Neurotica (3 page)

They were trying to decide whether they'd get any response if
they put postcards in the newsagent's window advertising for people
to join when it hit Brenda that Anna had never seen any of the
clothes she made.

Anna knew very little about real couture, but she took one
look at Brenda's exquisitely cut, hand-finished jackets and
trousers and knew this came pretty close.

“Blimey, Bren, I knew you were talented, but I had no idea
you were Edina bloody Ronay. I can't understand why you're not
making a fortune.”

“I'll tell you why. I've got orders coming out of my ears,
but I can't keep up, because I've got no staff, one rotten sewing
machine in a flat not much bigger than a pair of Christina Aguilera's panties, not to mention fucking Goering here making
twenty-four-hour-a-day territorial demands on my tits.”

Anna, being an accountant's daughter, couldn't see the
problem. Once Brenda had got Alfie on the bottle and into day care,
all she needed to do was form a company, write a business plan,
find a backer to put up half the money she needed and her bank
would probably lend her the rest.

“God, what planet do you live on? Find a backer? You may not
be aware of this but you don't find too many ordinary daddies
sticking around in Peckham—let alone sugar ones.”

Driving home to Blackheath, with Josh asleep in his carrycot
on the backseat and Dire Straits on the cassette player, Anna began
running through a list of people who she thought might be able to
come up with the kind of cash Brenda needed. In the end she decided
the only person she knew who wasn't up to their eyes in mortgage
repayments and didn't have the ladies from Barclaycard on the phone
every five minutes over late payments was her father. He had the
money from his mother's flat in Brighton sitting in a building
society. But to convince Harry that investing in Brenda's business
would be a sound move, she first had to convince her mother.

A
nna spent the next three weeks, in between
breast-feeding Josh, on the phone trying to persuade her mother—directrice
of Maison Gloria in Stanmore (Fabulous Fashions For the Fuller
Figure)—to take a look at Brenda's work.

Harry had bought Gloria the shop over thirty years ago, when
her need to repeatedly clean things—the Maudsley called it
obsessive-compulsive syndrome—had reached a particularly
worrying phase.

One Saturday lunchtime, he had come home from synagogue
expecting a nice bowl of borscht before he went off to see
Tottenham. Instead he found Gloria on her knees removing bits of
dirt from between the floorboards with a cotton swab while two of
his best suits were soaking in a bath full of Parazone.

Her psychiatrist at the hospital suggested to Harry in
private that an outside interest would be a good idea.

“Funny you should mention it, Dr. Mittelschmertz. I've been
thinking maybe a few gentle rounds of golf now and again would do
me good.”

Dr. Mittelschmertz grimaced. “I mean for your vife, Mr.
Shapiro, for your vife.”

Harry began phoning estate agents.

Maison Gloria seemed to have done the trick. Every day,
Gloria glided around the shop, black velvet pincushion on her
wrist, flogging mauve chiffon evening dresses to size twenty-two
mothers-of-the-bar-mitzvah-boy who couldn't lay off the
cheesecake.

Anna knew that as far as Harry was concerned, Gloria was
northwest London's answer to Coco Chanel. If Gloria thought Brenda
was worth backing, he wouldn't hesitate to put his hand in his
pocket.

But persuading Gloria wasn't easy. Every time Anna brought
the subject up, Gloria told her she was mad and obviously suffering
from postnatal depression if she expected her to convince Harry to
invest money in a total stranger—a shikseh no
less—who at best needed a good elocution teacher and at
worst might turn out to be a psychopath, only they wouldn't find
out until they woke up one morning dead in their beds.

Anna never quite worked out why—maybe her mother could
no longer stand her continual badgering—but finally Gloria
caved in and agreed to schlep over to Peckham.

“There'll be dirt and litter and people in Acrilan. What
should I wear?”

“Pith helmet and puttees should just about hit the right
note.”

To placate Anna further she even took a present for
Alfie.

