Neurotica Read online

  Then she would go downstairs and slam round the kitchen getting more and more furious. Furious with Dan for rejecting her and refusing to see a shrink, and furious with herself because she still loved him and didn't have the heart to walk out on him.

  Anna blamed Dan's mother for his hypochondria. According to the other Bloomfield children—Gail, Dan's sister, who was married to an architect in Tel Aviv, and Jonathan, who was a cameraman with CNN in Atlanta—the late Lilly Bloomfield, who dropped dead from a stroke in Solly's the kosher butcher while delivering some vitriolic rant about the pitiful size of her briskets, had been something of a tyrant. A five-foot kosher tigress in Crimplene slacks and strawberry-blond tint courtesy of Chez Melvin in Hendon, she was one of those Jewish mothers who was never satisfied by her children's achievements.

  She would stand frying fishballs on a Friday afternoon—a plastic bag over her new hairdo—waiting for each of them to come home from school. Then she would start: why had they only got a B plus that week and not an A plus? Why had they come third in class and not first? Then, over dinner, she would turn on her husband. Stan down the road was earning three times what he got, and just by driving a cab; Morry from the synagogue was taking the family to Rimini twice a year from wet fish. What Lilly wanted was a Lord Sieff, a Baron Rothschild, even Stan down the road. What she had was Lou, who made sixty quid a week selling ties off a stall in Leather Lane market.

  Dan used to joke that if Hitler had been given Lilly for a mother she would have turned to him after he had slaughtered six million Jews and said, “Huh, you call that a holocaust?”

  Of her three children, it was Dan, the youngest, who had found it particularly hard to cope with his mother's constant undermining. Nevertheless, he was the most successful, academically and professionally. By the time she died in 1981, aged sixty-five, he was making a good living freelancing and doing the odd late-evening shift on the FT. But Lilly had almost destroyed him. Not only had she taken away every ounce of his self-confidence, she had also made him fear her wrath at every turn. Eventually, whenever he did anything he believed she might disapprove of, he developed “symptoms” that to him were quite real, even if they were largely invisible to the medical profession.

  As soon as the seven days of mourning for Lilly were over, Lou sold up and went to live in Marbella with Nora, the shikseh from the post office whom he'd been screwing for years behind Lilly's back.

  After thirty years appearing in a marriage without a speaking part, Lou, it seemed, had balls after all—he must have sewn them back on one night when Lilly wasn't looking. For two weeks during that summer, Dan, using his father as a positive role model for the first time ever, decided that now his mother was dead, he could stop living his life trying to please her. She, after all, was now sitting drinking lemon tea on a pink Dralon settee in her celestial through lounge, and couldn't get at him anymore. The time had come for Daniel Bloomfield to rise up, rebel and get the late Mrs. Bloomfield off his back.

  He decided that his first act of rebellion would be to go looking for his own Nora and, near as damn it, found her.

  In fact Anna found him—at the party his cousin Beany Levine held to celebrate passing his bar exams. It was one of those utterly safe young Jewish singles do's where one's grandmother wouldn't have felt out of place. The venue was the Levine parents' row house in Gants Hill, where, although Beany was twenty-three, he still lived. The boys stood around drinking Coke discussing that day's West Ham versus Tottenham Hotspur game. Beany, who had been a bit of a comedian since childhood, was interrupting with a joke about an ultra-Orthodox kangaroo, a rubber and a box of matzos. All in all, they were the kind of conservative young Jewish men who, when they got married, would invite their mates to a stag coffee morning.

  The girls convened in the kitchen, in their velvet jeans with rhinestone studs. They drank lemonade and lime and debated engagement ring settings. A few daredevils had got slightly merry on Beany's parents' advocaat and cherry brandy and were dancing to 10CC in the middle of the lounge.

  Anna had come to the party with one of Beany's friends from chambers, who had since deserted her and gone off to meet the rhinestones. She was now standing alone in a corner in her black dungarees, CND T-shirt and short-spiked lefty feminist hair, sifting through Beany's record collection, which seemed to consist mainly of old Monty Python LPs.

