Authors: Lana Citron
‘Yes, Jeremy that’s right. You don’t mind me calling you Jeremy?’
Beneath the scorching studio lights I prayed my sweat stains wouldn’t show. Prime-time TV; I mean who’d have thought? Maybe a five-minute slot with Richard and Judy, but this was
beyond even my expectations. Jeremy Paxman. I think it’s the large sloping nose that provides the pow-wow factor. A hint of what lies below? Alas I would never find out.
‘And now we have in the studio, Issy Brodsky . . .’
A human interest story that had a nice ring to it. (Painful, hey?) OK, so I didn’t exactly make it on to
Newsnight
, but the story spread like, well, spread, and before long I was
munching on the leaf-edge of local celebrity.
Bambuss called, offering advice on how to survive the limelight, and saying should he be required he was more than willing to contribute.
‘Thanks, but no thanks. I think I can handle it myself, Detective.’
‘Be careful what you say. Journalists have a knack for twisting the truth.’
I promised to bear it in mind and enquired after his recent all-over body wax. Maria had sought and taken my advice on finding him an unusual gift for his birthday.
‘Yes, Miss Brodsky, I have you to thank for my afternoon of torture.’
‘A pleasure,’ I assured him.
Besides, on Maria’s last visit she’d confided, ‘He like a new man, a smooth operator.’
Oh how my head swelled, and as I am so superficial, I got my legs waxed and even had a facial. As I said to Nadia, ‘It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. The
pressure to look good is unbelievable.’
‘Issy, you’ve been interviewed on two local radio shows.’
‘Tip of the iceberg, my good friend. How do I look?’
‘Fine.’
‘Only fine?’
The story had been covered, sans photo, in the
Antiques Gazette
,
Ham and High
and
Camden New Journal
. But now the big time beckoned and Max and I were expected at the
Finklesteins’ to be zapped for the
Jewish Chronicle
.
Nads generously offered to drop me and Max down at their house on Carlton Avenue, no doubt hoping to get her face in the picture too. So I decided to take the bus and we ended up arriving half
an hour late.
‘What’s kept you?’ Gladys shrieked with relief, ushering us into her grand home. She was obviously house-proud: most of the furniture was covered in plastic.
‘So much easier to keep clean,’ she silently mouthed.
There was even a clear plastic runner, which we were instructed to walk along in order to preserve the underfoot sea of beige, which, as if on cue, Max managed to destroy, by spilling his berry
juice.
Gladys’s face contorted in visible agony, in sharp contrast to her empty proclamation, ‘Don’t worry about it – these things happen!’
I offered to clean up.
‘Under the sink you’ll find all you need.’
Joel wanted to know why such a lovely girl as I wasn’t married.
‘The boychik needs a brother or a sister.’
‘First opportunity I get, Mr F, I’ll be on the case.’
Meantime Gladys had grabbed either side of Max’s face and was tugging gently at his pinched-cheek flesh.
‘Get off me,’ he shouted at her.
‘Not until you give me a kiss,’ she demanded.
‘Yeughh yuck,’ squealed Max, and he ran for his life.
The photographer was eager to get going, so while I mopped up, he began snapping.
A double-page spread with a creepy picture of Gladys in a suggestive pose reclining on her chaise longue, Joel standing uncomfortably by her side, and then a smaller photo of
Max and my forehead. Goddamnit, but I was usurped by my own son taking centre stage and thwarting my special moment by masking eighty-five per cent of my face with his.
My honour was positively impugned. Nadia howled with laughter, and Silvio decided to blow up the picture and stick it on the café wall, with ‘Issy’s Moment
of Fame’ scrawled beneath. Served me right, I suppose, for having obnoxiously boasted about it to all and sundry.
On the night Stephan came to say goodbye and humbly apologise for misleading me, he reminded me of the wooden box I’d found in Sarah’s apartment.
The box! I’d totally forgotten about it.
Where the hell had I put it?
Frantically, I scoured the apartment, finally found it at the bottom of one of Max’s baskets of toys.
‘Put there for safe-keeping,’ I glibly assured Stephan, handing it over to him.
‘Sure, and well, thanks, Issy – this is for you.’
We exchanged boxes, a big for a little one.
