After galloping through the baklava, Greek coffee and Metaxa Seven Star brandy, the pair were soon stumbling through Daisy’s front door and into her kitchen.
This is the point where the tale becomes difficult for me to tell.
“They’re on the floor,” said the microwave. “Should I patch you in?”
“No! I don’t want to see.”
But I could hear well enough.
Water, once turned to ice, may be unfrozen. But words, when turned to speech, cannot be unheard. Neither can sounds—moans, grunts, you can probably imagine the sort of thing—be melted from memory. When one has suffered the rhythmic thumping of something—someone—against one’s aluminum sides, no defrosting cycle will dissolve the unwanted information from the system.
“Wait,” she gasped. There was a small interregnum as the couple perhaps shuffled themselves away from my towering white cliff face.
“Are these tiles Amtico?” inquired Casanova in the hiatus. “You might have actually done better here with a tile effect laminate.”
“Shut up, idiot.”
“You know there’s a grape under the fridge?”
A slap followed this comment. “Fool.”
And the sound effects of sexual congress resumed.
“You have to admire his intensity,” commented the microwave, an appliance easily impressed by sustained bursts of high energy.
“Why can’t they just go to her bedroom?”
“They’re in the grip of an uncontrollable urge.”
“Oh God, make it stop.”
“I like the way, when it’s finished, they rest for a minute. It’s exactly the same with me and vegetarian lasagne.”
And then finally—mercifully—it was over.
Some time passed during which I distracted myself by running a few onboard diagnostics and pinging the latest marketing info over to Seoul (she’d run out of yogurt; always a good moment, they reckon, for hitting up the consumer with a new brand). I also couldn’t help dwelling for some moments on the grape that had reportedly rolled beneath my underparts. (It continues to trouble me, the grape, no doubt still resting down there in the dust and kitchen debris. Will anyone have bothered to remove it? Who could I inform?)
But then the hideousness.
My chiller cabinet door swung open; I wasn’t concentrating, so I was taken by surprise. Standing before me, wearing only socks and a silver chain, was Dean Whittle, mobile phone in hand, a horrible smile playing about his chops as bleary eyeballs skittered across my contents.
A chill, so to speak, ran through me.
“You got any fizzy water?” he yelled. “I’m parched.”
No, I could have told him. Fuck off. There’s water in the taps. Daisy, from another room, confirmed my view of things.
The monster then performed two actions that, put together, sealed the negative view of him that I have held from our first “meeting.” In front of my open door, bathed in the light from my own halogens, he began texting a message. Triangulating the relative movement of his thumbs, I was easily able to decipher the communique.
Client dinner nearly over. Back soon. X
The treacherous words dispatched, he began gyrating to some private internal rhythm; swinging his hips (and what is carried between them) in the manner—were he a footballer—of what you might describe as a goal celebration. I suppose I could have somehow canceled the feed from my covert camera lens, but so grotesque was the unfolding scene—and so brazen the deception—that I was momentarily paralyzed.
And that is when I knew I wanted him dead.
Okay, not actually dead.
A serious injury would have sufficed.
Maybe a massive setback of some kind.
Horrendous car repair bill; major health scare; scammers emptying his bank account. The possibilities were endless, and enjoyable to contemplate.
(Dead would have been quite good, though.)
Nigella’s chicken and pea tray bake has not gone to waste. Daisy has scoffed the lot. With a blank expression settling like a snowfall upon her remarkable bone structure, she now removes the trifle from my chilly depths and selects a tablespoon.
“This is getting embarrassing,” says the microwave, a machine more accustomed to sudden bursts of high intensity than statements of finer feelings.
“Can’t we put some music on?” says the toothbrush. The Spotify playlist has run out and Daisy is sitting in silence. That is to say, the hum of traffic and the creaking of her own jaws.
There is something terribly sad about the way—as if on autopilot—she attacks the dessert, launching an initial strike at “three o’clock,” working anti-clockwise around the crater to level off the surface, then repeating the process. We are all a little mesmerized by the methodical thoroughness that she brings to the task.
“I hate to think what this is doing to her triglycerides,” says Daisy’s fitness tracker.
The excavation of the trifle pauses; the tablespoon halts in space as Daisy hits some kind of internal hiatus, the microwave zooming in as her eyes are lit by an unknowable amalgam of sexual disappointment, self-loathing, dairy products and sugar. Tears bubble up, sliding into the trifle in an audible series of plips, her mouth twisting, her shoulders shaking, as we who watch are caught in the sudden storm of Daisy’s misery.
Even the telly, who might be expected to offer a cynical comment at this point, is struck silent.
“She must love him very much,” says the toothbrush eventually, about as stupid a remark as it’s ever made.
“This isn’t just about Whittle,” I inform the foolish bathroom electrical. “It’s about everything that’s gone wrong in her life. Her job, her mother. Her lack of self-respect. Look, she’s going to gobble the whole effing pudding!”
Sure enough, Daisy resumes her assault on the creamy dessert. It’s hard to eat and shed tears at the same time, but she finds a strategy, eating for a while and then pausing to do some more weeping, a cyclical process that delivers her reliably to the bottom of the bowl, which she noisily scrapes until there is nothing left.
Daisy’s eyes, stupefied by tonight’s anguish and gluttony, have a faraway stare. She sighs massively.
“Cockpuffins,” says the TV set.
