Neurotica (4 page)

I
t took Dan a few moments to get his breath back and lift
himself into a sitting position, but by that time the little boy
had unscrewed the lid and had his nose deep inside the jar. He then
proceeded to lift it high above his head and began showing it off
like the Jules Rimet cup to everybody in the waiting room.

“Look, man done a great big smelly poo-poo like my do. Why
has man done poo in jar and not in va twoilet?”

F
or a few seconds there was an ominous silence. This was
followed by what can only be described as a universal waiting-room
retch-in, after which the little boy's mother started to have
hysterics. These involved her climbing up onto her chair, lifting
up her skirt and screaming for somebody to remove
that
thing,
as if Dan's turd were about to sprout legs and whiskers
and start scurrying about the surgery. This led to a widespread
panic among the pensioners, who all made a surprisingly aerobic
dash for the door, but were forced to a halt when their walking
frames, sticks and shopping trolleys ended up logjammed in the
narrow hallway.

In a matter of seconds, the receptionist had relieved the
toddler of Dan's stool sample, but by that time Dan had escaped out
of the emergency exit. Five minutes later he was back at his desk
writing an intro to a piece on the effect on the FTSE-100 of recent
profit-taking in Wall Street.

D
an was just about to turn into the park and wondering how one went about changing GPs when he noticed a 1960
turquoise Ford Zephyr convertible pull into a parking bay on the
other side of the road. A moment later, Brenda got out, looking as
if she had completely lost her sartorial marbles.

A
nna was beginning to panic. The traffic on the east-bound lane of the North Circular was at a complete standstill. The roads
had been clear until just after Hanger Lane roundabout, but for
the best part of ten minutes she had moved no more than a few
feet. She couldn't help thinking that if they still lived in
Blackheath the journey to manor park would have taken no more than
half an hour. Not that the proximity of Blackheath to Manor Park
Jewish Cemetery was a reason for moving back. Anna had loved
Blackheath and all the friends she had there and had been mightily
pissed off with Dan for demanding they move simply because some
examination league table or other had insisted that state schools
in the London Borough of Richmond got some of the best General
Certificate of Secondary Education results in the country. So now
they lived on the outskirts of one of the poshest areas of London,
and were struggling every month to pay a whacking great mortgage on
an Edwardian town house, just so Dan didn't have to send his
children to private schools and could pretend he was still an
ideologically sound socialist.

Anna had passed most of the time frantically twiddling the
tuner on the car radio, trying to find the local traffic news, but
kept getting some Talk Radio shrink doing a phone-in. The rest of
the time she had spent staring at the room settings in Leather
Universe, the furniture hypermarket, which was set back a few yards
from the road. A particularly gruesome lounge setting caught her
eye. This had, without doubt, been put together from artifacts
plundered from Liberace's tomb, because it included a lavender
suede three-piece, a zebra-skin hearthrug and a white-and-gold baby
grand complete with four-branch candelabra.

Anna took another look at her watch. It was nearly half past
two. She was never going to get to the burial ground by three. She
decided the best thing to do was to abandon any idea of trying to
make it to the cemetery. Instead she would head straight for Uncle
Henry's house in Manor Park, where everybody was due to come back
for the traditional postinterment tea.

The bugger of it was that because she had missed the actual
burial, Gloria had undoubtedly lost important daughter-parading
time. Now she would have to make it up to her mother by hanging
around until after the rabbi had been to the house to conduct
evening prayers. These probably wouldn't start until after seven,
which meant she wouldn't be back until ten. Anna reached into the
glove compartment for the mobile phone. As she dialed home, she
hoped desperately that this wasn't Denise's night for her line
dancing, and that the baby-sitter could be bribed with the promise
of a few extra quid in her pay packet to stay on until Dan got
home.

It took over an hour for the traffic to crawl up to the Brent
Cross turnoff, where for no apparent reason it melted away. Anna
put her foot firmly on the accelerator. She could see a set of
traffic lights a few hundred yards down the road. They had just
turned green. She decided if they stayed green until she had gone
through them, then she would find a lover within the week and she
wouldn't have to phone Liaisons Dangereux and make an awful video.
They did.

