Neurotica (9 page)

They came together, slowly and gradually, in a delicious heap
of hot and wet. Afterwards the two of them lay facing each other,
smiling in a breathy, comfortable haze. They both felt gloriously
and magnificently knackered. Charlie propped himself up on his
elbow and trailed a finger down Anna's neck to her breast and told
her again how beautiful, wonderful and sexy she was. Anna was about
to return the compliment as sexual etiquette demanded and reiterate
her sentiments on Charlie's supreme sexual mastery with particular
reference to his spectacular tongue and finger work, when she
realized she couldn't because somebody had obviously been along
and cut her vocal cords while she was thrashing about in
midorgasm.

In fact, Anna's vocal cords were perfectly intact. They were
merely suffering from a temporary bout of impotence brought on
by shock.

As she started to come back down to earth, and her eyes slowly
began to rekindle their relationship with her brain, she concentrated
on focusing properly on Charlie's face. For a moment, she thought
all this steamy frenzied passion had been too much for him and given
him a nosebleed.

The moment at which Anna had lost her voice was the same as the
one in which she was overtaken by a flash of horrific realization
and insight. The appalling truth had dawned on her: the
reddish-brown stuff forming a beard over Charlie Kaplan's mouth and
chin, not to mention the tip of his nose, was not, as she thought,
dried blood, but something quite different.

How the blue buggering blazes was she going to explain to
Charlie that their copious bodily fluids and juices produced during
his magnificent cunnilingus had caused her Bush Magic to run?

C H A P T E R     S E V E N

A
NNA LAY WITH HER HEAD ON Charlie's chest. Every so often she
would take a quick look up at him and try to prevent her
affectionate smile from becoming a grimace. In between looks she
kept hoping the dye might magically dissolve or evaporate. It
didn't. The lower half of Charlie's face continued to be stained
bright bloodred.

She decided she couldn't bear the humiliation of relating the
grim saga of her botched attempt to dye her prematurely graying
pubes. Her only option was get the dye off Charlie's face in
such a way that he wouldn't realize what she was doing. Short of
confessing to a Lassie fetish and licking his face clean during
another bout of frenzied sex, which would no doubt be followed by
her dropping dead as a result of ingesting some toxic aboriginal
ingredient in the Bush Magic, her mind was a blank.

Anna's minimal brain activity was interrupted after a few
minutes by the muffled warble of her mobile phone. The phone was in
her handbag, which she'd left on one of the repro occasional tables
in the other room. She let out a long, irritated moan.

“Shit, I thought I'd turned it off.”

Reluctantly, she sat up and swung her legs over the side of
the bed.

“Stay where you are,” said Charlie. “I'll fetch it.”

As Anna allowed herself to sink onto the two huge pillows
Charlie had just vacated, she suddenly remembered the gilt mirror
above the table.

“No, don't,” she almost shrieked, and launched herself to the
foot of the bed in an attempt to pull him back. All she managed to
grab was the air. Panic-stricken, she watched as Charlie's toned
rear rippled out of the door.

Two seconds later he was handing her the phone. Judging by his
untroubled expression there was no sign that he had looked at
himself in the mirror.

Anna, who was still lying on her front facing the foot of the
bed, took the phone and propped herself up on one elbow.

“Anna, angel .   .   . Campbell McKee here,
babe.” As soon
as she heard who it was she raised her eyes
heavenwards,
mouthing “jerk” as she did so. Charlie laughed and
sat himself on the bed behind her. He began stroking the inside
of Anna's thighs.

“Listen, doll,” Campbell went on, “I thought we had the
Mavis de Mornay story pretty much as an exclusive, but it seems like
the whole of bleedin' Fleet Street has suddenly changed its mind and
decided to muscle in. Apparently there's been a posse of hacks
camped out at the de Mornay house since sparrer's fart. Why the
fuck that India girl didn't ring to tell us the gig was starting
early and that we'd 'ave competition, I've no idea. Anyway, angel,
I think you should get over there postwhatsit. Can't risk you
missing the old tart snuffin' it.”

By now, Charlie was, with the lightest touch, repeatedly
running his fingers between Anna's buttocks. Every so often she
would slap his hand and flick it away, but a few seconds later it
was back again like some horny mosquito.

“OK, Campbell .   .   . ummm .   .   . right .   .   . I'll be over
there .   .   . in twenty
minutes .   .   . thanks .   .   . ooh,
oooh   .   .   . thanks for letting me know.” Anna
finally grabbed Charlie's wrist and did her best to hang on to it,
but he pulled himself free. Then he made her turn over, forced her
legs apart and pushed his tongue inside her.

