‘Welcome, Mi… Patsy. I see you’ve booked our ground floor room for a week,’ Laura confirmed when she looked up from the  guest list. ‘Eh, would you like a hand with your luggage?’ she asked after she handed Patsy her key.

     Igor jumped to his feet and came over to the reception desk. ‘I take for you,’ he offered.

     Patsy nearly jumped out of her skin for a second time. ‘Oh laudy, nearly another accident!’ she declared as she twisted one leg in front of the other and bent her knees. ‘You people don’t have much respect for a woman’s bladder, do you?’

     With the thought of the beautiful new, taupe coloured carpet foremost in her mind, Laura ushered Patsy through to her room. Igor followed, but only after he nearly ripped his arm out of its socket when he picked up Patsy’s case…
 
 
 
Laura chuckled to herself as she listened to Patsy having yet another full-blown, one-sided conversation in the residents’ lounge.

     ‘If you didn’t like the sausages, you should have said something.’

     ‘But if they don’t know you only like pork sausages, it’s not their fault!’

     ‘Really?’

     ‘Of course. They probably don’t serve pork sausages in case any of the guests are Jewish. It stands to reason.’

     ‘So what do I do about it?’

     Silence followed for a few seconds while Patsy considered the question.

     ‘Why don’t you talk to Laura about it?’ she eventually suggested.

     Another moment’s silence.

     ‘Good idea… Do you think she’ll mind?’

     Patsy’s alter ego replied immediately. ‘Well, she seems nice enough. There’s only one way to find out…’

     Laura tried to look engrossed in something on her laptop as she heard Patsy come through from the lounge and approach the reception desk. It would seem that when she knew there was another human being within ten feet of her, Patsy’s ‘friend’ disappeared. For two days everyone had looked for her companion every time she was overheard. Not anymore. Laura was just relieved the bedroom walls and ceilings were as thick as they were. When the ‘conversations’ got animated, they could be heard through her bedroom door.

     ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Patsy said when she reached the desk and pulled out the chair so she could sit down opposite Laura. ‘But I’d like a word, please.’

     The fact Patsy was wearing the same yellow sweater over the pair of black trousers she’d worn the previous day, came as no surprise. After Jenny serviced her room the morning after she arrived, she couldn’t wait to tell Laura and Karen the reason for Patsy’s heavy suitcase. The only clothes it had contained were the ones she was dressed in now, another sweater, seven pairs of knickers and socks, a pair of pink, winceyette pyjamas, and her fluffy slippers. The rest of the enormous, antiquated, leather case had been filled with an old fashioned computer, a monitor, a mouse, and a book about penguins.

     ‘It’s about the sausages, isn’t it?’ Laura asked as she tried to keep a straight face.

     Patsy looked dumbfounded. ‘Why yes, yes it is… how did you know?’

     Laura was just about to tell her about overhearing her soliloquy in the residents' lounge, but decided not to. If Patsy wasn’t aware of the fact that she talked to herself, who was she to tell her?

     ‘Igor told me you didn’t eat them this morning for the second time running. Would you prefer pork?’

     The relief of not having to ask showed on Patsy’s face. One of the things she’d looked forward to when she booked her holiday at the Bedford, was having a full English breakfast every day. Because she hated cooking, she hadn’t had a decent sausage in months.

     Her charming smile warmed Laura to her yet again. She might be a bit batty, but there was something very endearing about her. Well spoken, and always polite, Patsy had chatted amiably to all of them when she was either having her breakfast in the dining room, or a drink and snack in the bar.

     ‘Do you mind me asking a question?’ Laura asked.

     Patsy didn’t mind at all. It was nice to have a chat with someone while her room was being serviced. Personally, she didn’t care if anyone cleaned her room or not, but it was fun being away from it for a while.

     ‘It’s just that Je…the chambermaid mentioned you had a computer in your room. Would it not be easier for you if you had a laptop? That way you would have access to the free Wi-Fi we have available for all the guests. It would also mean you don’t have so much to carry when you travel.’

     A look of confusion swept over Patsy’s face. ‘Wi-Fi… what’s that?’

      It was hard to work out what age Patsy was because of her greying hair and old-fashioned glasses, but Laura was sure she couldn’t be much over forty. It was as though she was trapped in a different time zone. A place where things like Wi-Fi didn’t exist.