B
renda was wearing a short red-and-white-checked gingham dress
with puffed sleeves, white ankle socks and red sparkly shoes.
She'd got her bleached blond hair in two wiry plaits held in place
by glittery ribbons, which matched her shoes. A Yorkshire terrier
puppy yapping under her arm completed her grits-and-hominy
ensemble.

She hadn't seen Dan because she was busy trying to control
the puppy, which was wriggling and squirming to get down onto the
pavement, probably to cock its leg up a traffic warden. At the same
time, Brenda was attempting to rummage through her brown leather
school satchel for parking meter money.

Dan, although baffled, had taken one look at Brenda's getup
and experienced an immediate lightening of his mood, together with
a temporary restoration of his sense of humor. He decided to sneak
up and surprise her.

He approached Brenda from behind on what would have been
tiptoes had he not been wearing a pair of brand-new Oxford brogues
which were still rock hard and almost impossible to bend even when
walking normally.

By now, Brenda had put a pound in the meter, but still had
her back to him as she stood thumbing through a Nicholson's
Streetfinder. Dan tapped her twice on the shoulder.

“What's the problem, Bren? You and Toto having trouble
finding the Yellow Brick Road?” To Dan's disappointment and
annoyance, Brenda didn't flinch. She'd clearly caught sight of him
as he crossed the road.

“Wrong film, stupid,” she said, reaching up to kiss him on
both cheeks and nearly squashing the dog in the process. “F'your
information, this is the prototype for the Sweet FA Pollyanna look
I'm gonna be launching in Milan next summer. Me and the team
thought it was time we got a bit more cutting edge—more
Vivienne Westwood.”

D
an couldn't help thinking that if Brenda wasn't careful, all
she would be launching next summer would be a new range of
straitjackets together with the latest sweet fa fragrance, Eau de
Largactyl. But for the time being, she sounded fairly sane, even if
she didn't look it. She was on her way to do a home fitting with
the actress-model wife of some worn-out millionaire rock star. She
said she had twenty minutes or so to kill, and did Dan fancy a
cuppa?

H
e held the yapping hound, who was called Keith, while Brenda
hauled up the car's white-canvas hood. She locked Keith in
the Zephyr, and she and Dan headed for a Café Rouge two or
three hundred yards down the road. The young Aussie waiter couldn't
take his eyes off Brenda's outfit. As he showed them to a table
by the window, he seemed unable to prevent his thoughts becoming
words. He pulled out a chair for Brenda. “You wouldn't prefer a
tuffet, I suppose?” he asked. Brenda pretended not to hear. Dan
ordered a decaf cappuccino (caffeine gave him palpitations) with skimmed
milk (full fat gave him heartburn). Brenda asked for a Perrier with
extra slices of lime.

The waiter went to the bar. “One Perrier, extra lime, one
Why Bother,” Dan heard him say.

D
an watched Brenda chew silently on her bits
of lime without
so much as wincing and then drop the bright-green crescent
skins into the Ricard ashtray. Her mood seemed to have changed
since coming into the restaurant. She had become very quiet
and hadn't said a word for over a minute. In all the years Dan
had known Brenda, he had never seen her looking so nervous
and unsure of herself. It was as if she were trying to pluck up
the courage to say something, but couldn't. Dan decided to help
her out.

“C'mon, Bren, speak to me. What's up?”

Brenda looked at him without a trace of a smile or mischief
on her face. She began picking at the lime skins.

The truth was that ever since giving Anna the newspaper ad
for Liaisons Dangereux, she had been tormented by thoughts of how
unspeakably wicked and disloyal she had been to Dan. Now she
had bumped into him out of the blue, she felt she owed it to him to
at least give him a vague hint that Anna might be up to something.
The problem was that she was frightened of saying too much and
spilling all Anna's beans.

