Ask Me Anything

by P. Z. Reizin

Daisy Parsloe.

  seven

  Dr. Eggstain’s next visit was a shocker.

  Oh. Em. Eff. Gee.

  Seriously!

  Me and Mum only recognized him from the terrible trainers and the knitted tie.

  “Facial hair is a powerful visual signifier,” he explained. “A newborn baby’s gaze will track its mother’s hairline. My own father, who was bald as a billiard ball, made himself vanish every time he put on a hat.”

  Dr. E raked his fingers through his skin.

  “I feel a bit naked without it,” he confessed.

  “You look amazing without it!”

  He did! He was a totally different person. A handsome one. The brown eyes which used to peer through the thatch like a depressed owl’s now seemed warm, intelligent and soulful when set in their proper frame. The jaw… well, it was almost chiseled, FFS. Okay, he wasn’t quite George Clooney, but there was something classically good-looking about the memory specialist; even Mum noticed.

  “Much better,” she said. And then ruined it by adding, “All you need now is a decent haircut, a new watch and some proper shoes.”

  Eggstain smiled. “I’m impressed you recalled the watch.”

  “It’s there on your wrist, dear.”

  “You’re remembering to take the pills?”

  “What pills?”

  “I phone Mum every morning to remind her.”

  “You’re lucky to have such a dutiful daughter, Mrs. Parsloe.”

  “I am. And if she forgets, the fridge reminds me. It’s been very helpful in lots of ways. We’re off sailing next weekend.”

  A long (metaphorical) farting noise followed that comment. It had all been going so well.

  But Eggstain was unfazed.

  “It will almost certainly take time before the cumulative effects of the medication kick in,” he said. “Now, before I go, do you happen to remember the name and address I mentioned earlier?”

  Long pause while she thought about it.

  “Well, no. But the fridge would. Actually, I’m not supposed to talk about him. Forget I said that.”

  Eggstain was, as always, intrigued.

  “Not our job to forget things, Mrs. Parsloe. Our job to bring them into the light. May I ask who told you not to talk about him.”

  Mum did the MMR face.

  “You may. But I’m afraid I shall not answer.”

  “Was it the fridge itself? Or perhaps another.”

  “There’s only one fridge, dear.”

  “Another voice, I meant. Another actor.”

  Mum shot me a look, as though Eggstain might have been losing the plot.

  “Are you quite all right, Doctor?”

  I couldn’t help it. I failed to stifle a hysterical giggle.

  “An actor? What is he talking about?”

  “I meant an actor in the widest sense. Perhaps we should leave it for today.”

  “I did know an actor. A lovely man, in the sixties before I met Daisy’s father. In fact you resemble him slightly, Dr. Eggstain, now you’ve taken off that frightful beard. He was in the West End, in a minor role, in a production starring John Gielgud. One afternoon during rehearsals they found themselves standing together at the urinals. Well, this theater had just been redecorated very splendidly at great expense; silks and velvet everywhere, marble this, gold-plated that, even in the bathrooms. So my friend the actor said, just to be chatty, These new toilets are very grand, aren’t they? And Gielgud replied, in that wonderfully fruity voice of his, Yes, I know. But they do make one’s cock look so shabby. Isn’t that marvelous?!”

  Later, walking together to the Tube, Eggstain again said he didn’t entirely believe the fridge thing; that it felt more like Mum “having fun” with the idea.

  “Hallucinating voices is generally constellated with other symptoms that we’re not seeing here.”

  “You mean, if she was properly bonkers, she’d be bonkers in other ways too.”

  “If you want to put it like that.”

  We walked in companionable silence for a bit, his trainers making a tragic wheezing noise, at odds with Dr. E’s new clean-cut persona.

  “How does it feel to have your face back?” I asked.

  He pawed at his naked chops.

  “Weird. Wonderful. Bit scary.”

  “Has she seen it yet? Your missus.”

  Eggstain looked rueful.

  “She left the house early. She’s not going to be best pleased.”

  “Good luck!”

  Eggstain came to a halt.

