Neurotica (28 page)

While Ed and Anna sat waiting for the Lover Boys to come on,
Anna put on her Walkman headphones and listened to the tape of
her interview with Kelly.

“There's some great stuff here,” she said to Ed as she took
off her headphones. “With a bit of tweaking and tidying up I can
get some great quotes out of this.”

“Anna, tell me,” he said, giving her a sexy grin, “have you
ever written a piece you didn't make up?”

“Ed, change the record. You were going on about tabloid
hacks making it all up when we were on that job two years ago. Stop
being such a fucking wind-up merchant .   .   . the
Lover Boys are about to come on. Be a good boy and go and snap
something. It's easy, you know.”

“I always love watching the way women's nipples go hard when
they're turned on,” he said, still smiling.

“Ed,” she said, sighing with mock weariness, determined not
to give him the satisfaction of blushing and slapping her hands to
her chest, “the only thing you are doing to my tits right now is
getting on them.”

Giving her a look that could have melted frozen Bournville, Ed
stood up and slung his camera bag over his shoulder. As he walked
over to the butter churners, Anna leaned forward and quickly felt
her nipples under the table. They were as hard as walnuts.

After a couple of minutes, the lights went down and the MC
picked up his mike from the stand, ready to perform one final
act of tantalizing foreplay with the audience.

“They're hunky, they're horny .   .   . they've
got rock-hard bodies that give off more heat than a lava flow.
Lie back and get ready for an eruption. They're here, and they're
available now. Girls .   .   . step into your
fantasy.”

The women went berserk, to the accompaniment of “When a Man
Loves a Woman.” It was all bass and drums, the musical equivalent,
Anna decided, of cheap aftershave.

As the stage filled with dry ice, the audience quieted down
a little. Then out of the haze came the six dancing Lover Boys,
dressed as firemen in yellow helmets, heavy jackets and huge black
boots. Each of them was wielding a large plastic axe which looked
like something bought in Toys “R” Us.

Somebody yelled, “What a bunch of prats.” Then the entire
audience joined in, screaming at them to “Get 'em off” and
“Show us yer willie.”

The Lover Boys' dancing talent was nonexistent. They stomped
around in their huge black boots, rhythmically hitting the air,
stroking their crotches and thrusting their hips, barely trying, Anna
thought, to keep time with the music or each other. Nobody seemed to
mind because by now the boys were down to their jockstraps. They'd
torn off their firemen uniforms in one flamboyant movement. This
maneuver was particularly easy because the uniforms were only
held together at the seams with Velcro.

A few women couldn't resist the chiseled tanned torsos and
concave stomachs. Four of them ran up on stage for a quick
feel of pumped-up baby-oiled pec, but were swiftly removed by
the MC.

The Lover Boys ended the routine with some simulated
masturbation involving firemen's hoses. After a few minutes of
rubbing, massaging and rhythmic hip thrusting, there was a perfectly
synchronized ejaculation of fireworks. The audience hysteria was
eclipsed minutes later when they repeated the performance using
banana skins and suntan cream.

F
or the next half hour or so, the Lover Boys came on dressed
as sailors in white suits, Tarzans in leopardskin jockstraps and
Aztec warriors in cardboard masks.

Then the pace slowed down and one Lover Boy, bare-chested
except for a dinner jacket and bow tie, stood alone in the center
of the stage. Behind him was a small table covered with a white
cloth. It was laid for two. In the center of the table was a bottle
of champagne and two glasses.

Anna, who had become increasingly bored as the Lover Boys
segued from one uninspired dance routine into the next, had put on
her Walkman headphones again and was going through her interview
with Kelly for the second time and taking notes. She realized she
had plenty of material to fill the bulk of the piece, but was
struggling to find something which would make a strong final
paragraph.

She looked up briefly from her note-taking and realized she
recognized the Lover Boy standing on the stage from his picture
in the program. His name was Tor. According to the blurb he
was never happier than when taking a chick out on the back of his
Harley.

