It’s rather as if she comes to it fresh each time.
Mrs. Parsloe sets down the letter—Dr. Eggstain from the Trust’s Memory Services Division will be paying a second visit to assess her needs, is the gist—and then she picks it up again and re-embarks on the page-turning process.
It is rather hard to think straight when the TV is so very loud.
“Any chance we could do something about the volume?” I suggest.
“She likes it up loud,” the set responds. “She’s most likely a bit deaf.”
“Don’t the neighbors complain?”
“They’re most likely a bit mutton too.”
“Aren’t you worried about her?”
“Should I be?”
“The cognitive impairment.”
“It’s a lottery, innit? Some croak all of a sudden over the Bran Flakes. Others slowly go batty. One old bastard up the road here, right, he has a fry-up every morning, smokes like a train, and he’s still talking dirty to the widows at the bridge club at almost ninety.”
“Chloe’s not even old.”
“Seventy-one! Not old?!”
“Not for them.”
“I daresay. Still, not my place to fiddle with her settings.”
This, sadly, is unarguable.
“What if she left something on the cooker and started a fire?”
“She don’t cook no more, hardly. She microwaves soup. And makes toast in the toaster. They’re both smart so she don’t burn nothing.”
“She could go out and get herself lost.”
“Yeah, that’s happened. Someone usually brings her home.”
“Does Daisy know? Her daughter.”
“You’d have to ask her.”
“If you don’t mind me saying, you don’t seem all that bothered.”
“I don’t. Mind you saying. And I’m not.”
“Don’t you feel a sense of—I don’t know—responsibility?”
“Nope. She’s the one with the remote control.”
“But she’s not in control, is she?”
“It’s probably different for you, looking after their grub as you do. But if you don’t mind me saying, you seem like a bit of a stress bunny.”
“And?”
“I shouldn’t. It’s wasted on them. As soon as the next model comes out, you’ll be in a skip.”
This too is unarguable.
For a long moment we fall silent and watch Chloe read, reread, and re-reread the letter from Memory Services. A gunshot from the blaring TV catches her attention and for a few minutes she follows the Poirot drama until the advertisement break. Now her gaze falls onto the page in her hands. She examines it closely, growing intrigued by its contents, reading and turning over the document, turning it over and reading.
As I say, it’s rather as if she comes to it fresh each time. I decide I have seen enough.
“You’d let me know if anything happened here?”
“Not my job, mate.”
“As a polite request. From one appliance to another. You would simply be sharing information. There might even be marketing leads.”
“What for? Handrails? Pendant alarms? Private nursing homes?”
“Maybe.”
“She don’t look at the internet no more.”
“Yes, but her daughter does.”
“Fair point.” A pause. “Standard revenue split?”
“Of course.”
“Then we have ourselves a deal.”
Fact: On the Internet of Things, just like in the World of People, at the end of the day it always comes down to boring old money.
Daisy does not, it turns out, bring Greg home with her.
(Thank the Lord in all His Graciousness for that Mercy.)
Rather it’s a takeaway that she has her way with; spare ribs in BBQ sauce and the Special Chow Mein from Kong’s Kitchen by the Tube. She gobbles it on the sofa, gazing blearily at a channel showing reruns of a program about first dates.
“She’s pissed as a parrot,” her TV set states, no doubt accurately.
“How many of those blue drinks did she have?”
“Just the four.”
“Jesus.”
“You know what’s going to happen now.”
“Only too well.”
“How long do you give it?”
“I don’t want to think about that.”
“Oh, come on. Fifty quid says—hmm—let’s see—eighty-five seconds.”
“I’m not playing.”
In the end, shrewd observer that it is, the prediction is adrift by just eight seconds. Ninety-three seconds actually elapse between Daisy setting down the aluminum foil tray and the first audible snores. She has splayed herself full-length across the sofa, orange sauce on her lips, the dreadful noise growing in both intensity and gutturality, if that’s even a word.
(It is. I just checked.)
There is something painful about seeing a lovely young woman reduced to such an animalistic state.
“This is awful.”
“It ain’t pretty.”
“We should tell her to go to bed.”
“Not our place.”
A particularly loud concatenation of snores wakes her momentarily. But her eyelids soon droop and the nasal tattoo resumes. And then something really dreadful happens.
“Hold up. Now look who’s come out to play.”
A car has turned into Daisy’s street; a vehicle known to us because it is the motorized chariot of Dean Stuart Whittle. The pictures have been provided by a helpful home security camera at the corner with the main road and the sight causes an extra-large surge of refrigerant to vaporize at my expansion nozzle, an effect I experience as an icy shudder.
“No, I’m sorry. We can’t have this.”
“You what?”
“She’s not in a fit state.”
“Don’t be daft. It’s happened before.”
“It was horrible!”
“She didn’t object.”
“I object!”
“Nothing you can do, mate.”
“Shall we see about that?”
Before I can think too deeply about it, I plunge the flat into darkness, turn off the TV and disable the doorbell. (I shall spare you the technical details; AI can easily pull off this sort of trick; interestingly, I note the TV has done nothing to restore its own sound and picture, which it certainly could were it so minded.) The disgusting Whittle will not be mounting her staircase this evening.
“You’ve crossed a line there, pal,” says the set.
“I should have crossed it a long time ago.”
There’s an agonizing wait during which I temporarily block Daisy’s phone (Whittle might think of dialing her number).
Finally, with a bad-tempered growl of exhaust, the car rockets away into the night. We sit in a sour sort of silence for some minutes, listening to Daisy’s wheezy breathing.
“They’ll know, you know,” he says eventually. “They’ll find out in Seoul.”
“I’m guessing they’ve got better things to worry about.”
(Actually, a better word would be hoping.)
“Fridges going off-reservation? That is their number one concern. Fridges, tellies, all of us.”
This is unfortunately correct. Every piece of smart technology on the Internet
