Ask Me Anything

by P. Z. Reizin

“Marcus, Oliver, Franklin, Hallam, Wells, Jamie, Didier.”

  Hugh nodded—was it approvingly?

  “I’m guessing Didier would have been French.”

  “He still is!”

  “Hallam’s a fairly unusual name.”

  “Unusual guy. What can I say?”

  Why had I done this? And where had Hallam, Franklin and effing Wells come from? I guess I’d been intimidated by Hugh’s list of posh birds that he was still chummy with. Was it too late to row back?

  “I made all those names up. I’m sorry.”

  “Really? They’re extremely inventive.”

  “It’s sweet of you to say so. The best I can offer you is Matthias.”

  There was a long pause while Hugh just looked at me with a quizzical expression on his face. Odd, the number of men I’d met lately who’d done that.

  “Would you like to come?”

  “Sorry?”

  “To Petal’s wedding. The invitation says plus one. You could be my plus one. It’s in Oxfordshire. It should be rather fun.”

  I entertained a vision of Hugh’s exes ranged around a wedding table, sipping champagne and gossiping. No one is saying anything to me because I have chocolate cake smeared all over my face.

  “It’s lovely of you to ask, but I’m afraid I can’t.”

  Hugh said, “Think about it. If your plans change, the offer’s still there.”

  I thought about the last wedding I went to: Normotic Andrew’s sister’s. The freezing church in Cirencester; his ghoulish family; my mature response to the whole hideous day being to drink myself stupid. A terrible memory of a massively inappropriate snog with a random cousin; the shame of honking up in the bushes to laughter and catcalling from the car park; Andrew’s complete and absolute refusal to find any offense in my performance.

  Something had put me in a funny mood. And I knew what it was. Or rather, who it was.

  It would be weird to see him after all this time. A stupid part of me somehow hoped that, older and wiser, we’d fall together like the last fifteen years hadn’t happened. The same part that could hear him saying, “I’ve been a fool, Daisy.” The part that believed in fairy tales. The part—if this isn’t too many parts already—that was still waving a sundress from a hotel balcony in the Aegean.

  It was a different part of me that wanted to punch him in his shiny new teeth.

  I’m not unhappy with the way things went with Hugh. That he desired her was obvious to us all—his Fitbit numbers told the story even if the body language was necessarily subtle; they are work colleagues, after all. However, Daisy seemed oddly resistant to the young man’s charms. And in this perhaps we have made progress; just because she finds herself to be the object of attraction doesn’t—as has sometimes been the case in the past—automatically activate her feelings in the reverse direction. Or is it possible that she is acting “hard to get”? A first if true, this not being a quality Daisy is especially known for!

  Who knows? Hugh may be a low-energy, slow-burn kind of fellow who could turn out to be the last man standing when everyone else has gone down in flames, metaphorically speaking.

  Time will doubtless spill the beans.

  The pair say their goodbyes, but after Hugh begins his trudge to the Leicester Square Tube, Daisy waits for him to clear the corner and then walks straight back into the pub. There, she joins Antoni—I hadn’t spotted him—who is nursing a drink the color of a Hawaiian sunset. He, good friend that he is, has already bought her a gin and tonic.

  They clink.

  “Thanks for coming,” she says.

  “Mon plaisir,” he replies, inexplicably in French.

  Antoni, I have established, is one of Daisy’s oldest friends, the pair having met at secondary school at the age of eleven. It doesn’t appear to be one of those deep friendships, the sort where intimate confidences are exchanged, possibly under the stars, on a sweet-scented lawn one hot summer evening, when views are aired about love, death and the meaning of L. Their bond is not like that, lacking the intensity, but it has somehow endured when other more powerful relationships have gone down the pan.

  Long ago they pledged that when each finally marries, the other will be a “bridesmaid.”

  Antoni is not this evening playing the part of Daisy’s husband. They have (correctly) decided that scenario would not be believable. Rather, it is what it is; Antoni is an old friend who will overlap with the incoming Nicky for twenty minutes and then make his exit unless Daisy speaks the code word, which took some time and much amusement the previous evening to arrive at.