As Frank Sinatra sang “It Had to Be You,” Tor walked into
the audience and told them he was looking for a companion to “take
to dinner.” He turned and nodded his head towards the table. The
audience screamed with delight. Some poor cow was for it.

Anna missed his announcement because she was listening to Kelly
on her headphones and still trying to find a decent quote for the
final paragraph. It was a good fifteen seconds before she noticed
Tor standing in front of her, holding out his hand. Nauseating as
she found men with long blond highlights and sunbed tans, she had
to admit he was pretty. She took off her headphones and was about
to ask him what was going on when he gave her a Persil-white smile,
reached down for her hand and gently pulled her to her feet.

The penny finally dropped that Tor wanted her to go with him
onto the stage when she saw Ed bounding back towards their table,
bashing into people's chairs en route. Once he'd reached it he
positioned himself in front of Anna and Tor and began taking
pictures. Anna shot him a horrified pleading look which said, “For
Chrissake get me out of this,” but he ignored it and carried on
clicking.

“Ed, you bastard,” she hissed. “I'll never fucking forgive
you for this.”

A couple of seconds later she was on the stage and Tor was
opening the bottle of champagne. Naturally, its contents spurted
forth with appropriate magnificence and the audience roared. He
poured Anna a glass and then began taking off his jacket and bow
tie. She stood sipping it, trying desperately to look as if she
were game for a laugh, but finding it impossible to do much more
than stare down nervously at her feet. In an exaggerated gesture, Tor
threw his jacket onto the floor. He then put one arm round Anna's
waist and drew her close to him as he slowly unzipped his fly
and stepped out of his trousers. The women in the audience were
almost making themselves sick with excitement as he rotated his hips
and thrust his well-filled crotch towards her. She didn't know
where to put her eyes and did her best to focus on a waitress
with long greasy hair who was sulking in the corner.

Anna had no idea how he did it, but the next thing she knew,
she was on the floor and Tor was kneeling down, pushing her legs
apart. Taking his weight on his hands so that their bodies wouldn't
actually touch, he then lay himself above her and began moving up
and down, in time to the music.

“Come on, sweetheart, relax,” he whispered, seeing the look
of abject horror on Anna's face. “Just go with it.”

Her instinct was to hit him, but at the same time she felt
she couldn't disappoint the audience, who, judging by all the
whistling and
wurrgh
noises coming from the tables, were
lapping it up.

Anna thought this had to be the most degrading thing that had
ever happened to her—far worse than when the consultant had
come onto the ward with five male students the day after she'd
delivered Josh and asked if each of them could take a look at her
prolapsed back passage.

By now, Tor had repositioned the pair of them so that his naked
rear was facing the audience. He began moving himself along her
body until his crotch was over her face, millimeters from her skin.
By now her humiliation had turned to fizzing rage. She also felt as
if she was about to suffocate.

Tor continued to keep his back to the audience. As a
consequence, only he and Anna were privy to what happened next. Anna's
anger finally got the better of her and she made a grab for Tor's
black leather posing pouch. The amount of adrenaline pumping through
her must have given her three or four times her normal strength.
The thing simply came away in her hand.

For several seconds, Tor froze and looked helplessly at Anna.
Anna froze too, not because she had embarrassed him and felt guilty,
but because she couldn't believe her eyes.

Tor, with his huge granitelike torso and thighs which could
crush cars, possessed the smallest set of genitals she had ever
seen on an adult male. His tiny circumcised penis looked exactly
like the top of a roll-on deodorant bottle. She stared at the
leather jockstrap. It was stuffed with cotton wool.

I
n those few seconds, Anna composed her final paragraph.

C H A P T E R     N I N E T E E N

W
HAT DO YOU MEAN, WHY DID I come back with
you? .   .   . 'Cos I thought we could spend the
night sitting here in this cottage, sharing insights into Dorset
dairy farming. .   .   . For Chrissake, Ed, why do
you think I'm here?”

