“Exactly. They’ve all been either wide boys or dullards. Unfaithful and unreliable—or boringly overreliable. And each relationship follows a similar cycle. All begin in the highest of hopes, each being in some way a reaction to the collapse and disappointment of the relationship before; the Golden Nicky being the source of it all, the Edenic ideal, if you like, which all of us—all of them, I should say—are aiming to recapture.”
“Are you feeling all right?” (The TV set.)
I continue. “Each story opens in a great uprush of positivity and sexual intercourse”—the microwave throws in some pings—“and in these early stages, there’s clear evidence that Daisy willfully, deliberately and often perversely blinds herself to the shortcomings of each male. The mildly amusing northerner she describes in electronic communications to friends as hilarious. The lying shagger, because he’s a news reporter, is admired for being a seeker after truth. The boring safe one is—well, the best she can find to say about him is he’s a gentle soul”—even the toothbrush snorts at that—“the drunken poet is placed on a pedestal because he’s an artist, and the abnormally normal poker player is favored because he can create order (wealth, a nice flat) out of randomness (a shuffled pack of cards). Unfathomably, she even maintains that Whittle is a fundamentally decent person and not a dog turd in human form.”
I do not mention that none of these fuckwits knows the freezing point of cheese and, although I shouldn’t—it varies of course with each cheese, according to age, moisture and salt content—I can’t help feeling, well, yes, cheesed off about it!
“Round about the six-month mark, each relationship slips into the comfortable habitual phase—the couple holidaying together; parents being introduced—but by the end of year one, doubts begin to creep in. Daisy sees in glimpses what she has been determined to set her face against, so she doubles down on the stories that she has told herself and her friends. The northerner isn’t just hilarious, he comes from the Planet Funny in a parallel universe. The lying shagger is ‘the rising star’ at the news channel, and this explains why he is working all hours. The gentle soul has a ‘Zen thing going on’; the alcoholic poet reminds her of Dylan Thomas; the poker player is a fascinating puzzle; Whittle is lovely ‘deep down.’ But there is always a moment when the scales finally fall from her eyes and even Daisy—even lovely, good-hearted, thinks-the-best-of-everyone Daisy—can see what’s been obvious to everyone else: that her boyfriend is either a world class crasher, a lying git or a borderline inpatient.”
“And how would you know all this?” growls the TV set.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think about it.”
It’s true, I have. And there is, I believe, something in the cyclical nature of my operations—the endless exchange of heat for cold—that leads me to return, as night follows day, to the Problem of Daisy.
Broadly stated it is this: How can such a good person possess such bad judgment?
Some moments pass while we stare at the list of the ever more dismal parade of bores, philanderers and weirdos—sorry, hopeful young men—to whom Daisy has been content to hitch her wagon (The Mythical Quant, The Comedian, The Lying Shagger, The Boring Safe One, The Poet, the Normotic Poker Player, the Depraved Estate Agent).
“One name stands out here,” I announce. “The one honorable exception.”
“Him,” says the telly. “Mr. Floppy hair.”
“The Golden Nicky. Precisely. I shall make it my job to locate this character—not because I think there is a chance that he and Daisy may be reunited—that would be unrealistic—but because he represents the source, if I may put it like that. Going out with him, Nicky Bell, I believe, was the last time that Daisy was truly, uncomplicatedly happy.”
I tell the team everything I know about Daisy’s long-lost love, which isn’t a great deal more than I have already set out. Then I ask my colleagues to call out his ten most obvious qualities; as they do, I “write” them onto my virtual whiteboard. (It’s a struggle, frankly, to get to ten and I wish I’d said five.)
1. Posh
2. Rich
3. Handsome
4. Clever
5. Big hair
6. Hinterland (classical music; cosmology etc.)
7. Dog or dogs in childhood
8. One or more parents in legal profession slash chipped plates
9. “Golden” quality
10. Missing
In regard to the last item on the list, we agree how very unusual it is to find no trace of him on the internet. Granted Nicholas Bell is a very common name—when one types it into the little box, almost seventy million results are found by Señor Google! But even when one includes other search terms—the name of his employer; his High Court judge daddy—one still draws a blank. We decide a deep dive into the data is the way to go, but in the meanwhile we shall only “permit” Daisy to meet men who satisfy at least four of the first nine categories above; and only then if they have first cleared a general “quality threshold”; that is to say, only if they are not obvious members of the dog turd community. The result should be an immediate improvement in the caliber of potential mates for Daisy. Merely okay will no longer be… okay. We will be making a difference from Day One!
“She’s wasted too much time,” I tell my—I nearly wrote troops. “She’s shown she’s not a fit person to make important life decisions for herself, so we shall assist. Frankly, what young woman wouldn’t want a team of smart machines manipulating events behind the scenes to her advantage?”
“Yeah, what’s not to like?” says the telly, but with a bit of an edge, I can’t help feeling.
Fortunately I don’t have time to get into a debate about the ethics of Operation Daisy. I have places to go. People to see.
Well, people to observe.
Okay, person.
Him.
three
Why did it not cross my mind before now to take a long, hard look
