Neurotica (2 page)

She reckoned the last time she and Dan had done anything
which vaguely resembled mind-blowingly filthy sex was at Amy's
fifth birthday party, three years ago, before Dan's obsession with
his health had started affecting his libido.

It was one of those sweltering summer days when old ladies
have funny turns in the Co-op and small boys try to set light to
worms with magnifying glasses.

In Anna's back garden poisonous packs of Jessicas, Olivias
and Harrys, untroubled by the heat, were rampaging over flowerbeds,
hunting the thimble with Smarty Arty, the rented clown, while plump
forty-something mummies falling out of their Indian-cotton
sundresses made a play for the thirty-something daddies in their
white T-shirts and Ray•Bans.

Anna was bustling round the trestle table which she had set
up that morning under the apple tree and dutifully covered with
matching paper cloth, plates and cups depicting the latest
thigh-booted, whip-wielding girlie superhero Amy had been going on
about for weeks. She was trying, with little success, to tempt the
children with egg mayonnaise sandwiches. They were more interested
in tearing around the table blowing raspberries at each other and
raucously discussing the similarity between egg smell and fart
smell. Dan, sensing she wasn't far off the kind of violence that
would have seen her go down for a five stretch, and suddenly
fancying her like nobody's business, stopped pouring spritzers for
the grown-ups, and made his way towards the table. With a face so
straight he could have been saying that her mother had just had a
pulmonary embolism and wasn't expected to make it through the
night, he whispered in her ear, “I want to fuck you right
now.”

He handed the Orvieto and the Waitrose fizzy mineral water
bottles to a drunken mother, who was so out of it that she didn't
bat an eyelid as he dragged a giggling and protesting Anna off
towards the house. Nobody else gave them a second glance either,
even when Dan put his hand up Anna's silk skirt and kept it
there.

Without saying a word he pulled her up the stairs and into
their bedroom. He locked the door, unzipped her skirt, then turned
and pushed her gently over the pine desk she used as a dressing
table. As the grown-ups helped themselves to more booze and Smarty
Arty worked the children into a frenzy telling slightly rude
knock-knock jokes and producing rabbits from nowhere, Dan pulled
her pants down to her ankles, reached for the bottle of baby oil on
the table and allowed a few drops of the clear, thick liquid to
trickle onto her buttocks. Anna moaned softly as he massaged the
oil into her skin. With the lightness of touch he knew she adored
he brushed his fingers gently between her wet bottom cheeks and
then over her clitoris. She gasped as suddenly, almost violently,
he pushed two fingers deep inside her. Anna yelled at him rather
too loudly to make her come. For a second she went off the boil,
thinking the children might have heard, but Dan, feeling her tense
up, started to lick the back of her neck and whisper that it was
OK, nobody could hear. Then, while continuing to play with her
clitoris, he pushed himself inside her. The exquisite danger and
naughtiness of it all made them both come in seconds.

F
at chance of anything like that happening now, Anna thought,
as she squirted Jif onto the bath and set about the greasy
bath ring with a nonscratch scouring pad.

The most Anna got these days was an occasional wake-up call
in the small of her back from Dan's early-morning erection. In a
voice that sounded like a child in Woolworth's trying to get round
its mother for pick-'n'-mix, he would then ask her if they could do
it. She invariably said yes because he looked so miserable and
pathetic and she felt sorry for him. He was also, if she was
objective about it, still as slim, dark and good-looking as the
night she met him. When they had finished their basic-model,
bottom-of-the-range humping, Dan would roll off her and go back to
sleep and Anna would lie there for a minute before getting up to
make tea, thinking how utterly fucking miserable and lonely she
felt.

Then she would go downstairs and slam round the kitchen
getting more and more furious. Furious with Dan for rejecting her
and refusing to see a shrink, and furious with herself because she
still loved him and didn't have the heart to walk out on him.

A
nna blamed Dan's mother for his hypochondria. According to the other Bloomfield children—Gail, Dan's sister, who was
married to an architect in Tel Aviv, and Jonathan, who was a
cameraman with CNN in Atlanta—the late Lilly Bloomfield, who
dropped dead from a stroke in Solly's the kosher butcher while
delivering some vitriolic rant about the pitiful size of her
briskets, had been something of a tyrant. A five-foot kosher
tigress in Crimplene slacks and strawberry-blond tint courtesy of
Chez Melvin in Hendon, she was one of those Jewish mothers who was
never satisfied by her children's achievements.

