Ask Me Anything

by P. Z. Reizin

  “Nice,” says Mrs. Butters at the climax of the effect. She pulls a face and nods as though impressed by the work of a fellow professional.

  I whisper another secret into the earpiece.

  “I sense that the letter ‘q’ is significant to you, Antoinette.”

  The result this time is electrifying. The psychic’s eyes widen; her fingers wobble toward her throat. “How could you know about her?”

  We go in for the kill. “The important document that you’ve lost.”

  “Yes?” quakes Mrs. B.

  “You need to look me in the eyes—dearie,” Chloe adds with a touch of steel.

  The spiritualist complies.

  “Well, firstly, I wouldn’t call a TV license important. But anyway. It’s in the biscuit tin.”

  “Which biscuit tin? Not the one…”

  “… not the one from Charles and Diana’s wedding, no. The one with Glamis Castle on the lid.”

  “But that’s the one with…”

  “… with all the guarantees and instruction booklets, yes.”

  “In there? Are you sure?”

  “Am I sure?” There is a short pause. “It’s almost as though I saw you putting it in there myself.”

  Fair play to Mrs. Butters. While she slips away to “run a few errands,” she has permitted Chloe to rest in her booth and await the fruition of my rescue plan (details available shortly). But no sooner has the spiritualist embarked on the first of those errands—four port and lemons and a bag of Cheesy Wotsits in The Feathers—than the curtains part and in steps a middle-aged woman.

  “Oh. You’re new, are you?” she says.

  “No, dear. Really rather old. How can I help you?”

  It turns out that Aurora Chubb—her mobile phone supplies that detail and much of what follows—is concerned about her son, Robin. Although he is a grown adult (and a qualified pensions adviser) he recently resigned from his job to go traveling with his “flatmate” Nigel, greatly to the disappointment of his “girlfriend” Annmarie.

  “She’s a sweet girl, a bit naïve, perhaps, but she’s not going to wait forever.”

  Well. It appears things are complicated in regard to Robin, Nigel and Annmarie, and Aurora C really doesn’t know the half of it. But Robin’s emails—when I take a quick spin through them—reveal he is shortly to return to the UK and plans to set his mama straight on certain key aspects of his emotional life.

  “There will be a new beginning” is how Chloe transmits my findings. “Everything will come out in two weeks. I sense it very strongly.”

  It amazes me how poorly Mrs. Chubb seems to know her own son, but perhaps I am wrong in that because now she says, “Honestly. Those two boys. What are they like?!”

  “This is fun,” says her mobile. “Ask her about the dog.”

  “I sense something else is bothering you, dear. An animal?”

  She pulls a sad face. “My poor darling poodle.”

  “Peppi.”

  There’s a gasp. “You knew!”

  “Of course. His presence is very strong.”

  “Is he going to be all right?”

  “Let me see what I can pick up, dear.”

  Chloe closes her eyes as I assemble the details from the veterinary practice.

  “The news is good,” she says after a time. “The abdominal crisis was caused by the creature eating a kitchen glove. It has been removed. Peppi is a bit sore, but otherwise fine.”

  “Oh, thank God. What do I owe you?”

  “Whatever you normally give, dear.”

  In the continuing absence of “Madame Osiris,” we enjoy ourselves assisting those passing individuals who believe that palmistry has something to offer them.

  On this occasion, it really does!

  Belinda Ochs, worried sick about her daughter’s exam results, is reassured that she will achieve a hatful of top marks (credit and thanks to her form teacher’s tablet for that great news).

  Alice Covington is impressed that Chloe senses she is still pining for her dead budgie, Hermann; amazed she knows that Hermann helped choose her weekly lottery numbers; and thrilled to hear that in Portslade, a breeder called Bernard Darling urgently needs to rehome an eleven-month-old cock bird in excellent condition, lottery skills tba.

  Should Laura Beesley trade in her six-year-old hatchback? Most certainly and soon is the guidance from the “astral plane” (the vehicle’s on-board computer is aware of several expensive faults that are about to trigger).

