Neurotica (17 page)

When Alex announced that he intended to specialize in
cosmetic surgery, Kimberley wasn't sure if she approved.

“Seems downraht un-Christian,” she said, “to go meddlin'
with what the good Lord dun give us.”

Nevertheless, she stood by her man. While Kimberley
re-created down-home domestic bliss in Hammersmith, Alex pursued
nips, tucks and large checks in Harley Street.

They had been happy until two years ago, when Kimberley
started to put on a huge amount of weight. Alex would stand
outside the kitchen and watch her stuffing her face with chips,
pizza and Coke.

At first he thought his wife was trying to make a political
or moral statement about how he earned his living. As the months
went by and she became truly obese, he realized there was more to
it than feminist ideology.

She now wore her long hair in a cheap corkscrew perm. She
had also taken to wearing voluminous pink shorts which she
asked her mother to buy for her at the local Wal-Mart back home.
Kimberley's sister would buy them in packs of six and they would
arrive in huge padded envelopes. Kimberley would team the shorts
with glitzy T-shirts which had shoulder pads, white cotton
socks with pom-poms and a mint-green eyeshade.

Kimberley, he realized, was turning herself into a caricature
of a middle-aged working-class Southern woman. The reason for
this was that she had become unspeakably homesick. Getting fat
and wearing clothes from Wal-Mart put her back in touch with her
roots.

Very soon she decided she wanted to rediscover
Southern-style Christianity. She located a few expats in west
London and together they set up their own Baptist chapter which
they called the Evangelical Women of Salem in Hammersmith and
Barnes.

Alex packed her off to Alabama one summer with the children,
but it made no difference.

In fact it made things worse. When she got back she would
only cook Southern-style food and began trying to locate possum
suppliers in west London. Breakfasts became unbearable. Brandy
and Jim Bob made it clear they preferred Coco Pops to grits,
but she wouldn't listen. Nothing changed. Every morning they
got up to find grits bubbling on the stove and Kimberley
standing by the kitchen table holding a Bible, waiting to
conduct morning prayers.

Every day she filled the children's lunchboxes with
mountains of cold fried chicken, umpteen slices of pumpkin pie
and great chunks of cornbread. What Brandy and Jim Bob couldn't
eat they distributed like Red Cross parcels to their classmates.
The other children, most of whom were on low-fat, low-salt,
low-sugar diets, wolfed it down.

One mother phoned Kimberley and said that her little
Anastasia was putting on weight eating all this Southern fried
food. Her child, she explained, was used to live yogurt and
pieces of sushi in her lunchbox. Kimberley got quite angry,
saying they had sushi in Alabama too, but there it was called
bait.

Her latest attempts to turn their bit of Hammersmith
into rural Dixie included trying to get planning permission to build
a stoop on the front of their house and insisting that because
she took the children on so many camping trips they should invest
in a thirty-foot Winnebago.

“When I asked her where we were going to park it, she
said the Lord would provide. .   .   . I try to
get home as late as I can each evening. If I get home too early
she's either having a prayer meeting at the house or she and
her good-old-girl friends are sitting on rocking chairs whittling
and making patchwork quilts. I think the reason she refuses
to have sex is because she feels trapped here with the children
and blames me.”

Alex offered Anna some more lamb passanda. She smiled, said
the food was lovely, but she was full and couldn't manage another
bite. She watched him take some for himself.

She wasn't sure what to make of his tragicomic saga.
He was either the most incorrigible joker, or his tale of
Southern discomfort was genuine. Working for the tabloids, she
was no stranger to the bizarre-but-true. She knew Brenda would
call her a gullible tart, but she decided to give Alex and his
story the benefit of the doubt.

“So,” Alex said, putting the stainless-steel lamb
passanda dish back on the hotplate, “that's my story. What's
yours? What made you phone Reenie Theydon-Bois?”

It was Anna's turn to put down her fork and stare into
the distance. She had been dreading him asking that. She still
had no intention of compounding her betrayal of Dan by discussing
the problems in their marriage. Nor was she about to confess
to Alex that one of the reasons she had contacted Liaisons
Dangereux was because she needed another subject for her unorthodox
journalistic experiment.

