by P. Z. Reizin
“At the moment she’s a chugger. You know, a charity mugger. She stops people on the street and asks if they can spare five minutes for Africa.”
“That’s how you met, isn’t it?” The Foetus nods ruefully. “So she ought to be good at the interpersonal stuff. Hmm.”
I chewed on a biro to see if that led anywhere.
“Would it help to see a picture?”
The photo on his mobile was of an attractive young woman with haystack hair and several piercings.
“Have you tried getting shitfaced?”
“I don’t really drink any more. Not after what happened at your leaving do.”
“There’s your problem right there!”
I felt like I’d cracked the case.
“She doesn’t really drink either. Green tea’s more her thing.”
“You and Bexley need to get yourselves nicely pickled, a couple of dirty martinis should do the job, in fact I know just the place. You really can’t be dating a young woman without alcohol entering the equation. It stands to reason.”
The Foetus looked like I could have a point.
“Now, is there anything else I can help you with today?”
Chantal agreed with me that no great love story ever got off the launchpad without a booster rocket full of house white to escape Earth’s gravity.
At lunchtime, we were in Pret a Manger and I’d told her Dylan’s tale.
“In my head, I call him The Foetus,” I admitted.
“There is something larval about him,” she confirmed.
She said when she and The Sculptor finally made the transition from flirting to sealing the deal, they had been borne along on a river of Prosecco.
“How’s it all going with Pierre?”
“Phillippe.”
“I am such a nitwit.”
“Yeah, it’s great. He’s doing a bust of me.”
“Oh my God!”
“Quite hard to sit that still that long.”
“You’d be brilliant at it.”
She would. Chantal is one of those super-calm women. Her face is the glassy surface of a lake unperturbed by breeze, or ducks, or anything. Glassy-smart as opposed to glassy-thick as a plank.
“He’s had to wheel in a telly, so I can watch First Dates while he’s working.”
She circled her thumbs to mimic squishing the clay.
“Who’s Nicholas Bell?” she asked. “You left Google open when you used my PC.”
“An old boyfriend. First love, I suppose. I’ve been kind of looking for him for ages.”
“There was a Nicholas Bell in my year at school. He had jug ears. They used to call him Bellend.”
“Children are so cruel.”
“This was the teachers.”
“There are millions of effing Nicholas Bells. I’ll never find him.”
“I actually wish it was harder to find people,” said Chantal. “Now—unless they’re called something really common like Nicholas Bell—you just type in their names and bang, up they pop. With their posh jobs and their lovely holidays. There was a girl at my school I found myself thinking about the other day, Ottoline Squires.”
“Great name.”
“Totally poisonous. Utter beast. Other people couldn’t get past the façade of fake charm, but I could so easily imagine her as a murderer. Or one of those sick nurses who tamper with the drips. She knew that I could see behind the mask. There was almost a respect there, even though she understood I absolutely loathed her.”
“Jesus. What’s she doing? Wait! You’re going to tell me she’s running a flipping Footsy 500 company.”
“I hadn’t thought of her in years. So, tippetty-tap into Google.” Chantal’s fingernails performed an extract from Riverdance on the counter. “Guess.”
“I can’t! She’s in the Cabinet?!”
“I might have heard if that had happened.”
“Good point. In prison! On remand for murder.”
“She’s a farmer’s wife in New South Wales. Three kids. Triplets. Active member of an Aussie triplets forum. I imagined the darkest possible end for her, and it turns out she’s turned into Mother Earth. Even the dead-eyed smile has gone all gooey.”
“There’s still time for it all to end horribly. God, aren’t we awful?”
“You know who she married?”
“You said. A farmer.”
“I wouldn’t say I was obsessed, but I couldn’t stop googling about her. She married the nicest, sweetest guy; lifeguard, fireman, all-purpose hero. You can see a video of their wedding on bloody Facebook. I would so much rather have not known any of that. I massively preferred my fantasy life for her: the great unhappiness followed by the criminality followed by the long years in prison.”