“Look, Dan,” she began hesitantly, “the last thing in the
world I'd want to do is interfere in your marriage, but I don't
think you've got the foggiest how much this imaginary illness
carry-on of yours has got to Anna. It's driving her seriously off
her trolley. I know she still loves you, and she's tried very hard
to understand and help, but I'm telling you, Dan, if you don't make
a real effort right now, today, to find yourself a shrink, and
knock this thing on the head, I'm frightened you might end up
losing her.”

As Brenda spoke, guilt and shame began to coat Dan's stomach
like heavy black treacle. It was the same feeling he'd got as a
child the time his mother caught him at the dinner table stuffing
her inedibly fatty salt beef into his school trouser pocket.

Dan couldn't look at Brenda. Instead he concentrated on
scraping his spoon around the rim of his coffee cup and removing
bits of dried-up cappuccino froth. He found himself thinking that
if God was meant to be so bloody merciful, why was he inflicting
all this emotional pain on him in one day?

He began to realize how the ancient Egyptians must have felt
when the Almighty sent down the ten plagues. He was overtaken by an
urge to rush back to the
Vanguard
building and smear the
main entrance with ram's blood, otherwise there would, he felt
sure, be a swarm of locusts hovering over his desk when he got
back.

A
nna had just driven round Gants Hill roundabout and, glancing
at a signpost, realized that not only was she no more than
fifteen minutes from Uncle Henry's house, but that the road seemed
slightly familiar. It was then she worked out that she must have
driven through Gants Hill in her lime-green VW Beetle the night in
1980 when she got off with Dan at Beany Levine's party. But years
before that, even, she must have come this way with her parents
whenever they went to visit Uncle Henry and Aunty Yetta.

So when was the last time she had seen them? For a few
minutes Anna trawled through her mind's Filofax, remembering
weddings at the Regal Rooms in Edmonton, Passover meals with
Harry's sister in Newbury Park and Harry's sister's son's bar
mitzvah at the Manor Hall in Chigwell. Then she got it. The last
time she had seen Henry and Yetta was at a particularly poignant
Sunday-afternoon tea party at their tiny Victorian terraced house
nearly thirty years ago.

The Canadian cousins were over from Montreal, and Yetta had
decided to lay on one of her smoked salmon bagel spreads in their
honor. Henry had decided to use the occasion to make a dramatic
announcement about Sidney. Sidney was Henry and Yetta's only
child, whom nobody in the family ever talked about because he was
in his forties and appeared to be having a homosexual relationship
with a pastry chef he lodged with in Kilburn. The family could
never work out what upset Yetta and Henry most—the thought
of Sidney living with a man or the fact that he was doing so in
Kilburn.

On the day of the tea, about thirty people were crammed into
Yetta and Henry's best room. The short, overweight men wore
suspenders. These held up trousers which seemed to Anna to come up
to their chests. They leaned back in Yetta's faded red moquette
armchairs, their chubby fingers looking incongruous gripping the
handles of her pretty pink-and-gold bone-china teacups.

Harry was impressing everybody with how well Maison Gloria
was doing and what a natural Gloria was for the garment trade:

“I tell you,” he said, invoking what Anna now realized was
a Jewish joke old enough to have come from the Dead Sea Scrolls,
“a man could come up to her in the street these days, open up his
raincoat and expose himself, and do you know what her reaction
would be? I'll tell you what it would be. All he'd get from my
Gloria, God bless her, would be: “Huh, you call that a
lining?' ”

Everybody laughed—even the children, who instantly
worked out that “expose himself” had something to do with
willies. Five of them, including Anna, were sitting bunched up on
the settee, the girls in their red Clarks sandals, the boys in
their long gray Cubs socks with green Baden-Powell garters. Anna sat
on the end, quietly working her way through a plate of her favorite
cakes, miniature Danish pastries from Broers the bakers, which were
filled with sweet cream cheese and half a dried apricot. She
concentrated on finishing her Danish and tried to ignore one of her
cousins digging her in the thigh with a sharpened lolly stick,
because she knew that if she was good and didn't get into trouble,
then Gloria would let her stay up to watch
Sunday Night at the
London Palladium
when they got home.