  Madagascar, Angouleme, Frittata, Morgan Freeman, Gerund, Mackerel, Holly Willoughby, Spatula, Bagpipes, Tintin… all these and many many more were mooted until they settled upon Pancake, Daisy (unwisely) revealing it would be easy to remember because it was her password, “for, like, everything.”

  Antoni says, “I’m picturing one of those blond boys with too much hair from the perfume ads. A moody faraway stare, but you know what he’s really thinking about is chips.” The pastry chef was working abroad during Daisy’s relationship with the Golden N. This will be their first encounter.

  “Fucking hell,” says Daisy, “my hands are shaking.”

  They are. Her glass trembles on its way to her lips. Antoni tries to lighten the mood by talking about a comedian he watched on the TV the night before.

  “He said, My brain knows when a wig has come into the room before I do.”

  “That’s extremely true.”

  “You always know.”

  “Did I say extremely true? I’m gibbering, Ant!”

  “Listen. I have news. I’m writing a mystery novel,” he says. “Or am I?”

  “A cake-based mystery. It’ll be brilliant. Murder by Cake.”

  “It was a joke! Jesus. But I like that title!”

  “Death Came to Battenberg. The Lemon Drizzle Affair.”

  “All a Bit Rum Baba.”

  There is nervy giggling. And then—as when a wig enters a room—her fitness tracker reports a sudden spike half a second before she clocks him and the smile falls from her face. In three strides he is at their table.

  “Daisy Parsloe. I’d know you anywhere.”

  She stands up. Sits down again. Offers a hand. Seems flustered. Introductions are effected.

  Nicky smiles. Even in the murky shots from the pub CCTV, the teeth are sensationally white.

  “What will you guys have?”

  When Nicky goes to the bar, Daisy drains the rest of her G and T.

  “I’m as nervous as a kitten,” she hisses to Antoni.

  “I’m catching it off you; I’m as limp as a vicar’s handshake.”

  While he is being served, the pair take the opportunity to study the long-lost golden figure; as do I. Desert boots, skinny jeans, brown canvas jacket with many pockets, skier’s buff. From the camera over the optics, blue eyes flick in a narrow English face darkened and creased by its years in the sun. In the mirror behind the bottles, he fixes a straggly piece of pale hair and fires a blazing grin at the barmaid.

  “Cheers!” they clink collectively on his return.

  “God, I miss the old place,” says Nicky after a deep dive into his pint of London Pride. “Wales is lovely and everything, but all the conversations are about rainfall. Or what’s been stolen from whose yard.”

  He begins rolling a cigarette from a battered leather tobacco pouch, nicotine-stained fingers adroitly doing the business with the impedimenta.

  “You never used to smoke,” says Daisy, a bit of an edge in her voice.

  Nicky sends his crinkly-eyed beam to all corners of the lounge bar.

  “I only do free-range tobacco.”

  He tucks the slim cheroot behind an ear and turns his gaze upon Daisy.

  “I want to hear all about you.”

  “Pulse rate is through the roof,” says the fitness tracker, who we have asked to sit in on the encounter.

  Daisy—and I never thought I would write this senten
ce—is struck dumb. But Antoni, trouper that he is, rides in to the rescue.

  “But we want to hear all about you! Especially about the sea pirates and the teeth!”

  A flicker of irritation from The Man Who Never Was (in the eyes of a well-known financial institution). But he knows he has to be nice to Daisy’s friend, and so embarks upon a long, colorful and highly fictitious account of a journey through the Arabian Sea into the Indian Ocean, where Somali pirates attacked the ship, robbed the passengers and badly beat selected members of the cast. As he warms to his narrative, Daisy visibly begins to relax, the knuckles of her left hand un-whitening, something close to a smile breaking out on her notably wide face.

  “My mistake,” says Nicky, “was getting a bit pompous and using the phrase Her Majesty’s Government. They were high on khat, of course, and HMG doesn’t cut a lot of ice in those latitudes, as I found out to my cost.”

  Comically, he bares the gnashers.

  “They come in useful finding my way home in the dark.”