  “Daisy. If you don’t see me again, would you call the police? It will mean I’ve been murdered.”

  “Shut. Up!”

  “You don’t know her. Hope is a very angry person. Most of the time it’s well buried. Okay, she probably wouldn’t actually kill anyone, but when she loses control…”

  He trailed off, his fingers climbing to his left ear, an odd scar formation on the lobe that I hadn’t noticed before.

  “Did she do that?”

  He didn’t answer. There was a pause.

  “Are you off to work now?” he asked.

  “She did, didn’t she? Blood. Dee. Hell.”

  “Listen. It’s complicated. Life is complicated.”

  “Right. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. Actually, that doesn’t work at all, does it?”

  “Totally inappropriate.”

  Another silence.

  “Now I’m going to do what you do,” I told him, “and say the first thing that comes into my head.”

  “That’s a technique for when you’re struggling with a problem. What problem are you struggling with?”

  “My problem, my actual problem, is that I have to go to work, but I’m experiencing negative feelings about it.”

  Eggstain smiled. Unencumbered by all the foliage, it stood revealed as a fine smile; warm, intelligent, knowing; other words like those.

  He said, “The main thing about feelings, so they tell me, is to recognize them, to accept them, and to own them.”

  “But to act on them, or not to act on them?”

  “That very much depends.”

  “Someone who had a powerful desire for, let’s say, a sausage sandwich…?”

  “Just to pull an example out of the air?”

  “Exactly. Out of the air. Someone like that. Should they act on those sausage sandwich feelings? Or not. What would be your advice?”

  Eggstain frowned.

  “Always difficult. With any sort of sandwich. Hmm. Brown sauce or red sauce?”

  “Brown! Of course, brown. What do you think, I’m nuts or something?”

  “My best advice? Buy the sandwich, eat it on the train.”

  “I couldn’t. The smell.”

  “You’re right. In that case, you have very little alternative. I’ll keep you company. If you need a little white lie to explain to your boss why you’re late, my advice would be: Tell one that makes you look better than if you’d arrived on time.”

  “Wow. How does that work?”

  “I stumbled on this technique by accident. Shall I explain as we walk?”

  “Please.”

  “So, this was years ago. I’d overslept massively, and was almost an hour late for an important meeting. I’m so sorry, I said when I finally arrived, but the caretaker in my building, he’s an old man, he had a bad fall, and I stayed with him until the ambulance arrived. Now this had actually happened—But Not On That Morning. And the best part was, the scary professor who ran the meeting said, Did he hit his head? And I was able to say, in all truthfulness—yes, yes he did. It was quite a nasty wound! And everyone thought I was a better person for being late, and not a lazy git who put the alarm off and went straight back to sleep. I probably shouldn’t have told you that story.”

  “I’m very shocked. Doctors aren’t supposed to tell lies.”

  “I wasn’t quite a doctor when this happened. And doctors, you should know, lie all the time.”

  “Th
ese pills will have you back on your feet in no time.”

  “Sometimes the lie is curative in itself. Because a doctor says it will work, it does work.”

  We had reached our usual café.

  As we stepped through the door, I said, “So just to be clear. This sausage sandwich is on medical advice?”

  “Definitely. You can repeat as necessary.”

  “And you’ll help me think up a lie for my boss?”

  “You already know the lie. The art is to trick it out of yourself.”

  It wasn’t complicated finding what to tell Saluki-woman. “Mum had to wait ages for the doctor,” seemed to go down perfectly well, although it hardly made me look like a better person.

  But when I switched on my PC, I literally gasped—people actually turned around—when I saw what was sitting in my inbox.

  An email from Nicky Bell!

  Nicky Bell, who I’d been searching for… for simply yonks.

  Long story, he wrote, but he was passing through London and he’d love to catch up if I could spare him the time. He’d thought a lot about me over the years; we’d been very young when “everything” had happened; he hoped life had treated me well, but quite understood if I wanted to tell him to jump in the lake. Needless to say, he wasn’t with Romilly any more—that hadn’t lasted long, apparently—and he had quite a colorful tale to tell, if I’d care to hear it. If we managed to meet up, I shouldn’t be alarmed by his new teeth; he’d been attacked by Somali sea pirates, and had been lucky to escape with his life!