Gloria decided that as Brenda had been brought up in public
housing and her gene pool probably left a lot to be desired, little
Alfie's IQ might need a jump start, and so she bought him a
times-tables tape. Furious, Anna made her take it back and exchange
it for a furry duck.

E
ven then, Brenda's taste in interiors was unconventional.

“Tell me,” Gloria had said on the way home, “what sort of
a person keeps her panties in a filing cabinet?”

But, like Anna, she had been bowled over by Brenda's
creations.

Anna had never known Gloria to be silent for so long. She was like
a little girl gazing at her first party dress in the days when they
were pink and frothy with rosebuds and bows.

Gently, she ran her fingers over Brenda's seams.
Analytically, she squinted at her buttonholes. Approvingly, she
stroked the outside of her sleeves. Anna knew they'd got it sorted
when, finally, Gloria took off her glasses and declared that the
last time she had seen lapels like these was on her uncle Manny at
the end of the war. Apparently, Manny had been a petty East End
crook who had once come into possession of a vanload of Savile Row
suits. Although he never got nicked for the suits, he went on to do
six months in Wormwood Scrubs for black-market onions.

Gloria got home, marched into the kitchen where Harry was
munching on a pickled cucumber and reading the Social and Personal
column in the
Jewish Chronicle,
and informed him that he
was about to invest £30,000 in Brenda's business.

Harry carried on reading.

“Harry, put the paper down, stop making that awful noise and
listen to me. You've heard of Christian Lacroix. If you invest in
this Brenda Sweet person, I'm telling you, overnight you'll become
Yiddishe Lacroix.”

Harry did as he was told and even prepared Brenda's business
plan for the bank. Three months later Sweet FA-UK was born.

T
enyears on, Brenda had a personal fortune of well over four million, plus an eight-bedroom house in Holland Park. Harry
had made enough money to retire at fifty-five, and he and Gloria
had bought a smart holiday flat in Eilat where they spent three
months every year. Gloria brought in an assistant to help her run
Maison Gloria, but refused to sell the shop because she adored
chatting and getting to know her customers. Over the years the
business had become her social life. Without it she would have been
lost.

Brenda always said she would never be able to put into words
how grateful she was to Anna. Anna said she needn't bother—a
couple of free suits a year said it all as far as she was
concerned.

In fact, Brenda did much more than supply Anna with clothes.
When Amy got pneumonia just after she was born, it was Brenda who
phoned one of her clients, who just happened to be a professor of
pediatrics, and persuaded her to have a look at the baby; when Dan
began going peculiar, it was Brenda she cried to and got drunk
with, and Brenda who listened. Now that she was about to cheat on
Dan, it was Brenda she had come to, partly for advice on how to go
about it, and partly because, despite her determination to go
through with it, she realized she still needed somebody to give her
permission.

“God, Anna, you make me feel like the Mother Superior in
The Sound of Music.
What do you expect me to do, burst
into song and tell you to climb ev'ry mountain until you find your
dream so that you can waltz out of 'ere in some poxy brown burlap
jacket and silly hat singing to all and sundry down Kensington
Church Street that you have confidence in bleedin' sunshine and
rain? I don't think so. Anna, have you any idea what you'll be
risking if you go on this shagathon? I mean, what if Dan finds out?
You could lose the kids.”

“But that's the whole point of the exercise,” Anna said
tetchily, annoyed that she wasn't getting the lavish approval from
Brenda she had hoped for. “According to Rachel Stern, you can only
do it if you know you have the wit not to get found out and the
strength not to tell. Perhaps the cow's right.”

“And you reckon you've got all that?”

“Yes. Look, 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.”

T
here was a very long pause. Finally, Brenda licked her middle
finger and began flicking through a copy of the
Evening
Standard
which had been lying on the kitchen table.

“If it really is only the sex you're after, you might find
this useful. I noticed it last night.”

Brenda stopped flicking and reached for a ballpoint. Anna
could see she was ringing one of the personal ads.