  There is something insidiously likable about him; charming, articulate, and still handsome in a life-bashed sort of way. Okay, he’s gone a bit off-grid at the edges, if I may put it like that, but even a fridge-freezer can sense his appeal to someone like Daisy, who, like her namesake the flower, is capable of being blown four ways before breakfast. I sense danger.

  “You still want me to email you that pancake recipe?” says Antoni, draining his drink.

  Daisy smiles. “Thanks. Maybe catch up next week.”

  Released from any further part in the scene, Antoni brushes cheekbones with Daisy and goes in for a manly handshake with the visitor.

  “Great to meet you, Antoni,” says Nicky, gripping the pastry chef’s right hand and firing up a presidential candidate smile. “I hope we’ll be seeing you again.”

  Antoni says, “Enchanté,” and does a funny walk toward the exit, pouting comedically over his shoulder before vanishing into the street.

  Finally, the lovers—ex-lovers—are alone in their golden bubble.

  “Anyone else have a bad feeling about this?” I ask.

  Nicky has been “explaining” that he has been something of a “gadfly” since they were last in contact. The financial world wasn’t for him, he recounts. There was a lot of travel, especially in the East, where he played with spirituality. “I even thought I might become a Buddhist,” he says (apparently truthfully).

  “Why couldn’t I find you on the internet?” asks Daisy.

  “Were you looking?”

  “Just occasionally.”

  He taps the side of his nose.

  “You had a nose operation?”

  “I’ve signed the Official Secrets Act, I’m afraid.”

  “Shut. Up!”

  “Can’t really talk about it.”

  “You’re a spy?”

  “It’s a long story. You’re familiar with the phrase work of vital national importance…?”

  Can you believe the fellow? Is she actually buying this absolute crock of horse droppings? He sighs. Runs his fingers through what remains of the floppy blond fringe. Fixes her with a particular gaze. Then—we all see what he does—he softens it.

  “This is going to be good,” says the toothbrush.

  “He stole that move off Hugh Grant in Love, Actually,” says the telly.

  In a quiet tone, Nicky says, “I’d like to pick up where we left off, Daisy.”

  For a moment, time stands still. Which of course cannot happen in actual nature, but is definitely the kind of thing that occurs in love stories, so one gathers. Daisy’s face has become very serious, her eyes the proverbial saucers.

  “Nicky,” she says softly, shaking her head. “You are such a hopeless cunt. You think I’ve been parked in the same place all these years, just waiting for you to come back?”

  “Of course not,” he says, undeterred, although funnily enough, in one way, you could say this is exactly what she has been doing.

  Nicky tries another expression. Solemn, reflective, with an undertow of melancholy, and perhaps a hint of parsley. I mean, ruefulness. He’s a master of timing, you’ve got to give him that, because he holds the silence for as long as it will bear and then comes out with a corker:

  “I’ve been a fool.”

  If Daisy’s eyes grew any wider, they would plop from their sockets into her gin and tonic.

  “I can’t believe you actually said that!”

  And here we see the particular genius of the man. Instead of dissolving in shame, he simply persists, perhaps having discovered at an early age that persistence is as useful as intelligence in achieving one’s desired goal.

  “You remember my old pal, Marco? He’s head chef now at a lovely Mediterranean restaurant in Soho. His baby lamb chops…”

  He leaves the sentence hanging and does the thing where the eyes narrow, the lips purse and the fingertips of the right hand touch and then spring apart to signify the explosion of mouthfeel, as the food scientists have it.

  “The baby lamb chops, Daisy, are To Die For.”

  Christ! This fucker knows how to bait Daisy’s hook. The skeptical expression of thirty seconds ago has been loosened and supplanted by a vision (I dare say) of a delectable heap of char-grilled baby lamb chops, speckled with pomegranate seeds, spritzed with fresh lemon and dusted by a final magical sprinkling of herbs.

  “What do you say to a spot of dinner?”

  “Nicky. I don’t know,” she says. “Whereabouts in Soho?”

  A new light appears in the seducer’s eye. If she’s asking for details, the barbs have sunk into the flesh. He senses victory. Time to start reeling her in.

  “You still remember that place on the beach in Skiathos?”

  “Oh my God, the fried squid!”