She would stand frying fishballs on a Friday
afternoon—a plastic bag over her new hairdo—waiting
for each of them to come home from school. Then she would start:
why had they only got a B plus that week and not an A plus? Why had
they come third in class and not first? Then, over dinner, she
would turn on her husband. Stan down the road was earning three
times what he got, and just by driving a cab; Morry from the
synagogue was taking the family to Rimini twice a year from wet
fish. What Lilly wanted was a Lord Sieff, a Baron Rothschild, even
Stan down the road. What she had was Lou, who made sixty quid a
week selling ties off a stall in Leather Lane market.

Dan used to joke that if Hitler had been given Lilly for a
mother she would have turned to him after he had slaughtered six
million Jews and said, “Huh, you call that a holocaust?”

Of her three children, it was Dan, the youngest, who had
found it particularly hard to cope with his mother's constant
undermining. Nevertheless, he was the most successful, academically
and professionally. By the time she died in 1981, aged sixty-five,
he was making a good living freelancing and doing the odd
late-evening shift on the
FT.
But Lilly had almost
destroyed him. Not only had she taken away every ounce of his
self-confidence, she had also made him fear her wrath at every
turn. Eventually, whenever he did anything he believed she might
disapprove of, he developed “symptoms” that to him were quite
real, even if they were largely invisible to the medical
profession.

A
s soon as the seven days of mourning for Lilly were over,
Lou sold up and went to live in Marbella with Nora, the shikseh
from the post office whom he'd been screwing for years behind
Lilly's back.

After thirty years appearing in a marriage without a speaking
part, Lou, it seemed, had balls after all—he must have sewn
them back on one night when Lilly wasn't looking. For two weeks
during that summer, Dan, using his father as a positive role model
for the first time ever, decided that now his mother was dead, he
could stop living his life trying to please her. She, after all,
was now sitting drinking lemon tea on a pink Dralon settee in her
celestial through lounge, and couldn't get at him anymore. The time
had come for Daniel Bloomfield to rise up, rebel and get the late
Mrs. Bloomfield off his back.

He decided that his first act of rebellion would be to go
looking for his own Nora and, near as damn it, found her.

In fact Anna found him—at the party his cousin Beany
Levine held to celebrate passing his bar exams. It was one of those
utterly safe young Jewish singles do's where one's grandmother
wouldn't have felt out of place. The venue was the Levine parents'
row house in Gants Hill, where, although Beany was twenty-three, he
still lived. The boys stood around drinking Coke discussing that
day's West Ham versus Tottenham Hotspur game. Beany, who had been a
bit of a comedian since childhood, was interrupting with a joke
about an ultra-Orthodox kangaroo, a rubber and a box of matzos. All
in all, they were the kind of conservative young Jewish men who,
when they got married, would invite their mates to a stag coffee
morning.

The girls convened in the kitchen, in their velvet jeans with
rhinestone studs. They drank lemonade and lime and debated
engagement ring settings. A few daredevils had got slightly merry
on Beany's parents' advocaat and cherry brandy and were dancing to
10CC in the middle of the lounge.

Anna had come to the party with one of Beany's friends from
chambers, who had since deserted her and gone off to meet the
rhinestones. She was now standing alone in a corner in her black
dungarees, CND T-shirt and short-spiked lefty feminist hair,
sifting through Beany's record collection, which seemed to consist
mainly of old Monty Python LPs.

Anna noticed Dan sitting at the end of the room in his new
denim bomber jacket looking moody and sexy and a dead ringer
for Bob Dylan. Sensing a kindred spirit and fellow subversive, not
to mention the possibility of sex, she started to make her way
over to him.

What Anna took for moodiness, Dan would have described as
downright depression. He couldn't work out how, on a Saturday
night in his twenty-fifth year, when he should have been defiling
his mother's memory by snorting coke in Fulham, he was at his
cousin's party on the outskirts of Ilford, drinking it.

He was, at the precise moment of meeting Anna on Beany's
mother's tan leatherette sofa, balancing a plate of her
cocktail-size gefilte fishballs on his lap. He was pretending one
of the fishballs was his mother's head and taking a stab at it with
a cocktail stick, when he missed and sent the whole lot flying onto
the shag rug. They ended up at Anna's feet. She bent down and
picked up two of them.

“Er, I seem to have your balls in my hand,” she said.

For many nights afterwards Dan lay awake cursing himself for
not being able to come up with a witty reply. The best he could do
was an embarrassed smile.

“Hi, I'm Anna Shapiro. Do you fancy making a break for it
and finding somewhere to get rat-arsed?” As she spoke she took an
Old Holborn tin from a tatty old shoulder bag and offered Dan a
roll-up. Realizing he had come face to face with his first-ever
Jewish shikseh, he got an instant erection.