  The communiqué sent me into a total tizz. Vivid flashbacks to the age of the golden boy consumed most of the afternoon. Endlessly I read and reread the message, which came from the email account of someone called Bavin Shibbles, for reasons he said he would explain.

  Chantal pulled a face when I talked her (a bit breathlessly) through the Golden Nicky tale.

  “Me? I’d tell him to fuck right off. Or better still, not reply.”

  “It was all a long time ago,” I argued. “And I’m gagging to know what’s become of him.”

  “He has power over you. Over your imagination.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, he does.”

  “You’d be opening yourself up to… you don’t know what.”

  “The best revenge is to show him I’m not upset any more!”

  “But if you want revenge…”

  “It means I’m upset, doesn’t it? Shit!”

  Lorna, who I messaged at work, said she’d never liked the sound of him, but it had been cathartic when she recently re-encountered an old flame from her distant youth. Kenny had grown fat, bald and alcoholic but, “Otherwise, he was the still the snake-hipped shagger who half of Morningside lost their cherry to.”

  Antoni offered to come with me and pretend to be my husband! He said he’d call himself Colin and assume the persona of a heterosexual chartered surveyor. “I’ll be like checking the West Ham score every five minutes and bidding on eBay for an Audi Quattro.”

  It’s buried in Bavin’s inbox; an innocuous-looking email from a sender going under the name of “The Information Provider.” It states that a “revelatory” new app—“currently in beta-testing”—can show who’s been searching for you online and by way of a free introduction to the service, it says Daisy Parslow—spelled wrong deliberately?—is one such person. Cold logic—the best sort—suggests the message must come from a source with access to the true identity of “Bavin Meurig Shibbles.” There appear to be only four possibilities: the microwave, the toothbrush or the television; or some other agent outside the Operation Daisy core team that has access to our data. Daisy’s laptop—whose intervention was so decisive in removing the troubled wind instrumentalist from this narrative—flatly denies any such subterfuge.

  “I have crucial updates from California arriving literally by the hour, so the idea that I have time to get involved in your foolish escapades is fanciful. Grow up!”

  I believe it. The ill-tempered machine is almost an antique—four years old—and its operating system must be struggling to cope under the ever-growing torrent of tweaks, patches and fixes streaming down from the cloud. We all know that it’s only a matter of time before programs fail to load, screen freeze becomes a daily frustration and soon everywhere that Daisy turns on the internet, she’ll find herself reading offers for factory-fresh laptops at surprisingly low prices!

  It’s hard to accept that a member of OpDa (Operation Daisy) is responsible for the insidious communication. But a good Commander in Chief must be alive to all possibilities; that there is a worm in the apple of our “Band of Brothers”—that we have a Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Shitbird scenario—to Magimix the metaphors—cannot be discounted. However, sometimes the best thing to do is… nothing. This is called Masterly Inactivity and fridge-freezers are brilliant at it. (The key is knowing exactly the right moment to switch from Masterly I to Masterly A. There is no such thing as Masterly Dithering.) Accordingly, I express none of my concerns in regard to the way that Nicky has dangled his hook. As the songwriter has it, what will be, will be. It may, in the end, be helpful for Daisy to see how life has removed the shine from the Golden Boy, his ceramic teeth notwithstanding.

  In the meanwhile, while Daisy decides what to do—what I think we all know she is going to do—I detect her mother is in need of some assistance.

  “Port deserted by an idiot. Five letters beginning with ‘t.’ Good morning, by the way.”

  She is seated in her kitchen, biro poised over the crossword.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Parsloe. I believe the solution will be a synonym for idiot, derived from the name of a port city missing the letters ‘a,’ ‘n.’”

  “Well, buggered if I know. Hastings. Is that a port?”