She was about to deliver a pre-prepared anodyne speech
about twelve-year itches when all of a sudden her mobile phone
started to ring. She picked up her bag from the floor and reached
inside. She put the phone to her ear, but before she could
say anything, the voice came at her, low, breathless and full
of panic.

“Hello, Anna, is that you? It's me. Please don't be
cross, but I need you to come over now, right away. Something
dreadful has happened. I'm hiding in the airing cupboard. Anna,
be quick, I'm terrified for my life.” Then the phone went
dead.

The voice belonged to her mother.

C H A P T E R     T H I R T E E N

“
B
RENDA!” ANNA YELLED. “FOR Chrissake take it easy. Did you
ever have proper driving lessons or did you just take the
correspondence course?”

Anna and Brenda were steaming towards Gloria's house
in Stanmore. Anna couldn't believe Brenda was managing to get
nearly eighty out of her ancient Zephyr.

Still in battle dress, she was flashing and hooting at
anything which got in her way and then saluting her thanks as
she careered past. Anna kept making the point that nobody could
see her saluting in the dark, but she carried on doing it anyway.

Ignoring Anna's plea to take it easy, Brenda pulled out
to overtake a lorry. In the process she cut off a Porsche which
was careering down the outside lane. Anna winced, clutched her
seat belt with one hand and shielded her face with the other.

“Brenda, for crying out loud .   .   . will you
slow down and bloody listen?” she bawled. “There is absolutely
no reason to get us killed. My mother has pulled stunts like
this before. Whenever my father goes away her obsessions get
worse. She's probably having a panic attack because she's run
out of Flash liquid.”

For the umpteenth time, she leaned forward, picked the
phone up off the dashboard and stabbed the redial button.

“Still engaged,” she spat, slamming the phone back on the
dashboard. “My mother is a woman clearly so terrified for her
life that she can't resist sharing her terror with all one
hundred and twenty-six members of the synagogue ladies' guild.”

Brenda said nothing. Anna folded her arms, looked out of the
window and sulked.

She was irritated not only with her mother, but with Brenda
too. Anna had given her a brief outline of the Kimberley and
Alex story. As she had predicted, Brenda had called her a
gullible tart.

“What you have to understand,” Brenda had said in a
patronizing tone which got right up Anna's nose, “is that blokes
like him tend to marry Sloane Rangers called Annabel—women
who have amazing grace rather than sing it. Then, what usually
'appens is that during the week while she is safely stowed away
in the country with the kids and the dogs, he's safe to bonk
around in London. In 'is case I would guess it's mainly
grateful face-lift patients. I'll bet you a tenner 'e's got
the use of a flat over his Harley Street practice.”

“And what you have to understand,” Anna had replied coldly,
refusing to allow Brenda to undermine her judgment, “is that I
have spent my entire working life pursuing stories which sound
like hoaxes and then turn out to be true. What about that
tip-off I got last year about the woman in Shanklin who heard
voices coming from inside her washing machine and called in a
priest to get it exorcized, only to find a four-foot midget
who'd hidden inside the drum when he was disturbed burgling
the house?”

Brenda had grunted to indicate her partial submission.

“Just because you have a nose for a good story doesn't mean this bloke's genuine. I still think 'e sounds like a smarmy upper-class git.”

S
uddenly the Zephyr lurched forward along its chassis as
Brenda screeched to a tire-scorching, Disney-style halt outside
the five-bedroom mock-Georgian house.

Getting out of the car, Anna could see all the curtains
were drawn. She could hear nothing but the hum of traffic
in the distance.

“It all looks perfectly normal,” she whispered. “She's
probably got over her panic and gone to bed. I tell you, we are
going to scare her witless if we just march in.”

Brenda agreed they should ring the bell and give Gloria
a chance to answer the door. Anna pressed the button. The chimes
played three choruses of “Hello, Dolly!” There was no answer.
Anna took out the set of keys to her mother's house she
always carried. Gloria had given them to her just after she and
Harry had moved to the house, in case of an emergency. She turned
the key in the lock. The paneled door, which was guarded on the
outside by two miniature stone lions, opened.

The hall lights were on, illuminating Gloria's newly painted
mural depicting a Venetian street scene. It covered three walls.
Anna had first seen the mural a couple of weeks ago and told
Gloria that cute didn't begin to describe it. Gloria's hall,
she said, resembled the interior of a motorway cafeteria with
ideas above its service station.

