Ask Me Anything

by P. Z. Reizin

  “Fellow I met in Laos,” said Nicky. “He had memory issues. It was most unusual. He suffered from amnesia and déjà vu at the same time.”

  Eggstain smiled. “He couldn’t remember what happened next. Am I right?”

  “I should have guessed you’d know that one.”

  I noticed that Eggstain was holding a sports bag. He met my gaze and something passed between us.

  “She kicked me out.”

  “Shut. Up! Just because you shaved the beard?”

  He nodded sadly. “It was kind of inevitable anyway. There was a screaming row. I said, well, if that’s the way you feel about it, I’ll leave. And she said, Yes. Leave. In fact, leave now. So I went. I didn’t really have much of an idea of where to go, so I waited for something to pop into my head.”

  “That’s his technique,” I explained to Nicky (who didn’t look all that interested, to be honest). “And what did pop in?” I asked.

  Eggstain looked at me like I should have been able to guess. There was quite a long gap before the penny dropped.

  “Me?”

  “Your mother told me where I’d find you.”

  “My mother!? How would my mother know?”

  “I phoned her and she told me. Rather, someone she was with told her. And then she told me.”

  Well, now I was properly confused.

  “Who was she with?”

  “She didn’t say. It didn’t occur to me to ask.”

  “What did they sound like?”

  “It was difficult to tell, Daisy. I was standing on a busy main road.”

  “Of course. But this person who was with my mother. They knew I was in this exact bar?”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” said Nicky.

  I gave him a look. What? You’re still here, are you?

  “Your mother said she didn’t know where you were. And then the voice said this was where I’d find you.”

  “What sort of voice? Not Mrs. blooming Abernethy! How the fuck would she know?”

  The doctor shrugged.

  “I mean, was it a man? A woman?”

  “It was hard to tell with the traffic,” said Eggstain. “It could have been either. But he or she gave the address. Even the postcode.”

  “That is properly weird.”

  A pause fell on the conversation.

  “And now?” said Nicky; helpfully or unhelpfully, it was impossible to tell.

  And because I didn’t know the answer, I simply waited for the first thing to pop into my mind.

  It didn’t take long to arrive.

  “Crash on my sofa, if you like.”

  At the flat, Eggstain was massively apologetic for what he called the “intrusion.”

  “It’s terrifically kind of you. I promise I’ll leave first thing in the morning,” he said.

  “It’s absolutely fine, honestly. But what will you do?”

  “Arrange to get my stuff from the flat. Sort out somewhere to live.”

  “It’s irretrievable between you two?”

  “Oh, I hope so.”

  “Why do you say it like that?”

  “It’s over. If it isn’t the absolute end, it’s the beginning of the end.”

  “It might just be the end of the beginning.”

  “No, we’ve done that bit. This has been coming for a long time. I’m really sorry, Daisy, for bringing my dirty linen into your life.”

  I couldn’t help glancing at his shirt when he said that; a blob of Hoisin sauce had come to rest between two buttons, possibly forever. Kong’s Kitchen had excelled itself and we were sitting at either end of the sofa surrounded by takeaway detritus. My feet were up on the coffee table and I encouraged Eggstain to follow suit if he could find a space for his own between the aluminum containers.

  He shrugged off the tragic trainers to reveal a big toe poking through his sock.

  “I was afraid that would happen,” he said.

  When we’d first arrived after waving goodbye to a sick-looking Nicky—he did a pathetic let’s talk thing with his little and index fingers as we left!—Eggstain prowled about, inspecting my various artworks, knick-knacks and “library.” He admired the framed poster of the London Tube map where all the stations are replaced by the names of famous people, giving rise to a Footballers’ Line, a Comedians’ Line, a Philosophers’ Line, etc.—an uncharacteristically edgy present from Normotic Andrew. And he was pleasingly satirical about the “Souvenir from the Isle of Wight,” a plaster figure of two copulating pigs labeled “Makin’ Bacon” that I bought with my pocket money on a family holiday.