“What is it, Bren? If you think I'm going off with some sad
creep who has to advertise, you can think again.”

“Don't read it now. Wait until you get home.”

Brenda tore out the page, folded it over a couple of times
and slipped it into Anna's jacket pocket.

G
loria was convinced that if the light caught Anna's marble-topped coffee table at a certain angle, she could see a
small raised mark. It was either a spot of Superglue, probably
spilled by Dan when he was mending one of Josh's Lego men, or a
flaw in the marble.

By holding her head slightly to the right she could keep the
mark in her sight and move in on it very slowly. The tiniest
movement and it would disappear. Then she would have to move back
and start again.

It was definitely Superglue. She started alternately spraying
it with Pledge and picking at it with her thumbnail. After ten
minutes, it still wasn't shifting. The thought of having to leave
it filled her with terror.

Desperate for another cleaning fix, she got up from her knees
and ran into the kitchen. She opened the cupboard under the sink,
took out a bottle of Ajax Liquid and poured nearly half of it into
a bucket. As she dipped her J-Cloth into the bucket she could
feel her heart rate coming down and the tension easing. Gloria had
just begun to wipe down Anna's worktops when she looked up and saw
Anna standing staring at her in the doorway.

“My God, Mum, you don't get any better. Am I the only sane
one in this bloody family? Would you mind telling me what you are
doing? Mrs. Fredericks came in yesterday. The place is
spotless.”

It turned out Gloria was on her way to her
obsessive-compulsive group's annual bazaar, an event which had
looked like it was never going to happen. Apparently their group
therapist had been forced to postpone it three times because all
the obsessive compulsives had been too busy obsessively and
compulsively cleaning the hall and checking the wiring to organize
the actual event.

Gloria had popped in to see if Amy and Josh had wanted to
come, but when she arrived they'd been on their way out to the
roller disco with Dan. He'd said she was welcome to stay, as Anna
was due back just after one.

“Oh, and there's something else you ought to know,” Gloria
said to Anna. “I got a phone call last night. Your uncle Henry
died yesterday.”

“Good Lord. I had no idea he was still alive. He must have
been a hundred and six.”

“A hundred and two. Just dropped dead out of the blue. The
funeral's three o'clock Thursday. They've had to delay it a few
days because there has to be a postmortem if you haven't seen a
doctor in the past two weeks.”

Uncle Henry wasn't Anna's real uncle. In fact, he was no
relation at all. In 1901 Henry and Anna's grandma Esther had met
and become inseparable on the boat bringing Jewish immigrants from
Poland to England. Once the two seven-year-olds had found each
other, it wasn't long before their parents became friends too, and
when they arrived in the East End, they all lodged together in the
same miserable, damp house off the Roman Road.

From then on, the two families never lived more than a couple
of streets apart, and Esther and Henry, who were both only children,
became like brother and sister. Strangely, as they grew up, there
was never any romance between them. As far as both sets of parents
were concerned, it wasn't for want of trying.

In the end Henry married a beautiful but half-witted girl
called Yetta, and Esther married a young tailor called Saul, who
owned three sewing machines and seemed to have above-average
prospects. Nevertheless, Henry and Esther remained extremely close
into old age. As a child, Anna had always received a ten-shilling
note in her birthday card from Uncle Henry and Aunty Yetta, and
always thought of them as part of her mother's family.

G
loria put on her jacket, gave Anna's worktop another wipe, took a look in the fridge to check she had enough food in, kissed
her and said, “See you Thursday.”

A
nna went upstairs to the bathroom, sat on the toilet seat and started to read the small ad Brenda had ringed.

“Are you in a relationship or happily married, but would
like a lover? Liaisons Dangereux is a dating agency with a
difference.” Then there was a telephone number.

Anna refolded the page, rolled it into a small cigar and
slipped it inside a box of Tampax.