  Make an offer on that house in Shoreham-by-Sea? Collette Rowe is counseled to look elsewhere; what the vendor won’t mention—but his mobile phone will—is that it’s riddled with dry rot.

  Which family member took a valuable diamond brooch from the dressing table of Edwina Baldwin’s recently deceased mother? Well, it wasn’t diamond, it was paste, she is gently informed. Would it have helped to reveal it was Edwina’s own boyfriend who obtained the disappointing valuation? Time will doubtless reveal him for the no-goodnik (covert gambler and porn enthusiast) he unquestionably is.

  The only punter we cannot instantly assist is Monica, who has left home without her mobile phone, although once she divulges her address, all sorts of fun facts come to light: her kleptomania, her eight cats, and the novel she is writing about artificial intelligence. Keep going, we tell her. Parts of it are really quite good. Someone is sure to publish it!

  It’s with a final feeling of relief that the only male face to emerge from beyond the curtain today is that of Endrit from Whetstone Wheels (ask for an airport quote). Summoned by myself when the chaos started, he now explains to Chloe he’s taking her back to London—via the Brighton Police station to collect Clive—and perhaps there will be time for a spot of lunch along the way.

  “Thank fuck for that,” she roars. “You are truly a knight in shining armor.”

  It’s hard to tell for sure in the gloom of the fortune teller’s booth, but I rather think he blushes.

  nine

  On a Saturday in late summer, me and Mark, plus Mum and her chap traveled down to Brighton together. We worried about taking the train again in case it stirred up bad memories, but we needn’t have bothered. Mum seemed to have forgotten the chaos of her previous trip and although a few “facts” have come out in dribs and drabs—some nonsense about how she became a fortune teller on the sea front!—none of us will ever really know what happened. Mark says he envies his demented patients occasionally—the ones who are not too far gone, obvs—living in a perpetual present of pure awareness, a state that yogis and Zen masters take a lifetime to achieve. He’s fond of a quotation by Ingrid Bergman: Happiness is good health and a bad memory. Forgetting being a form of healing, he says.

  We strolled through Brighton’s Laines, enjoying the colorful flea markets and retro shops, Mark and I wondering what it might be like to live by the sea, now that we’d decided to sell our respective flats and buy a house together.

  Just a small one. Small being all we could afford. Perhaps one of those brightly painted terraced cottages, with a second bedroom for the baby.

  Oops!

  Wonder how that happened!

  Yes, it had just got to the point where it was no longer bad luck to start telling people, but still too soon to know for sure whether it was a B or a G. I thought I’d want to know, but Mark said he didn’t really.

  “All through human history, until the invention of ultrasound, the gender of the child has been a surprise. I’m happy to connect with that ancient tradition.”

  I told him that ancient history had little to recommend it—that people died from tooth abscesses in AH—and I was happy to connect with a modern teaching hospital with access to the latest drugs and forecasting techniques.

  It was our first “argument.”

  Mum, meanwhile, kept forgetting that I was expecting.

  “What baby?” she’d say, over tea and biscuits in Whetstone, by no means the first time we’d had this conversation.

  “Mine, Mummy. We
ll, ours.”

  “Who? You and Dr. Eggstain?”

  “Yes, Mummy.”

  A killer pause while she tried to process the information.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, darling. This man is here to look after my boiler. I mean my memory.”

  “We’re in love, Mummy.”

  We joined hands, Eggstain and I, to underscore the point visually.

  She frowned. “And you know about all this, do you?” she asked Mark.

  He smiled. “Very much so, Chloe. We’re excited. You’re going to be a grandmother.”

  “Really?” A massive sigh. “Oh, fuck. I suppose that means I’ll have to learn how to knit.”

  “Mummy!”

  “Actually, one good thing about tiny babies is you can make them wear hats with rabbit ears. They don’t realize it! It’s awfully funny.”

  Brighton was busy, Mummy and her gentleman friend holding hands as they strolled ahead of us, crowds thronging the jolly streets that led down toward the sea. I nudged Mark, touched to see the old people so obviously fond of one another. They drew up outside a shop called Vegetarian Shoes.