  “Have you read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich?” he asked. We were standing side by side before my bookshelf.

  “It belonged to my father. I don’t think he’d read it either.”

  “A thousand pages,” he said, flipping through them, landing on a postcard of the Rialto Bridge in Venice.

  “He wrote that to me when I was six. After he ran off to Italy with the Whetstone Trollop. That’s what my mother always calls her.”

  Eggstain replaced the fat paperback.

  “I don’t know why I don’t take it to Oxfam. I’m never going to get through all that.”

  “Because it represents your father. Another great unread book.”

  “Ooh. I like that,” I told him. “Very shrinky.”

  “I apologize. It’s a bad habit. Once you’ve read a bit of Freud, everything is always something else.”

  I handed him the takeaway menu from Kong’s Kitchen.

  “So go on, make something out of this.”

  He pulled a face; a novelty because finally his expression was visible to the world.

  “So here is the tragedy of the human condition,” he said with shy smile. “As we cannot have everything in life, we are forced to choose. Alternatives exclude. For every yes, there must be a no. If we order the deep-fried chili beef we are obliged to forgo the spicy mutton hotpot with mushroom and beancurd.”

  “Where does it say that?”

  “This menu, Daisy, is a perfect metaphor for our human fate. We can’t have it all, and in any case, everything ends. Right here, where it says last orders 11:30 p.m.”

  “Well, I’m not agreeing to that. Let’s order the chili beef and the hotpot.”

  “Even though everything fades in the end?”

  “Because everything fades!”

  “How do you feel about Peking duck and pancakes?”

  “Let’s get that too! And the Metaphorical Kung Pao Prawns.”

  “Interesting. How do they come?”

  “The prawns? Stir-fried in existential ennui with a mixture of regret and despair.”

  “They sound yummy.”

  Over dinner and an episode of First Dates which happened to be playing when I flicked on the telly we managed to forget the essential awfulness of humanity’s predicament (forced to choose, in a world where all choices end in darkness, etc.).

  Eggstain had never seen the show and was amazed that people allowed themselves to be filmed flirting with others whom they fancied (or didn’t if it turned out “there wasn’t that spark”).

  “These two are very dull, aren’t they?” said Eggstain of a pair of divorcees from the Midlands. “I honestly don’t know who I feel more sorry for.”

  “That’s the meanest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

  “Really? You must have somehow got the idea that I’m a nice person.”

  “Now don’t spoil it.”

  “Christ, they’re boring. Maybe they deserve each other. They say, don’t they, that when two awful people pair up it prevents four people from being miserable.”

  It felt like a relief to see Eggstain’s normal side; to discover that he could be just as shitty as anyone else.

  “So tell me about Nicky,” he said.

  I poured us each another glass of Pinot Grigio and gave him the extended play version.

  “You were babies,” he said of the early bit. When I’d waved a sundress from a balc
ony in the Aegean.

  “And now he’s all grown up. Horribly grown up. He said he’d signed the Official Secrets Act!”

  “Do people who’ve signed that ever tell?”

  “Good point!”

  There was a lull while I revisited some uneaten mutton hotpot.

  “So she really went bananas when you shaved off the beard?”

  “There was a difficult conversation. Then a big chill. And I thought, well, that’s where we are. Things will settle. But the next evening—tonight—she had an absolute meltdown. She actually said…” He trailed off.

  “What? What did she actually say?”

  Eggstain sighed. “She said, I actually can’t bear to look at you.”

  “Jesus.”

  “That is quite a hard thing to hear. Impossible, in fact. But as I say, things hadn’t been right between us for a long time.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I was rude.”

  “Go on. Sorry for smiling.”

  “That’s okay. It is kind of funny.”

  Then there was a long pause, maybe ten or fifteen seconds while he just stared at me.

  I said, “What?”

