“In the olden days, people would do anything to get on TV. You’ve never secretly hankered after a job gutting fish?”
“Is that why you agreed to meet?”
“Yeah. Totally. It was mainly haddock. But there was pollock and skate too. Would you have been interested?”
“Your fish-gutter would have done my job?”
“That was the basic premise. But as I say…”
“It’s pretty technical what we do.”
“Really?” Daisy has furrowed her brow comedically. I don’t think her interlocuter is catching the irony. (Perhaps he would if he was a bit more fridge-freezer and a bit less prat.)
“Your guy would need to be fully across social media. I mean fully.”
“Right.”
“And organic traffic referral is huge now.”
“Is that something one could pick up on the job?”
Greg considers the matter as though it were a serious question.
“We do a lot of proxying. I mean a lot.”
“Too much? I mean too much for Darryl to cope with? That was his name. Darryl. He mainly does haddock. Pollock and skate too. There can be hake.”
A slow smile appears on Greg’s face. “Yeah, okay, I get it. You’re taking the piss.”
“Sorry. I’ve had a shit day.” Daisy siphons the remaining fluid from her glass. Engages her eyelashes. A single bat. “Same again?”
Greg’s gaze never unlocks from Daisy as she—yes, I’m afraid the word really is—wobbles off toward the bar. High heels and the toxic cocktail have set the decks rolling, but the young man seems charmed by the sight of his date swaying through the throng and I daresay had I blood in my system and not Freon 134a, I too would find the vision stimulating.
As she waits for the barman’s attention, her expression depowers, as though someone has flipped a switch. Without knowing it, she is staring straight into the security camera behind the bottles, her face a perfect mask. I want to tell her: You’re tired and bored, Daisy. Go home. Is this man’s desire the only thing keeping you here? Greg may be a passably handsome male in the right age and socioeconomic bracket but he is not on your wavelength. I know wireless keyboards with a better sense of humor. But she is purchasing beverages, and the evening must limp forward to its—I sincerely hope—not too messy conclusion.
When Daisy resumes her position at the top of the stool—how Greg loved that bit of business!—they clink glasses and set about transfusing more alcohol into their pipework.
“So tell me about your family,” says the online marketer, presumably having read somewhere that it’s a good idea to show interest in the other party.
Daisy sighs. “My mum’s losing her marbles. My dad lives in Italy with a woman he met in Woolworth’s, which tells you how long ago it happened. No siblings. An aunt who’s dead and some cousins we no longer see. Sorry. Is that too much information?”
Greg doesn’t look equipped to handle this sort of intimate material. He grimaces. And because he knows he must come up with some kind of sympathetic comment, he pulls a face. “Tough gig.”
“Just forget I said any of that.” She takes a big swallow of her Blue Bombsicle.
“It’s okay. Complete bummer when the rents start going doolally.”
For a second, just for a second, I have the feeling she is going to punch him. Something flares in her eyes, but then dies. She smiles. It’s thin, but it’s still a smile.
“Tell me about you,” she says. “Have you always lived in London?”
I can take no more. I thank Daisy’s TV for providing the video link and explain I have better things to do.
“Yeah, I know what you mean, mate,” it replies. “This one has dud written all over him.”
“You going to stick with it?”
“Dunno. Maybe give it another half hour.”
“What time do you think she’ll get home?”
“No telling, is there?”
“You think she’ll bring this halfwit back with her?”
“He should be so lucky.”
“I can’t bear it. I actually can’t bear it. The way she’s wasting herself.”
“You’re not wrong, mate. But hey. It is what it is.”
“Not for much longer.”
A famous psychiatrist, Eugen Bleuler, a contemporary of Freud, said toward the end of his career that after a lifetime studying the stranger corners of the human psyche, his patients remained as alien to him as the birds in his garden. How I love that quotation. Were I in a position to, I would copy it onto a sticky note and attach it to my own door. It speaks most beautifully of interpersonal unknowability. If a top shrink like Eugen B ultimately couldn’t fathom his customers, what chance do I have?
Okay, my patient isn’t a carpet-chewing nutjob. But neither can one read her like an instruction manual. She contains layers, as you may have already noticed; depths, if you will. If some of these—it’s possible—are not even available to her, how would I ever understand what’s going on in her head?
To look for clues to the origins of her bad decision making, to find the source of Daisy’s—in software you would call it poor coding—the obvious place to start is with the person or persons responsible for her programming. As luck would have it, her lead programmer, if I may put it like this—her mother, Chloe Parsloe—owns a smart TV made by the same Asian corporation as her daughter’s set; thus I have easily been able to pay visits to her owing to the frictionless reciprocity of the IoT. Tonight in the north London suburb of Whetstone, this apparatus is pumping out an episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot at a painfully loud volume. (The central heating is also cranked up absurdly high, though the thermostat is of an older generation so it doesn’t make conversation.)
Mrs. Parsloe however isn’t watching TV. She is sitting on the sofa in her living room absorbed utterly in a letter from her local NHS Trust. I too have had ample opportunity to study this document because she has spent the last twenty-five minutes repeatedly turning over the single sheet of paper when she reaches the end of the text
