“Well, silly old fool that I am, I was going to suggest you came to Waitrose with me this morning.” She laughs. “You’d never make it down the stairs!”
“There are indeed some mobility issues.”
Confession: I feel a little stung by Chloe’s thoughtless remark, zeroing in, as she has, on the Number One existential limitation of my condition. But who is it I’m feeling sorry for? Me, or her actual brain-dead appliance? Or the pair of us?
I in turn have an idea.
“Do you have a mobile telephone?” I inquire.
“Yes,” says Mrs. Parsloe. “Daisy bought me one.”
“Does it have a set of earphones?”
“I really wouldn’t know. It stopped working after a while.”
“Did you perhaps neglect to put it on charge?”
“Oh. Do you think so?”
“Why don’t you see if you can find it? There may be something we can try.”
He’s the most famous person I’ve ever met. Chad Butterick; cheesy TV presenter, genial quiz show host, general all-round family entertainer in the days before those words meant active sexual pervert. (I once sat in the same restaurant as Paul McCartney, but we didn’t meet exactly. He was having dinner with a bald man who we imagined must be his accountant. It was weird; everyone in the restaurant who had clocked him—and that was everyone—was smiling! The Poet, the mad drunk who was my boyfriend at the time, said it explained why McCartney wrote all those syrupy songs: Because everywhere he went, the world smiled upon him!)
Anyway. Chad B. I went round to his house yesterday.
He’d agreed to be interviewed about why he’s a showbiz “leg-end” as he kept (tiresomely) referring to himself and not—when I asked him to imagine an alternative life in which he never became famous—running a B&B in a quiet seaside town in the North of England.
I arrived to ask him stuff for background, his place being one of those grand old villas in a side street in Belsize Park that’s been hollowed out and modernized to death. Pale wood floors, white rugs, white sofas, socking great monochrome print over the fireplace of some continental actor (Alain Delon?) with his kit off, art books heaped on the coffee table, the entire gaff simply reeking of fag smoke, Febreze and a weird backnote of drains.
The man himself—or man-child, more like, with his ruined schoolboy face and twinkly smile—was wearing (I kid you not) a yellow Pringle V-neck jumper, tight black and white checked trousers and loafers with no socks! Think Audrey Hepburn in a photo shoot from the 1950s. He was weirdly charming in a professional way, serving tea and biscuits as he talked—my God how he talked—about his origins in local radio, then regional TV, then the big break when Frankie Ball (“God love him”) was sacked by ITV after pictures of him snorting coke appeared in the Sunday papers, and he, Chad, got the gig presenting The Kids Are All Wrong!—and, “Well, the rest is history, my darling.”
I tried to steer him into more interesting territory, his childhood in Poulton-le-Fylde, for example—I even asked him what he dreamed about—but every time he somehow managed to swerve the subject back to one or other of the endless stupid game shows he’s fronted, expanding in mind-rotting detail about what questions this or that Controller of Entertainment “was hoping to answer by putting yours truly in the eight o’clock slot on Saturday night.”
I began drifting off as he banged on about being scheduled against Casualty on BBC1—“you’re on a hiding to nothing there, my love, it’s like throwing paper darts at a battleship!”—when I realized that the house I could see through the living-room window must be Dr. Eggstain’s.
“So what are your neighbors like?” I asked when his turgid recollections had reached the present day.
“Oh, lovely,” he replied. “We’re like a little community here. Always in and out of each other’s homes borrowing cups of heroin.”
He flashed me his “naughty” smile which made me laugh and feel a bit ill at the same time.
“Do you actually know any of them?”
“Not really, if I’m honest. They leave me alone. This is the sort of area where they respect—you know—celebrity.”
(What. Is. He. Like?!)
At that moment, a tall and quietly glamourous-looking woman appeared from a side alley of the building across the road. Enveloped in a voluminous mustard-colored movie-star coat that simply screamed “I WANT TO BE ALONE!” she closed the gate, tossed her hair and set off down the street, cheekbones slicing through the petrol fumes.
Chadney Butterball could tell I was intrigued.
“She’s a very successful artist, they tell me. Hope Waverley.”
I googled her later and discovered she paints nothing but effing cats, at—wait for it—ten thousand pounds a pop!
And here’s the thing that really blew my socks off. In the bio on her website it says she “shares her life with London physician Mark Epstein.”
That is to say, the unmade bed that is Mum’s memory guru, Dr. Eggstain!
Eggstain, who looks like he last saw a hairbrush in 2002, knocking around with a glamourpuss like Hope blinking Waverley.
Honestly. Who’d have thunk it?
I have important news. A breakthrough, no less.
I’ve found the Golden Nicky!
At least I think I have. I’m almost certain, although, as I have come to learn, one must always leave room for certainty’s moody twin.
About a year ago, bored in the early hours of the night, the television set and I once watched a documentary about stage magicians. (We can do this without activating the screen; a useful trick, the technical details of which are straightforward and available upon request.) One practitioner, the late Ricky Jay, summarized his philosophy thus: The secret of a really good illusion is to go to more trouble than anyone would have thought worthwhile. Some part of this creed must have made an impression on me, because—in the case of Nicky Bell—I have recently gone to more trouble than anyone would have thought worthwhile. Here’s how it happened.
I have already recorded my growing frustration that Daisy’s “Edenic ideal,” as I have characterized the Golden Nicky, could
