Daphne
Daphne
“So, how are we going to spend my seventieth birthday?” said Daphne to Jack. Which was, obviously, ridiculous, since Jack hadn’t been in a position to respond for the past fifteen years.
Daphne not only spoke to Jack regularly, she also talked to her house plants and to the people in the photographs dotted around her apartment, and she often shouted at actors and presenters on the TV. She didn’t, however, talk to the neighbors. Ever. Unless an urgent administrative issue cropped up, like the recent redecoration of the building’s “common parts.”
“Common parts?” she’d said to Jack in outrage, waving the letter from the building’s management company at the ceiling. “What kind of a descriptor is that? Sounds like something you’d find in a second-rate brothel.”
But, while Daphne avoided engaging with any of the other residents—or anyone at all, actually—she did know all about them. She could argue that she enjoyed the feeling of connection with the community that this gave her, but the reality was that she liked the sensation of power that an imbalance of information imbued. When you know more about someone than they know about you, it puts you in control. And it makes you safe.
Daphne’s source of information was a website she’d come across, about a year ago, called OurNeighbours.com. An extraordinary number of local residents appeared to have signed up to the sub-group that covered their end of Hammersmith, and she’d discovered that, if she joined them, she was able to lurk furtively, eavesdropping on everyone’s strongly held opinions, without ever having to declare herself.
Every morning, while she ate her toast and marmalade, Daphne would scroll through the latest posts, watching video surveillance footage of Amazon parcels being stolen from people’s doorsteps, reading heated debates about traffic-calming systems and residents’ parking, or looking at the awful , tasteless, often broken items people put up for sale, expecting some fool to pay good money for them.
Yesterday morning there’d been an argument about urban foxes. Were they friends, who should be left food in our gardens, or mange-ridden vermin who spread disease and caused damage? As always, the debate had rapidly descended from reasonable and measured into a slanging match resulting in one resident threatening a call to the police and the RSPCA, and another offering to cover his neighbor’s garden with fox poo to see how she liked it. Finally, after several posters being misnamed “Karen” for some reason, an admin had removed the whole thread from the site, and everyone had gone back to talking about rubbish collection.
Daphne loaded up the website, trying not to get toast crumbs on her keyboard. What was waiting for her on her birthday morning?
The talk today was surprisingly, and annoyingly, genial. A cleaner looking for work, a woman seeking advice on retrieving a wedding ring from a kitchen sink U-bend, and someone selling a dining-room table and chairs to a community of people who were highly unlikely to own a dining room. Since Daphne’s second-favorite website was Rightmove.co.uk, she knew that every local dining room had long since been converted into a home office, a gym or a “media center.” What, she wondered, did one do in a media center? Mediate? Meditate? Who knew?
Daphne kept scrolling through the recent posts, but was finding it impossible to concentrate. Seventy , she kept thinking. Seventy . Could she really be that old? She certainly didn’t feel it, and couldn’t yet believe it. How on earth had she got here? Where had all that time gone?
This wasn’t where Daphne had expected to be at this stage of her life. She’d rather imagined that she’d spend her older age surrounded by loving friends and family. Well, perhaps not loving friends and family, but at least a group of familiar people connected by history, genetics, or shared finances and real estate. Yet, here she was, utterly alone, stalking her neighbors and talking to her plants. Except for the yucca, which she’d never entirely trusted.
Her apartment, admittedly, was gorgeous, with views of the majestic, winding Thames, with Hammersmith Bridge to her right, Putney Bridge to her left, and the imposing, salmon-pink, terra-cotta-clad Harrods Furniture Depository on the opposite bank. But while it had initially felt like a place of safety—a cocoon—it had gradually become a prison, however luxurious. Since she’d moved in, fifteen years ago, she’d only ventured out once or twice a week to buy groceries, and recently she’d had the feeling that the walls were closing in on her, that eventually she’d be mashed, together with all her furniture, into a tiny cube.
Maybe it was time, whatever the consequences might be, to reengage with the world, to make some friends? Or at least some acquaintances. And what better day to start than her birthday?
The problem was, Daphne didn’t actually like other people very much, and she had no idea how one went about making friends as an adult, in any case. You couldn’t exactly ask someone to play hopscotch with you, or give them one of your Sherbet Lemons. They’d probably report you to the authorities, or bad-mouth you on OurNeighbours.com.
Daphne needed a plan , which shouldn’t be a problem since she was, after all, one of the best strategists she knew. She and Jack had spent hours standing in front of elaborately mapped-out flowcharts, uncapped pens in hand, interrogating them from all angles, adding in options, contingencies, backstops, firewalls. Stress testing, then redrawing until the names, places, times, code words, arrows, and symbols would infiltrate her dreams, whirling around and coalescing in alternative patterns, which sometimes provided a breakthrough.
It was probably when she’d loved Jack the most, those long evenings when she would toss him an idea and he’d catch it, reshape it slightly, and throw it back, the to-and-fro volley continuing until they’d created something spectacular together.
Could she do it without him?
Of course she could! She’d always been the real brains behind the operation. Not that Jack, or anyone else, would have acknowledged that. And, in any case, this was hardly a complex project, was it? Make some friends. A five-year-old could do it!
Daphne pulled a coat and handbag from the pegs by her front door. She would buy herself a whiteboard and some colored pens. Then she would construct a plan.