It turned out that Anna, who was a postgrad English student
at Sussex, had begun life as a nice Jewish girl from Stanmore with
a father who was an accountant and a mother who had gold-plated
bathroom taps.

As she downed pints of Guinness in the Cocked Hat on Woodford
Avenue, she explained how she had rejected the whole neo-bourgeois,
crypto-fascist Jewburbia thing by smoking dope in the ladies at
synagogue during the Yom Kippur service and turning up to her
bubba's Shabbas dinners wearing no knickers.

Dan fell instantly, utterly and overwhelmingly in love.

T
he morning after Dan and Anna first slept together, Dan woke
up with a pounding head. He'd had a nightmare which involved
his mother dressed as one of the Bay City Rollers, in tartan
trousers, scarf and red platforms, chasing him round the imitation
Louis Quatorze dining room table trying to stab him with the ornate
silver scissors she kept in the fruit bowl for cutting
grapes.

Two days later, when the headache still hadn't gone, without
telling Anna, he took the first of his eleven malignant brain
tumors to Harley Street.

S
itting on the side of the bath while she rubbed moisturizer
into telly-ad-smooth legs, Anna heard Dan's key in the
door. He called to her from the bottom of the stairs. The tone of
his voice said it all. Anna had no doubt she was about to find yet
another electronic juicer, mixer or squeezer on the kitchen
table.

C H A P T E R     T W O

I
T WAS ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK THAT finally did it. Anna was standing in her red Cystitis Awareness Week T-shirt
that she wore in bed, rubber gloves and Day-Glo-pink nylon
slippers, trying to wash up and at the same time fry sausages and
eggs for Amy and her two friends who had slept over, when “Release
Me” came on the radio.

She knew she had finally scored a personal worst in sexual
fantasy, but it was a measure of her frustration when, for a few
minutes, she imagined being carted off to some tropical island by
Engelbert. She even refused to snap out of her reverie when her
rational brain reminded her that sad old medallion-man crooners
were much more time-share in Tossa del Mar than beach house in
Barbados. But it didn't matter. Dan hadn't made love to her last
night—even on electrical appliance night.

Usually when he'd had some good news from some specialist or
other, Dan was all over Anna. He would cuddle up to her on the
sofa, hold her, hug her and flick her bangs with his fingers. This
would be followed by the
sorry-I've-been-such-a-bastard-to-you-I-promise-finally-and-
forever-that-my-obsession-with-my-health-is-over-and-wouldn't-
it-be-great-if-we-put-the-kids-in-kennels-and-got-away-for-a-few-
days speech.

Anna would usually respond with her
shit-Dan-we've-been- here - a - million - times - before - and -
I - can't - live - like - this - any - more - unless - you - see - a - shrink speech. Dan would then
assure her that he would definitely get help if she ever found him
imagining symptoms again.

Anna always caved in and by ten o'clock they would be in bed,
Dan promising her the orgasm of her life. By 10:45 Dan would start
whispering in her ear that he was getting carpal tunnel syndrome in
his middle finger and could she hurry up. But Anna found it almost
impossible to come when she was still so angry. So she held her
breath, thrashed her head about a bit, let out a long sigh and
said, “Thank you; that was lovely.” She then let Dan have his
turn. Two minutes later they would both be asleep.

Last night had been the same, up to the children-in-kennels
bit, which he'd got to while they were watching
Newsnight.
Some impenetrable European Monetary Union item
came on, and Anna got up to make herself a cup of tea. While she
was waiting for the kettle to boil, she thought she'd unpack the
John Lewis bag, which was still on the kitchen table.

Inside were two boxes, one containing the blender (that made
four they now owned), while the other was from a medical supplier
in Wigmore Street.

Anna ripped into the bubble wrap with some kitchen scissors
and pulled out a square, wallet-sized plastic device. It had a tiny
screen at the top, and a round opening at the side. The only
instructions were in Spanish or Norwegian, but from what Anna could
make out from the diagrams, this was some kind of newfangled home
blood pressure machine. You put your index finger into the anuslike
hole, which automatically tightened round it. The electronic
sphygmomanometer then gave you a digital readout of your blood
pressure.

A few months ago she would have gone screaming into the
living room, ranting and raving at Dan as if he were an alcoholic
and she had just found three bottles of whiskey hidden in the
toilet tank. But last night she had been so bloody worn out with it
all, so tired of the pleading and begging, that she simply put the
sphygmomanometer back in its box, finished making her mug of tea,
yelled goodnight to Dan from halfway up the stairs and climbed into
bed.

