Neurotica Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  About the Author

  Also by Sue Margolis

  Praise for the novels of Sue Margolis

  Previews of Pushing 30 and Is That a Moose in Your Pocket?

  Copyright Page

  To Jonathan, who never has a headache

  C H A P T E R O N E

  DAN BLOOMFIELD STOOD IN FRONT of the full-length bathroom mirror, dropped his boxers to his ankles, moved his penis to one side to get a better look and stared hard at the sagging, wrinkled flesh which housed his testicles. Whenever Dan examined his testicles—and as a hypochondriac he did this several times a week—he thought of two things: the likelihood of his imminent demise; and the cupboard under the stairs in his mother's house in Finchley.

  It was a consequence of the lamentable amount of storage space in her unmodernized fifties kitchenette that Mrs. Bloomfield had always kept hanging in the hall cupboard, alongside the overcoats, macs and umbrellas, one of those long string shopping bags made pendulous by the weight of her overflow Brussels sprouts. From the age of thirteen, Dan referred to this as his mother's scrotal sac.

  These days Dan reckoned his own scrotal sac was a dead ringer for his mother's. His bollocks couldn't get any lower. Dan supposed lower was OK at forty; death on the other hand was not.

  By bending his knees ever so slightly, shuffling a little closer to the mirror and pulling up on his scrotum he could get a better view of its underside. It looked perfectly normal. In fact the whole apparatus looked perfectly normal. There was nothing he could see, no sinister lumps, bumps or skin puckering which suggested impending uni-bollockdom, or that his wife should start bulk-buying herrings for his funeral. Then, suddenly, as he squeezed his right testicle gently between his thumb and forefinger, it was there again, the excruciating stabbing pain he had felt as he crossed his legs that morning in the editors' daily conference.

  Anna Shapiro, Dan's wife, needed to pee right away. She knew because she had just been woken up by one of those dreams in which she had been sitting on the loo about to let go when suddenly something in her brain kicked in to remind her that this would not be a good idea, since she was, in reality, sprawled across the brand-new pocket-sprung divan on which they hadn't even made the first payment. Looking like one of those mad women on the first day of the Debenhams sale, she bolted towards the bathroom. Here she discovered Dan rolling naked on the floor, clutching his testicles in one hand and his penis in the other with a look of agony on his face which she immediately took for sublime pleasure.

  As someone who'd been reading “So you think your husband is a sexual deviant”–type advice columns in women's magazines since she was twelve, Anna knew a calm, caring opening would be best.

  “Dan, what the fuck are you up to?” she shrieked. “I mean it, if you've turned into some kind of weirdo, I'm putting my hat and coat on now. I'll tell the whole family and you'll never see the children again and I'll take you for every penny. I can't keep up with you. One minute you're off sex and the next minute I find you wanking yourself stupid at three o'clock in the morning on the bathroom floor. How could you do it on the bathroom floor? What if Amy or Josh had decided to come in here for a wee and caught you?”

  “Will you just stop ranting for one second, you stupid fat bitch. Look.”

  Dan directed Anna's eyes towards his penis, which she had failed to notice was completely flaccid.

  “I am not wanking. I think I've got bollock cancer. Anna, I'm really scared.”

  Relieved? You bet I was bloody relieved. God, I mean for a moment there last night, when I found him, I actually thought Dan had turned into one of those nutters the police find dead on the kitchen floor with a plastic bag over their head and a ginger tom halfway up their arse. Of course, it was no use reminding him that testicular cancer doesn't hurt. . . . What are you going to have?”

  As usual, the Harpo was full of crushed-linen, telly-media types talking Channel 4 proposals, sipping mineral water and swooning over the baked polenta and fashionable bits of offal. Anna was deeply suspicious of trendy food. Take polenta, for example: an Italian au pair who had worked for Dan and Anna a few years ago had said she couldn't understand why it had become so fashionable in England. It was, she said, the Italian equivalent of semolina and that the only time an Italian ate it was when he was in school, hospital or a mental institution.

  Neither was Anna, who had cellulite and a crinkly postchildbirth tummy flap which spilled over her bikini briefs when she sat down, overly keen on going for lunch with Gucci-ed and Armani-ed spindle-legged journos like Alison O'Farrell, who always ordered a green salad with no dressing and then self-righteously declared she was too full for pudding.

  But as a freelance journalist, Anna knew the importance of sharing these frugal lunches with women's-page editors. These days, she was flogging Alison at least two lengthy pieces a month for the Daily Mercury's “Lifestyles” page, which was boosting her earnings considerably. In fact her last dead-baby story, in which a recovering postnatally depressed mum (who also just happened to be a leggy 38 DD) described in full tabloid gruesomeness how she drowned her three-month-old in the bath, had almost paid for the sundeck Anna was having built on the back of her kitchen.

  Dan, of course, as the cerebral financial editor of The Vanguard, Dan, who was probably more suited to academia than Fleet Street, called her stuff prurient, ghoulish voyeurism and carried on like some lefty sociology student from the seventies about those sorts of stories being the modern opiate of the masses. Anna couldn't be bothered to argue. She knew perfectly well he was right, but, like a lot of lefties who had not so much lapsed as collapsed into the risotto-breathed embrace of New Labour, she had decided that the equal distribution of wealth starting with herself had its merits. She suspected he was just pissed off that her tabloid opiates earned her double what he brought home in a month.