C H A P T E R     T H R E E

“
W
E USED TO BE A HAPPY FAMILY before all this happened,' wept attractive mum of two, Dawn, 40, from the beamed
mock-Tudor lounge of her apartment in Barking. “I used to enjoy
going out for a Malibu and Coke with the girls of an evening. Terry
used to look forward to a bit of a fight with his mates at the West
Ham football matches. These days, all our friends have deserted us.
We daren't even walk round the estate without the Rottweilers,
because there's always some bastard pointing a finger at us.
Sigourney and Keanu are wonderful kids since they came out of the
detention center, but they're being bullied so much at school over
this, they've been offered counseling.' ”

Anna was sitting at the word processor in her
bedroom-cum-study, just getting to the end of a piece for the
health pages of the
Globe on Sunday
about coping with
nits—provisionally headlined “Lousy Mother's Nit Nightmare
Shame”—when she looked down at her watch and realized that
if she didn't get a move on, she was going to be late for Uncle
Henry's funeral.

The article should have taken only a couple of hours to
write, but Anna was spending ages on it, because she had passed
most of the morning staring out of the window trying to pluck up
the courage to phone Liaisons Dangereux, but then decided she
couldn't because they were bound to want her to deliver her
romantic manifesto in some cringe-makingly embarrassing video. She
knew the style, since she had done an article a couple of years ago
on women who used dating agencies, and had sat in while some of
them performed what one outfit referred to pretentiously as the
client's “piece to camera.”

The women fell into two groups. First there were the fat
middle-aged divorcees with bad perms, who had just started some
computer access course or other. Then there were the sad
twenty-something lasses with eczema and brains the size of
Cadbury's Creme Eggs, who sat in front of the camera and gabbled:
“Hi, my name's Nicole and I come from Worcester Park. I work in
personnel for a large company which specializes in intimate
rubberwear. My ambitions are to meet Simon Cowell, to find a way to
wax my bikini line without getting that embarrassing rash and to
end world hunger. At this moment in time I am without a special
someone in my life and I'm searching for a soulmate for walks,
talks and maybe more. Are you the shining star who can brighten up
my lonely nights?”

With the possible exception of auditioning for
Pop Idol
in
nothing but silver hot pants and a matching boob tube, Anna could think of no worse humiliation
than making a dating agency video. Nevertheless, she couldn't help
fantasizing about what she might say, should the occasion arise.
She suspected she would dispense with the introduction and launch
straight into: “Look, I live with a fucking lunatic who would
rather spend his nights on an Internet Terminal Illness Forum
exchanging information on symptoms and hospice facilities with
fellow hypochondriacs in Kentucky than have sex with me. So if you
own your own liver, your tap stops dripping after you've had a pee,
or better still, you had yet to be weaned onto solids the night
Kennedy was shot, I'm all yours.”

She typed another couple of sentences and broke off yet
again. She didn't know why she was bothering to go to the funeral.
She hadn't seen Uncle Henry or Aunty Yetta for donkey's years, but
on the phone the day before, Gloria had laid on the guilt, saying
that she should go for Bubba's sake. Anna pointed out that Bubba
had been dead for eleven years and, as a former person, had
forfeited all rights to a sake. Gloria, who was desperate to show
Anna off at the funeral and introduce her to Uncle Henry's family,
who hadn't seen her for years, as “my daughter the important Fleet
Street journalist who once interviewed Maureen Lipman,” then
instantly changed tack. Suddenly she became an expert on funeral
etiquette, a sort of sarcophagal Miss Manners, and warned Anna
ominously that if you didn't go to people's funerals, they wouldn't
come to yours. Faced with this priceless piece of Gloria-esque
logic, Anna gave in.

She wasn't surprised when Dan announced he would not be
coming. He'd given her some involved explanation about having to
drop off a stool sample at the doctor's surgery and then having to
go on to Newport Pagnell for lunch with a trade delegation from
Venezuela. As soon as Anna heard the words “stool sample,” her
eyes glazed over and she stopped listening.