     ‘It’s a cordless way of getting on the internet,’ she advised her without trying to sound like a know-it-all. ‘Everyone uses it nowadays. It’s so much easier. Here, I’ll show you,’ she said as she swivelled her handbag sized laptop around for Patsy to see the screen. ‘There… look, I’m on the internet now, and I can get a signal anywhere in the building.’

     Patsy adjusted her glasses and squinted at the screen before shaking her head. ‘I’ve heard about the internet, but you wouldn’t catch me going anywhere near it. My father warned me about it. It’s full of nasty people trying to get hold of your money. I only need my computer to do my writing and…’ she tittered before continuing. ’Playing my games of spider solitaire. I couldn’t do that on one of those silly little things. The screen’s not big enough for a start!’

     Laura was lost for words. Surely there wasn’t anyone left on the planet who didn’t know about Wi-Fi and laptops? The TV was full of adverts, as was the press. Even her seventy-eight year old aunt was up to speed in that department. Deciding to change the subject, Laura asked Patsy what she wrote about as she turned her laptop back to face her. Thanks to the information derived from Jenny, Patsy’s answer came as no surprise.

     ‘Penguins!’ Patsy told her with a proud smile. ‘I write about two penguins called Floyd and Fanny.’

     Another conversation stopper. What was there to write about penguins? Sure, Laura had been intrigued with the David Attenborough documentary on the BBC a couple of years ago, but she couldn’t imagine it was a subject a middle-aged spinster in the UK would know much about.

     ‘I see…‘  Laura said, although obviously, judging by the expression on her face, she didn’t. ‘Any particular kind of penguins?’

     She wished she’d never asked. Patsy hardly drew breath as she rattled on about King Penguins from Antarctica. In an effort to impress her on the merits of Wi-Fi, Laura googled ‘King Penguins’ as she listened, and found a clip from the David Attenborough documentary on YouTube. Patsy stopped talking as soon as Laura turned her laptop around to face her again, the sound of squawking penguin chicks filling the air between them.

     Patsy’s face was a picture. ‘How did you do that?’ she gasped, her eyes glued to the screen.

     ‘My laptop’s connected to Wi-Fi. I just Googled it,’ Laura explained.

     Without pulling her eyes away from one of the most fascinating things she’d ever seen in her life, Patsy asked Laura what Google was.

     ‘It’s a search engine on the internet. You can find out about anything these days. You just type in a question and it gives you various answers.’

     Patsy took her glasses off and blinked back at Laura with the innocence of a child.

     ‘What’s a search engine?’
 
        
 
Laura couldn’t believe how quickly the week had gone by. After Patsy bought her laptop at Argos, plus a pair of new reading glasses from Boots, they’d spent several hours together at the reception desk as Laura tried to teach her as much as she could in the little free time she had. After Patsy explained that she’d lived with her elderly father until he’d died the year before, Laura began to understand why she was so old-fashioned in her ways. Her father didn’t approve of television, with the exception of the news, so she’d rarely watched it since her mother passed away twenty-five years ago. She wouldn’t even have had her computer, her most valued possession, if her father’s district nurse hadn’t given it to her after she bought a new one. It was then that Patsy had started to write about the two penguins.
 
     On Sunday afternoon, Laura decided to talk to Patsy about the main thing that gave everyone the impression she was a nutter. After she'd successfully transferred what little data there was from Patsy's computer to her laptop by putting it on a memory stick, she summoned up the courage to ask the question.

      ‘Have you always talked to yourself, Patsy?’

     Without hesitation, Patsy replied. ‘Well, yes. After Mummy died, there was nobody to talk to but Daddy. Not that he said much. Living in the country, I never really saw anyone else because he ordered all the shopping from the village by phone. But most people talk to themselves, don’t they?’

     Laura hesitated before she answered her. It was all beginning to make sense. Now forty-one, Patsy had obviously spent over half her life in solitary confinement. With no friends or siblings to advise her, she had no idea how to dress, how to socialise, or even what new technology was available to her. The fact that her wealthy father was nearly fifty when Patsy was born, something she’d told Laura the day before, meant he’d retired before she left boarding school. She’d obviously just taken over her mother’s job as a housewife after she died in a car accident, and not questioned the fact she should have a life of her own. No wonder she talked to herself.

     ‘No, Patsy, they don’t…’