“I’ve enjoyed meeting.” (Have a nice life.)
At Tesco Express, Dylan’s cute phrase popped into my head like an earworm.
And I did it again.
Willfully, I stepped into the unknown, doing something I had never done before, and as a result, getting something I had never got before.
Instead of the usual Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, I picked Boom Chocolatta!
What was happening to me?!!
It is an evening in late spring when I realize my thoughts have crossed a line.
Evenings are generally the worst times for us, as we wait for her to come home. Wondering how late it will be. Wondering whether she will be alone. She almost always is, as it happens, but naturally there have been men. In recent months, there was the banker, there was the firefighter, there was the cartoonist (I quite liked the cartoonist). None of them lasted more than a few weeks, and none deserved longer. They say, don’t they, that becoming a parent is to sign up for a lifetime of worry. They say grief is the price we pay for love.
They say a lot of things.
“Are you worried?” I ask.
“Should we be?”
“It’s past eleven.”
“Not late. Not by her standards.”
“You know something? I can’t decide which bothers me more; that she’ll bring this one back with her, or that she won’t.”
“You want to talk me through your logic?”
“You don’t think she should have found someone by now?”
“A special someone.”
“Isn’t it time?”
“Perhaps Mr. Right just hasn’t come along.”
“You still believe that stuff?”
“That there’s someone for everyone? Sure.”
“What if Mr. Right lives in… Turkmenistan?”
“Then she can be happy with Mr. Very Nearly Right.”
“To be honest, at this point Mr. Actually Not Too Bad Considering would be a breakthrough.”
A pause falls on our conversation. For a while we sit in companionable silence. We are very used to one another’s company, we two.
Finally, I say, “I worry that she drinks too much.”
“They all do. It’s the culture.”
“Her diet is all over the place.”
“Yeah. When she went on that vodka diet, and lost two days.”
“Not funny.”
“The seafood diet…”
“See food; eat it. Still not funny.”
“Okay, you make some jokes.”
“Listen. This is serious. It’s all of a piece. Unwise choices in men. Unwise choices about what she puts in her body. A whole tub of Häagen-Dazs last night. A whole tub!”
“I liked the fireman.”
“Firefighter. You’re supposed to call them firefighters.”
“Whatever. I liked him.”
“He hadn’t read a book since he left school!”
“You need to read books to put out fires now?”
“He was not her intellectual equal.”
“Just because he’d never heard of Pedro Almodóvar?”
“Look, we all understand she’s not Einstein, but you want someone you can talk to.”
“People are getting dumber. It’s the metals in the water.”
“You know this?”
“It’s not the internet making everyone stupid. It’s the water.”
“You’re saying this because you wash plates?”
“And pans. And cutlery. And glasses. The way she stacks the glasses, my God.”
“For a so-called smart dishwasher, you do actually believe some awful nonsense.”
“Yeah, and you know what? You need to chill out.”
“I see what you did there. Hilarious.”
“Be cool.”
“Thanks. I’ll bear it in mind.”
Sleep mode eludes me until I know she’s safely returned, so I’m on standby when finally I hear her key in the lock. She totters into the flat, kicks off her heels and allows her bag to slump to the carpet. She stands before the hall mirror, swaying gently as she considers her reflection. The hair is slightly awry, her lipstick smudged. The pink flush on her pale face has been caused only in part by the ascent of three flights of stairs.
“Christ on a bike,” she murmurs.
She takes a pace forward and pulls the fakiest of fake smiles; one of those that doesn’t even attempt to reach the eyes. Then she exhales—huhhhhh—on the mirror. Her finger inscribes the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet on the fogged glass.
“Oh, bollocks,” she says to what she believes is an empty apartment. “Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, bollocks… bollocking bollocking cockpuffins.”
Now she is in the kitchen standing before my mighty white door. We both know what is going to happen next. The rubber seals unkiss from the metal—my thermostats have already detected the temperature change—and I follow the recommendations of the habitual mantra.
Lights, camera, action!
The words are appropriate; the lights do indeed come on—they’re automatic, but I could override—and the virtually invisible micro-pinhole lens situated at eye level—shhhhh, no one’s supposed to know it’s here—perfectly captures the agony on Daisy Elizabeth Parsloe’s lovely intoxicated face.
Lying in state on its silver dais, nicely framed in the foreground of the shot, is the object of her torment—half of a birthday cake, encased—no, entombed—in chocolate cream and mosaiced chaotically with Smarties. It looks terrific, brilliantly lit—my main chiller cabinet has state-of-the-art halogens—with frail zephyrs of icy vapor drifting about its fortifications. It’s certainly more edible than the month-old potato salad currently developing mold spores (I’ve sent two reminders to the app on her phone about it).
But Daisy’s internal conflict seems to have reached some kind of plot point. She has selected a finger and now, slowly, looming ever larger in the lens, it approaches its landing site. Will she stick to a finger-full?
Again, we both know the answer to that.
Daisy turned thirty-four last week and the semi-circular confection is all that remains of the small celebration that took place here to mark the occasion.
“You’ve never looked more beautiful,” said the revolting “Sebastian,” her so-called “gentleman caller” (I nearly voided my ice cubes when he came up with that pearl). Sebastian is in quotes because it isn’t his real name, nor is he a gentleman.
He is a divorced estate agent in his middle years whose wholly manufactured “charm”—I’m going to stop with the quotes any moment—Daisy is completely unable to see through.
I mean, FFS, I’m a fridge-freezer and I can tell the guy’s a total no-goodnik! If you don’t believe me, ask the telly! It’s also extremely intelligent though it’s Chinese-made rather than assembled in Korea. I wouldn’t waste time talking to her smart toaster, however. Why a toaster should need to
