Neurotica (7 page)

“Anna, Campbell McKee 'ere. Just fought I'd give you a bell to
say what a fucking brilliant job you did on that nit piece. We even
managed to find the girl on the cooked meat counter at Streatham
Niceprice who refused to serve the family, and got a reaction from
their priest. Mine jew, 'aving said that, the mother looks like a
complete dog in the contacts I just got from the picture
desk—plus she's got jugs as flat as last Christmas's Asti
Spumante. Still, it's going to make a bollocking good page eighteen.
Listen, Anna, I was wondering if you fancied doing another story for
us tomorrow evening?”

Anna hesitated for a couple of seconds. She had imagined
spending Tuesday evening at home in the tub, immersed in delicious
sexual afterglow and Body Shop bath foam—not chasing round
every accident and emergency unit in London on behalf of Campbell
McKee because some soap star had been caught shagging a vacuum
cleaner attachment.

Campbell immediately picked up on her uncertainty and realized
a touch of gentle thumbscrew was called for.

“Anna, don't say no before you've heard me out. Believe me,
angel, this is a blindin' story .   .   . sort of
tragi-wacky if you get my drift. Listen, just between you and me,
I've had Lucinda Fee Plotter coming into my office every half hour
since Friday, begging, just begging me to let her do it, but I said,
“Lucinda, you daft tart, get up off your knees, it'll do no good,
you're just not up to it. There's only one reporter talented enough
to do this piece and that's Anna.' Angel, just listen for a couple
of minutes and let me fill you in.   .   .   .”

Anna listened, but not before deciding that she must take
Campbell McKee to one side at some stage and point out that if he
wished to remain attached to his wedding tackle he really should
stop calling her “angel.”

The story Campbell outlined sounded pretty so-whattish. Mavis
de Mornay, the seventy-something best-selling romantic novelist who
wore Lycra boob tubes and black patent thigh boots, was dying of
some mystery illness.

De Mornay was famous for her puerile seventeenth-century
melodramas. These usually concerned an amply bosomed parlormaid
called Agnes who suddenly discovers she was taken into slavery at
birth and is really an Italian contessa, but that's OK, because the
swarthy stablehand she has the hots for is really the illegitimate
son of a French prince.

They were the kind of twaddle devoured by both office juniors
from Upminster and dyslexic Sloanes skipping crème
brûlêe class at Swiss finishing schools.

Throughout her writing career, de Mornay had been a publicity
junkie. In interviews she always said that her need to mainline on
maximum press attention in order to ensure her books sold not just
in their thousands, but in their millions, was linked to an
overwhelming fear of reliving the poverty she'd known as a child
growing up as plain Mavis Truswell in a Nottinghamshire coal-mining
village. Mavis had gone into service in a grand house in
Leicestershire, married a footman, Harold Chettle, and spent
twenty years observing the ways of the aristocracy before writing
her first novel,
Housemaid No More,
and sending it to
a London publisher under the pen name she borrowed from a posh
soap label. She ditched Harold in 1955, within a month of signing
a ten-novel deal, and subsequently married her publisher.

As a consequence of her addiction to publicity, she'd employed
umpteen PRs, mainly called Sophie, over the years to pester news
desks every time a new de Mornay was about to hit the book
shops—which they seemed to do almost every week. This press
harassment took the form of incessant phone calls to editors and
the mailing of hundreds of press packs, which included black lace
garters and ripped scarlet satin bodices. A couple of times a year
there were also invitations to champagne receptions chez the de
Mornay pile in Chelsea, where the waiters and waitresses would
be dressed as her latest hero and heroine and the climax of
the evening was always a musical reenactment of the duel in
Chapter 8.

Mavis de Mornay was a bore, and as far as journalists were
concerned had been one for donkey's years. Where Campbell's
story started to get interesting was when he got to the bit about
de Mornay deciding that she would turn her own imminent death
into some kind of macabre publicity stunt. She had left instructions
with her latest PR—a jolly girl called India, which made a
change—that as soon as she lapsed into a coma and her death
seemed within hours, she was to invite the press and TV cameras to
her bedside to witness her departure from this world into the
next.

