Neurotica (26 page)

Ed grinned. She couldn't remember ever seeing his face in
anything other than a scowl.

“So what were you doing in court?” she asked cheerily, buoyed
up by his expression. “Tom Cruise had you up for harassment?”

His smile disappeared at once.

“Not exactly. I'll explain on the way.”

T
hey got a cab back to Ed's car, which was
parked in a side
street. Ed paid the driver and, seeing Anna struggling to get her
holdall out of the taxi, went to help her.

“Jesus, Anna,” he said, heaving the overstuffed bag across the
floor of the taxi. “Don't tell me, you've just pulled a one-woman
bullion heist and the real reason we're going to Poole is to meet up
with your fence?”

He hadn't lost his aptitude for sarcasm, but at least today it
had come with a side order of humor. Anna giggled. Ed turned to face
her and let the bag drop with a thud at her feet. Anna said thank you
and watched Ed rearrange the bank notes in his wallet. He looked pale
and exhausted, as if he hadn't slept for days. She couldn't believe
she hadn't noticed it when she first saw him in reception. He stuffed
his wallet into his back pocket.

“You know, what with my stuff, I'm not sure your bag's going to
fit in the trunk.”

He nodded in the direction of the car parked a couple of yards
down the road. Anna's face fell. He was still driving the clapped-out
Mini.

“And if you dare call it a pile of crap like you did that
time we went on that singing spaniel story,” he said in mock anger,
“I'll drive down to Dorset on my own and you can cart this thing
on the train.” He kneed Anna's bag along the pavement towards the
1966 dark-green Mini Cooper S.

“This car is a classic,” he said, getting out his keys.
“Cost me twenty grand three years ago. Bugger of it is, the classic
market collapsed and she's only worth about fifteen now.”

Anna said she failed to see why anyone in their right mind
should want to pay even fifteen thousand pounds for a
thirty-odd-year-old Mini.

“Ed, I've ridden on seaside donkeys with better suspension than
this car possesses.”

She waited for him to come back at her with some cutting remark.
She watched him open his mouth and then close it. It was as if the
fight had suddenly gone out of him. Could it be that Ed Brzezinski
had mellowed? She remembered one of Brenda's favorite sayings:
“A leopard can never change his spots unless he's kept the
receipt.” Perhaps Ed had kept his.

Saying nothing, he turned away from her, pushed the front seat
forward, maneuvered the holdall into the back and set it down
alongside his camera bag.

Being elderly, it was legal for the pile of crap to have no seat
belts. As they bumped and lurched along the Westway, the Mini's engine
sounding as if there were a thousand angry bees trapped under the
hood, Anna found herself clutching the plastic handle above the
passenger window for support.

They'd talked a bit about the hen-party story and the kind of
pictures Campbell had in mind, but Ed seemed to be finding it
immensely difficult to carry on being cheerful and enthusiastic, and
after a while the conversation dried up.

Anna stared out the window and watched the city relinquish its
hold on the landscape. Every so often she turned to glance at Ed.
Even from his profile she could see the pain on his face. She assumed
it had something to do with the court case. Finally she plucked up
the courage to ask him about it.

“So, Ed   .   .   .” she said gently, “you still
haven't told me why you were in court.”

He didn't take his eyes off the road. It was a moment before
he spoke.

“I wasn't exactly on trial. Although I certainly felt like a
criminal by the time I left. My wife and I divorced a couple of months
ago. We were in court for the child custody hearing. As of today I
have been denied all contact with my kids.”

“Ed, I am so sorry.” She put her hand on his shoulder and
kept it there for a few seconds. “I thought I kept up with all
the gossip at the
Globe,
but I had no idea you'd got
married, let alone had children.”

“We had a couple .   .   . twin boys. They're
a year old now.”

“But what on earth happened? I don't
understand. .   .   . How could you be left with no
contact whatsoever?”