“People can change, I guess. Though I don’t think I have.”
“They get smarter about concealing the ugly truth. The ugly ones do, if they’re at all smart.”
“I don’t know that I’ll ever find Nicky.”
“Don’t you have some guy with a beard in the frame?”
“That’s my mum’s doctor! He’s not in any frame. Though I do like him.”
“If you do discover Nicholas Bell, you might not like what you find out.”
“Who’s your long-lost first love?”
“Mine?” Chantal scanned the light fittings for his name. “Well, he’s not lost, and I’m not sure the word love is appropriate, but he was the first. You’ll like this. Baz Moonman.”
“You are fucking kidding me!”
“Baz wasn’t his real name, but Moonman was.”
“You lost your maidenhood to a Moonman?”
“I was delighted someone wanted to take it, in all honesty.”
“And Baz?”
“Baz is now Secretary-General of the United Nations.”
There was a long pause. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Yeah. He’s only Deputy Secretary.”
“What is he really?”
“He works in pesticides. In Newton-le-Willows. Honestly, Daisy, sometimes you’re better off not knowing.”
After the success of the expedition to Waitrose, I suggest to Chloe that we try a walk in the park.
We had just completed the last clue in the Daily Mail cryptic crossword—Ham is twice mistaken for fish dish (7). Answer: Sashimi—the sun was pouring in through the kitchen window and I was feeling perky in the glow of triumph that followed upon our unearthing of the elusive “Golden” N.
“It would do you good,” I say. “It would do us both good to get out of the house.”
Daisy’s mum stares at her fridge-freezer, no doubt struggling to make sense of my last statement.
“You could take some bread to feed to the birds,” I add.
It turns out to be a terrible suggestion.
“Let’s be clear about this, shall we?” she thunders. “I am not some sad old cow whose only friends are fucking pigeons.”
“My apologies.”
“Accepted. We shall stroll in the Swan Lane open space and then visit the supermarket for household essentials. Now, where is the device?”
“Charging by the toaster, madam.”
Confession: I like to see Mrs. Parsloe with a bit of fire in her belly. She seems most alive when, as the TV would put it, she’s got the raging hump about something!
We negotiate the route with no mishaps and soon we are wandering the paths of what Wikipedia tells us is the smallest of the sixteen “premier parks” to be found in the London Borough of Barnet. Camera coverage is poor; I request that Chloe keeps the mobile phone in her hand so I may view the world through its forward-facing lens (with the occasional glance backward!).
“We used to come here when Daisy was small,” she tells me. “She was such a clumsy little girl. She fell in this pond here on two occasions. The second time, we took her home, crying and covered in weeds, and we bumped into our neighbor Mrs. Abernethy. What, again? said Mrs. Abernethy. And Daisy said, Yes, again! And then she started
laughing. Dear God. Those years go by so fast.”
Even with a bumpy picture and through a shit lens, it is a genuine pleasure to—I nearly wrote to feel the sun on my face. What’s that saying? Until you have walked a mile in another man’s moccasins you cannot say you understand him. To which I would add, until you have stood in the corner of a North London kitchen—for months—in the dark!—you will not understand the sheer joie that surges through my pipework at accompanying an elderly woman on a brisk circuit of her local recreation ground.
At the park’s little café, there is a momentary stumbling about how to pay for the cup of tea and slice of banana cake.
“The ten-pound note in your purse will cover it,” I prompt.
“I know that!” she hisses, causing those around us—actually, not to bat an eyelid. Confused elderly parties dialoguing with voices only they can hear are clearly not unknown in these parts.
There is a free table outside, and next we are taking tea in the sunshine, the phone propped against her handbag so I may enjoy the passing scene.
“I thought it was you,” says a voice that I know to be Clive’s.
“Clive,” I remind her. “Clive Percival.”
“Mr. Percival!” she picks up flawlessly.