  But what about Dan's cancer?” Alison asked, shoving a huge mouthful of undressed radicchio into her mouth and pretending to enjoy it.

  “Alison, I've been married to Dan for twelve years. He's been like this for yonks. Every week it's something different. First it was weakness in his legs and he diagnoses multiple sclerosis, then he feels dizzy and it's a brain tumor. Last week he decided he had some disease which, it turns out, you only get from fondling sheep. Alison, I can't tell you the extent to which no Jewish man fondles sheep. He's a hypochondriac. He needs therapy. I've been telling him to get help for ages, but he won't. He just sits for hours with his head in the Home Doctor.”

  “Must be doing wonders for your sex life.”

  “Practically nonexistent. He's too frightened to come in case the strain of it gives him a heart attack, and then if he does manage it he takes off the condom afterwards, looks to see how much semen he has produced—in case he has a blockage somewhere—then examines it for traces of blood.”

  As a smooth method of changing the subject, Alison got up to go to the loo. Anna suspected she was going to chuck up her salad. Wh
en she returned, Anna sniffed for vomit, but only got L'Eau d'Issy. “Listen, Anna,” Alison began the instant her bony bottom made contact with the hard Phillipe Starck chair. “I've had an idea for a story I think just might be up your street.”

  Dan bought the first round of drinks in the pub and then went to the can to feel his testicle. It was less than an hour before his appointment with the specialist. The pain was still there.

  Almost passing out with anxiety, he sat on the lavatory, put his head between his knees and did what he always did when he thought he was terminally ill: he began to pray. Of course it wasn't real prayer, it was more like some kind of sacred trade-union negotiation in which the earthly official, Dan, set out his position—i.e., dying—and demanded that celestial management, God, put an acceptable offer on the table—i.e., cure him. By way of compromise, Dan agreed that he would start going to synagogue again—or church, or Quaker meeting house, if God preferred—as soon as he had confirmation he wasn't dying anymore.

  Mr. Andrew Goodall, the ruddy-complexioned former rugby fly-half testicle doctor, leaned back in his leather Harley Street swivel chair, plonked both feet on top of his desk and looked at Dan over half-moon specs.

  “Perfectly healthy set of bollocks, old boy,” he declared.

  Kissed him? Dan could have tongue-wrestled the old bugger.

  “But what about all this pain I've been getting?”

  “You seemed perfectly all right when I examined you. I strongly suspect this is all psychosomatic, Mr. Bloomfield. I mean, I could chop the little blighter orf if you really want me to, but I suspect that if I did, in six months you'd be back in this office with phantom ball pain. My advice to you would be to have a break. Why not book a few days away in the sun with your good lady? Alternatively, I can prescribe you something to calm you down.”

  Dan had stopped listening round about “psychosomatic.” The next thing he knew he was punching the air and skipping like an overgrown four-year-old down Harley Street towards Cavendish Square. He, Dan Bloomfield, was not dying. He, Dan Bloomfield, was going to live.

  With thoughts of going to synagogue entirely forgotten, he went into John Lewis and bought Anna a new blender to celebrate. One can only imagine that God sighed and wondered why he had created a world full of such ungrateful bleeders.

  Anna got home just after four. Denise, her baby-sitter, had taken Josh and Amy swimming after school, so she would be bratless for at least a couple of hours—more if Denise got them sausages and chips at the pool. Anna decided to have a bath and a quick de-fuzz. All through the lunch she had been aware that she was having a bad pubic hair day. The sideburns on her inner thighs were reaching a density that would have done a woolly mammoth proud.

  As she turned over Dan's knicker drawer looking for his razor, which he always tried to hide because whenever she used it she left it blunt and clogged up with leg hairs, Anna realized she was getting quite enthused by Alison's feature idea.

  She'd said to Alison she wasn't sure if she had time to do it, which was a lie she always told features editors just in case they started taking her for granted. But she thought she probably would. She could never say no to work, in case the Alison O'Farrells of this world forgot who she was and never used her again. But more than that, while Alison was explaining the idea to her, she began to feel rather horny.

  Alison had just received a preview copy of Rachel Stern's new book, The Clitoris-Centered Woman. Anna despised Rachel Stern almost as much as she despised polenta-eaters. Stern, an American, was one of a gaggle of beautiful Harvard-educated feminist writers, barely old enough to menstruate, who with their pert bosoms, firm arses and live-in personal trainers had the audacity to lecture the sagging, stretch-marked masses on how antiwrinkle creams, Wonderbras and cosmetic Polyfillas were a form of treachery against the sisterhood, or some such rot.

  In her last book, Dermis, Stern had railed against cosmetic surgery. On the day of publication she had led a massive protest rally outside an LA clinic to launch her “Get a Life Not the Knife” campaign. Hundreds of East and West Coast academics, “educators” and writers—mainly svelte Stern look-alikes, but with a smattering of token uglies—turned up to yell abuse at the women going into the clinic. According to the LA Times the protesters even dunked one woman's head in a vat of liposucted fat, thoughtfully provided by a mole at the clinic who was sympathetic to the cause.