The walls were covered with rows of charmingly dilapidated
Italian houses with peeling terra-cotta paint. Each one had
been given a wrought-iron balcony from which there trailed
nonspecific purple and orange flowers. There were several small
arched bridges crossing canals, as well as three gondolas complete
with gondoliers and courting couples. There was even a sickeningly
cute mouse poking its nose and whiskers out of a hole in one of the
charmingly dilapidated bits of wall.

There was, however, no sign of Gloria.

Anna stood at the foot of the staircase and called to her
mother. Silence. Brenda said she was going upstairs. They ran
up, passing a doe-eyed Italian beauty hanging washing from
her balcony, still calling. Gingerly they opened Gloria's
bedroom door. The light was on, but the bed hadn't been slept
in. For the first time Anna began to feel frightened. Brenda
was almost hysterical.

“Right, that's it. I'm phoning the police.”

“No, Brenda.” Anna caught hold of her arm as she reached
into her pocket for the phone. “Don't. Wait.”

She walked along the landing to the airing cupboard and
opened the door. Gloria was sitting cowering and shaking at the foot
of the oversized hot-water tank. She was wearing her peach velour
dressing gown and slippers and clutching her cordless phone.
Her face was covered in a thick layer of night cream. This made
the rims of her eyes, which were red and swollen from crying,
look particularly hideous.

“Mum!” Anna screamed. She put her arm round her mother and
gently helped her stand up.

“He's down there! He's down there!” Gloria sobbed.
“I've been trying to reach your father in Tel Aviv, but the
line's been permanently engaged.” Anna's arm was still round
her mother's shoulders. Gloria was shaking like a water diviner's
hazel twig.

“Mrs. S., if there's somebody in the house,” Brenda was
standing next to them now, “you should have phoned 999.”

“No, you don't understand .   .   . I wanted to
ask Harry's advice first.” Gloria took a deep, shuddery breath.
“Now you two are here it'll be all right.”

“Mum,” Anna said, looking confused, “what in God's name
has been going on?”

Gloria said nothing. She put the phone into her dressing-gown
pocket and took hold of Anna's arm. She led her towards the
staircase. Brenda followed. The three of them crept down the
stairs, backs close to the wall, clutching each other like
Enid Blyton children exploring a haunted castle. They tiptoed
along the marble floor tiles as Gloria led them through the
hall towards the downstairs loo. They stopped. Gloria stood in
front of Anna and Brenda and gripped the brass doorknob. She
paused and closed her eyes for a few seconds as if summoning
strength. Then, very slowly, her eyes still closed, she opened
the door a crack, reached in and turned on the light. Coming
from inside was the sound of soft snoring. This was punctuated
every couple of seconds by bouts of desperate wheezing and
gasping. It was as if somebody was fighting for breath. The door
finished opening. Brenda's and Anna's eyes shot towards the
loo window.

S
o there's me and Anna, quaking and bloody
terrified—it's just like that bit in
Close
Encounters
when they watch the spaceship land—thinking
there's some maniac standing in the lavvy with 'is axe poised.”
Brenda broke off to slurp some of her cocoa. “And the first
thing we see is a great huge bunch of red roses and a box of
Milk Tray which appear to have come in through the window and
seem to be thrashing around in midair just above the loo seat.
Then we see the horn-rimmed specs, the trilby and the half-open
mouth and we realize there's a bloke stuck half in and half
out of the window. Finally we work out that the sash must
have broken, sending the frame careering down onto his back
and trapping him.”

By now it was nearly two in the morning. Anna had dragged
Dan out of bed and made him come and sit with them in the
kitchen, drink cocoa and listen to this latest installment in
the Gloria and Gerald Brownstein saga.

“So, I take it he is now safely tucked up in the nick,”
Dan said, rubbing his face, which was creased and puffy with
sleep.

Anna and Brenda exchanged glances. Anna shifted from
buttock to buttock on her chair.

“Not as such,” she said, concentrating on dunking a
Jaffa Cake into her mug and watching the chocolate melt and
leave a trail in the cocoa.