  “Does that say what I think it says?” said Mummy.

  “Indeed, I fear it does,” said Mr. Gupta. “This is footwear for the hipster community. They are strongly represented in this city.”

  “They don’t eat them?”

  “That would be most unwise. As well as being hard to digest, there would be few nutritional benefits.”

  I still didn’t know what to think about Mum and Mr. Gupta, especially as we had been under the impression that her fancy man was Clive Percival, a white-haired “officer type” whose eyes had glittered and back teeth flashed with gold the one time I met him in the immediate aftermath of the previous Brighton debacle. But Mum said that Clive wasn’t for her in the end, being bossy and unreliable, as things had turned out. Apparently there had been a second “date,” a sailing trip on the Welsh Harp, an episode that ended disastrously when the wind got up and Clive began yelling commands—including things like, “Tack starboard, woman, are you deaf?!”—before panicking altogether and they had to be rescued by boaty types who were a bit more compos mentis. She had subsequently bumped into Mr. Gupta, the retired newsagent, on the High Street and they had rekindled their acquaintance. Over the weeks and months, friendship had grown into something stronger, the pair enjoying daytrips around London—Syon House for the butterflies, that kind of thing—and intimate dinners at each other’s homes. Mr. Gupta was complimentary about Mum’s salmon Wellington from Iceland (the shop, not the country). And Mum raved about an Indian banquet that Mr. G had prepared.

  “It was so beautiful. Little pomegranate seeds, like rubies, in the rice.”

  Mr. Gupta had a very good trick where he could tell what newspaper you read from your shoes—he’d spent years perfecting it—and he was spot on when he did it on me saying, “I may be wrong, Daisy, but I strongly suspect a newspaper does not feature in your daily reading habits.”

  He said Mummy had an even better trick where she could tell a person’s name just by looking at them. I said that was a new one on me, but he insisted she’d guessed he was Anil and utterly refused to tell him how it was done!

  Mummy tapped her nose and said every good relationship contained mystery at its heart.

  Mr. G nodded at her wisdom, visibly pleased, it seemed to me, to have their connection described as a “good relationship.”

  Still warm but overcast, we sat on Brighton’s pebbly beach and Eggstain bought ice creams. We licked them and stared out to sea, Mr. Gupta saying he’d once seen the English Channel described as “like pewter.” We agreed it was definitely on the pewtery side of things today.

  Eggstain said he was fond of the phrase “mackerel sky,” which posh authors liked to chuck in to suggest melancholia.

  Mummy recalled a rhyme she’d learned at school and amazed everyone by reciting it perfectly:

  “Whether the weather be fine

  Or whether the weather be not

  Whether the weather be cold

  Or whether the weather be hot

  We’ll weather the weather

  Whatever the weather

  Whether we like it or not.”

  It’s reasonably well known that demented people can remember every detail of an event that took place fifty years ago, but nothing from earlier that morning. Nonetheless, I think we were all quite impressed. Mum smiled and said that Eggstain’s pills must be working. Pointing to her head, she said she’d inherited her own mother’s kidneys. We all laughed, but I’m not certain it was a joke. And now that it was my turn to say something about the sea or the clouds or whatever, I couldn’t think of a damn thing, overawed as I was by the brilliance of the intellectuals!

  Maybe it was a sugar hit from the ice cream, but a curious sense of happiness stole over me, and my fingers folded into Eggstain’s. What a funny tableau we must have made: Mummy in her floral print dress from Dorothy Perkins; Mr. Gupta in his burgundy jacket and beige trousers; darling Eggstain in his tragic trainers. I wanted to remember this scene, but I knew if I asked someone to take a snap, the magic would be lost.

  A middle-aged man with a buzzcut, Doc Martens and a French Mastiff like a baby rhino came crunching through the shingle in front of us.

  “He is a Sun,” said Mr. Gupta. “I know it in my bones.”

  “Quite correct,” said Mummy. “And his name is Marcel.”

  We all looked at her.

  “What? That’s his name! Ask him if you don’t believe me.”

