about this?”

  “Not at all.”

  It’s what Mummy’s here for.

  “When you say there are no signals, right? Are you sure? Because four dates is… is quite a few dates.”

  “Well, that’s what I was thinking.”

  “If she wasn’t interested at some level in moving to the—the, er next level, she would probably have stayed at home.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Have you tried looking into her eyes and saying, you know I really like you, whatever her name is. What is her name?”

  “Bexley.”

  “Bexley?! That’s a place.”

  “Yeah, in Kent.”

  “Have you tried saying, I really like you, Bexley?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “I see your point, to be honest. Who calls their kid Bexley?”

  “Maybe she just likes, you know, being out.”

  “What does she even do, Bexley?”