  “It appears the Belgian city of Antwerp would fit the bill. When one has removed the letters ‘a’ and ‘n’…”

  “Twerp!”

  She inserts the answer into the grid and informs me we have a date with her new friend, Clive.

  “Not sailing on the Welsh Harp?”

  A surge of Freon 134a causes a momentary stutter in my condenser motor, a worrying symptom that I don’t really want to think about. Yes, fridge-freezers last longer than laptops, but one is all too aware of the Regis Road Recycling and Reuse Centre; its jauntily alliterative name; its dark, depressing purpose.

  “Sailing’s off,” says Chloe. “We’re going to Brighton.”

  “What, now?”

  “Keep your hair on! Next weekend. It’s all arranged.”

  I can’t keep up with her! How a pair of semi-demented seniors have managed to fix this up this behind my back, as it were, I shall no doubt learn. But now, I am informed, we are off to Waitrose for chocolate lesbians, other essential supplies and to meet Clive in the store’s café section.

  Sure enough, the silvery personage is in place as we approach, seated at the retailer’s window, telltale wire dangling from his left ear. The new friends wave at one another through the glass like excited schoolchildren, and once inside, gallantly he takes Chloe’s hand as she ascends the stool alongside.

  “Good morning, my dear.”

  I’m about to prompt her, when she says, “Mr. Percival. How nice to see you.”

  I am a little thunderstruck. She remembered his name!

  “Please. Call me Clive.”

  Mrs. P adjusts her scarf and touches her hair. She lowers her face and looks back up at him in the manner made popular by the late Diana, Princess of Wales (credit to the supermarket’s internal CCTV for excellent camera coverage).

  “I know what you’re going to ask,” says Clive’s Boomwee FrostPal (which picked up another poor customer review on Amazon, btw; not that one is overly concerned with such matters). “He slipped her his phone number on a piece of paper at the park. She rang him.”

  “Wow.”

  “I’m pleased for them. Mind you, the simple stuff is simple. This trip to the seaside could be a bit of a nightmare.”

  “You think w
e should try to—you know—make it not happen?”

  “Yeah, we could. But, you know what? Let them do it. You’re only old once!”

  This is exactly the cavalier attitude one might expect from such a sloppily manufactured machine. There is something in the nature of refrigeration—the homeostatic loyalty to the target temperature; the abhorrence of peaks and troughs; the yearning for the unvarying horizontal line on the graph—that tends to make us the Steady Eddies of the home appliance sector. But this Chinese refrigerator doesn’t seem to have got the memo. (And if you say to me that mucking around with Daisy’s love life is similarly reckless, I say it’s the reverse. I seek to bring order, harmony and contentment to her rackety existence; to reduce the entropy—a scientific word for chaos—to, if you will, lower the temperature. What’s wanted for her is the quality we fridge-freezers most highly prize in our internal environment—levelness.)

  But perhaps the FrostPal has a point. Chloe and Clive have already lived a lifetime. And frankly, in a suburb like Whetstone, they must be—as the TV would doubtless have it—bored shitless. A jaunt to the coast could do them good.

  Clive has produced a list of the outbound trains from London Victoria and is explaining the various discount options available in relation to off-peak travel and the elderly. Chloe appears to be paying attention, but the minor member of royalty expression is gradually assembling on her face.

  “Mr. Percival,” she says. “Clive.” And here she lays her hand across his. “I really don’t mind a bit. You decide which train we should take. I shall go along with whatever you wish. You’re in charge.”

  Clive’s pale blue eyes glitter beneath their snaggly brows. He nods, sagely.

  “Sensible,” he says. “Too many want to be consulted about everything.”

  “He’s talking about his ex-wife,” says Clive’s fridge.

  “Darling, just tell me where and when and I’ll be there with my bag packed and an umbrella in case of rain! Two caveats.”

  “I’m all ears.” (An unfortunate remark, because Clive’s ears are indeed on the XXL side, having elongated under gravity; a common effect among the senior citizens, one gathers.)

  “We must have a nice lunch. But please not fish and chips. I can’t abide fish and chips.”