At the next appointment with Eggstain, Mum told a crazy story of how she and her fridge had been to the supermarket together!
Eggstain was brilliant, you have to say. As she explained how the fridge had walked her to the shops, reminded her what she needed—even organized a taxi back!—Eggstain just listened quietly, didn’t respond to any of the WTF faces I was making over Mum’s shoulder, and at the end calmly asked the killer question.
“I’m curious, Mrs. Parsloe. How did you manage the stairs?”
Mum laughed, like she’d seen it coming.
“We took the lift.”
Eggstain was unfazed.
“And crossing the roads? Any difficulty with the curbs?” (Taking her seriously; as though elderly women often went shopping with their effing fridge-freezers!)
Mum looked at Eggstain as though he might have been a bit simple.
“Curbs were not a problem, I can assure you. Now, Daisy, have you offered Dr. Egg—have you offered the doctor any tea?”
“Another question about this shopping expedition, if I may.”
“Of course. I’m at your disposal.”
Eggstain smiled graciously, like a courtier.
“If curbs were not a problem, were there any other difficulties?”
I was about ready to pee my pants with laughter! At Eggstain’s serious face—what there was to see of it—engaging with Mum’s trip down the rabbit hole.
“Well, the traffic was quite noisy. I couldn’t always catch what it was saying.”
I had to stifle a cackle of hysteria.
“Did you meet anyone, you and your… companion?”
“Yes! A nice old boy we found iffing and arring over the chocolate lesbians.”
A small bump of surprise—finally—in Eggstain’s glassy gaze.
“They’re biscuits,” I explained. “It’s what Mum calls them.”
“No one knows why,” she added cheerfully.
“Did this man,” he asked slowly, “say anything about the fridge?”
Mum gave Dr. E the you’re a bit of a dim bulb stare.
“Well, he couldn’t, could he, dear? He didn’t know it was there. That was the joy of it!”
I’ve read stuff online about how it’s usually a bad idea to argue with the demented. They find it stressful, and you generally don’t achieve anything by telling them that Vladimir Putin is definitely not working for British Gas and therefore it could not have been him who came to read the meter. Dr. Eggstain, though clearly a subscriber to that approach, wanted to get to the bottom of the “mystery.”
“Why—” he said. Speaking. As. Slowly. As. It’s. Possible. To. Speak. Without. Causing. Offense. “Why didn’t he know it was there? I don’t quite understand.”
“Well, he couldn’t see it.”
“But you could?”
Eggstain’s eyes tightened a micrometer. That was the only way you could tell we had arrived at the Heart of the Matter.
Mum’s face was a picture. If you had to sum it up in three words they would be: Who is this idiot?
Sorry, four words!
She spoke to him quietly. As though to a backward child.
“No, dear. I couldn’t see it either.”
“And why, if you could explain, was that?”
There was a long pause. Was this it? Had we arrived at the bottom of the rabbit hole? Or were there further tunnels branching off?
Mum said, “Because it was still here, of course.” Like, durr!
“It was still here. Here in this flat?”
“Yes! In the kitchen.”
Less patient practitioners might have chucked in their cards at this point. But Eggstain was quietly determined to follow the demented trail of bread crumbs wherever they led.
“If the fridge was still in the kitchen.” He waited a beat. Two. Three. Four. “How was it able to speak to you in Waitrose?”
A long pause. The longest yet. Mum patted her hair and pulled at her skirt. She did her wintry MMR smile (minor member of royalty).
“Dr. Eggstain.”
I didn’t even bother to interrupt. Here, I was sure of it, was the moment. Howard Carter probably felt like this when he sprung the locks on Tutankhamun’s bedroom door. I exchanged a glance with E; he flashed me a micro-nod. As if to say, this is gonna be good!
“Dr. Eggstain. Have you heard of something called the portable telephone?”
He had.
“Do you yourself use one?”
He did.
“Well, you’ll know that you can use them to speak to those who are distant from you.”
Something in Eggstain’s eyes died as he heard these words.
“You spoke to the fridge by phone.”
“It uses a system called Partial Cobbler. Are you familiar with it?”
He was not.
Gently, he guided the conversation away from the hallucinatory shopping trip and back to safer territory like knowing the year (wrong), knowing the day of the week (correct on the second attempt) and remembering three objects (“a man in your position really ought to wear a better watch, if you don’t mind me saying.” He didn’t).
When it was time to leave, he mentioned he was going to grab breakfast in the café in the High Street. Mum was surprised that he hadn’t already eaten.
“One should breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dine like a something else,” she said. “That’s what we were always taught.”
“Pauper, I believe.”
“Are you sleeping better, dear?” she asked him on the doorstep.
Eggstain’s sad smile as he took her hand to say goodbye.
Once he’d gone, I didn’t hold back.
“What the hell was that… gibberish, Mum, about the flipping fridge?”
We went into the kitchen and stared at the object in Q. It looked about as capable of making a phone call as the bowl of bananas on the window ledge.
“It talks to me. We do the crossword together.”
“Ask it to say something then.”
She rapped on its door. “Yoo-hoo. Anyone home?!”
Silence.
“It’s probably having a little sleep. I need one myself after all those blooming questions. Do you know the year?”
“Yes, Mum.”
She pulled a face. “This year. Next year. Sometime. Never. What’s the difference?”
“I need to get to work. Next time the fridge feels like chatting, perhaps you could put him on the phone to me.”
“Goodbye, darling.”
She gave me a hug. As the door closed, I stood on the mat listening for… for I don’t know what. But sure enough, after a few seconds I heard her voice.
“Now, look, I know you can hear me. I was thinking I might bake some