Dan yanked at the belt of his toweling dressing gown
and tightened it. Anna thought he suddenly looked like a
particularly gruff bank manager, albeit a very unusual one
who attended his overdrawn clients in his dressing gown. Glowering,
he sat waiting for her explanation.

Anna said that it was Gloria, who, yet again, had refused
point-blank to let them call the police. Once she had calmed
down she had begged Anna and Brenda to let him go. She kept
saying over and over that he was an old, ill man who needed
psychiatry, not incarceration.

Apparently, before he had got stuck in the window, Gerald
had spent nearly an hour ringing on Gloria's doorbell and
calling through the letter box, begging her to open the
door because he was in love with her and wanted to give her some
flowers and chocolates. She had kept shouting at him to leave
them on the porch and go away.

Finally everything had gone quiet. Gloria thought he
had driven off, so she got ready for bed. Then, after a few
minutes, she came downstairs to make a drink and heard him
trying to break in through the loo window.

By the time Anna and Brenda got to him, he was white
with fear and fighting for air because the window had trapped him
so tight he could hardly breathe. Seeing Brenda in her fatigues
and because he was old, frightened and a bit confused, he assumed
she was a policewoman and that Anna was a plainclothes detective.

He spent the next five minutes, still half in and half
out of the window, weeping and begging for mercy. He implored
them to take pity on him as he was having a lot of trouble
with his bowels and had to be at outpatients on Tuesday afternoon
to get the result of his barium enema and Dr. Mednik, the nice
Jewish gut doctor, had said his intestines were looking none
too promising. According to Gerald, the doctor said he'd seen
frankfurter skins with more life in them.

Their anger beginning to subside, Brenda and Anna forced
the window up a few inches and the three of them managed, without
too much difficulty, to haul Gerald down onto the loo seat. He
sat there for a few minutes trying to stop shaking and then,
summoning up his last ounce of pathos, held out the roses and
the chocolates towards Gloria. Gloria managed a half smile, helped
him into the kitchen and made him a cup of tea.

While he was drinking it she took Brenda and Anna into the
living room and pleaded with them not to call the police. She
said that if they let him go she would have another word with
Julian at her obsessive-compulsive group and see what could be
done to help Gerald.

“Gerald, of course, still thinks we're real cops,” Anna
went on. “So Brenda and I, having caved in and agreed not to
call the police, decide the old boy should, nevertheless, be
taught a lesson. So we march him out to his car, where Brenda
screams at him to lean over the hood and spread 'em. Then she
reads him his rights, frisks him, screams at him as if she's on
some parade ground, telling him he's an abominable, vile and
depraved piece of humanity who deserves to be castrated. Then she
lets him go. .   .   . Come on, Dan, please try
and understand. I'm beginning to think my mother is right. I
really don't think Gerald is dangerous.”

Dan rubbed his face again and said he thought they were
crazy, that they were not qualified to make judgments about a
person's state of mind and that Gloria could be in serious
danger. He then said he wasn't going to argue with them about it
anymore, because he had some
really
interesting news
vis-à-vis the wife of their honorable
friend, the member for Lymeswold.

T
hey got to bed just after three. Brenda
didn't bother trying
to sleep. She was feeling too wired. After Dan had given
her the dirt on Lavender Hardacre she had gone whooping and
dancing round the kitchen before almost hugging the life out
of him. Instantly adopting a new moral stance as well as setting
aside her fears about being banged up in Holloway, she spent
the rest of the night lying in bed planning how best to go about
blackmailing the old tart.

Dan left the house at seven because he had to be in
Birmingham by ten to do an interview with the EC Commissioner
for Herrings. As a consequence, Anna was forced to do the
school run.

When she got back she had a shower, woke Brenda with some
toast and herb tea and then decided she would phone Alex to
apologize for running out on him. She couldn't believe she had
been so rude to the poor man. She had simply taken the call
from Gloria, said that she was sorry she had to leave because
her mother wasn't well and got up from the table.

She rang the Harley Street number—Alex had chased
after her as she was leaving the restaurant and pressed his card
into her hand—but got the answer machine. He wouldn't
be in for another half hour.

She decided she would fill the time by making a further
attempt to come to grips with Rachel Stern's leaden and
incomprehensible introduction to
The Clitoris-Centered
Woman.