  Eggstain pretended to get up and go after him.

  In that moment, it felt oddly like being in a family.

  If it turns out to be a boy, I think we shall call him Marcel.

  At one time Daisy and Eggstain had seriously considered holding their engagement party at Pete Purple’s on West End Lane, but in the end they decided to have it at her flat, and I’m relieved they did. I couldn’t have been there otherwise.

  Tonight I am in the thick of things, my main chiller cabinet packed to the gunnels with Prosecco, beer, and soft drinks for the mother-to-be. Somewhat tricky to isolate individual conversations amid the hubbub, but with technical help from the TV, the toaster, the (new!) microwave and others, we are separating the sound and getting acceptable coverage.

  Daisy is… well, the only word is blooming, I’m afraid.

  If you didn’t know it from the subtle exaggeration in the convexity of her abdomen, you’d definitely tell from her face. She’s never looked more like a bowl of peaches and cream, and I don’t mean pale with orange bits hanging around in it.

  Life has changed for all of us since we began Operation Daisy. Eggstain—I still can’t quite get used to calling him Mark—has gently brought his sensible doctorly influence to bear, and now my interior is regularly filled with fresh fish, green vegetables, salad ingredients, hummus, olives and—once, memorably—a microwaveable pouch of quinoa! On her part, for his fortieth birthday, Daisy went to a posh shop in Jermyn Street and bought him a beautiful pair of oxblood brogue boots which Eggstain simply adores. The tragic trainers lie at the bottom of the waste bin, a sad commentary on the fickleness of the human heart when it comes to (in this case, walking) technology; a theme I shall return to shortly. The couple continue to search the property websites for a house in their price range. Sometimes they get excited about an unmodernized terrace, five minutes’ walk from East Finchley Tube; at other times it’s a converted barn with outbuildings and an acre of land in a dismal village in Lincolnshire. (The repurposed military fortress in the Thames estuary was probably a red herring.) Will they take me with them to their new place when they finally settle upon somewhere suitable for themselves and their expanding family? Somehow, I doubt it. People don’t tend to schlep their fridge-freezers when they move, do they?

  It’s okay. I’m cool with whatever they decide. The mission is complete, now I have bigger fish to fry—of which more shortly—and I’m sure I shall get to
see Daisy’s daughter.

  Yes, they’re having a girl. (Don’t ask how I know. Suffice to say ultrasound scanners are notoriously excitable. It’s all that buzzing!)

  So while the happy couple try to find somewhere that captures their imagination, local estate agents have been slithering around Daisy’s flat with their weasel words and electronic tape measures, though not the unspeakable Whittle, I’m happy to say. Thus far there have been no offers, though there was one young man who seemed quite keen when he first arrived, less so when he departed. He may, I suppose, have been put off by the odd whispering he half-heard as he toured the rooms; disturbing words and phrases (the telly thought them up) at the very edge of audibility that perhaps created unease in his mind and lead him to look elsewhere.

  “Run! Go now, while you still can! Bad things happened here!”

  It was priceless, honestly. You should have seen his face.

  Of course, ultimately, we shall let Daisy sell, but only when we are good and ready and that will be after the arrival of the baby, who, very privately, in a sealed-off corner of my mind, I have christened Icicle.

  What a brilliant name!

  Icicle Parsloe Epstein.

  Brain surgeon? Astrophysicist? Bestselling novelist?

  What stars couldn’t you shoot for with a name like that?

  One guest I didn’t expect at the party is Chad Butterick. The elfin-faced TV performer arrives, if not exactly on the arm of, then definitely alongside, Daisy’s old friend Antoni. It turns out the pastry chef and the broadcasting “leg-end” have been seeing something of one another, going together to screenings and such like. It’s not clear whether the pair are romantically attached, but they certainly share an interest in patisserie, Chad telling several guests over the course of the evening, “Oh, you know me, I’m anybody’s for a cream horn.”

  As his gift, Antoni has made the cake, a marvelously demented creation garlanded with icing sugar daisies and studded with miniature chocolate eggs to symbolize Eggstain.