“What we'll do,” said Campbell, “is put a picture of her at
the moment of death on page one, and then your obit-cum-color-piece
about her final moving moments as she loses her brave battle for
life, et cetera, across two and three. Goes without saying none of
the broadsheets will touch it, and most of the pops seem to have
given it the bum's, so it looks like it's just us, Jennifer's
Diary and
Panorama.
What do you say? India, the
PR—nice girl, well, fucking dim, ack-shally—says she's
fading fast and tomorrow evening we'll be sure to catch her au
moment juiced, as they say.”

Anna thought it was possibly the most prurient, grotesque and
obscene idea she had ever heard.

“OK, Campbell,” she heard herself say. “Fax me the
address.”

C H A P T E R     S I X

T
HE PANIC SET IN YET AGAIN THAT morning, in the lift at the
Park Royal going up to Charlie's room. In the few seconds it took
to reach the fourteenth floor, Anna could feel dots of sweat
breaking through her foundation and her mouth filling up with saliva
as if she were about to be sick. The moment the lift came
to a jerky
stop, she decided she had to get to a bathroom. She pressed the
button for the ground floor and started
taking deep breaths in
between swallowing fiercely to get rid of the saliva. Anna wondered
what the odds were on Charlie having the hots for women who smelled
of vomit.

T
he lift took ages to reach the ground. It
stopped at the tenth floor to pick up two American businesswomen wearing big
hair, eighties power suits and running shoes, and who were deep in
discussion about the best way to get to some dump way out in
the 'burbs called Wimple-tahn, a place where, apparently, they
had some business meeting set up, but that was famous, Anna
gathered from listening to the women, for its tennis. The lift
stopped again at the eighth. A Japanese family got in, but
not before the father insisted on holding open the lift doors
with his forearm and foot while the teenage son stood by a
small table in the corridor and spent an irritating few seconds
videoing a particularly uninspiring oasis arrangement of pink
carnations.

By now Anna had trawled through her handbag and found a
half-empty packet of tomato-ketchup-flavor Wotsits, which she'd
probably confiscated for some reason from one of the children. It
might just come in useful, she thought, when she chucked up.

A
s the lift reached the ground and the doors opened, Anna
barged past the Americans and Japanese, intending to make a bolt for
the powder room, but queasy as she felt, she couldn't resist
pausing at the doors for a second and turning back towards the
Americans. “If you're looking for
Wimbledon,
I think
you'll find your best bet is via Ed in Burrow and Saint Al
Burns.”

T
he next minute she was sitting on a kidney-shaped lavender Dralon stool which had gold legs. She was thanking God that, firstly,
there was no bored lady loo attendant on duty raring to provide her
with comfort, not to mention a twenty-minute discourse comparing
and contrasting the size and consistency of her fibroids with those
of all her friends, and secondly, the nausea was beginning to wear
off. Getting angry with the two Anglophobic tarts in the lift had
probably helped.

Thinking back over the events of the morning, it wasn't
difficult for Anna to work out why she had felt so anxious and sick
in the lift.

She had been OK first thing, when she was laying out on the
bed clothes which she thought were contenders as outfits in which to
commit adultery. Not that she intended to still be wearing them
during the actual committing. It was the bit leading up to the
committing which concerned her.

She had decided black was definitely out because she'd been
wearing it at Uncle Henry's funeral and she didn't want to look as
if she only ran at one sartorial speed. However, that excluded most
of her wardrobe. She was left with a bright-pink imitation Chanel
suit from M&S which had a gob of either snot or aioli down the
skirt—she couldn't tell which—and a powder-blue dress
and coat which was very sixties, very Jackie Kennedy and which Anna
wore with matching low, pointy slingbacks. She had bought it last
spring for a wedding. Although she thought it was ideal for her tryst
at the Park Royal, it crossed her mind that it might be a bit dressy,
a bit Moët and nibbles, for Mavis de Mornay's deathbed
vigil afterwards. Still, if de Mornay was in a coma, she wouldn't
give a toss what Anna was wearing, and if she was vaguely conscious,
it might cheer her up.

So the blue dress and coat it was—along with a
brand-new fifty-quid bra, which was sexy but not overly lacy and
tarty, and matching cream-colored panties.