“Anna, babe, everything OK from up your end? You sound a bit
odd—sure you're not feelin' a bit Tom and Dick?”

“No .   .   . no .   .   . Campbell,
my end's fine. Speak .   .   . speak to you later.”

As Anna dropped the phone onto the bed, Charlie began
kissing her on the mouth. Anna knew she had to leave, but she was
no match for her hormones, which appeared to have formed themselves
into armored battalions and were driving Chieftain tanks through
her willpower. It took a full minute, but finally she was able to
pull away from Charlie.

“Charlie, I really am so sorry,” she said gently, “but I've
got to go. That was the features editor at the
Globe.
I
promised to do a story for them today, only it's all happening a bit
earlier than we thought.”

Charlie's crest didn't just fall. It plummeted.

Anna started stroking his red face and kissing his cheek. She
couldn't help noticing his mouth had become even redder in the
last minute or so.

“Listen,” she said, trying to cheer him up, “let's get in
the shower.” As she said the words, she realized she had cracked
the Bush Magic problem and kicked herself for not thinking of it
half an hour ago.

Charlie's face brightened considerably at the thought of soapy
underwater sex. Anna went into the bathroom and turned on the
shower. In a couple of minutes steam was filling the room and the
huge mirror over the his-'n'-her basins was becoming more and more
opaque.

C H A P T E R     E I G H T

D
AN'S CAB DRIVER WAS AN expansive salt of the earth geezer type who kept taking both hands off the wheel to look in the
driver's mirror and adjust his ginger hairpiece.

“Wife got me the syrup for me
birthday   .   .   . can't get used to it. I gen'rally buy
her slippers and a vibrator. I always tell 'er if she don't like the
slippers she can go fuck 'erself.”

The driver gave another burst of wheezy phlegm-ridden laughter
and pulled up at a crosswalk. As he waited he again craned his
neck towards the mirror. He saw Dan sitting on the backseat staring
blank-faced out of the window. After ten minutes of trying to engage
his fare in some lighthearted misogynist banter and getting nowhere,
the driver decided to give up.

Dan was aware of being rude, but was feeling exceedingly
nervous and apprehensive and was in no mood to be matey. He was on
his way to his first appointment with Virginia Livermead, the
pyschotherapist he had found in
Time Out.
She had finally
phoned him at the office late the previous afternoon and said she
could see him at six the following evening. Her voice was calm and
businesslike. Dan hadn't expected to be offered an appointment so
quickly. The same fear that had overcome him a few days ago, of
Virginia Livermead discovering he was insane and beyond help, had
engulfed him once more and caused him to dither over the phone for
a few seconds before accepting. Virginia Livermead then said she
charged fifty pounds for an hour's session and was that going to be
a problem? Dan gulped and dithered again before lying that this
would be absolutely fine. He hoped to God she wasn't going to insist
on seeing him three times a week. He wouldn't have a hope of hiding
that sort of expenditure from Anna.

The rush-hour traffic was particularly heavy. The journey from
the
Vanguard
offices to Virginia Livermead's flat, which
was somewhere behind Sloane Square, shouldn't have taken more than a
few minutes. Dan had been sitting in the cab for more than half an
hour. He was going to be late. Once again his anxious stomach shot
burning gastric juices into his mouth and he began to cough.

He had spent most of the journey trying to imagine the
questions Virginia Livermead would ask him and recoiling at the
thought of her probing endlessly, the way he knew shrinks always
did, about his childhood. There were things his mother had done to
him that he had never mentioned to a soul, not even Anna. He'd read
somewhere that successful psychotherapy depended on patients trusting
their therapists and keeping no secrets from them. Did he have the
courage to tell a complete stranger about the bucket episode?

This had occurred a couple of weeks before his bar mitzvah. Dan
had been getting a pain in his back passage whenever he went to
the loo and was stupid enough to tell his mother. Mrs. Bloomfield
dragged him to the doctor. Forgetting that she wasn't speaking to old
Dr. Lazarus, who had retired, but to the new doctor from Lahore, his
mother explained that her son had a sore tuchas. Dan would never
forget the confused expression on Dr. Qureshi's face as he asked,
“What please is a tuchas?”

The new GP diagnosed a small tear in Dan's rectum caused, he
thought, by constipation, and prescribed a steroid ointment. Mrs.
Bloomfield allowed Dan to use the ointment, but she had her own
ideas for curing his problem. Mrs. Bloomfield prescribed Jewish
penicillin.