A
nna took another look at her watch. It was just after one. She bashed out a lackluster final paragraph and faffed irritably
with the modem, which, as ever, threw a wobbly and refused to work
if she was in a state any more stressful than one of sublime,
bucolic repose; indeed, to function properly, the modem would have
preferred Anna to be sitting with her feet on her desk, straw in
mouth and humming “One Man Went to Mow.” After fifteen minutes of
sending and resending, roughly as long as it would have taken to
dictate the story to an old-fashioned copytaker, Anna's article was
finally ingested by the
Globe
's computers.

She took her latest Sweet FA black jacket out of the wardrobe
and put it on over a tight white top and boot-cut black pants. She decided,
even though she was going to a funeral, that the outfit needed a
bit of a lift. She also retained an adolescent urge to shock at
important family do's. So she went to her jewelry box and took out
a brightly colored four-inch-long wooden brooch she had bought a
couple of years ago at a market when she was on holiday with Dan
and the kids in Tobago. It was a carving of a naked, dreadlocked
African painted in ANC colors with a huge red erection and a joint.
She pinned it to her left lapel, patted it and giggled. Then she
grabbed her bag and keys off the desk, bolted downstairs and out to
the car.

D
an thought a stroll might calm him down. As he turned left
out of the
Vanguard
's office and headed down Kensington
High Street towards Holland Park, he realized he had never been so
humiliated in his life. It was nearly four hours since the incident
in the doctor's surgery, but his entire body was still bright red
with embarrassment. Even his internal organs felt as if they were
blushing. He couldn't face lunch. It was just as well the
Venezuelans had canceled.

The day had begun routinely enough. He had dropped in at the
office just after half past eight to check his messages from the
previous night, before popping out to hand in the stool sample at
the surgery round the corner. There was nothing on the voice mail.
All that had come through overnight was the fax from the
Venezuelans postponing lunch until the following Tuesday, but
inviting him to a performance of
Die Meistersinger
at
Covent Garden that evening, as they had been given some free
tickets. He sent back a fax confirming the new lunch date, but
politely declining the opera as Wagner always gave him this
irresistible urge to annex the Sudetenland.

Ten minutes later he had strolled into the crowded doctor's
waiting room. He realized it had been months since he had actually
set foot in the surgery because Dr. Harper, the kindly middle-aged
lady doctor, had of late taken to discussing his symptoms with him
on the phone so that she could dismiss them there and then, rather
than waste her time and his with a pointless visit to the
surgery.

Last Monday evening, just as Dr. Harper thought she had dealt
with her last patient of the day, the receptionist had put a call
from Mr. Bloomfield through to her, as she did three or four times
a month.

Dan, standing alone at the kitchen phone, began describing
his symptoms. This time it was gripping stomach pains, and frequent
loose bowel movements, which had a greenish tinge together with
reddish streaks which could have been beetroot from the beetroot
salad he'd bought from the deli on his way home from work the night
before, but then again could have been blood. All this, in his
opinion, and he felt sure she would agree, suggested several
possibilities:

“Colitis was my first diagnostic port of call, although I'm
not sure I've got the characteristic mucus in the blood. I'd have
to take another look. Then of course it could be Crohn's disease or
diverticulitis. I know that patients bleed with both of those,
although I understand people with diverticular disease can remain
asymptomatic for years, but certainly severe cramps are a symptom
of both. Of course there is an outside chance it could be Whipple's
disease—I do have the chronic low-grade fever. Then there
is   .   .   .” Dan hesitated before saying the word,
“.   .   .   cancer. But of course you'll know better than
me,” he added as a deferential afterthought.

That afternoon Dr. Harper had dispatched a burst appendix and
a suspected ectopic pregnancy to hospital, visited a senile chap
who thought his wife was in a coma, but by the look and smell of
her she had been dead for at least a fortnight, and had a
two-year-old with measles vomit over her new Mansfield suit. She
was tired, irritable and in no mood for malingerers like Dan
Bloomfield.