  He shook his head. Smiled.

  I said, “Aren’t you going to tell me what you said?”

  “I called her a bad word.”

  “Did it begin with ‘c’?”

  “It might have.”

  “I called Nicky the C-word this evening. How funny.”

  “Not very grown up, is it?”

  “Who wants to be one of those? Not when everything ends and… and, what was it? Alternatives explode.”

  “Exclude. For every yes, there must be a no. In fact, there must be many noses. Noes. Examples of the word no.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “No.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m gabbling.”

  Is there a book about how it happens? When you know you’re going to kiss someone. Perhaps it’s just one of those things that pops into your head unannounced; a command sent directly from the non-verbal grapefruit underlying the pancake. And how does it happen when it pops into two heads simultaneously? Eggstain would have had an answer, but it definitely wasn’t the moment to ask.

  “Wow,” he said when it was finished.

  “You know you’ve got Hoisin sauce on your shirt?”

  “It’s hard to care, Daisy.”

  We kissed again. I wasn’t timing it with a stopwatch, but after a minute, or perhaps it was longer, I opened one eye to discover Eggstain had opened one of his eyes too. We laughed.

  “There’s Hoisin sauce on your jumper now,” he said.

  “So there is. You’re right, though. It is hard to care.”

  The third kiss ended in a clatter of takeaway containers falling off the coffee table.

  The fourth—

  I won’t list them all.

  Somewhere, probably in the low teens, we broke off and I said, “Listen. I can’t go on calling you Eggstain. Not if we’re. Not if we’re doing this kind of thing.”

  “Boyhood nickname. I see your point.”

  “But Mark?”

  “It is my given name.”

  “It’s very wotsit. You know. Rhymes with bark.”

  “Markie?”

  “Not that either.”

  “Middle name?”

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t laugh.”

  “Go on. What is it?”

  “It’s for my grandfather. Promise you won’t laugh.”

  “Markie, I can’t make that promise.”

  “Okay. Here goes nothing…”

  Well, it was a pretty funny name. And I was right not to make any promises about laughing. Fortunately, nature has arranged it that you can’t kiss and laugh at the same time. Like sneezing with your eyes open, it just can’t be done.

  As you may imagine, we onlookers from the Internet of Things were transfixed by the unfolding events on Daisy’s Ikea sofa.

  Yes, we all understood there had been a growing understanding between the lady of the house and the memory guru, but none of us expected it to erupt in the way it did, namely in an epic outbreak of smooching.

  “Yikes,” said the television set. “What just happened?” (It hadn’t been paying attention, being preoccupied by a so-called “relegation clash” between two struggling football teams in the north of England.)

  “Oh my FG,” said the toothbrush, who, despite its fondness for Wodehouse, was trying to sound Down With The Kids.

  The microwave pinged many excited pings. “I knew it! I felt it coming!” it said, a statement which was plainly untrue. (I have some interesting information about this appliance, btw, which I shall share presently.)

  The washing machine, who is not strictly part of the OpDa High Command, was nonetheless concerned at news of the Hoisin sauce situation.

  “That stuff is an absolute bugger to shift,” it declared. “On a woolen, it’s pretty much game over.”

  I’m assuming we all fed the relevant marketing data back to our respective parent corporations (I know I did). The next time she goes online, Daisy will perhaps wonder why she’s seeing so many announcements for knitwear separates at low, low prices! (Eggstain too could be in the market for a new shirt, and I made a mental note to pass on the tip.)

  Around midnight—with work looming in the morning—the pair managed to prize themselves apart and Daisy fetched the beardless doctor a spare duvet. There was a certain amount of what the TV described as “afters” on the love scene, with further (standing up) smooching and what may or may not have been a subtle invitation from Daisy to share her bed.

  “You’ll be okay on the sofa, will you?” she asked.

  “Perfectly. Thank you so much,” said our hero.

  “Pissed on his chips, there,” said the television.