“No, that's not what I meant.” Ed gave the pasta a stir and
turned to face her. “I think we both know what we have in mind
for tonight. What I'm trying to say is that in my experience, happily
married women, particularly happily married Jewish ones, don't
usually leap into bed with men who aren't their husbands.”

Anna stared into her wineglass and ran her finger round the
rim. She said nothing and neither did Ed. She was aware of him backing off, allowing her to get her thoughts together.

She watched him strain the pasta into a red plastic colander.
He bent his head into the crook of his arm and wiped the steam off
his face with his shirtsleeve.

Anna had assumed that Ed's interest in her didn't extend
beyond sleeping with her, so that for a few hours, at least, he
could push his pain about his children to the back of his mind. It
hadn't entered her mind that he would be curious about her
marriage.

“You know you should really rinse the starch off the
spaghetti with boiling water—otherwise it goes all
glutinous,” she said, dodging his question. She couldn't help
wondering if he was genuinely interested in finding out about her,
or whether he was merely inquiring out of good manners. After all,
she'd spent hours listening to his troubles this afternoon. He was
probably doing no more than returning the gesture.

“I know what you're thinking,” he said, piling the spaghetti
into bowls. “I'm not asking out of duty and this is not some
kind of cynical verbal foreplay. Look, it doesn't take a genius to
see that deep down, underneath all the wisecracks, you're pretty
fucking miserable.”

Anna looked at him. He had stopped dishing out the pasta and was
staring straight into her eyes. Until this minute she had thought
she was reasonably happy. After all, she'd had more decent sex in the
last few weeks than she'd had in years with Dan. As Ed continued to
look at her without saying a word, it struck her for the first time
that she had been kidding herself. Ed was right. She was still
unhappy. Sleeping with Charlie and Alex hadn't made her problem
with Dan go away. How was it possible to fool herself into thinking
she was happy, and yet fail to convince somebody she barely knew?

Ed Brzezinski, she realized, not only got inside women's pants,
he got inside their minds. She wanted to hump him there and then,
until he was nothing but husk.

He walked round to her side of the breakfast bar and stood in
front of her.

“Come on.   .   .   .” he said, taking her glass of
wine from her hand and putting it on the worktop. “Tell
me .   .   . what is it?”

She sat looking up at him. Her eyes were suddenly glassy with
tears.

“You're right .   .   . I'm not happy.” Her tone
was flat. She knew that her promise about not discussing Dan with
any of her lovers was about to be broken.

Ed pulled her to her feet, put his arms round her and held
her. Anna put her head on his shoulder and sobbed like a child.

W
hen she'd finished, Ed kissed her on the forehead and wiped her tear-stained face with his hand.

“Go and sit in the living room. I'll bring supper in and we
can eat and talk in front of the fire.”

Like all the other rooms in the cottage, the living room was
tiny. It had a low, beamed ceiling and uneven white walls. Anna sat
down on the rug in front of the fire, leaning her back against
the navy linen sofa. Graham had left the fire laid in the grate.
Ed had lit it when they arrived and now the room was baking.

After a minute, Ed came in and handed her a plate of
spaghetti covered in tomato sauce and Parmesan.

“That looks wonderful. I can't remember the last time I ate
so late. It must be after midnight.”

“Quarter to,” he said, looking at his watch. He went over to
the window and threw it open. Anna felt the rush of cool air on
the back of her neck.

Ed sat himself down next to her on the floor.

“So   .   .   .” he said, curling spaghetti
round his fork.

A
nna talked, almost nonstop, for three hours. Everything
just spewed out of her. When she began telling him about Dan's
hypochondria and his collection of medical appliances, she was
expecting Ed to laugh, but he didn't. He just listened and wiped
her face whenever she cried. When she told him that she had lived
for years with virtually no sex, he put his arm round her shoulders,
drew her close to him and kissed the side of her face. She felt his
tears on her skin.

