by P. Z. Reizin
“Chloe,” I whisper. “It’s best that I remain your confidential servant. Kindly apologize on my behalf and explain that I’m unavailable.”
“Ah,” says Mrs. Parsloe.
Daisy and Eggstain exchange a particular look.
She taps the side of her nose. “Be like Dad and keep Mum, eh?”
Eggstain’s expression has that special blankness common to many men with overgrown facial topiary, impossible to read because so much visual information is lost in the tangle of thatch. Were I to hazard a guess, I’d probably go for: This one is the full cuckoo bananas. Maybe we should think about doubling the dose.
“Who are you talking to, Mummy?”
“No one, dear. Well, hasn’t this been lovely? Thank you so much for coming. I expect you’re all very busy…”
Later, in the café on the High Street, Eggstain (tea and three rounds of toast) reminds Daisy that psychotic episodes are not unknown in cases of dementia, but rarely at the onset, and the “fridge business” with Chloe doesn’t quite “smell” like one to him.
“I really don’t know what to say about it,” says the doctor. “It’s not something we like to admit, but I’m baffled.”
Daisy (sausage sandwich) pulls a face and shrugs.
“Thank you for your honesty,” she says, possibly satirically.
“Tell me something about you, Daisy,” says Eggstain, a little bit apropos of nothing.
“Me?”
“It’s a technique my psychiatric colleague Dr. Schauffus recommends. When you’ve run out of theories, just say the first thing that comes into your head. Even though your conscious mind has reached a dead end, your unconscious will still be working on the case.”
“What would you like to know about me?”
“I don’t know. Something I would never have guessed.”
“Well,” begins Daisy. And she wrinkles her nose. It lasts—I time it—fourteen seconds, during which Eggstain’s expression never varies, although his pupils dilate, which tells you something.
“Sometimes,” she says at the end of the fourteen secs, “I have this thing. I can be at the office. Or on the Tube. Or anywhere. I sort of… wake up in my own thoughts? And then I’ll ask myself, what have you been thinking about for the last five minutes? And I don’t know! I actually can’t answer!”
“You’ve been daydreaming.”
“Have I?”
“Allowing your thoughts to drift like smoke. It’s a good thing.”
“Is it? It feels feeble. My old boss used to clap his hands behind my chair and make me jump!”
“Most of what your brain does is unavailable to you—we are literally unconscious of it. We should be grateful that this is so. Imagine if we had to think about how to walk, ride a bicycle, make…”
He trails off.
“What?”
“Make. Make something. Make breakfast.”
(It wasn’t breakfast that he was about to say, was it?!)
“The human brain,” continues Eggstain, moving right along (nothing to see here), “is like a grapefruit wrapped in a napkin. The grapefruit is the old pre-conscious animal brain that’s evolved over millions of years. And the thin surface layer of napkin is the recent conscious bit that arrived with Homo sapiens and enabled us to invent science and literature and… whatever you think is the pinnacle of human achievement.”
“Twitter?”
“If you say so.”
“Some mornings my brain feels more like a tomato wrapped in a pancake. A big beefsteak tomato. And one of those pancakes with golden syrup. Well, treacle really.”
Eggstain smiles.
“The point is, we are so wrapped up in our pancake thoughts, we lose sight of all the wisdom gathered over millennia in the grapefruit. Tomato, if you prefer. When you daydream, activity in the outer layer is turned down, allowing some of the contents of the tomato to penetrate the conscious pancake. I hope this isn’t getting too technical.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“Of course, the tomato brain speaks tomato language. Whereas the pancake layer…”
“Speaks pancake?”
“This is why dreams feel so strange. They are in a foreign language.”
“So, I’m normal. Normal for a pancake wrapped round a tomato.”
“Better than normal. Healthy! Your beefsteak tomato has not been stifled, which is so often the case in our pancake-driven culture.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
They chink teacups and I am left a little dazzled by the exchange. So much to think about, not the least of it being: If the human brain is partly—maybe mainly—unconscious, how about the brain of a fridge-freezer? Are there also depths of which we know nothing? But this powerful thought must await another occasion, because Eggstain is already moving on.
