I couldn’t help it. I failed to stifle a hysterical giggle.
“An actor? What is he talking about?”
“I meant an actor in the widest sense. Perhaps we should leave it for today.”
“I did know an actor. A lovely man, in the sixties before I met Daisy’s father. In fact you resemble him slightly, Dr. Eggstain, now you’ve taken off that frightful beard. He was in the West End, in a minor role, in a production starring John Gielgud. One afternoon during rehearsals they found themselves standing together at the urinals. Well, this theater had just been redecorated very splendidly at great expense; silks and velvet everywhere, marble this, gold-plated that, even in the bathrooms. So my friend the actor said, just to be chatty, These new toilets are very grand, aren’t they? And Gielgud replied, in that wonderfully fruity voice of his, Yes, I know. But they do make one’s cock look so shabby. Isn’t that marvelous?!”
Later, walking together to the Tube, Eggstain again said he didn’t entirely believe the fridge thing; that it felt more like Mum “having fun” with the idea.
“Hallucinating voices is generally constellated with other symptoms that we’re not seeing here.”
“You mean, if she was properly bonkers, she’d be bonkers in other ways too.”
“If you want to put it like that.”
We walked in companionable silence for a bit, his trainers making a tragic wheezing noise, at odds with Dr. E’s new clean-cut persona.
“How does it feel to have your face back?” I asked.
He pawed at his naked chops.
“Weird. Wonderful. Bit scary.”
“Has she seen it yet? Your missus.”
Eggstain looked rueful.
“She left the house early. She’s not going to be best pleased.”
“Good luck!”
Eggstain came to a halt.
“Daisy. If you don’t see me again, would you call the police? It will mean I’ve been murdered.”
“Shut. Up!”
“You don’t know her. Hope is a very angry person. Most of the time it’s well buried. Okay, she probably wouldn’t actually kill anyone, but when she loses control…”
He trailed off, his fingers climbing to his left ear, an odd scar formation on the lobe that I hadn’t noticed before.
“Did she do that?”
He didn’t answer. There was a pause.
“Are you off to work now?” he asked.
“She did, didn’t she? Blood. Dee. Hell.”
“Listen. It’s complicated. Life is complicated.”
“Right. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. Actually, that doesn’t work at all, does it?”
“Totally inappropriate.”
Another silence.
“Now I’m going to do what you do,” I told him, “and say the first thing that comes into my head.”
“That’s a technique for when you’re struggling with a problem. What problem are you struggling with?”
“My problem, my actual problem, is that I have to go to work, but I’m experiencing negative feelings about it.”
Eggstain smiled. Unencumbered by all the foliage, it stood revealed as a fine smile; warm, intelligent, knowing; other words like those.
He said, “The main thing about feelings, so they tell me, is to recognize them, to accept them, and to own them.”
“But to act on them, or not to act on them?”
“That very much depends.”
“Someone who had a powerful desire for, let’s say, a sausage sandwich…?”
“Just to pull an example out of the air?”
“Exactly. Out of the air. Someone like that. Should they act on those sausage sandwich feelings? Or not. What would be your advice?”
Eggstain frowned.
“Always difficult. With any sort of sandwich. Hmm. Brown sauce or red sauce?”
“Brown! Of course, brown. What do you think, I’m nuts or something?”
“My best advice? Buy the sandwich, eat it on the train.”
“I couldn’t. The smell.”
“You’re right. In that case, you have very little alternative. I’ll keep you company. If you need a little white lie to explain to your boss why you’re late, my advice would be: Tell one that makes you look better than if you’d arrived on time.”
“Wow. How does that work?”
“I stumbled on this technique by accident. Shall I explain as we walk?”
“Please.”
“So, this was years ago. I’d overslept massively, and was almost an hour late for an important meeting. I’m so sorry, I said when I finally arrived, but the caretaker in my building, he’s an old man, he had a bad fall, and I stayed with him until the ambulance arrived. Now this had actually happened—But Not On That Morning. And the best part was, the scary professor who ran the meeting said, Did he hit his head? And I was able to say, in all truthfulness—yes, yes he did. It was quite a nasty wound! And everyone thought I was a better person for being late, and not a lazy git who put the alarm off and went straight back to sleep. I probably shouldn’t have told you that story.”
“I’m very shocked. Doctors aren’t supposed to tell lies.”
“I wasn’t quite a doctor when this happened. And doctors, you should know, lie all the time.”
“These pills will have you back on your feet in no time.”
“Sometimes the lie is curative in itself. Because a doctor says it will work, it does work.”
We had reached our usual café.
As we stepped through the door, I said, “So just to be clear. This sausage sandwich is on medical advice?”
“Definitely. You can repeat as necessary.”
“And you’ll help me think up a lie for my boss?”
“You already know the lie. The art is to trick it out of yourself.”
It wasn’t complicated finding what to tell Saluki-woman. “Mum had to wait ages for the doctor,” seemed to go down perfectly well, although it hardly made me look like a better person.
But when I switched on my PC, I literally gasped—people actually turned around—when I saw what was sitting in my inbox.
An email from Nicky Bell!
Nicky Bell, who I’d been searching for… for simply yonks.
Long story, he wrote, but he was passing through London and he’d love to catch up if I could spare him the time. He’d thought a lot about me over the years; we’d been very young when “everything” had happened; he hoped life had treated me well, but quite understood if I wanted to tell him to jump in the lake.
