“What would you like to know about me?”
“I don’t know. Something I would never have guessed.”
“Well,” begins Daisy. And she wrinkles her nose. It lasts—I time it—fourteen seconds, during which Eggstain’s expression never varies, although his pupils dilate, which tells you something.
“Sometimes,” she says at the end of the fourteen secs, “I have this thing. I can be at the office. Or on the Tube. Or anywhere. I sort of… wake up in my own thoughts? And then I’ll ask myself, what have you been thinking about for the last five minutes? And I don’t know! I actually can’t answer!”
“You’ve been daydreaming.”
“Have I?”
“Allowing your thoughts to drift like smoke. It’s a good thing.”
“Is it? It feels feeble. My old boss used to clap his hands behind my chair and make me jump!”
“Most of what your brain does is unavailable to you—we are literally unconscious of it. We should be grateful that this is so. Imagine if we had to think about how to walk, ride a bicycle, make…”
He trails off.
“What?”
“Make. Make something. Make breakfast.”
(It wasn’t breakfast that he was about to say, was it?!)
“The human brain,” continues Eggstain, moving right along (nothing to see here), “is like a grapefruit wrapped in a napkin. The grapefruit is the old pre-conscious animal brain that’s evolved over millions of years. And the thin surface layer of napkin is the recent conscious bit that arrived with Homo sapiens and enabled us to invent science and literature and… whatever you think is the pinnacle of human achievement.”
“Twitter?”
“If you say so.”
“Some mornings my brain feels more like a tomato wrapped in a pancake. A big beefsteak tomato. And one of those pancakes with golden syrup. Well, treacle really.”
Eggstain smiles.
“The point is, we are so wrapped up in our pancake thoughts, we lose sight of all the wisdom gathered over millennia in the grapefruit. Tomato, if you prefer. When you daydream, activity in the outer layer is turned down, allowing some of the contents of the tomato to penetrate the conscious pancake. I hope this isn’t getting too technical.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“Of course, the tomato brain speaks tomato language. Whereas the pancake layer…”
“Speaks pancake?”
“This is why dreams feel so strange. They are in a foreign language.”
“So, I’m normal. Normal for a pancake wrapped round a tomato.”
“Better than normal. Healthy! Your beefsteak tomato has not been stifled, which is so often the case in our pancake-driven culture.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
They chink teacups and I am left a little dazzled by the exchange. So much to think about, not the least of it being: If the human brain is partly—maybe mainly—unconscious, how about the brain of a fridge-freezer? Are there also depths of which we know nothing? But this powerful thought must await another occasion, because Eggstain is already moving on.
“There’s something I’d like to ask you,” he says.
“Sure.”
“I’ve been thinking about getting rid of this.”
He rakes his fingers through his beard. A few toast crumbs catch in the sunlight as they tumble out.
Daisy nods. “Why not? In fact, definitely.”
“The issue is, my partner is opposed.”
“Ah.”
“She has a thing about beards, but I feel like I don’t recognize myself any more. Both literally and metaphorically. Is this too much information? It really is, isn’t it? Apologies.”
“Not at all. No. Listen. You have to be true to your truest self, don’t you? To be absolutely honest, I read that in Metro. But there’s only so long you can live a lie. It happened to me quite recently.”
“You had a beard.”
“I was in a relationship that was based on a lie. Perhaps at some level I always knew.”
“At the level of the tomato.”
“The pancake wasn’t ready to listen. But there was a lot that was good about it.”
“There always is. And in the end?”
“In the end, the pancake was presented with the terrible truth.”
(That would have been Mandy White, I’m guessing.)
“You’re in favor of truth, generally, in all circumstances.”
“Have you got something to hide under there?”
“To be perfectly honest, I can’t remember.”
“Go for it! If it’s a disaster, you can always grow it back.”
“You’re right. What’s that thing Churchill said? Success isn’t final. Failure isn’t fatal.”
“Oh, I saw that film. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds. Never once mentioned beards.”
“You’ve inspired me. I’m going to do it.”
“Congratulations.”
Daisy raises a hand. Eggstain looks perplexed.
“High five?”
They clap palms.
“Yay,” she cries. “Free your inner tomato.”
“I’m not sure that really works in this context. I won’t be shaving the actual tomato. That would be weird.”
“Surgically impossible.”
“That too. Look, are you still hungry? It’s this talk of pancakes and tomatoes.”
“Hungry? I’m starving. It’s all your fault.”
A good-looking boy from the serious programs downstairs parked his bum on the edge of my desk and said he was Hugh Someone.
“Hi,” I responded.
Did I know if it was okay for him to listen to some music in one of our edit booths? Theirs were all busy. Sure, I told him. Was it the new Ed Sheeran album?
He didn’t understand this was a joke and explained he’d been trawling through Soviet era vinyl for their series about the Russian Revolution. Had I worked here long? He hadn’t seen me before. A couple of weeks, I replied. There was something amusingly swotty about him, inky fingers, creased shirt beneath the blue V-neck. I told him that I once had a conversation with Saluki-woman about his show; it hadn’t gone well.
“She can be quite abrasive,” he said. “But you have to respect the intellectual rigor. And her attention to detail is forensic.”
I said she reminded me of a neighbor’s dog in childhood. A Saluki. Name of Mishkin. Killed when it chased a squirrel into the path of a family from Frodsham who were lost in the suburbs on their way to see the Royal Tournament at Olympia. They were mortified by the accident (their horrible car, the color of rust). It wasn’t so much the attention to detail or the intellectual rigor that reminded me of Mishkin, I explained, it was more the face shape,