The following afternoon when Dan got home from school she
decided to administer the first dose. He was sprawled on the sofa
in the lounge, eating mashed egg and salad cream sandwiches, when
he became aware of his mother rooting around in the cupboard under
the stairs and pulling out what sounded like a metal bucket. Curious,
and not having the blindest notion of what lay in store, Dan got
up and watched her put the bucket on the kitchen floor. Then,
using both hands, she heaved a huge saucepan off the gas cooker.
Sighing with exertion, she took this over to the bucket, which she
then filled almost to the top with hot, steaming chicken soup. That
done, she proceeded to balance an ancient wooden lavatory seat on
top of the bucket. She carried out these maneuvers while at the
same time conducting an animated and involved conversation with
Aunty Esther, who had come over for tea to discuss the seating
plan for Dan's bar mitzvah. Mrs. Bloomfield broke off from listing
her reasons why Maisie and Burt should be excluded from the top
table and turned to face her son, who was standing in the doorway
looking perplexed.

“Come on, Daniel,” she said, putting the saucepan back on
the stove and sounding slightly breathy because she was overweight
and unused to sudden physical exertion. “Don't let the soup get
cold. Pull your trousers and pants down and sit on the bucket.
The vapor from the chicken soup is good for you. It will take away
the pain you get when you do your business. What are you waiting for?
You think your Aunty Esther hasn't seen a schmekel before?”

Dan did as he was told. He had never been able to work out
why. At thirteen he stood nearly a foot taller than his mother. Had
he refused to obey her, she wouldn't have possessed the strength to
force him.

He sat on the bucket with his back to his mother and aunt,
tears streaming down his purple face. As the two women continued to
stuff great chunks of honey cake into their mouths they concluded
their discussion of top-table politics and went on to consider the
likelihood of Phil Jaffa and his Jazzmen being available the Sunday
after next.

B
y the time the taxi pulled up, Dan was sweating with relived humiliation. The driver turned around and slid back the
glass partition.

“Sorry, mate,” he shouted at Dan, who didn't seem to have
registered their arrival. “Can't get any closer. Bloomin' great
television van parked in the way. If I double-park I'll be holding
up the traffic. The house you want is just a couple of doors down.”
The driver lowered his window and stretched his arm back to the
passenger-door handle.

Dan came to suddenly as the door swung open. He got out of
the cab and handed the driver the fare along with a ridiculously
overgenerous tip, partly to apologize for being so silent and rude.
In return, when he asked for a receipt, the driver flicked through
his pad and tore off half a dozen blanks and passed them to Dan
through the window. Dan and the driver nodded to each other in
a way that indicated that both their backs had been appropriately
scratched.

The cabby sat with his engine running while he clipped his
receipt book to the sun visor and took out the notes in his money
bag to count them.

Dan began walking down the street, which formed one side of a
square of intimidatingly grand creamy-white Victorian villas, a few
hundred yards, as the Sloane strides, from Peter Jones. Even the
houses which had been converted into flats, or embassies serving
little-known African dictatorships, retained an air of dowagerlike
haughtiness, almost daring would-be visitors who lacked independent
means to approach.

It was a couple of seconds before Dan noticed the television
outside-broadcast van. He thought little of it until he saw the
group of people standing around on the pavement ten or so yards
ahead of him. They were eating pizza out of flat cardboard containers.
Dan recognized at least half the hacks and photographers. He was
just trying to work out what story they could be on, when, to his
complete horror, he caught sight of Anna. She was standing in her
best blue dress and coat drinking from a can of Coke, which she then
handed back to a girl from the
Mail.
Suddenly the penny
dropped. They were all here to cover the Mavis de Mornay story Anna
had been going on about. Dan knew the way these sordid occasions
worked. De Mornay had probably snuffed it a few minutes ago and the
hacks, not content with their gruesome deathbed harvest of snaps
and quotes, had decided to hang around for another couple of hours
in case her children turned up to pay their respects.

Almost as soon as the first penny had dropped, a second followed as
Dan suddenly realized that Mavis de Mornay and his shrink shared
virtually the same address. Today, of all days, the coincidence was
unspeakably cruel.

Dan began to tremble. Virginia Livermead's flat was in one of
the houses a bit farther down the road. To get to it he had no choice
but to walk past the press group and, in particular, his wife, and
risk being recognized. Anna would ask questions, he would cave in
and tell the truth and the promise he had made himself not to tell
her he was seeing a shrink would be broken.