When Dan came up twenty minutes later she was still sipping
her tea and reading. He gave her another hug and told her he loved
her, but there was no mention of orgasms. Anna put her book on the
bedside table and turned out her light. Dan had his back to her and
was pretending to be asleep, but she could sense that under the
duvet he was feeling his pulse.

A
s she gave the sausages another turn, Anna decided she had no
choice. If she didn't find some fun soon, not to mention some
decent sex, she would shrivel up and die. She tore off her rubber
gloves, threw down her spatula and dialed Alison O'Farrell's home
number.

“Alison, it's Anna. Sorry to ring so early on a Saturday
morning, but I just thought I'd let you know, I'll definitely do
the Rachel Stern piece.”

What she didn't tell Alison was that the stories would be
genuine, but instead of belonging to three interviewees, they would
all be hers.

Anna Shapiro, thirty-seven-year-old mother of two in
desperate need of a tummy tuck, breast lift and open-pore surgery,
was about to spend the next eight weeks committing
adultery—just for fun.

B
renda Sweet, single mum from Peckham turned millionaire
fashion designer, dunked a bit of buttery croissant into her
coffee, and watched as globules of fat started to appear on the
surface.

“But what I don't understand is why you can't make do with
solo sex for the time being? I mean, Dan's bound to recover the use
of 'is pecker eventually.”

“First, because “eventually' might mean forty years from now
when he's got cataracts and incontinence pads, and second, because
when I get up to heaven with all the other Jewish mothers, St.
Peter, or whoever my people's equivalent is, will read out that
summary of what everybody did with their lives. There will be Naomi
Fishman who planted a thousand trees in Israel, Melanie Greenberg
who, despite being blind and having no arms or legs, stuffed
fifteen million chicken necks and won prizes for her chopped liver
sculpture, then there will be me, Anna Shapiro—who wanked.
OK, so I do it when I'm desperate, but believe me, adultery is much
more respectable.”

Brenda said she took the point and topped up their coffee
cups, which were round and metallic, like sputum bowls with
handles. Apparently they'd cost nearly twenty quid each from some
Japanese shop in Covent Garden, but because Brenda was her best
friend, Anna made allowances for her interesting taste in
crockery.

Brenda's kitchen, on the other hand, went well beyond
interesting into the outer suburbs of downright peculiar.

It was situated, stylistically speaking, somewhere between
morgue and sluice room. The cupboard doors were brushed aluminum,
the stainless-steel sink was conical, its metal U-bend exposed,
and the floor was covered in those industrial nonslip concrete
tiles which usually surround public swimming pools. The only object
which bordered on the ornamental was a six-foot-by-four-foot grainy
black-and-white photograph, which took up most of the space on the
wall at the far end. It was of some poor terrified bastard strapped
in the electric chair minutes before his execution.

“Fuck me, Bren,” Dan, who could be witty in a sardonic way
when he momentarily forgot he was dying, had said the first time
they were invited to dinner in the new kitchen. “You certainly do
a great line in concentration camp chic. S'pose the Mengeles are
just outside parking the car. Hope they've remembered to bring a
bottle.”

To give Brenda her due, she laughed, but she was obviously a
bit put out, because she called Dan “a bleedin' Philistine,”
whose idea of style didn't extend beyond a matching bread-bin and
mug-tree set.

Brenda was very good at putting people in their place. Anna
saw her do it the day they met and became friends. It was at the
antenatal clinic, ten years ago, when she was expecting Josh and
Brenda was expecting Alfie.

The hospital made all the women sit in the waiting room in their maternity dresses, but minus their knickers and pantyhose. These
they kept on their laps in wire supermarket baskets. Humiliating as
this was, none of them challenged the ruling. These were National
Health Service patients, who treated doctors like feudal lords, and
in place of a forelock to tug, practically curtsied at the end of
their examinations before walking out of the consulting room
backwards. The tatty notice on the wall, written in green felt tip,
explained that it speeded things up if the doctors had instant
access to patients' nether regions.

Anna, however, did make some small effort to assert herself.
Along with her wire basket, she always took a copy of
Ulysses
into the consulting room and placed it
purposefully on the doctor's desk, like a poker player revealing
his hand. This was her way of ensuring that whichever supercilious,
patronizing git of an obstetrician she was about to see spoke to
her in words of more than two syllables—and didn't refer to
her as Mum.