“There’s something I’d like to ask you,” he says.
“Sure.”
“I’ve been thinking about getting rid of this.”
He rakes his fingers through his beard. A few toast crumbs catch in the sunlight as they tumble out.
Daisy nods. “Why not? In fact, definitely.”
“The issue is, my partner is opposed.”
“Ah.”
“She has a thing about beards, but I feel like I don’t recognize myself any more. Both literally and metaphorically. Is this too much information? It really is, isn’t it? Apologies.”
“Not at all. No. Listen. You have to be true to your truest self, don’t you? To be absolutely honest, I read that in Metro. But there’s only so long you can live a lie. It happened to me quite recently.”
“You had a beard.”
“I was in a relationship that was based on a lie. Perhaps at some level I always knew.”
“At the level of the tomato.”
“The pancake wasn’t ready to listen. But there was a lot that was good about it.”
“There always is. And in the end?”
“In the end, the pancake was presented with the terrible truth.”
(That would have been Mandy White, I’m guessing.)
“You’re in favor of truth, generally, in all circumstances.”
“Have you got something to hide under there?”
“To be perfectly honest, I can’t remember.”
“Go for it! If it’s a disaster, you can always grow it back.”
“You’re right. What’s that thing Churchill said? Success isn’t final. Failure isn’t fatal.”
“Oh, I saw that film. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds. Never once mentioned beards.”
“You’ve inspired me. I’m going to do it.”
“Congratulations.”
Daisy raises a hand. Eggstain looks perplexed.
“High five?”
They clap palms.
“Yay,” she cries. “Free your inner tomato.”
“I’m not sure that really works in this context. I won’t be shaving the actual tomato. That would be weird.”
“Surgically impossible.”
“That too. Look, are you still hungry? It’s this talk of pancakes and tomatoes.”
“Hungry? I’m starving. It’s all your fault.”
A good-looking boy from the serious programs downstairs parked his bum on the edge of my desk and said he was Hugh Someone.
“Hi,” I responded.
Did I know if it was okay for him to listen to some music in one of our edit booths? Theirs were all busy. Sure, I told him. Was it the new Ed Sheeran album?
He didn’t understand this was a joke and explained he’d been trawling through Soviet era vinyl for their series about the Russian Revolution. Had I worked here long? He hadn’t seen me before. A couple of weeks, I replied. There was something amusingly swotty about him, inky fingers, creased shirt beneath the blue V-neck. I told him that I once had a conversation with Saluki-woman about his show; it hadn’t gone well.
“She can be quite abrasive,” he said. “But you have to respect th
e intellectual rigor. And her attention to detail is forensic.”
I said she reminded me of a neighbor’s dog in childhood. A Saluki. Name of Mishkin. Killed when it chased a squirrel into the path of a family from Frodsham who were lost in the suburbs on their way to see the Royal Tournament at Olympia. They were mortified by the accident (their horrible car, the color of rust). It wasn’t so much the attention to detail or the intellectual rigor that reminded me of Mishkin, I explained, it was more the face shape, and especially the hair, which fell in the same way as Mishkin’s ears.
He started looking at me oddly, head dropping to one side, brow furrowing, as if I’d said something he didn’t quite follow. It lasted for quite a long time, and then he stopped doing that and asked me if I had any serious plans for lunch.
Going to Pret with a colleague, I explained.
“Okay. Well. How do you fancy a drink after work?”
“Sorry. Are you asking me out?”
“I suppose I am. Yes.”
“Bold move!”
He nodded, looking rather pleased with himself.
I suggested he dropped me an email and I’d get back to him.
But it was puzzling. You don’t just wander up to people and ask them out; for all he knew, I could have been in a long relationship with a jealous and violent criminal. Or married.