  “He’s a gentleman,” suggested the toothbrush. “With excellent teeth, now one can see them,” it added.

  There was a certain amount of coming and going—bathroom; glass of water; Eggstain, wanting to read for five minutes, picking out The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, a poor choice because it’s the stuff of nightmares—before Daisy emerged from her bedroom to give him a goodnight kiss.

  “Night, night… Gustav,” she giggled.

  Shortly afterward, the apartment fell silent.

  This is a good point in the narrative to confess my small but crucial role in the night’s events (a coda, if you will; I set it down here for the avoidance of doubt, although perhaps you have already guessed). Disturbed by the Golden Nicky’s appearance on the scene—and the possibility of Daisy falling for his expert brand of bogus charm—it was I (or Chloe’s fridge-freezer, if you prefer) who told Daisy’s mum where her daughter was to be found. I was surprised to hear that Eggstain felt my “voice” could have been either male or female, because I imagined it to be firmly on the masculine side of the divide. Perhaps none of us really knows how we appear to others, and maybe this is the essential predicament of existence—be it human or machine—and not all that guff about alternatives and endings. We are all—humans, machines—trapped in our unique, personal worlds and no being (fleshy or metal) can ever know completely what it feels like to be another.

  We contain multitudes. In my own case, cheese, eggs, frozen pizza, ice cream.

  There is coleslaw.

  I could go on.

  eight

  Six days later, on a bright blue Saturday morning in the London suburb of Whetstone, Chloe Parsloe stands at the entrance to her apartment block waiting for the arrival of a minicab. A passing stranger would see a well turned-out woman in her seventies, the pale wire trailing from her left ear suggesting that she may be listening to a talk on the radio. Under a sensible beige raincoat—there is a fifteen percent chance of showers on the Sussex coast—she wears a lemon-colored outfit that caused to me to exclaim “bravo!” when she stepped up to the mirror to study its effect. Ar
ound her neck is a string of pearls; they too seem as though they are reserved for special occasions.

  “What do you make the time?” she asks. It’s the third such inquiry in the last half hour.

  “Five minutes to nine,” I reply. “We are comfortably early.”

  Chloe, I suspect, is nervous. The phone’s positioning system indicates she is pacing to and fro, perhaps scanning the highway for the Whetstone Wheels vehicle containing Clive.

  “Trains running normally?”

  “No reported delays or cancellations,” I reply, quoting from the website.

  The two elderly parties have wisely decided to travel to Victoria station by private hire car rather than tangle with the London Underground. I happen to know Clive has booked seats in a first-class compartment on the service to Brighton, the demented silvery gentleman being whip smart when it comes to making an impression on his lady friend (as this gesture surely will).

  “What’s the forecast?” (Fourth request since breakfast.)

  “We’re still looking at a fair picture,” I report. “A mixture of sunshine and cloud. Highs of nineteen—that’s sixty-six in Fahrenheit—the odd spit and spot of rain a possibility, but nothing much really to write home about.”

  Don’t tell me, I could be a TV weather presenter. I’m actually rather well qualified, having a natural interest in climate, access to global weather information, and—ahem—not a few communication skills. You think a fridge-freezer couldn’t stand before one of those maps at the end of the news bulletin and talk (with authority, yet also a lightness of touch) about depressions sweeping in from the Atlantic bringing rain to parts of Ireland and the West Country? Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams!

  “And we remembered to tell Daisy, didn’t we?”

  “You spoke to her only last night, madam.”

  Chloe’s daughter was somewhat alarmed when her mother revealed the plan during a telephone call.

  “But you barely know him, Mummy.”

  “Be happy for me, darling. We’re both in our seventies. Mr. Percival is very respectable. The fridge has googled him.”

  “Mummy!”

  “Forget I said that last bit.”

  I hear a car draw up. The mobile phone affixed to the driver’s windscreen affords me excellent coverage of what follows.