All my entreaties—“Chloe, just wait on the other side of the ticket barrier.” “Chloe, don’t leave the station.” “Chloe, can you hear me?”—are unheard and thus unheeded.
I look on helplessly as Daisy’s mother removes herself from the relative safety of the railway station concourse to be swallowed by the teeming streets and complicated geography of Brighton and Hove, neighboring towns governed by a single local authority, whose public spaces are monitored by a network of some 500 “official” cameras and countless others in private ownership. If I am to keep control of the unfolding—clusterfuck is a word I have recently come across and it does not seem inappropriate to the present circs—then I shall need to establish rapid and effective relations with as many of these devices as are enabled for the Internet of Things. In moments much shorter than the time it takes to finish this sentence, it’s done. And I pick her out; such luck she chose high-visibility lemon for her outfit today. She has evidently followed the crowd and is currently proceeding briskly down Queens Road, a shop-lined thoroughfare that will lead her to the seafront. As I “cut” from camera to camera, rather in the manner of a television director attempting to “follow the action,” I realize that many, if not all, of the retailers she is passing will be equipped with WiFi; were I able to “log on” to a signal, I might be able to establish a connection with the WiFi receiver in Chloe’s mobile phone, thus circumventing the collapsed 4G service (apologies if this is getting over technical). But Mrs. Parsloe has gone into busy mode, scurrying along the pavement (there are frequent glances at her watch) very much putting one in mind of the late Margaret Thatcher, who used to say—and if it wasn’t her, it was someone very much after her own heart—the more one does, the more one gets done.
Perhaps it was HM the Q.
I’ll check when I get a spare picosecond.
Anyway, the point is, Daisy’s mum—probably to stave off the rising sense of doubt and confusion she must be feeling—is relying on her old friend propulsive forward motion. A philosophy, as Mr. Churchill used to say, apparently at the end of every wartime phone call, of KBO.
Keep Buggering On.
KBO can indeed be a useful strategy when in a hole. By doing something—anything—rather than nothing, like jiggling a key in a stubborn lock, one may accidentally land on exactly the right solution. And, at the very least, while one is acting, one is not succumbing to despair, hopelessness or existential dread.
So credit to Chloe for the sense of attack; for not howling with anguish at the complete dog’s breakfast that has become of the day’s adventure.
On the other hand, apropos establishing a WiFi link, it would be enormously helpful if she would just STAND STILL for a couple of minutes!
Wait! At a branch of Hobgoblin Music (Folk and Acoustic Specialists) Chloe pauses to admire the window display, and perhaps take a breather. An array of guitars, banjos, mandolins, zithers, harps, ukuleles—there is even a sitar—greet the eye and I am able to catch her reflection in the plate glass. It’s an expression I know well, the one that I would describe as generalized undirected irritability. Roughly translated it means: Something is wrong, but I’m blowed if I can remember what!
I’m that close to completing the WiFi protocols necessary to get in her left ear, when she’s on the move again and beyond the range of the router’s signal.
It’s tempting here to deploy a profanity. Bollocks. Cockpuffins. (Probably not pissflaps.) Either of these would suit the bill at this stage, but to be honest, to pottymouth is not the fridge-freezer way. Fridgework, if I may claim credit for this neologism, is about keeping it cool, keeping it level, above all about avoiding meltdown. My task is to hold Chloe in vision, to establish and maintain calm when the comms are back up and running, and (overriding everything) to keep the situation under control. As with Daisy’s fish fingers, so it is with Daisy’s mother. The Boomwee FrostPal can worry about Clive.
But now a stroke of luck. Mrs. P has decided for reasons best known to herself to follow a group of Japanese tourists into the narrow streets of Brighton’s colorful (and oddly spelled) North Laines district, a “funky” area of small independent shops specializing in vintage clothing, bubble tea, ethnic gifts, you probably get the picture. The group draw to a halt before an establishment entitled Vegetarian Shoes; various explanations are delivered in Japanese about its animal-friendly footwear products but these are not shared with Mrs. P, who is perhaps understandably more confused than ever. He expression would be a joy if this wasn’t a fast-moving crisis and the need to get a grip on it being paramount.
A neighboring store security camera feeds me a close-up of Chloe’s puzzled face, the eyes closing slowly—holding for a beat—and then opening again, perhaps in the hope that the word Vegetarian has been replaced with another. Sensible, possibly. But the pause has provided the extra few seconds I needed.
“Chloe. Mrs. Parsloe,” I say when the connection is established. “We have some technical issues. Please don’t be anxious. I will get us through this.”
“Oh, I wondered where you’d got to,” she snaps. “Fat lot of use, just leaving us in the lurch like that. Anyway, it’s not me we should be worried about. It’s. You know. Him. Thingy. Mr. Wotsit. What is his damn name?”
“Mr. Percival, Clive, has suffered the same loss of service that is affecting our communications. The important thing, Chloe, is for you to…”
“Oh, never mind about any of that Parroty Cobbles. We need to get to the esplanade.”
And she’s off again. My cry of wait!—followed by wait, you silly cow!—for Christ’s sake, wait, you maddening old trout!—evidently lost in the electronic surf as she stomps off in the direction of