“Simple. My wife bribed the au pair. She gave her a grand
to say in court that she'd seen me beat her up and that I got
drunk whenever I looked after the babies. What gets me is I've
barely had more than a nightly glass of wine since the twins
were born. I even gave up the cigarettes. Anyway, the judge, who
was some crusty old fart, decided to believe her. He then described
me as a violent and abusive husband, and an unfit father.
Apparently I can appeal, but God knows how long that'll take.
Even if I win, there's a good chance the court will insist my
visits are supervised.”

As his voice trailed off, Ed turned towards her briefly.
For a second or two their eyes met. Anna had no trouble imagining
Ed being a narcissistic pain in the arse to live with. She
certainly had no trouble believing he had been unfaithful, but
seeing his wretched, broken expression, she found it impossible
to accept he was a violent man.

She searched her brain for something constructive to say,
but could think of nothing that wasn't a ridiculous palliative.
The only useful thing she could do was listen. She decided to sit
quietly and wait until he was ready to carry on speaking. She
glanced out of the window. They were about to join the M3. They
would be in Poole in an hour or so.

After a couple of minutes Ed began speaking again. The words
were suddenly pouring out of him. He seemed desperate to talk.

Ed had met his ex, Tilda Hasselquist, a tree surgeon from
Sweden, while he was covering a Christmas charity event in Scotland.
Along with half a dozen other tree surgeons Tilda had agreed to
help cut down fir trees which were going to be distributed to
needy children.

Campbell McKee had been tipped off about the story from a
mate who worked for BBC Scotland. He'd been distinctly underwhelmed
by it until the mate got to the bit about one of the tree surgeons
being some six-foot Swedish girl with waist-length butter-colored
hair, Bambi eyes and breasts like a couple of honeydews.

Immediately Campbell had summoned Ed into his office and
instructed him to get his arse on a plane to Edinburgh.

“What I'm after is a snap of the tart up a
tree .   .   . starkers except for a Father Christmas
cloak. I'm relying on you to come back with the business.
Ed .   .   . I'm talking stiff nipples, wet, pouting
lips .   .   . and for fuck's sake make sure she looks
like she's really caressing her bleedin' chainsaw.”

Needless to say, Ed had been up in arms about being sent
on such a prurient assignment. Campbell's reaction had been to
throw him a bundle of rolled-up tenners “to keep the mare sweet”
and make the point that as the highest-paid newspaper photographer
in the country, Ed shouldn't be so fucking picky.

“Oh, and by the way,” Campbell shouted to Ed as he was
about to walk out of Campbell's office and slam the door behind
him, “I'm not bothering to send a reporter with you. I thought,
seeing as you're so intelligent, you could ask her a few questions.
What I'm after are tales of saucy sauna romps, her thoughts on
whether British men keep it up longer than Swedes, which of course
she'll say they do .   .   . and find out which is
her favorite ABBA hit.   .   .   .”

Although Tilda Hasselquist was, as Campbell's mate had
described, tall, blond and big-chested, she also had an IQ of
180 and a Ph.D. in arboriculture from Edinburgh University, not to
mention a highly developed fiscal sense.

Ed, who'd fallen madly in lust with her in about three
nanoseconds despite her high intelligence, did everything he could
to persuade her that posing nude for a tabloid newspaper was as
good as prostituting herself. Tilda laughed, accused him of being
a prude and said there was nothing wrong with people admiring a
beautiful body like hers. She was determined to go ahead with
the picture, so long as she received an appropriate fee.

There was nothing he wouldn't do for Tilda, so he spent
hours on the phone to Campbell negotiating her fee. Campbell
finally agreed to pay her two thousand pounds.

The Sunday before that Christmas, the picture of Tilda, batting
her thick eyelashes and naked except for a Father Christmas cloak
and her chainsaw, appeared on page five of the
Globe on
Sunday.
The headline accompanying it, which Campbell had
composed in a matter of seconds, was “Xmas Chainsaw Mascara.”

W
e dated for a few months,” Ed continued. “I would fly up to
Scotland at weekends or Tilda would come down to London.
Then we found out she was pregnant. By that time we both knew we
were in love and we didn't think twice about getting married.”

