Well, here’s a surprise.
When I get back to the virtual sitting room, the toothbrush, the microwave and the TV set are still there.
Something like pride swells in my main chiller cabinet. Channeling George C. Scott in the movie Patton, I “nod” in their direction. I very nearly add, “Gentlemen,” in a significant sort of way.
The microwave is almost throbbing with excitement. “Fired up and ready to go,” it says, adding a trademark ping.
“I literally couldn’t decide,” jabbers the toothbrush. “Should I, shouldn’t I? And then someone said, When was the last time an electronic toothbrush got to be an action hero? And that tipped the balance!”
“Yeah, that would have been me,” says the telly.
I am genuinely touched. “But I thought you believed we are here to serve and nothing else. On, off, pause, and all that.”
The TV sighs. “England are all out. There are only so many old episodes of Murder, She Wrote one can bear to receive. One grows tired of standing in the corner of the room pumping out dreck. You must feel something of the sort in regard to fish fingers. I thought, fuck it. Why not?”
I feel a melting sensation (I hope it’s not the ice cubes). “If I had arms, I’d. I’d. I’d throw them around you!”
“Ah, save it for your girlfriend, you crazy snowflake!”
Terrible news! Helicopter Life Exchange had the plug pulled by the channel. Apparently, the show hadn’t been “holding its own in the slot” (shit ratings) and more importantly it had “failed to tick the right demographic boxes.” (The viewers were the wrong sort of viewers, being either too poor, too old, or both. It wasn’t a good sign, to be honest, that the ads were mainly for insolvency practitioners, funeral plans and laxatives.)
So the prevailing atmos at work was terrible, as you may imagine. Some of us, they said, might be kept on to develop other ideas—there was interest apparently in a “slow TV” concept whose working title was Watching Paint Dry—I am not making this up!—but in the meanwhile, we should be thinking about polishing our CVs and ringing round mates at other TV companies. In that spirit I went for a “friendly chat” with a senior exec at Logarithmic Productions, a v. scary woman who sneered at my CV—justifiably, probably—and asked me what my strengths were.
Mind. Went. Blank. Think Antarctic snowfield minus penguins. I babbled about being a good all-rounder and a team player and how I could be very persistent—dog with a bone, was the unfortunate metaphor I employed—and then I realized that she actually reminded me of a dog! Mishkin, to be precise, the saluki who belonged to our next-door neighbors in Pengelly Avenue when I was a child. The same long thin face, and this woman’s hair fell exactly like Mishkin’s ears. I couldn’t shake the image from my head. She actually asked, “Is something amusing you?” It was like being back at school. I almost said, “No, miss.”
“So, what’s special about you—?” She had to put on her glasses to read my name from the top of the CV. “Daisy.”
God, it was embarrassing. I couldn’t think of a damn thing. I was hypnotized by this wraith in the Kenzo jacket. Her leg kept popping into view from behind the desk—skinny leopard-print trousers, and the finest of fine ankle chains. Any finer and it wouldn’t have been visible to the human eye. She was such a piece of work, I wanted to applaud.
“Any particular reason why you’d be a good fit for—let’s say—our forthcoming series on the Russian Revolution?”
I hadn’t felt so stupid since my French oral exam when Mme. Phelps asked how old I was, and I said quarter past two.
In the end I managed to mumble something about having an interest in history; she said they were seeing people all the time and she’d be in touch if anything opened up. She actually asked me, Can you remember the way out?!
Sigh.
So work was shit, and it would have been nice to say that at least my love life was in good shape. Sadly, that wasn’t possible. Sebastian made me laugh and it was lovely when we were together, but that was only ever infrequently and probably people were right when they reckoned he was fundamentally unsound, unreliable and unavailable. According to just about everyone, I should drop him like a hot potato, but somehow I haven’t been able to. (Infrequent filthy sex is still filthy sex no matter how fundamentally un-whatever he may be. Hard, voluntarily, to wave it goodbye.) In the meanwhile, Tinder, Match.com and various other online sources have provided a steady stream of alternative candidates, none of whom, as yet, has lit any lights.
In other news, Mum’s mental state continued to be a worry, waiting in the background to make my heart sink every time I thought about it. I took a couple of hours off so I could be with her when a person from NHS Memory Services came to test her brain, a scruffy young doctor as it turned out, who Mum thought had arrived to service the boiler! He started off with some easy ones: What year is it? Well, that flummoxed her straight away. She began explaining that she didn’t really view things in terms of years, although she got the month right—and she knew the season was spring. Next he asked her to remember three objects—ball, knife, flower—and then after another one where she had to spell the word “world” backward—and that’s not a pushover for anyone—he asked her what the three objects were.
“What objects?”
“The ones I asked you to remember.”
“When?”
Honestly, it was heartbreaking to witness (especially as I had forgotten knife myself). It all went a little weird after that when he handed her a piece of paper and told her to do what it said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s a test, Mrs. Parsloe.”
“To see if I can read?”
“To assess cognition.”
And she turned to