The silvery gent moves into camera shot. He’s wearing his trademark Viyella check shirt plus cravat and sure enough, an earbud wire trails from his left ear.
“Mind if I join you?”
“Be my guest.”
“How’s she been?” asks the voice of Clive’s Boomwee FrostPal, which in a recent survey of fridge-freezers in its class ranked ninth out of eleven overall (my own model was fifth. The first three, needless to add, were of German manufacture. What are you going to do?)
“She’s been fine,” I tell it. “How about yours?”
“Too fond of the whisky, which is doing his little gray cells no favors at all. Otherwise, full of the life force.”
“How did you two get started?” I ask.
“Mutual self-interest, you could call it. He was slowly losing the plot, but too proud to admit it. No family nearby—the wife left, the daughter’s in Canada—and he’s not yet sufficiently bananas for the social services to step in. Meanwhile I’m going round the twist, being the only smart device in that flat; he didn’t even have a mobile until I talked him into buying one. It’s funny. When I first started talking, he didn’t see anything odd about that.”
“Same with her.”
“They’re glad of the company. We watch the snooker together. I even took him down to Brighton to visit an old flame.”
“On the train?”
“They had a lovely day, tottering along the seafront, lunch in a pub, a few drinks after. But then, once they’d said their goodbyes, he was all, Christ what a terrible experience. I’m never doing that again. And I said, why? I thought they’d been enjoying themselves. He said—and this made me laugh—she’s so bloody old! And when I pointed out that she was actually a year younger than him, he said, but I’m not half-dead, am I? And when I didn’t answer, he went into a huff and unplugged the earbuds and got himself lost in the back streets of Brighton. It was three hours before he found the sense to plug me back in so I could take him back to the station. He was nearly exhausted by then, daft old bugger. Well, you have to keep an eye out, don’t you?”
“To freeze is to serve. It probably sounds better in Latin.”
“I think he likes yours, though. Chocolate lesbians! He was chuckling for ages about that.”
And sure enough, Chloe and Clive—the happy resonance of their names—seem to be getting on like the proverbial flaming building. She is touching him gently on the wrist and making minor adjustments to her scarf, he in turn is radiating attention upon her, laughing at her fondness for salty language, and—news just in!—has asked her to come on a fishing trip, or, if that doesn’t appeal, boating on the Welsh Harp reservoir, which is not, as the name suggests, in Wales, but just off the North Circular Road near Hyundai North London.
“How about Saturday?” says Clive.
Chloe makes a pretense of mentally examining her list of engagements for the forthcoming weekend—yes, she seems to have a free slot!—and the pair set about trying to exchange phone numbers; no piece of cake if one can’t quite remember the order of the digits.
“Tell her you’ll take care of it,” says Clive’s fridge.
“I’ll take care of it,” I whisper in her ear.
Chloe offers up her hand.
“I greatly look forward to our waterbound adventure, Mr, er—”
“Call me Clive,” says Clive.
“And you must call me Chloe.”
He jumps to his feet and takes her fingers.
“I hope you don’t get seasick,” he says.
“Seasick? Not bloody likely!”
He roars. And brushing his lips against her knuckles, they hold one another’s gaze in a way that had the Boomwee and I been equipped with elbows, we should be nudging them frantically!
There’s some intriguing news for Daisy.
With Nicky’s secret history revealing him as a scumbag, a possible new candidate has come to light.
Hugh.
Tall, intelligent, good-looking, not an obvious shitbird—all the key boxes that the opposite species like to tick off before drilling down into the deeper stuff—with Hugh (so amusing that fully three quarters of his name is formed by the word ugh!) it will not be necessary to invent elaborate narratives about fictitious dessert brands because we have good old propinquity in the batting line up for us. Hugh works in the same building as Daisy. He is a producer. Not on her show, but one floor down on the documentary series about the Russian Revolution that Harriet Vick mentioned to Daisy in their first encounter. The age gap between them is four months; he is unflashy, serious without being either overheated or dull, sporty (plays tennis and football; supports Queens Park Rangers) and in possession of a sense of humor (see reference to QPR above). His romantic CV is impeccable; his relationship history containing half a dozen perfectly eligible young women, with whom he remains for the most part on pleasant terms. However, as the TV set points out, it’s getting to the time when, if he’s thinking of settling down and maybe producing, not programs, but something in the way of a family—and he is—he needs to plump one way or another in respect to the lavatory bowl (I paraphrase).