Stephan was to surprise me once more, though this time it was rather touching.
See . . . as for the ring –
It lay inside the box he gave me.
And now I wear it on my little finger.
My left-hand pinkie.
Way back when, in the mists of my memory, I vaguely recall an afternoon with Max, feeding the ducks and geese in Regent’s Park. Max was two and I merely existing, being
sleep-deprived and functioning on auto-pilot. It was fierce cold, the middle of winter, and wrapped up warm, we were swarmed by feathered friends glad of the crumbs we scattered. Hundreds clucked
at our feet and we soon ran out of stale bread.
‘What a beautiful boy,’ smiled an old woman, offering Max a large chunk of bread.
Max continued to feed the ducks and we began chatting. I was so glad of the company, too much time spent on my own with Max, and we ended up in the lakeside café nattering about who knows
what over tea and scones.
When Max saw the ring, he said, ‘Like the lady in the park.’
In the café my little magpie Max had taken a shine to one of the rings on her fingers.
She’d let him play with it.
I’m almost certain.
But this was a long time ago and perhaps my memory was teasing me.
I put my father’s generous present to good use and enrolled in a stand-up comedy course at the Amused Moose. Joe the comedian suggested I gave it whirl. Thus I found
myself up at the Enterprise of a Saturday afternoon, making a right tit of myself, while Maria sat for Max. Hadn’t had so much fun in an age – jeez, when I think of all that money
wasted on counselling.
This coincided with my promotion at the café, to ‘general manager’. I’d persuaded Silvio to amend my status, arguing it would undeniably raise my morale and thus I would
work harder.
‘You drive a hard bargain, Issy, but no more wage increases.’
Having recently received one, I didn’t mind.
‘Oh and Silvio, can I wear a “general manager” badge, just so everyone knows?’
‘You buy it, wear whatever you want.’
I had Silvio in the palm of my hand, having implemented certain changes in the café, which brought the punters rolling in. It was easy, and so damn obvious. I set up a mums’ morning
club, so that full-timers could while away a couple of hours in a kid-friendly environment. All it took was a basket of toys in the corner and the ingenious invention of Fun Froth. Yep, while Mummy
was sipping her mid-morning coffee, offspring was offered a cup of milk froth with hundreds and thousands scattered on top, not to mention a special kiddies’ menu, including puréed veg
for the teeny-tinies. For the mums, lots of low, low-calorific but tasty guilt-free dishes.
Plus, and as I am one to boast, our kid-friendly policy operated during the café’s usually dead hours, i.e. ten–twelve and three–five.
Word spread and soon enough they were coming in from far and wide. ‘Oh, what a cutie,’ I’d insincerely coo about a thousand times a day at wee blighters, nay, savages, who ran
amok, leaving grubby paw-prints all over the place and making an unholy mess. But as Fiona once remarked, ‘Business is business.’
She showed up in a rather fetching Nicole Farhi linen number.
‘Issy, can I have a word.’ Fiona hollered above a screeching brat.
‘Give me a minute,’ I pleaded, surprised to see her, then turned to the offensive tyke and said, ‘Oi, Beyoncé, zip it.’
She got the message and pranced back to her yummy mummy.
‘Nice badge,’ remarked Fiona.
‘Thanks. So what can I get you?’
‘I have interesting news. Can we talk?’
Long overdue a break, and notwithstanding the fact I was now general manager, I got one of our recent recruits, an aspiring actress, to hold the fort while Fiona and I skipped over the road, to
a quieter café.
After all, he had lost me mine.
Once seated comfortably, Fiona began to enlighten me on the Bob Thornton case, and the current state of his marriage.
‘Fiona, do I really want to hear this?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘I think you do.’
Bob Thornton and his wife had finally resolved the situation through the simple technique of communication. A procedure that if it should ever catch on would put the Honey Trap out of business
pronto.
But back to the saga. Bob’s wife had kept a steady check on all his extra-curricular Internet activity, which included membership of a heap of porn sites, dating chat rooms, etc. She was
confused to say the least as Bob was a man who rarely veered off the missionary position. Yes, to all intents and purposes, he was the perfect husband, but for this unusual behaviour. She
couldn’t make head nor tail of it and had then contacted the Trap hoping to obtain some hard evidence of marital transgression. At the same time Bob began acting cagey with her, suspicious of
her every move, till finally, after skirting round the issue for an age, he confronted her.