Then, just after nine, as Anna was thinking about getting in
the shower, she heard Dan, who had left with the children almost an
hour earlier, calling to her from the hall and then come charging
up the stairs. She just had time to hide the clothes under the
duvet and whip an old emery board out of her dressing-gown pocket.
As he came panting into the bedroom, Anna was sitting at her desk
filing her nails.

“Got halfway to the station and realized I'd forgotten my
bloody briefcase,” Dan puffed. Barely looking at Anna, he bent down
and picked up the ancient brown leather briefcase which was propping
open the bedroom door.

Until two weeks ago, Dan had never taken a briefcase to work.
The only thing he ever carried was a notebook and a Psion, which
fitted neatly into his jacket pockets. Up to that point, the
briefcase, Dan's only surviving bar-mitzvah present, had been used
as a filing cabinet. It was stuffed with insurance policies, bank
statements and HP agreements for furniture they had thrown out five
years ago. Floating around the bottom somewhere was the tiny plastic
ring which had been used to push back what remained of Josh's
foreskin after he had been circumcised, and which Anna was keeping
in order to bring out at his wedding. Now these family ephemera were
stuffed into a black bin bag down by the side of the wardrobe.

Anna had no desire to find out what was in the briefcase. She
had assumed it was nothing of any journalistic importance and
guessed it contained another of Dan's medical
contraptions—probably electronic paddles to jump-start his
heart, complete with operating instructions. She figured he'd
probably paid a fortune to have these translated into a dozen or so
languages. His argument for this would have been that as there were
so many tourists in London he had to be prepared in case it was a
Xhosa tribesman who ended up spotting him in midinfarction.

Anna's guess wasn't that far off the mark. The story of the
briefcase contents had begun one afternoon as Dan was walking past
Berry Pomeroy's desk at the
Vanguard.
Berry, who had been
christened Barry but thought Berry had more élan, was the
TV critic, and was renowned for never being about. The reason for
this, which was nonchalantly acknowledged by everyone in the
Vanguard
building, was that he spent most of his time
suffering from writer's block, which he could only relieve by going
to the cans to masturbate.

As usual, Berry was nowhere to be seen. On his desk was a pile
of videocassettes, one of which caught Dan's eye. It was a preview
copy of a BBC 2 documentary on spontaneous human combustion. He was
unable to resist picking up the tape, and felt compelled to slip
into the deputy editor's office, which happened to be empty and
had a telly and a video. Dan watched the program four times and
then immediately rushed out to Halfords.

The reason he had got into such a terrible stew on the way to
the station two weeks later was the sudden and frightful realization
that he had left home without his handy-sized fire
extinguisher.

I
t wasn't just the certainty that Dan's hypochondria was spinning out of control like some mad, loose flywheel which had
disturbed Anna. There was more to it. Something about his manner
troubled her. The way, for example, he hadn't looked at her when
he came into the bedroom to pick up the briefcase. There was no
doubt in Anna's mind: Dan seemed even more distant and self-absorbed
than usual. In fact, he'd been a bit strange all weekend. Whenever
she had taken a break from one of her wild sexual fantasies about
Charlie Kaplan, she had noticed that Dan, instead of slumping in his
usual depressive state, had been positively agitated and jumpy,
and kept getting up to check his office voice mail. He also had a
faraway look on his face, and kept not hearing the children when they
spoke to him. Anna had to repeat herself twice when she was
explaining about the Mavis de Mornay job for the
Globe,
and that she might be very late home on Tuesday if the old bat
didn't die on cue. Even after she had spelled it out again, she
wasn't sure how much he had taken in. Finally, she had decided not
to rely on Dan to baby-sit. She'd ask Denise to sleep over.

Anna had suspected that Dan's agitation (actually caused by the
sluggishness of the shrink he'd found in
Time Out
in
returning his call—as well as the fear that he was going mad)
was because he was waiting for the result of yet another test. That
would explain the obsession with the phone messages. Nevertheless,
it was odd he hadn't given the lab or whomever the home number.

By Monday night he had seemed a little calmer. The call he
was waiting for had obviously come. Anna was confident another
electrical appliance would turn up on the kitchen table, but none
appeared, and Dan continued to be hugely preoccupied.

