He started looking at me oddly, head dropping to one side, brow furrowing, as if I’d said something he didn’t quite follow. It lasted for quite a long time, and then he stopped doing that and asked me if I had any serious plans for lunch.
Going to Pret with a colleague, I explained.
“Okay. Well. How do you fancy a drink after work?”
“Sorry. Are you asking me out?”
“I suppose I am. Yes.”
“Bold move!”
He nodded, looking rather pleased with himself.
I suggested he dropped me an email and I’d get back to him.
But it was puzzling. You don’t just wander up to people and ask them out; for all he knew, I could have been in a long relationship with a jealous and violent criminal. Or married.
Chantal agreed that there was something strange about it. But no, he wasn’t bad-looking and using a phrase like intellectual rigor didn’t automatically make him a tosser, although it was a worrying sign. She thought I probably should agree to go for a drink, just to eliminate him from inquiries, as it were.
In other news, she and I have both been struck by the difference in The Foetus.
Hard to put our finger on what exactly. Something in the body language perhaps, or around the eyes, or maybe, we agreed, it was the smirky expressions flitting across the unformed landscape of his larval visage.
And then, once the penny dropped, it was blindingly obvious.
“Oh my God,” she said. “It’s had sex!”
I told her I felt responsible because I advised that he and Whatsit should sink a couple of toxic cocktails and check how the world looked then. And when I got the chance to raise it, the Foetus was quick to give credit where it was due.
“Yeah, brilliant,” he said. (I asked how it was all going with Herself? Silly name. A town in Essex, I recalled. Not Chelmsford.)
“You’ve moved it up to the next level?!”
“We have.”
A pink dawn rose upon his face.
“Wonderful! So when are you getting married?” (My little joke.)
Bashful smile. “Bexley loved the cocktail place you suggested. We both did.”
Bexley! Jesus.
“If you do get married, right? And your surname was Heath…”
“She’d be Bexley Heath. She’s heard them all.”
“I’m delighted for you,” I heard myself saying, like I was his grandma.
Chantal, who had been earwigging, said: “If your surname was… And District Community Health Council, she’d be Bexley and District Community Health Council.”
The Foetus grinned. It was as disturbing a sight as I’d seen in a while. Making a “pistol” out of thumb and index finger, he pointed it at Chantal and produced that click-click sound riders make when they want a horse to giddy up a bit.
“Like it,” he said, and away he sauntered, arms hanging satirically low, like an orang-utan off to find a banana.
“You realize we’ll have to stop calling him The Foetus now,” said Chantal.
“I know. We’ve created a monster.”
In response to Hugh’s email suggesting post-work drinks, Daisy has suggested a date the following week and nothing from our surveillance data suggests either party is especially excited about the encounter to come.
Perhaps this is how it should be. Level, calm, no unrealistic ideas allowed to develop, so, it is to be hoped, no fantastical expectations dashed.
In the hiatus, still glowing, as it were, from the success of finally running to earth the Tarnished Nicky, I find my curiosity growing in respect of the man who held captive Daisy’s imagination—and mine, I admit it—for much longer than was healthy. He is tricky to keep an eye upon, largely unconnected as he is to the Internet of Things. There’s just one ancient laptop with only intermittent access to the w.w.w.—the only abbreviation in widespread use that takes longer to say than the words it actually stands for!—and his (extremely dumb) mobile has buttons you actually push. As a result, one can only really take a “live” look at Nicky Bell when he decides to go online, although the contents of his hard drive have yielded up not a few choice morsels. To summarize: Bavin Shibbles is employed on the Gwynbrynydd estate (it sounds like someone clearing their throat) as a general gardener and groundskeeper. The lifestyle must suit him because neither the pay nor the accommodation that comes with the job (a caravan) are overly impressive. He doesn’t run a car; he has access only to a tractor and a bicycle, often pedaling the latter a distance of 3.2 miles to a pub in the closest village, The Cross Foxes at Bwlchgwydder (prolonged phlegmy expectoration).
Remote though it is, internet provision at this hostelry is very much tip-top for mid-Wales and over several evenings one has been able to watch and listen to the man’s interactions with fellow denizens of this rural demi-monde. Too late in the day to be introducing a host of new characters to the narrative, so we can skate over the intriguing cast of regular players to be found in the cozy lounge bar, to concentrate upon Myfanwy Perks, a mental health nurse of twenty-seven summers, the latest in a long line of impressionable young women to fall under the spell of the elusive N. Bell. (This is a shame because there is a pair of twin brothers here, semi-criminal scrap dealers, who are worthy of a chapter to themselves. And this is to say nothing of “Des the Wheel,” who, as his name suggests, is called Des. In the seventies, according to local legend, Des was a getaway driver for a notorious… but I’m getting carried away. Back to the main event.)
Nicky, known satirically in The Cross Foxes as “Call me Bav” (after his opening remarks) or “Johnny English,” or occasionally later in the evening as—inexplicably—“Sharon,” is nonetheless respected as an exotic; an orchid, if you will, in a garden of low-lying shrubbery. His over-bright teeth are the cause of some occasional ribaldry (which he takes in good part), but by and large there is grudging affection for