A few weeks before Josh was due, Anna was sitting in the
waiting room, wire basket on lap, working her way through a bag of
Everton mints, when Brenda walked in, eight months pregnant and a
size ten, wearing suede heels and a black Lycra minidress under a
biker's jacket. Even her tidy, pert bump looked like a casually
calculated fashion statement. Anna took one look at her and was
just descending into one of those “Omigod, I look like someone
turned the liposuction machine to blow” moments of self-hatred,
when Brenda started bellowing at the middle-aged woman on the
appointments desk.

“Look 'ere, you daft mare, if you think I'm sitting for two
hours with a draft up my jacksy on the off chance some doctor'll
decide a poke around my privates is in order, you can bloomin' well
think again.”

“I'm sorry, it's hospital policy.”

“I don't care if it's the soddin' Common Agricultural
Policy. It's bloody degrading and I'm not doing it.”

With that, Brenda turned on her four-inch stilettos, saw
there was an empty seat next to Anna and started to make her way
towards it. Anna couldn't help thinking that had this been New
York, the whole waiting room would have started whooping,
applauding, waving their urine samples in support and queuing up to
high-five Brenda. But this being Dulwich, everybody kept their
heads buried behind their
Good Housekeeping
s, and the
only sound was of embarrassed buttock shuffling.

As Brenda neared her, Anna had the same
feeling—without the sex part—she'd had the night she
met Dan at Beany Levine's party, of stumbling across a like-minded
soul. She knew she was on the point of making a friend.

Brenda was about to plonk herself down onto the empty seat
and Anna was about to whisper, “Well done; not many people would
have taken on that menopausal old bag” and “Where do you think
she gets her tank tops?” when Brenda looked down and murmured:

“Oh fuck. It's curtains for me Manolo Blahniks.”

She was standing in a small puddle of broken waters.

Brenda looked at Anna. “Christ, what do I do now? After that
performance, I suppose the old bag'll have me down for a triple
enema and a shave with a blunt razor.”

Anna laughed. “Don't worry, you scared the control pants off
her. I'll see if I can find one of the midwives.”

A calm, motherly midwife called Iris found Brenda a
wheelchair and took her up to the labor ward. As Brenda hadn't
started having contractions yet, she said Anna could stay to keep
her company. “Just until we locate your other half.”

Brenda said she would rather the hospital contacted her
mum.

It turned out that Brenda's other half, Elvis, had done a bunk
three weeks ago and was living in Leytonstone with an assistant
supervisor from Do It All. Brenda had just moved back to Peckham to
be near her mum and dad, and this had been her first appointment at
the hospital.

Apparently Elvis, who was a clerk with the Inland Revenue,
went off with Dawn who did it all because he felt jealous and
threatened when Brenda gave up hairdressing and started making a
success of designing and making clothes.

She'd studied fashion design at art school years before, but
had never had the confidence to set up in business on her own.
After art school, she'd just drifted into hairdressing. From the
start, posh clients at the salon in Sloane Street began admiring
what she wore and asked her where she bought her clothes. When
Brenda said she designed and made them herself—even the
Lycra bodies and skirts—she began getting dozens of
orders.

The first time she broke the five-hundred-pounds-a-week
barrier, Elvis took off.

B
renda and anna had been on the labor ward about an hour when
Brenda's mum arrived, all hot flush and eau de cologne. Anna
said a quick hello and decided she should leave them to it.

The next day Brenda phoned to say that Alfie had arrived
safely with Elvis's ears, but she thought she could learn to love
him, and that apart from tits as hard as Contiboard and what felt
like a net of satsumas hanging out of her bum, she was fine.

A
fter Josh was born, Anna and Brenda saw each other a couple
of times a week. They would sit on the floor in Brenda's
living room drinking wine, even though they knew that as
breast-feeding mothers they shouldn't because it would get the
babies drunk, and would try to work out why they were the only
women they knew who thought the joy of watching their babies crawl,
walk and talk didn't begin to compare with getting a new head of
highlights.

Anna said if Josh didn't stop screaming all day she was going
to lock him in his room and he could only come out when he turned
twenty-five or did something interesting, like get a record in the
Top Ten.

One evening, over a bottle of Chardonnay, they decided to
form their own subversive breakaway postnatal support group. In
order to join, mothers had to sign an undertaking to feed their
children only dehydrated baby food from packets. Anybody found
Mouli-ing up organic turnips or avocados would be expelled, as
would mothers who were caught coming out of the Early Learning
Center with boxes of flash cards about their person. Mothers who
were deemed to be the type who would carry on breast-feeding their
children until they were old enough to go to Guns N' Roses
concerts would be flogged.