Standing in the shower after Dan had left with his briefcase,
it occurred to Anna for the first time in donkey's years that this
time he might be genuinely ill—dying even. Here she was about
to commit adultery and her husband might only have months—or
possibly weeks—to live. Guilt surged through Anna's veins the
way anesthetic does before an operation.

She spent the next few minutes repeatedly soaping her armpits
and trying to remember the Jewish position on hell and whether
it came with or without fire and brimstone. Just so as she'd know
what to pack.

A
fter a while, the heat from the shower started to soothe
Anna, and she began reminding herself how much Dan had neglected
her, and how desperately she needed this fling with Charlie Kaplan.
It didn't mean she had stopped loving or caring for Dan. If he was
really ill this time, she would stop seeing Charlie, forget the idea
of taking more lovers and doing the newspaper article and start
investigating what was new in headstone designs. Her head clearer,
but still agitated, Anna finally rinsed her crotch.

She looked down at her pubes to check all the soap was off. The
guilt of a few moments ago had nothing on the horror and anguish
which were now following in its wake. Anna could not take her eyes
off her pubic area. Overnight, possibly even in the space of the
morning, Anna had sprouted not one, but at least seven or eight
gray hairs. Long, straight ones. They hung there like straggly weeds
in her beautifully tended bush.

Anna accepted that decrepitude started to set in around the
mid-to-late thirties. She just didn't want it to start setting in
today.

She couldn't comprehend her bad luck. How was it, she thought,
that the one day out of three hundred and sixty-five she had set aside
to be licked out by a virtual stranger turned out to be the
selfsame buggering day nature chose to pop up with a quick reminder
that she was, in fact, a crone in waiting, and that it might be
worth taking a look at some of the brilliant half-price deals around
on commodes?

God help her, wasn't it bad enough that she would have to make
sure she only made love to Charlie Kaplan on her back so that her
breasts looked vaguely aesthetic and remained in the rough vicinity
of her chest, instead of pointing perpendicularly downwards? Even
if she remained dorsal, they were bound to make a beeline for her
armpits. Why was it that at thirty-seven she had everything she had
at twenty, only now it was lower?

A
nna knew the easiest thing to do was to leave the hairs be, and accept that at almost forty, a few distinguished-looking pubes was OK. But she couldn't. She had no intention of letting Charlie Kaplan behold any more of her impending crone-hood than was
absolutely necessary. She also decided not to pluck them—a)
because it would hurt, and b) because her mother had always taught
her that if you plucked hairs, they would inevitably grow back
thicker and stronger.

It suddenly struck her that Clairol or someone might make
a dye
for coloring gray pubes. She quickly toweled herself
off, put on
joggers and a T-shirt and sprinted to Boots, which
was only a
couple of minutes down the hill in the George Street.

Of course, there were umpteen dyes for coloring gray hair, but
nothing for gray pubes, and she was damned if she was going to
ask. Then she spied it, alongside a new range of shampoos and
conditioners imported from Australia. Next to a conditioner for
permed and colored hair, there was a box with a picture of an
Aboriginal man on the front, carrying a long pole. There it was,
written in huge letters across the top of the box: “Bush
Magic—specially formulated to color gray in your most delicate
area.” Anna thought the name was a bit feeble for the Aussies, who
she would have expected to have gone for something like Minge Tinge,
The Better Way to Color Your Cunt, but she was nevertheless beside
herself at her sudden change of fortune. She paid the seven
ninety-nine for a color called Kanga Rouge, which the leaflet
inside promised was more chestnut than red, then walked out of the
shop in the full knowledge that the cross-eyed seventeen-year-old
boy assistant now knew she had gray pubes.

B
ack home, Anna reentered the shower and shampooed in the dye,
which, according to the instructions, needed to be left for an
hour to ensure the color became permanent. Pushed for time—by
now it was gone eleven—she decided to run the hair dryer over
her pubes for ten minutes or so, hoping this would make the Bush
Magic take faster. She turned the hair dryer to maximum heat and
stood in the middle of the bedroom with her legs apart, looking as
if she were about to deflower herself with a blast of hot air. After
a while there was a slight smell of scorched pubic hair. But Anna
didn't notice. She was feeling the anxiety creep over her
again.