It wasn't going to make any difference if he crossed the road
because the group had spread to the pavement opposite. His only
solution, he realized, was some form of instant disguise. He toyed
briefly with the idea of making a mad dash to Peter Jones to see if,
by any chance, they sold deerstalkers and false mustaches. Then
he remembered. As he got out of the taxi he had noticed a
red-and-white hat lying on the dashboard. He swung around. The cab
was still there. Dan dashed back and motioned the driver to open
his window.

“How much do you want for the hat? I'll give you absolutely
anything.” The driver's eyelids remained unbatted. He was used
to nutters, although in twenty-five years he had never had one
make an offer for his clothes. “You're welcome to it, mate,” he
smiled. “The wife got it for me in one of those souvenir shops on
the front at Blackpool. Can't wear it now 'cos when I take it off
it takes me syrup off too.” He handed the hat to Dan. It had a
turned-down brim and was shaped like a cricket hat. Dan put it
on. It was slightly too big.

He thanked the driver profusely, pulled up his jacket collar,
hunched his shoulders and lowered his head. Then he walked briskly
past the group of journalists, who didn't look up from their
pizzas. Two minutes later he was waiting outside the shrink's
flat.

As she opened the door, Virginia Livermead saw standing in front
of her a tall, slightly hesitant young man. He was carrying a
briefcase and wearing an expensive gray business suit, a sparkling
white shirt and a silk tie. She couldn't see much of his face as it
was obscured by the brim of a cheap fairground hat across which was
written in large black letters: “Kiss me quick. Fuck me
slow.”

B
y six-thirty, there was still no sign of Mavis de Mornay's
children. The posse of journalists gathered outside the de Mornay
house decided to call it a day. A few of them had started to get
calls on their mobiles from agitated news editors ringing to remind
them that unless they got their fucking arses in gear the story
would be too late to make the Guernsey and Outer Hebrides
editions.

As people offered each other lifts or headed off to the
main road to hail taxis, Anna stood trying to decide if she wanted
to go home or for a swift drink with a couple of people from the
Sunday Times.
As they were all working for Sundays they
could file as late as Friday or Saturday.

In the end, she decided to pop round to Brenda's. Her nanny was
off sick so she would be at home, probably cooking supper for Alfie.
What Anna fancied, she decided, was a girlie chat over a glass of
wine, during which she could pick at the remains of Alfie's Tesco
pizza and give Brenda a blow-by–blow job account of her blissful
couple of hours with Charlie. Plus, she had a posh dinner party
to go to the following week and she wanted to cadge something to
wear from the sample rail Brenda always kept in her bedroom.

Anna arrived at Brenda's to find her alone. Alfie was staying
at her mother's in Peckham for a few days. Anna was about to say
wasn't that odd as it was term time, but as Brenda seemed a bit
tense she thought it best not to pry until they'd loosened up over a
couple of drinks. Anna followed Brenda into the kitchen and Brenda
pulled out a bottle of a fashionable new Brazilian Soave from the
wine rack.

“So,” she said, pushing down the chrome arms on the corkscrew
man, “ 'ow's it going with this pilot geezer you met at the
funeral? S'pose you've been and done it, you daft mare?” Anna
thought Brenda sounded a bit more cheery.

“Yes, I have. Today, as it happens. Yes, it was brilliant.
Yes, it was the best sex I've had in years, probably ever in fact.
And no, I'm not going to fall in love with him.” Anna wasn't about
to give Brenda the upper hand by confessing that the affair was being
slightly marred by her worrying herself sick over whether Dan was
terminally ill. Instead she went even more on the attack.

“Look, Brenda, I know you don't approve, but I'm not prepared
to carry on living with little or no sex for the next ten years,
until I wake up one dark menopausal morning and discover it's too
late to have any fun because my genitals have shriveled up, packed
their bags and booked themselves into sheltered accommodation in
Eastbourne.”

Brenda finished pouring wine into Anna's glass and poured
herself a glass of Perrier. She had barely smiled at Anna's facetious
outburst.

“Bren', what the bloody hell is going on? You look and sound
completely knackered, your hair's got enough grease on it to take
the lead in a fifties musical, your son is staying at your mother's
and you appear to be on the wagon.”

Brenda pushed her face into her hands. When she released them
it took a few seconds for her features to rearrange themselves.

“I'm up the spout.”

“What, you mean the business is bankrupt?”

“No, not yet—although the way things are going that
could be on the cards pretty soon. .   .   . No, it's me.
I'm pregnant. Some miserable git went and knocked me up at a
party.”