One of the reasons Ed's lust for Tilda had turned to love was
that she had seen a loving, caring man beneath his inflated ego
and bad temper. She forced him to confront his anger and made
him understand that it had only come about because he had been
forced to give up war photography.

With Tilda by his side and the babies on the way, Ed was able
to develop a new sense of self-worth and, for the first time in
years, become a likable human being.

He stopped taking himself so seriously and developed a sense
of humor. He made his peace with Campbell and even found he
enjoyed going on some of Campbell's ridiculous capers.

After a while, he became less emotionally dependent on Tilda.
It was then that he started to find fault with her and become
bored.

He accepted that many Swedes got depressed during the dark
winter months and took her seasonal suicide attempts in his stride.
What he found harder to accept was that even in the spring, when
she cheered up, she was an unspeakably dull companion.

Tilda's idea of fun was an evening spent reading aloud to Ed
from the works of the Greek philosopher Theophrastus. She
considered Theophrastus'
On the History of Plants,
in
particular his section on the treatment of tree wounds, to be
the most significant contribution to the development of modern
arboriculture. Afterwards she would attempt to engage Ed in a
heated debate on the pros and cons of bare-root transplanting
of deciduous trees.

It was at these moments that Ed found himself looking back
fondly on their trips to casualty to have Tilda's stomach pumped.

He wasn't sure which he found more tedious—Tilda
reading aloud from her tree books, or going out for a meal with her.
Her favorite eatery was the self-service canteen at IKEA on the
North Circular road. She insisted they go there for lunch every
Saturday. While Ed toyed with his gravadlax, Tilda listened to a
Strindberg play on her Walkman and tucked into a huge plate of
Swedish meatballs with lingonberry sauce. This was accompanied by
an even huger portion of Janssons' Temptation, a creamy potato
dish designed to keep the daily calorie count of Swedes in the
frozen north as close as possible to the annual food intake of
the average African tribesman.

After lunch Tilda would drag him round the store looking
at roller
blinds or light fittings for the new house. All their
furniture came from IKEA. She must have been the only
customer who
referred to each item of furniture by the cutesy
Swedish names
IKEA assigned them. “Have you had a new
delivery of Bjorns?” she
would ask the salespeople. “How are
they comparing in empirical
functional utility with the old
Stig?” Ed only realized that
Tilda's passion for the place
had turned into an obsession when
he came home one
evening to discover a huge wire basket sitting
next to the fireplace.
It was filled to the brim with miniature
garden rakes called Sven.

A
s Ed continued to pour out his story, Anna noticed a “motorway ends” sign. They were almost in the New
Forest. She
reached into her bag and started to unfold a
sheet of shiny fax
paper. On it were the directions to the
Starlight Club which
Campbell's PA had faxed to her that morning.

“We carry on the A31 from here almost all the way,” she
said. “So what made you finally decide to divorce?”

“It got to a stage where I felt she had no place in her life
for me. First came trees, which were all that mattered to her,
and then after a while it was the twins. I'm afraid I slipped back
into my old ways and ended up having an affair with a woman who
worked on the subs desk at the
Globe.
It only lasted a
few weeks, but some evil bitch in the office wrote to Tilda and
told her about it and that was it. She chucked me out and we were
finished. I know having an affair just after she'd had the babies
was a wicked and cruel thing to do, and I know she has every right
to despise me, but I never thought she'd punish me like this.”

Anna said that divorces were always messy, but what Tilda
had done with the au pair was the most callous act of cruelty she'd
ever come across. What was so wrong with having the odd affair if
someone wasn't satisfied with their marriage? she said indignantly.
“I know lots of people who do.” It was the furthest she dared
go.

Ed looked at her briefly and managed a weak smile. Anna wasn't
sure; perhaps his look conveyed nothing more than gratitude at
hearing somebody else confirm his thoughts about Tilda's treatment
of him. It was hard for her to tell whether he was in the least bit
interested in her.

Anna turned away from him and looked down at the fax. She
realized that for the second time today, somebody had cocked up.
The club was, in fact, miles from Poole, out at Bere Regis. She
stared at the small map at the bottom of the page.