Chantal agreed that there was something strange about it. But no, he wasn’t bad-looking and using a phrase like intellectual rigor didn’t automatically make him a tosser, although it was a worrying sign. She thought I probably should agree to go for a drink, just to eliminate him from inquiries, as it were.
In other news, she and I have both been struck by the difference in The Foetus.
Hard to put our finger on what exactly. Something in the body language perhaps, or around the eyes, or maybe, we agreed, it was the smirky expressions flitting across the unformed landscape of his larval visage.
And then, once the penny dropped, it was blindingly obvious.
“Oh my God,” she said. “It’s had sex!”
I told her I felt responsible because I advised that he and Whatsit should sink a couple of toxic cocktails and check how the world looked then. And when I got the chance to raise it, the Foetus was quick to give credit where it was due.
“Yeah, brilliant,” he said. (I asked how it was all going with Herself? Silly name. A town in Essex, I recalled. Not Chelmsford.)
“You’ve moved it up to the next level?!”
“We have.”
A pink dawn rose upon his face.
“Wonderful! So when are you getting married?” (My little joke.)
Bashful smile. “Bexley loved the cocktail place you suggested. We both did.”
Bexley! Jesus.
“If you do get married, right? And your surname was Heath…”
“She’d be Bexley Heath. She’s heard them all.”
“I’m delighted for you,” I heard myself saying, like I was his grandma.
Chantal, who had been earwigging, said: “If your surname was… And District Community Health Council, she’d be Bexley and District Community Health Council.”
The Foetus grinned. It was as disturbing a sight as I’d seen in a while. Making a “pistol” out of thumb and index finger, he pointed it at Chantal and produced that click-click sound riders make when they want a horse to giddy up a bit.
“Like it,” he said, and away he sauntered, arms hanging satirically low, like an orang-utan off to find a banana.
“You realize we’ll have to stop calling him The Foetus now,” said Chantal.
“I know. We’ve created a monster.”
In response to Hugh’s email suggesting post-work drinks, Daisy has suggested a date the following week and nothing from our surveillance data suggests either party is especially excited about the encounter to come.
Perhaps this is how it should be. Level, calm, no unrealistic ideas allowed to develop, so, it is to be hoped, no fantastical expectations dashed.
In the hiatus, still glowing, as it were, from the success of finally running to earth the Tarnished Nicky, I find my curiosity growing in respect of the man who held captive Daisy’s imagination—and mine, I admit it—for much longer than was healthy. He is tricky to keep an eye upon, largely unconnected as he is to the Internet of Things. There’s just one ancient laptop with only intermittent access to the w.w.w.—the only abbreviation in widespread use that takes longer to say than the words it actually stands for!—and his (extremely dumb) mobile has buttons you actually push. As a result, one can only really take a “live” look at Nicky Bell when he decides to go online, although the contents of his hard drive have yielded up not a few choice morsels. To summarize: Bavin Shibbles is employed on the Gwynbrynydd estate (it sounds like someone clearing their throat) as a general gardener and groundskeeper. The lifestyle must suit him because neither the pay nor the accommodation that comes with the job (a caravan) are overly impressive. He doesn’t run a car; he has access only to a tractor and a bicycle, often pedaling the latter a distance of 3.2 miles to a pub in the closest village, The Cross Foxes at Bwlchgwydder (prolonged phlegmy expectoration).
Remote though it is, internet provision at this hostelry is very much tip-top for mid-Wales and over several evenings one has been able to watch and listen to the man’s interactions with fellow denizens of this rural demi-monde. Too late in the day to be introducing a host of new characters to the narrative, so we can skate over the intriguing cast of regular players to be found in the cozy lounge bar, to concentrate upon Myfanwy Perks, a mental health nurse of twenty-seven summers, the latest in a long line of impressionable young women to fall under the spell of the elusive N. Bell. (This is a shame because there is a pair of twin brothers here, semi-criminal scrap dealers, who are worthy of a chapter to themselves. And this is to say nothing of “Des the Wheel,” who, as his name suggests, is called Des. In the seventies, according to local legend, Des was a getaway driver for a notorious… but I’m getting carried away. Back to the main event.)