  Anna noticed Dan sitting at the end of the room in his new denim bomber jacket looking moody and sexy and a dead ringer for Bob Dylan. Sensing a kindred spirit and fellow subversive, not to mention the possibility of sex, she started to make her way over to him.

  What Anna took for moodiness, Dan would have described as downright depression. He couldn't work out how, on a Saturday night in his twenty-fifth year, when he should have been defiling his mother's memory by snorting coke in Fulham, he was at his cousin's party on the outskirts of Ilford, drinking it.

  He was, at the precise moment of meeting Anna on Beany's mother's tan leatherette sofa, balancing a plate of her cocktail-size gefilte fishballs on his lap. He was pretending one of the fishballs was his mother's head and taking a stab at it with a cocktail stick, when he missed and sent the whole lot flying onto the shag rug. They ended up at Anna's feet. She bent down and picked up two of them.

  “Er, I seem to have your balls in my hand,” she said.

  For many nights afterwards Dan lay awake cursing himself for not being able to come up with a witty reply. The best he could do was an embarrassed smile.

  “Hi, I'm Anna Shapiro. Do you fancy making a break for it and finding somewhere to get rat-arsed?” As she spoke she took an Old Holborn tin from a tatty old shoulder bag and offered Dan a roll-up. Realizing he had come face to face with his first-ever Jewish shikseh, he got an instant erection.

  It turned out that Anna, who was a postgrad English student at Sussex, had begun life as a nice Jewish girl from Stanmore with a father who was an accountant and a mother who had gold-plated bathroom taps.

  As she downed pints of Guinness in the Cocked Hat on Woodford Avenue, she explained how she had rejected the whole neo-bourgeois, crypto-fascist Jewburbia thing by smoking dope in the ladies at synagogue during the Yom Kippur service and turning up to her bubba's Shabbas dinners wearing no knickers.

  Dan fell instantly, utterly and overwhelmingly in love.

  The morning after Dan and Anna first slept together, Dan woke up with a pounding head. He'd had a nightmare which involved his mother dressed as one of the Bay City Rollers, in tartan trousers, scarf and red platforms, chasing him round the imitation Louis Quatorze dining room table trying to stab him with the ornate silver scissors she kept in the fruit bowl for cutting grapes.

  Two days later, when the headache still hadn't gone, without telling Anna, he took the first of his eleven malignant brain tumors to Harley Street.

  Sitting on the side of the bath while she rubbed moisturizer into telly-ad-smooth legs, Anna heard Dan's key in the door. He called to her from the bottom of the stairs. The tone of his voice said it all. Anna had no doubt she was about to find yet another electronic juicer, mixer or squeezer on the kitchen table.

  C H A P T E R T W O

  IT WAS ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK THAT finally did it. Anna was standing in her red Cystitis Awareness Week T-shirt that she wore in bed, rubber gloves and Day-Glo-pink nylon slippers, trying to wash up and at the same time fry sausages and eggs for Amy and her two friends who had slept over, when “Release Me” came on the radio.

  She knew she had finally scored a personal worst in sexual fantasy, but it was a measure of her frustration when, for a few minutes, she imagined being carted off to some tropical island by Engelbert. She even refused to snap out of her reverie when her rational brain reminded her that sad old medallion-man crooners were much more time-share in Tossa del Mar than beach house in Barbados. But it didn't matter. Dan hadn't made love to her last night—even on electrical appliance night.

  Usually when he'd had some good news from some specialist or o
ther, Dan was all over Anna. He would cuddle up to her on the sofa, hold her, hug her and flick her bangs with his fingers. This would be followed by the sorry-I've-been-such-a-bastard-to-you-I-promise-finally-and- forever-that-my-obsession-with-my-health-is-over-and-wouldn't- it-be-great-if-we-put-the-kids-in-kennels-and-got-away-for-a-few- days speech.

  Anna would usually respond with her shit-Dan-we've-been- here - a - million - times - before - and - I - can't - live - like - this - any - more - unless - you - see - a - shrink speech. Dan would then assure her that he would definitely get help if she ever found him imagining symptoms again.