‘He confronted her?’
I was baffled.
‘He noticed payments made to net sites on his visa bill, to porn sites, and thought she was the culprit.’
‘Yeah right, Fiona. He was playing mind games, aware that she had found him out. Slime ball just wanted to pass the buck, blame her.’
‘Apparently not. In the end it turned out that their teenage son was the culprit and had been using Bob’s name and visa card.’
‘The son!’
The youngster escorted from the bar on the night I went to meet Bob, the group of adolescents at the gig with the seductive chat-up line of, ‘Me mate wants to cop off
with you.’
It did make sense.
‘So are you saying. I didn’t fuck Bob?’
‘Suffering delusions, it would seem. An attention-seeking exercise that cost you your job. Issy, you caused us a lot of trouble.’
‘But we did.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘Did.’
Fiona lowered her eyelids and sanctimoniously remarked, ‘If I remember correctly you were very frustrated at the time.’
‘Fiona, I am not delusional.’
‘Be that as it may –’
‘Fiona, Bob is a bona fide head-messer. He’s a shrink. Look, he’s obviously got his wife in a state of derangement.’
‘Bob Thornton is a secondary-school teacher.’
‘Oh . . .’
The news took a few moments to sink in. So Bob wasn’t Bob, as in not the person I thought he was, as in, a complete stranger.
Chrissakes, all the needless worry and grief I’d suffered. The saddest thing was, we’d had a laugh together that night. He was nice, gave me his number, asked me to call him. There
we were, two lonely souls randomly seeking out some human comfort.
‘Shite, what a waste.’
‘Waste?’
‘Maybe I could trace him.’
‘Who?’
‘The other Bob.’
‘Well, now that’s cleared up, fancy a piece of cake?’
‘Another? Jeez, Fiona, hasn’t anyone yet mentioned the hip-lip factor?’
And the next thing I knew her face fell. Guess I must have hit a raw nerve. Her eyes welled up and she began blubbing.
‘It’s the hormones,’ she snivelled, ‘I can’t bear all this effusive emotion.’
‘Welcome to the real world of womanhood.’
‘I’m taking a drug that replicates the female menstrual cycle. It’s horrendous – one minute I’m snapping, next I’m weeping, then there’s the water
retention. Why didn’t anyone tell me it would be like this?’
‘Would you have listened?’
‘Maybe,’ she quietly whimpered, dabbing a tissue at the corners of her mascara-run eyes.
‘Well, there are positives to being a woman.’
‘Like what?’
‘Mmm, let’s see. The ability to bring another being into the world. For all its negatives, being a mother is, well, the very core of what it is to be a female.’
‘That’s so cruel, Issy.’
Sure it was, but I couldn’t resist.
‘OK, what about all the male attention we get? Though to be honest it only lasts till you’re about thirty. Yeah, hit thirty, the lines start coming, the hair starts turning grey and
before you know it you’re up Blind Alley, way past your sell-by-date and ignored by all mankind. Sure, who am I to tell you, Fiona?’
Her eyes spouted a fresh batch of tears.
‘Issy, it took me twenty minutes to reverse-park this morning.’
Her mood swang back and she was happy as, pie. (Ouch, but I think I’m perfecting the art of naff gags.)
Blushing, Fiona excused her little outburst of emotion and proceeded to inform me that my replacement had turned out to be a total psycho. A deeply insecure woman who ended up frightening off
all her dicks by acting like some emotional cripple on acid.
‘The upshot being, Issy, that now the Bob file is closed, we’d like you to –’
‘Fiona, I get the gist. But before I consider anything, it would be really nice if Trisha was to call me.’
I be the smuggest of all.
‘Sorry, what was that, Trisha? I can’t hear you.’
Monday afternoon, a fine summer day. Max and I had just reached the top of Primrose Hill. London lay at our feet, and as we peered into the distance, the future was looking good. And
that’s when Trisha’s call came through.
‘So as I said, we were hoping you’d consider coming to work for us again.’