It struck her yet again that Ed was playing the role of
counselor and confessor merely to get her into bed, but as the hours
went by he didn't attempt to make a move on her. He appeared to be
genuinely concerned about her unhappiness.

“Come on,” he said eventually, looking at his watch. “You're
knackered. I think all you need tonight is sleep. The beds in both
rooms are made up. Take your pick .   .   . and there
should be a full tank of water by now if you want a shower.”

Disappointment went through Anna like a skewer through a
kebab. She wanted to run round the room protesting, screaming
and proclaiming her wide-awakeness, the way children do when they
are ordered up to bed on a bright summer's evening, but she knew
he was just being kind. Begging him to make love to her would be
too humiliating.

She had a quick shower to get the remains of the muddy ditch
out of her hair, put on one of her baggy T-shirts and fell
into bed.

She closed her eyes, assuming that sleep would overtake her in
a matter of seconds. It didn't. Five minutes later she was lying on
her side, propped up on her elbow, gazing out of the tiny bedroom
window. It was almost pitch black outside. She could just make out
a couple of branches shaking gently in the breeze.

The reason Anna couldn't sleep was because she was remembering
standing in Brenda's kitchen the day six weeks
ago she had gone to
her and pretty much asked for her
permission to take a series of
lovers. Her words to Brenda kept
going round and round her head. What
was it she had said? “I
don't want heavy,
I'll-show-you-my-angst-if-you-show-me-yours-type relationships
and then we fall in love. I just want their bodies.”

Ed had certainly shown her his angst. She had shown him hers.
She knew herself well enough to be certain she would never have
done that if she didn't feel something for him.
Ed was a womanizer
and a recovering arrogant git, and yet
she had invited him into her
mind, into her most private part.

In Ed, unlike Charlie, she sensed a genuine desire for
closeness. What scared and excited her at the same time was that she
sensed precisely the same desire in herself. She wanted to get to
know this man. She felt easy and relaxed with him. She loved the
way they teased one another, the way he almost seemed to enjoy it
when she got stroppy with him. She remembered the way he'd smiled
at her in the Starlight Club when she told him he was getting on
her tits.

Anna knew they were two vulnerable, searching souls, hungry for
comfort. Ed had lost a wife and might be about to lose his children;
she felt she had lost Dan to his neuroses. She knew in the end that
they might not be right for each other. She also knew that if she
began a proper relationship with Ed, not one based simply on sex,
she wouldn't be able to keep it from Dan and her marriage would
be over.

She turned onto her back and stared at the ceiling. Lying
there in the dark, drunk on wine and exhaustion, she suddenly didn't
give a monkey's about the dangers of starting a relationship with
Ed. The only thing that mattered was that she was falling in
love—and what she wanted more than anything at that moment
was Ed in bed beside her.

Anna kicked off the duvet. She would run into Ed's room and
throw herself on top of him. What stopped her was
the sudden fear
that maybe she'd got it all wrong, and that
the reason Ed had sent
her to bed alone was because
he had changed his mind and maybe
he didn't fancy her after all.

Lying there in the dark, desire seeped through her body like
whiskey on a winter's night. She sat up and pulled her T-shirt
over her head. The tree branches made a cracking sound in the wind.
Lying down again, letting her head sink into the thick feather
pillow, she ran her hands slowly over her breasts and belly. She
drew up her legs and let them drop to the side and with both hands
began stroking the insides of her thighs. After a few moments she
parted her labia and felt the wetness flowing out of her. Her belly
quivered as she ran her finger over her clitoris. She closed her eyes
and felt the muscles tighten in her vagina. Her gentle strokes
gradually became harder and faster.

“Why don't you let me do that?”

Anna froze, partly with shock and partly with mortification.
How could she not have heard the door handle? Opening her eyes she
saw Ed standing just inside the bedroom, watching her, his body
backlit by the landing light. He was naked except for a towel round
his waist. He'd obviously just got out of the shower.