  Anna always caved in and by ten o'clock they would be in bed, Dan promising her the orgasm of her life. By 10:45 Dan would start whispering in her ear that he was getting carpal tunnel syndrome in his middle finger and could she hurry up. But Anna found it almost impossible to come when she was still so angry. So she held her breath, thrashed her head about a bit, let out a long sigh and said, “Thank you; that was lovely.” She then let Dan have his turn. Two minutes later they would both be asleep.

  Last night had been the same, up to the children-in-kennels bit, which he'd got to while they were watching Newsnight. Some impenetrable European Monetary Union item came on, and Anna got up to make herself a cup of tea. While she was waiting for the kettle to boil, she thought she'd unpack the John Lewis bag, which was still on the kitchen table.

  Inside were two boxes, one containing the blender (that made four they now owned), while the other was from a medical supplier in Wigmore Street.

  Anna ripped into the bubble wrap with some kitchen scissors and pulled out a square, wallet-sized plastic device. It had a tiny screen at the top, and a round opening at the side. The only instructions were in Spanish or Norwegian, but from what Anna could make out from the diagrams, this was some kind of newfangled home blood pressure machine. You put your index finger into the anuslike hole, which automatically tightened round it. The electronic sphygmomanometer then gave you a digital readout of your blood pressure.

  A few months ago she would have gone screaming into the living room, ranting and raving at Dan as if he were an alcoholic and she had just found three bottles of whiskey hidden in the toilet tank. But last night she had been so bloody worn out with it all, so tired of the pleading and begging, that she simply put the sphygmomanometer back in its box, finished making her mug of tea, yelled goodnight to Dan from halfway up the stairs and climbed into bed.

  When Dan came up twenty minutes later she was still sipping her tea and reading. He gave her another hug and told her he loved her, but there was no mention of orgasms. Anna put her book on the bedside table and turned out her light. Dan had his back to her and was pretending to be asleep, but she could sense that under the duvet he was feeling his pulse.

  As she gave the sausages another turn, Anna decided she had no choice. If she didn't find some fun soon, not to mention some decent sex, she would shrivel up and die. She tore off her rubber gloves, threw down her spatula and dialed Alison O'Farrell's home number.

  “Alison, it's Anna. Sorry to ring so early on a Saturday morning, but I just thought I'd let you know, I'll definitely do the Rachel Stern piece.”

  What she didn't tell Alison was that the stories would be genuine, but instead of belonging to three interviewees, they would all be hers.

  Anna Shapiro, thirty-seven-year-old mother of two in desperate need of a tummy tuck, breast lift and open-pore surgery, was about to spend the next eight weeks committing adultery—just for fun.

  Brenda Sweet, single mum from Peckham turned millionaire fashion designer, dunked a bit of buttery croissant into her coffee, and watched as globules of fat started to appear on the surface.

  “But what I don't understand is why you can't make do with solo sex for the time being? I mean, Dan's bound to recover the use of 'is pecker eventually.”

  “First, because “eventually' might mean forty years from now when he's got cataracts and incontinence pads, and second, because when I get up to heaven with all the other Jewish mothers, St. Peter, or whoever my people's equivalent is, will read out that summary of what everybody did with their lives. There will be Naomi Fishman who planted a thousand trees in Israel, Melanie Greenberg who, despite being blind and having no arms or legs, stuffed fifteen million chicken necks and won prizes for her chopped liver sculpture, then there will be me, Anna Shapiro—who wanked. OK, so I do it when I'm desperate, but believe me, adultery is much more respectable.”

  Brenda said she took the point and topped up their coffee cups, which were round and metallic, like sputum bowls with handles. Apparently they'd cost nearly twenty quid each from some Japanese shop in Covent Garden, but because Brenda was her best friend, Anna made allowances for her interesting taste in crockery.

  Brenda's kitchen, on the other hand, went well beyond interesting into the outer suburbs of downright peculiar.