Nicky, known satirically in The Cross Foxes as “Call me Bav” (after his opening remarks) or “Johnny English,” or occasionally later in the evening as—inexplicably—“Sharon,” is nonetheless respected as an exotic; an orchid, if you will, in a garden of low-lying shrubbery. His over-bright teeth are the cause of some occasional ribaldry (which he takes in good part), but by and large there is grudging affection for an intelligent, articulate drug-smoking individual (with an obviously checkered backstory) who is prepared to dirty his hands gardening at the big house. That he regularly seeks their collective local wisdom in relation to soil, climate and even micro-climatic issues is in his favor. The fact that Myfanwy Perks was prepared to lie down with him was initially a cause for sullen resentment until she stated, in the presence and hearing of most of the regulars, that “my chuff will have sealed up before I’d go with any of you grotbags”; a tricky sentence to make sense of, though its meaning seemed clear and its sentiment accepted.
Perhaps, after all the excitement, Gwynbrynydd and Bwlchgwydder represent the Good Life; fresh air, closeness to nature, honest toil, simple folk in whose company one may drink warm beer in the evening, and a comely young woman with whom to have amatory congress, either in Nicky’s caravan, or in Ms. Perks’ tiny cottage on the Abbeycwmhir Road.
All of which makes me surprised to witness the conversation which follows (sound courtesy of Myfanwy Perks’ mobile, vision from the Cross Foxes bar security camera; thanks, both). To set the scene, Nicky has been drinking Wem Bitter, an import from abroad (Shropshire) and Myfanwy is on her third pint of snakebite. They are seated to the left of the fireplace, in which a lump of peat smolders, and to the right of the dartboard, where Des the Wheel needs seventeen double top to finish.
Myf drains her glass and shines her headlamps upon her English lover. Even a fridge-freezer knows what this means (the scrap dealer brothers know too; they nod at one another in a particular way and the barman checks his w
atch to confirm).
“You about set then?” she says.
“Come back to mine tonight,” says Nicky quietly. “I’m up early to meet a train.”
Myfanwy signals she is ready to hear further and better particulars.
“Have to scoot down to London. Some family matters I need to clear up.”
“Good of you to tell me.”
Myf is… well, she’s miffed! He squeezes her hand.
“Sorry. The lawyer only phoned at five to six. I’ll just be away a day or two.”
An ugly expression settles itself into the pale complexion of the Welshwoman.
“Family business, is it?” she says unpleasantly.
And here I see for myself what a brilliant liar Nicky has become, or perhaps always was. Without missing a beat he tells her how he urgently needs to attend a legal conference with his sisters in relation to their parents, who are going into sheltered accommodation together: The house needs to be sold, and there are tricky issues in regard to several long-standing tenants on the estate; all of which I know to be an absolute crock of pork pies, there being no estate, and mother and father having decamped to a lovely stone villa in the Luberon some years previously.
“Poor Mums,” he says. “There’s the question of her dogs, Lupin and Chester. The last of the great Sally’s litter. She absolutely lives for those lurchers.”
He shakes his head, blinking rather a lot, and busies himself swallowing beer.
Disarmed by this sad tale of the end of things—the masterly touch of naming the fictitious canines, and the bitch who carried them!—the pair are soon heading back to Gwynbrynydd in Myfanwy’s Ford Focus, Bavin’s bicycle poking precariously from the rear.
The small caravan rocks on its tires during the lovemaking—Myf’s phone shares that detail—and when the mental health nurse is snoring happily, Nicky creeps from the narrow bed, powers on his laptop and activates the dial-up connection to the internet. One fully understands he is a duplicitous shitbird—and a dangerously charming one to boot—nevertheless the two words he types into the Google search box cause a sudden chill to travel through my pipework.