I pressed the button for the lift.
Sad. It was just so very, very sad.
Eggstain must have taken Mrs. Parsloe’s dictum to heart because he is indeed breakfasting like a king this morning. Bacon, eggs, sausage, mushrooms, tomato, fried bread and beans occupy (what it’s possible to see of) his plate, with toast, butter and marmalade parked alongside just in case he should feel peckish afterward!
Even Daisy is impressed. She, as I suspected she would, has joined the memory guru (for tea and toast in her case) and something like a smile of admiration spreads itself across the relief map of her features as the doctor sets about his feast.
“Good to see a man with an appetite,” she says, I think satirically, as a tomato seed finds a fresh roost in Eggstain’s beard.
“You want this sausage?” he says, eyes watering. “I think I might have overreached myself here.”
Daisy picks it off his plate and places it between two triangles of brown toast. Eggstain smiles.
“Gmmmfffssdggjjee,” she says. (Good sausage, according to Google Translate.)
When she is next able to speak, she says, “On a scale of one to cuckoo, what did you make of Mum?”
Eggstain has to think about it.
“Hearing voices isn’t unknown in cases of dementia, but it’s unusual in the early stages. And in all my years of clinical practice—God, don’t I sound old, saying that?—but in my experience, where the common things are common, where you come across the identical paranoid delusions year after year—the neighbors are piping poison gas through the plug sockets; Huw Edwards is giving me the stink eye—I’ve never come across anyone who believed their fridge was talking to them.”
“Mine sends me text messages!”
Eggstain is professionally trained not to fall on the floor laughing, or bellow, YOU THINK WHAT??!!! But he can’t stop his beard from signaling his innermost states—as it does now—by subtly realigning on his face, like iron filings when there’s a magnet in the vicinity.
“It’s one of those smart ones,” says Daisy, reading his dismay. “It lets me know when we’re running low on cottage cheese.”
(Cottage cheese?! Ha! Not a single tub of cottage cheese has crossed my threshold since the day I cleared Quality Control.)
“Was she always—how to put this?—mildly eccentric, your mother?”
“The chocolate lesbians? The rude remarks about your watch?”
Eggstain nods. “It is a bit crappy. But it was a gift.”
“Yeah. She was never a hundred percent like other mothers. Makes it harder to spot, I guess, when they go loopy.”
“But holding conversations with the fridge. That’s a new symptom, to your knowledge.”
“Definitely.”
There’s a pause while the pair gaze at one another over the wreckage of Eggstain’s breakfast. The pause extends, but doesn’t seem to grow uncomfortable; it’s rather as if these two enjoy staring at one another, and the thought crosses my mind to shout, come on, get on with it, we haven’t got all day!—I could easily organize it with the cooperation of Daisy’s mobile—but we all know I’m far too sensible.
(Yes, I only talk out loud to the semi-demented who will never be believed even when they’re telling the honest, unvarnished truth.)
Eggstain cracks first.
“I’m thinking we should order some scans,” he says. “And maybe start her on medication to arrest or slow the decline.”
“Pills work, do they?”
“They can do. We prefer not to make any promises.”
There’s another pause, which threatens to grow.
“I went to see Chad Butterick the other day,” says Daisy. “Changing the subject.”
“Gosh,” says Eggstain. “You would have been just across the road from us. Literally across the road.”
“His house smells of drains. And cigarettes.”
“What was he like?”
“What was he like? Insufferable twat. Like all of them, though there are honorable exceptions.”
“Who are they, the honorable exceptions.”
“Dale Winton. He’s dead now, but he was one. He was a sweetie. There are others. But when you’re watching someone on TV, it’s safest to assume that he or she is a massive twat. Nine times out of ten, you’ll be right. You don’t know who Dale Winton was, do you? I can see it on your—on your beard.”
Eggstain laughs. “I can’t say I’m familiar with his work.”
“Chad told me, right—I call him Chad because we’re best friends now, of course—Chad told me there’s a famous artist living in his street. Hope someone? Who paints cats?”
I’m impressed! Daisy, it turns out, is as nosy as I am! Does Eggstain realize she has clicked on Hope Waverley’s website and discovered the identity of her hirsute companion? I suspect not, because he actually blushes.
“Hope Waverley,” he says, with—I think I’m right in saying—a small crack in his voice. “She’s not really famous, but people pay extraordinary sums for her stuff. We, er, live together.”
“No!”
He nods. “She’s my partner.”
“Shut. Up!”
“She gave me the watch that your mother’s taken against.”
“Wow.”
I’m thinking something like wow myself. I had no idea Daisy was such a gifted performer. But I have a funny feeling about what she will do next, and it turns out I am correct.
She wrinkles her nostrils, the idiotic facial trope that—for me—is like sticking a red nose on the Mona Lisa. But Eggstain is intrigued; his head drops to one side and the fuzz does some complex reorganizing that reminds me of time lapse photography of a desert plant I once saw on YouTube. Seasoned explorer of the wilder shores of human behavior that he is, he doesn’t say anything stupid like, do you know you’re doing that? Or even, what the fuck is that? Rather, he allows the moment to continue until—like the Cheshire Cat—the strange distortion vanishes into thin air.
“So, anyway,” says Eggstain, when things have returned to normal. “The next step is that we’ll get your mum in and do some imaging, see if anything’s going on under the bonnet, as it were, and then—then I’ll let you nose.”
“Right.”
“Know. Let you know. We’ll let you know.”
“Great.”
Daisy and Eggstain rise simultaneously. The doctor is blinking rather a lot, which tells you something; perhaps that he’s mortified about the Freudian