  It was situated, stylistically speaking, somewhere between morgue and sluice room. The cupboard doors were brushed aluminum, the stainless-steel sink was conical, its metal U-bend exposed, and the floor was covered in those industrial nonslip concrete tiles which usually surround public swimming pools. The only object which bordered on the ornamental was a six-foot-by-four-foot grainy black-and-white photograph, which took up most of the space on the wall at the far end. It was of some poor terrified bastard strapped in the electric chair minutes before his execution.

  “Fuck me, Bren,” Dan, who could be witty in a sardonic way when he momentarily forgot he was dying, had said the first time they were invited to dinner in the new kitchen. “You certainly do a great line in concentration camp chic. S'pose the Mengeles are just outside parking the car. Hope they've remembered to bring a bottle.”

  To give Brenda her due, she laughed, but she was obviously a bit put out, because she called Dan “a bleedin' Philistine,” whose idea of style didn't extend beyond a matching bread-bin and mug-tree set.

  Brenda was very good at putting people in their place. Anna saw her do it the day they met and became friends. It was at the antenatal clinic, ten years ago, when she was expecting Josh and Brenda was expecting Alfie.

  The hospital made all the women sit in the waiting room in their maternity dresses, but minus their knickers and pantyhose. These they kept on their laps in wire supermarket baskets. Humiliating as this was, none of them challenged the ruling. These were National Health Service patients, who treated doctors like feudal lords, and in place of a forelock to tug, practically curtsied at the end of their examinations before walking out of the consulting room backwards. The tatty notice on the wall, written in green felt tip, explained that it speeded things up if the doctors had instant access to patients' nether regions.

  Anna, however, did make some small effort to assert herself. Along with her wire basket, she always took a copy of Ulysses into the consulting room and placed it purposefully on the doctor's desk, like a poker player revealing his hand. This was her way of ensuring that whichever supercilious, patronizing git of an obstetrician she was about to see spoke to her in words of more than two syllables—and didn't refer to her as Mum.

  A few weeks before Josh was due, Anna was sitting in the waiting room, wire basket on lap, working her way through a bag of Everton mints, when Brenda walked in, eight months pregnant and a size ten, wearing suede heels and a black Lycra minidress under a biker's jacket. Even her tidy, pert bump looked like a casually calculated fashion statement. Anna took one look at her and was just descending into one of those “Omigod, I look like someone turned the liposuction machine to blow” moments of self-hatred, when Brenda started bellowing at the middle-aged woman on the appointments desk.

  “Look 'ere, you daft mare, if you think I'm sitting for two hours with a draft up my jacksy on the off chance some doctor'll decide a poke around my privates is in order, you can bloomin' well think again.”

  “I'm sorry, it's hospital policy.”

  “I don't care if it's the soddin' Common Agricultural Policy. It's
bloody degrading and I'm not doing it.”

  With that, Brenda turned on her four-inch stilettos, saw there was an empty seat next to Anna and started to make her way towards it. Anna couldn't help thinking that had this been New York, the whole waiting room would have started whooping, applauding, waving their urine samples in support and queuing up to high-five Brenda. But this being Dulwich, everybody kept their heads buried behind their Good Housekeepings, and the only sound was of embarrassed buttock shuffling.

  As Brenda neared her, Anna had the same feeling—without the sex part—she'd had the night she met Dan at Beany Levine's party, of stumbling across a like-minded soul. She knew she was on the point of making a friend.

  Brenda was about to plonk herself down onto the empty seat and Anna was about to whisper, “Well done; not many people would have taken on that menopausal old bag” and “Where do you think she gets her tank tops?” when Brenda looked down and murmured:

  “Oh fuck. It's curtains for me Manolo Blahniks.”

  She was standing in a small puddle of broken waters.

  Brenda looked at Anna. “Christ, what do I do now? After that performance, I suppose the old bag'll have me down for a triple enema and a shave with a blunt razor.”

  Anna laughed. “Don't worry, you scared the control pants off her. I'll see if I can find one of the midwives.”

  A calm, motherly midwife called Iris found Brenda a wheelchair and took her up to the labor ward. As Brenda hadn't started having contractions yet, she said Anna could stay to keep her company. “Just until we locate your other half.”

  Brenda said she would rather the hospital contacted her mum.