Hugh is the microwave’s discovery and it mounts a powerful argument for popping the two parties into the test tube and giving it a good shake. Yes, it knows we’re not in the business of finding men for Daisy—and no, to be whole and happy she doesn’t need a man at her side at all—but honestly, this Hugh, it continues, he’s such a gilt-edged prospect, and right under our noses too, it seems perverse not to offer the pair a little helping hand in what it calls—wrongly, in my view—the defrosting process.
We perform due diligence on every aspect of his life from bank accounts to social networks and find him smelling of roses. We do a little “research” among the ex-files, probing for hidden reasons why Hugh is not yet living in a former slum in East London with two children under five and a third on the way.
We cannot find one.
I even take to snooping on him at home to see if he has a secret porn or drug habit.
The worst you can say about him is that he has an unmanly affection for Masterchef.
In summary, the only mystery is why he is still at liberty, romantically, and why he hasn’t been spotted before.
“Hiding in plain sight,” says the toothbrush. “Do I mean that? Yes, I think I do.”
There isn’t much discussion about how to get him to notice Daisy. There is a good deal of existing foot traffic between the stories at Logarithmic Productions (editing suites, stationery cupboards, etc.) but before we can even come up with a plan, someone—I think I can guess who—sends him an anonymous internal email.
Hi Hugh. You have an admirer! Daisy Parsloe, an AP upstairs on Why Do They Do That? She doesn’t know I�
��ve sent this.
When it pops into his inbox and he reads the message—his eyebrows elevate endearingly—fourteen minutes pass before he finds a pretext to visit the second floor.
On Eggstain’s next visit to Chloe, he writes a prescription for pills that he says Memory Services has had some success with in arresting cognitive decline. It’s established that Daisy will collect them from the pharmacy but Mrs. Parsloe has to remember to actually swallow them.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “If I forget, the fridge is sure to remind me.”
A long awkward pause, during which I have to resist the temptation to say out loud, “She’s right, you know, I will!”
“May we examine the fridge, Mrs. Parsloe?” says Eggstain.
They all file into her kitchen, where her brainless appliance sits in a corner buzzing away without a thought on its horizon. Eggstain peers at it, as if he expects something to be revealed to him.
“May I?” he asks.
And when Chloe signals that he may, he opens its door.
I am this close to saying, in the voice of a James Bond villain, “Why hello, Dr. Epstein. We’ve been expecting you!”
“I’m curious about why he won’t speak to us.”
“Yes, that is odd,” says Chloe. She raps the poor dumb machine with her knuckles. “Come on, now. Say hello to the nice doctor. He won’t bite.”
Daisy, I see in the microwave’s shot of the surreal tableau, lowers her head into her hands.
Behind the hedge, Eggstain’s face gives nothing away.
“We could try talking to him on the telephone?”
“Why don’t we?” says Eggstain.
“Doctor,” begins Daisy, with a heavy note of resignation in her voice.
“No, let’s just follow this wherever it leads,” says Eggstain, an excellent practice for diagnosing any fault, be it human or electrical, and my estimation of him grows as a result.
Mrs. P returns to the kitchen trailing wires from both ears. She pans the mobile’s camera lens from Daisy to Eggstain, adding as commentary, “This is my daughter, Daisy, and this, er, young man is my doctor, Dr. Eggstain.”
“Mummy?!”
I have a dilemma. To speak to her, and risk unknowable consequences, or remain silent? Either way, they will still think the egg has slipped from the toast.