In a second he was sitting on the edge of the bed and leaning
over her. She could feel his breath on her face. Although she
hadn't the slightest idea what she was going to say, she opened her
mouth to speak. Ed put his finger to her lips.

“Ssh, 's OK. Please don't be
embarrassed .   .   . you looked so beautiful.”

He brought his mouth towards her and kissed her. As his tongue
entered her mouth, she felt his hand move down over her stomach
towards her bush. She put her arms round his neck and breathed
in his warm, damp smell.

Ed played with her bush for a few seconds and then pulled away
from her. He knelt on the bed and took off his towel. Anna reached
out and began running the palm of her hand over the top of his
penis. After a while a tiny pearl of semen appeared. She touched
it with her forefinger and gently rubbed it away.

“I want to feel you inside me,” she whispered.

“In a minute .   .   . there's plenty of time.”
Ed moved himself round so that he was sitting up, leaning against
the bed's wooden headboard.

“Come here,” he said, his arms stretched out towards her.

Anna crawled across the bed and sat herself between his legs,
her back against his chest. “But I can't see you,” she
protested.

“Just let me hold you. Close your eyes.”

He held her with one arm while she let her head flop back onto
the top of his shoulder.

Gently he opened her legs. A moment later he had found her
clitoris. Anna gasped. As his fingers glided over the wetness, she
thrust her pelvis up towards his hand. Every so often he nipped
the base of her neck and ran his tongue inside her ear. As her
body relaxed and melted into his, Anna felt herself swimming in
pure pleasure.

Afterwards, Ed carried on holding her. For what seemed like
ages, they sat silently in the dark, listening to each other's
breathing.

Finally Anna turned round to face him and began running her
tongue over his belly. She watched his penis stiffen and turn upwards
towards his navel. A moment later he had pulled her on top of him.
Their kissing became fierce and urgent. She could feel his fingers
almost digging into her buttocks. They rolled across the bed in
a tangled, breathy heap like two frenzied creatures attempting to
caress and devour each other at the same time.

The next thing Anna knew, Ed was standing on the floor, his
hands round her ankles.

“Bring your bottom to the edge of the bed.”

Anna obliged. Ed pushed her legs up onto her chest. She felt
him run his tongue over her clitoris and put some gentle pressure on
her anus. Finally she was aware of his penis rubbing the entrance
to her vagina. She winced and let out a tiny whimper as she felt
the sensation, which exists somewhere between pain and sublime
pleasure, of him pushing himself fractionally too deep inside her.
She heard herself beg him to thrust harder.

Anna came first. Then, a few seconds later, Ed let out a huge
sigh. Gently, he lowered the top half of his body onto hers. As she
held him and stroked his head, she felt the same emotion she used
to feel years ago when she and Dan made love. She'd only ever been
able to describe it as a feeling of coming home—a sense
that she belonged with this person.

A
nna opened her eyes a few hours later to see
the sun streaming in through the tiny cottage window and
Ed standing by the
side of the bed. He was bare-chested and
wearing yesterday's jeans
with the fly buttons half un- done.

“For you,” he said, putting a mug of tea and a couple of
biscuits down on the bedside table. “I nicked the Garibaldis from the
stash of crap confectionery Graham keeps behind his jars of cep
mushrooms. You could have Jammy Dodgers if you prefer.”

Anna laughed and said the Garibaldis would be fine.

“Listen, Anna,” Ed said enthusiastically as he climbed over
the bed and sat himself down beside her, “I really don't want you
to go home. I've got the cottage for the weekend and I thought once
I'd got the car sorted out, assuming there's nothing major the matter
with it, we could do a bit of sightseeing and go out for dinner
tonight. The thing is, even though you're the most stroppy,
argumentative tart I've ever met, for some perverted reason I love
being with you and I'd really like to spend more time with you. What
d'you reckon?”

Anna dipped her Garibaldi into her tea and bit into it. She
decided to ignore the stroppy, argumentative tart bit.