“Me know better than you, Mr. Bloomfield? You flatter me,”
she spat sarcastically down the phone. “But, with your permission,
may I offer just a couple of suggestions? Have you considered
Norwalk virus infection or shigella bacillus?”

Dan's heart didn't just skip a beat—it skipped an
entire drum solo. He was about to faint.

Somehow, while still holding the phone under his chin and
maniacally scrambling through the
Home Doctor
index trying to find
N for Norwalk, he managed to get himself onto the kitchen floor and
raise his legs a few feet off the ground. After a second or two the
blood began to return to his head.

“Good God, what the hell are they?”

“What they are, Mr. Bloomfield, are nasty little so-and-sos
which give you an upset tum. You probably have a mild case of food
poisoning, nothing more. Simply take plenty of fluids. If you
insist, you can bring in a stool sample tomorrow morning and I'll
send it off to the lab for analysis. Good-bye, Mr.
Bloomfield.”

D
an did insist. However, in all the years that he had been one
of Dr. Harper's patients, he had never given a stool sample and
wasn't quite sure how one went about it. Dr. Harper had cut him off
without giving him any instructions. Would the lab want a whole
turd, or just a slice of turd, and what should he put it in?

The first receptacle that sprang to mind as being vaguely the
right shape was the Habitat spaghetti jar standing next to him on
the kitchen worktop. Dan picked up the glass container, which was
full of spinach fusilli, adopted a squatting position and placed
it over his jeans in roughly the right position. He realized
straight away that it was going to be much too tall to fit between
his backside and the bottom of the loo, as well as too large to go
in his briefcase. Crucially, it also had no lid, although he
supposed he could cover it with clingfilm.

T
hen, as he rifled through the kitchen cupboards in search of
something expendable, it occurred to him that a pickled cucumber
jar might be just the ticket. Once a week, Dan schlepped to Golders
Green to buy bagels and a couple of jars of his favorite new
green cucumbers. New greens had a distinctive sour taste, which
he preferred to the sweet-and-sour taste of ordinary pickles. New
greens were also longer and darker. In fact, size and shapewise,
they were not dissimilar to the average healthy stool.

Dan reached up and took one of the sturdy screw-top jars down
from its cupboard. It was slightly shorter than he'd thought, but
he hoped the turd he produced would be of a consistency to curl
up and hunker down. He tipped the pickled cucumbers into a
Tupperware container and soaked off the Mrs. Elswood label under
a hot running tap. He reckoned that pickles were probably pretty
sterile, but thought he'd boil up a kettle of water and rinse out
the jar just to be on the safe side.

Harvesting the sample was no problem as he still had the
trots. He waited until Anna was watching a
Tenko
rerun
on UK Gold and then went up to the bathroom to deliver his
payload.

Afterwards Dan quickly screwed on the jar lid. He decided
that the sample had to be kept fresh until the next morning. He put
it at the back of the fridge in a brown paper bag and prayed that
Anna wouldn't be overtaken in the night by a desperate yearning
for a new green cucumber. For added protection, he ring-fenced the
jar with some items he was pretty confident his wife would not be
seeking out over the next twelve hours. These included a bottle of
infant Calpol, some homemade chutney they'd bought at the school
summer fête six months ago and a bottle of the most
disgusting no-fat salad dressing.

W
hat Dan hadn't been able to see the next day as he opened the
door of the doctor's surgery was a three-year-old boy, with a
chesty cough and a stream of green snot hanging down from his nose,
careering around the waiting room on a small wooden tricycle. At
the exact moment Dan walked in, the child was a few feet away
revving his handlebars and making irritating
broom-broom
ing noises through his catarrh as he prepared
to do a hit-and-run on a baby just old enough to sit up, and who
was busy on the floor chewing on a Playmobil pirate. Hours later,
Dan still couldn't remember precisely what happened, but in a split
second, the baby's mother, sensing imminent danger, had scooped up
her child, leaving the speeding toddler a clear path to crash into
Dan and send both him and the cucumber jar flying.