  She can’t help herself. But you have to hand it to the manipulative swine, his use of euphoric recall is masterly. Having neatly evoked the long-lost summer of first enchantment, he begins tapping numbers into his mobile to make a reservation at his (possibly fictional) friend’s (ditto) establishment. The skepticism and pain that caused Daisy to call him the C-word seems to have vaporized like the morning mist over Koukounaries.

  As he waits for the call to be answered, his eyes never leave Daisy’s. And now—we all cheer ironically when it happens; me, the TV, the microwave and the toothbrush—he winks.

  “I can’t think how to get a grip on this,” I admit to my colleagues. The man with the shiny teeth has played a blinder.

  “Plenty of time for it to go tits up,” says the telly, which is doubtlessly true.

  “I think it’s rather beautiful,” says the toothbrush (who may be just a little dazzled by the luminance of the scoundrel’s dentition).

  But the smug gleam is fading fast from the Golden Nicky’s expression. Someone has entered the bar and made his way across the room to Daisy’s table. And the sunshine that has broken out across her (notably ample) features must—to the fraudulent personage presently known to the world as Bavin Meurig Shibbles—feel like a kick in the pipes.

  Oh. Em. Eff. Gee!

  I had no idea that Nicky would stir up so much… STUFF!

  To use a metaphor that the drunken poet was fond of, it felt like someone had dropped an oar into the muddy pond and started churning it around.

  Something had happened to him since we last met. He’d aged dramatically, or perhaps a better word is hardened. The youthful slenderness had given way to an almost painful thinness, a scrawniness even (too many words here ending in -ness). His blond hair had dulled, there were nicotine stains on his fingers, and the nails weren’t the cleanest. He seemed worn; no longer golden, something tired and adult around the eyes. That irresistible boyish enthusiasm—his excitement about the hugeness of the cosmos!—had been replaced by a kind of worldly knowingness. And where to even start with the RIDICULOUS teeth!?

  So all of this stuff on the negative side of the balance sheet naturally made me quite pleased, especially as he seemed to want to
smarm his way back into my good books (“I’ve been a fool”!).

  But at the same time it was sad, and I felt sorry for him, and the old feelings that he awoke made me (almost) forget how he dumped me for posh Romilly from Cheshire and… I nearly wrote ruined my life. Of course it wasn’t like that; yes, he dumped me, but my life was far from ruined. Nevertheless, somehow along the way I must have got it into my head that he was the One Great Love who no one else quite measured up to.

  If you’ve ever had the Hot and Sour soup from Kong’s Kitchen you’ll know what I’m trying to say. There was heat, there was sourness, and there were a few prawns floating about in there too.

  (Not that last bit about the prawns.)

  So even when I called him a rude word, I didn’t really mean it.

  Deep breath. This is what I’m trying to get at:

  Yes, Nicky was a hopeless cunt, but he was my hopeless cunt. If you ever fall for someone, perhaps a part of you always stays fallen. Although that can’t be right because I fell for the disgusting estate agent and the only soft spot I have for him currently is a swamp.

  Mixed feelings, I guess, is the best way to characterize it. But powerfully mixed! One part of me was melting in his gaze—especially when he started talking about baby lamb chops—but another part of me wanted to stab him through the eyeball with the swizzle stick from my drink.

  In fact, I was on the point of agreeing to go for dinner with him when you’ll never guess who arrived.

  “Dr. Eggstain!” I exclaimed. (I did. I exclaimed it!)

  “Did you just say what I think you said?” murmured Nicky.

  Shorn of his tramp’s beard, Eggstain had lost his inscrutable doctorly wisdom, and now stood exposed and heartbreakingly vulnerable. For some reason I was ridiculously pleased to see him.

  “So glad I found you here,” he said. “I hope I’m not interrupting?”

  Nicky’s face! He looked like he’d bitten into a rotten Brazil nut.

  I performed some basic introductions, describing Eggstain as “my mother’s memory specialist” and Nicky—oh, the satisfaction—as “someone I knew a long time ago.”

  The two men shook hands with one another warily, Nicky’s ice blue eyes searching Eggstain’s soulful brown jobbies for clues.