“Ooh. I like that,” I told him. “Very shrinky.”
“I apologize. It’s a bad habit. Once you’ve read a bit of Freud, everything is always something else.”
I handed him the takeaway menu from Kong’s Kitchen.
“So go on, make something out of this.”
He pulled a face; a novelty because finally his expression was visible to the world.
“So here is the tragedy of the human condition,” he said with shy smile. “As we cannot have everything in life, we are forced to choose. Alternatives exclude. For every yes, there must be a no. If we order the deep-fried chili beef we are obliged to forgo the spicy mutton hotpot with mushroom and beancurd.”
“Where does it say that?”
“This menu, Daisy, is a perfect metaphor for our human fate. We can’t have it all, and in any case, everything ends. Right here, where it says last orders 11:30 p.m.”
“Well, I’m not agreeing to that. Let’s order the chili beef and the hotpot.”
“Even though everything fades in the end?”
“Because everything fades!”
“How do you feel about Peking duck and pancakes?”
“Let’s get that too! And the Metaphorical Kung Pao Prawns.”
“Interesting. How do they come?”
“The prawns? Stir-fried in existential ennui with a mixture of regret and despair.”
“They sound yummy.”
Over dinner and an episode of First Dates which happened to be playing when I flicked on the telly we managed to forget the essential awfulness of humanity’s predicament (forced to choose, in a world where all choices end in darkness, etc.).
Eggstain had never seen the show and was amazed that people allowed themselves to be filmed flirting with others whom they fancied (or didn’t if it turned out “there wasn’t that spark”).
“These two are very dull, aren’t they?” said Eggstain of a pair of divorcees from the Midlands. “I honestly don’t know who I feel more sorry for.”
“That’s the meanest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
“Really? You must have somehow got the idea that I’m a nice person.”
“Now don’t spoil it.”
“Christ, they’re boring. Maybe they deserve each other. They say, don’t they, that when two awful people pair up it prevents four people from being miserable.”
It felt like a relief to see Eggstain’s normal side; to discover that he could be just as shitty as anyone else.
“So tell me about Nicky,” he said.
I poured us each another glass of Pinot Grigio and gave him the extended play version.
“You were babies,” he said of the early bit. When I’d waved a sundress from a balcony in the Aegean.
“And now he’s all grown up. Horribly grown up. He said he’d signed the Official Secrets Act!”
“Do people who’ve signed that ever tell?”
“Good point!”
There was a lull while I revisited some uneaten mutton hotpot.
“So she really went bananas when you shaved off the beard?”
“There was a difficult conversation. Then a big chill. And I thought, well, that’s where we are. Things will settle. But the next evening—tonight—she had an absolute meltdown. She actually said…” He trailed off.
“What? What did she actually say?”
Eggstain sighed. “She said, I actually can’t bear to look at you.”
“Jesus.”
“That is quite a hard thing to hear. Impossible, in fact. But as I say, things hadn’t been right between us for a long time.”
“So what did you do?”
“I was rude.”
“Go on. Sorry for smiling.”
“That’s okay. It is kind of funny.”
Then there was a long pause, maybe ten or fifteen seconds while he just stared at me.
I said, “What?”
He shook his head. Smiled.
I said, “Aren’t you going to tell me what you said?”
“I called her a bad word.”
“Did it begin with ‘c’?”
“It might have.”
“I called Nicky the C-word this evening. How funny.”
“Not very grown up, is it?”
“Who wants to be one of those? Not when everything ends and… and, what was it? Alternatives explode.”
“Exclude. For every yes, there must be a no. In fact, there must be many noses. Noes. Examples of the word no.”
“Are you all right?”
“No.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m gabbling.”
Is there a book about how it happens? When you know you’re going to kiss someone. Perhaps it’s just one of those things that pops into your head unannounced; a command sent directly from the non-verbal grapefruit underlying the pancake. And how does it happen when it pops into two heads simultaneously? Eggstain would have had an answer, but it definitely wasn’t the moment to ask.
“Wow,” he said when it was finished.
“You know you’ve got Hoisin sauce on your shirt?”
“It’s hard to care, Daisy.”
We kissed again. I wasn’t timing it with a stopwatch, but after a minute, or perhaps it was longer, I opened one eye to discover Eggstain had opened one of his eyes too. We laughed.
“There’s Hoisin sauce on your jumper now,” he said.
“So there is. You’re right, though. It is hard to care.”
The third kiss ended in a clatter of takeaway containers falling off the coffee table.
The fourth—
I won’t list them all.
Somewhere, probably in the low teens, we broke off and I said, “Listen. I can’t go on calling you Eggstain. Not if we’re. Not if we’re doing this kind of thing.”
“Boyhood nickname. I see your point.”
“But Mark?”
“It is my given name.”
“It’s very wotsit. You know. Rhymes with bark.”
“Markie?”
“Not that either.”
“Middle name?”
“What is it?”
“Don’t laugh.”
“Go on. What is it?”
“It’s for my grandfather. Promise you won’t laugh.”
“Markie, I can’t make that promise.”
“Okay. Here goes nothing…”
Well, it was a pretty funny name. And I was right not to make any promises about laughing. Fortunately, nature has arranged it that you can’t kiss and laugh at the same time. Like sneezing with your eyes open, it just can’t be done.
As you may imagine, we onlookers from the Internet of Things were transfixed by the unfolding events on Daisy’s Ikea sofa.
Yes, we all understood there had been a growing understanding between the lady of the house and the memory guru, but none of us expected it to erupt in the way it did, namely in an epic outbreak of smooching.
“Yikes,” said the television set. “What just happened?” (It hadn’t been paying attention, being preoccupied by a so-called “relegation clash” between two struggling football teams in the north of England.)
“Oh my