  “Look, I know you can't stand the bitch,” Alison had said, “but I reckon The Clitoris-Centered Woman is actually quite sensible. It's about infidelity and why women are more reluctant to be unfaithful than men. She says women don't go in for extramarital shagging because they feel they can only do it if they are actually in love with the guy, and being in love with two men seriously does your brain in, so not doing it in the first place saves all the hassle of whose heart you're going to end up breaking. Anyway, Stern says that all this needing to be in love in order to have an affair is crap and women are just as capable as men of having affairs purely for the sexual pleasure—hence the title. So affairs become no more than a bit of glorified pampering—like going for a manicure or a facial except you get an orgasm instead of your blackheads squeezing. Of course, the most difficult part is keeping it secret and not blurting it out to hubby.”

  “And don't tell me, she reckons we should all be into extracurricular rutting because it can really zap up your marriage . . . and what you want me to do is to go out and interview three slappers who make a habit of being unfaithful just for the sex.”

  “You got it. Two thousand words if you can. You've got loads of time—she's not due over here to launch the book until mid-July, which gives you about eight weeks.”

  Anna realized she had got so carried away replaying in her mind all this talk of adultery that she had been absentmindedly shaving her pubes for at least ten minutes and had left herself with little more than a Hitler mustache between her legs. As she rinsed Dan's razor in the bathwater and watched her hairs float on top of the white scum, it began to dawn on her that if anybody needed to become a clitoris-centered woman, it was her.

  She reckoned the last time she and Dan had done anything which vaguely resembled mind-blowingly filthy sex was at Amy's fifth birthday party, three years ago, before Dan's obsession with his health had started affecting his libido.

  It was one of those sweltering summer days when old ladies have funny turns in the Co-op and small boys try to set light to worms with magnifying glasses.

  In Anna's back garden poisonous packs of Jessicas, Olivias and Harrys, untroubled by the heat, were rampaging over flowerbeds, hunting the thimble with Smarty Arty, the rented clown, while plump forty-something mummies falling out of their Indian-cotton sundresses made a play for the thirty-something daddies in their white T-shirts and Ray•Bans.

  Anna was bustling round the trestle table which she had set up that morning under the apple tree and dutifully covered with matching paper cloth, plates and cups depicting the latest thigh-booted, whip-wielding girlie superhero Amy had been going on about for weeks. She was trying, with little success, to tempt the children with egg mayonnaise sandwiches. They were more interested in tearing around the table blowing raspberries at each other and raucously discussing the similarity between egg smell and fart smell. Dan, sensing she wasn't far off the kind of violence that would have seen her go down for a five stretch, and suddenly fancying her like nobody's business, stopped pouring spritzers for the grown-ups, and made his way towards the table. With a face so straight he could have been saying that her mother had just had a pulmonary embolism and wasn't expected to make it through the night, he whispered in her ear, “I want to fuck you right now.”

  He handed the Orvieto and the Waitrose fizzy mineral water bottles to a drunken mother, who was so out of it that she didn't bat an eyelid as he dragged a giggling and protesting Anna off towards the house. Nobody else gave them a second glance either, even when Dan put his hand up Anna's silk skirt and kept it there.

  Without saying
a word he pulled her up the stairs and into their bedroom. He locked the door, unzipped her skirt, then turned and pushed her gently over the pine desk she used as a dressing table. As the grown-ups helped themselves to more booze and Smarty Arty worked the children into a frenzy telling slightly rude knock-knock jokes and producing rabbits from nowhere, Dan pulled her pants down to her ankles, reached for the bottle of baby oil on the table and allowed a few drops of the clear, thick liquid to trickle onto her buttocks. Anna moaned softly as he massaged the oil into her skin. With the lightness of touch he knew she adored he brushed his fingers gently between her wet bottom cheeks and then over her clitoris. She gasped as suddenly, almost violently, he pushed two fingers deep inside her. Anna yelled at him rather too loudly to make her come. For a second she went off the boil, thinking the children might have heard, but Dan, feeling her tense up, started to lick the back of her neck and whisper that it was OK, nobody could hear. Then, while continuing to play with her clitoris, he pushed himself inside her. The exquisite danger and naughtiness of it all made them both come in seconds.

  Fat chance of anything like that happening now, Anna thought, as she squirted Jif onto the bath and set about the greasy bath ring with a nonscratch scouring pad.

  The most Anna got these days was an occasional wake-up call in the small of her back from Dan's early-morning erection. In a voice that sounded like a child in Woolworth's trying to get round its mother for pick-'n'-mix, he would then ask her if they could do it. She invariably said yes because he looked so miserable and pathetic and she felt sorry for him. He was also, if she was objective about it, still as slim, dark and good-looking as the night she met him. When they had finished their basic-model, bottom-of-the-range humping, Dan would roll off her and go back to sleep and Anna would lie there for a minute before getting up to make tea, thinking how utterly fucking miserable and lonely she felt.