Neurotica

by Sue Margolis

  It suddenly hit him that he wouldn't be around to check the tires on Amy's boyfriends' cars before they took her out on dates, or to have shouting matches with Josh about whether or not he was old enough to go to Glastonbury. He also remembered the promise he had made to Josh about the two of them going on a camping trip that summer. The thought of explaining to that little boy why he was breaking his promise was the most painful Dan had ever experienced.

  He stuck his key in the ignition, gripped the steering wheel and wept.

  The tears were still coming ten minutes later. Finally he blew his nose loudly and started the engine. As he set off for the hospital, he realized that his feelings towards Anna were, to say the least, exceedingly confused. If he combined his suspicions about her Barclaycard bill with the hints his mother had given him, they clearly added up to her having an affair.

  He could barely take in the enormity of what seemed to be happening. Here he was, dying, probably with only weeks to live, and his wife, whom he loved and adored, was cheating on him. But more than anything else, he couldn't believe how all this could have befallen him now, after he'd worked so fucking hard to kick his hypochondria. For weeks he'd been planning the glorious moment when he would put his arms round Anna's waist, swing her round in the air and announce that he was cured. He'd even picked up some holiday brochures from Thomas Cook.

  As he drove, he realized that at least one positive thing would come from his death. Anna would feel indescribably guilty for the rest of her life. That, at least, gave him some satisfaction.

  It was passing an undertaker's that made him start thinking once more about his funeral. The thought of a traditional Jewish burial added more misery to his despair. The no-flowers tradition made them such bleak, colorless affairs.

  The bit before the interment was the worst. The mourners stood facing each other, women on one side of the cemetery chapel, men on the other, watching the coffin, draped in black velvet, being wheeled in on a battered wooden handcart. It had often occurred to Dan that this contraption looked like something Jewish cemeteries had bought as a job lot after the Great Plague. The chap pushing the cart was usually some elderly, rabbinical-looking type wearing a top hat, a long, navy gabardine raincoat and mud-caked Wellington boots.

  Over the years, Dan had observed that as a consequence of having never met the deceased, the majority of rabbis conducting funerals operated a system of one eulogy fits all. At his mother's funeral, the rabbi had spent the first two minutes of his tribute referring to “our dear departed Lionel.”

  Sitting waiting for his chest X ray, he was beginning to think about his funeral tea. He was determined this should be a grand affair with musicians and posh caterers. He imagined three long, willowy girl cellists in black taffeta playing Handel while waitresses came round with trays of sushi, deep-fried baby squid and fingers of mozzarella wrapped in Parma ham. He was aware that his choice of menu might not go down too well with some of his elderly Orthodox relatives. It would, he decided, be necessary to provide some traditional Jewish food. This would come in the form of the buffet table centerpiece. He could see it now—his death mask molded in chopped liver. The picture of his gluttonous aunts and uncles gathered round the buffet table gouging out bits of his head and spreading him on tea matzos made Dan feel almost lighthearted.

  He was toying with the idea of having himself stuffed rather than buried, and wondering whom he should phone to get a quote, when he heard a young female voice call his name.

  Turning his head towards the voice, he saw a nurse smiling at him. She was holding open the door to the X-ray room. Dan stood up and wiped his palms down the front of his hospital dressing gown. He hesitated a moment longer and then started walking towards her.

  The minicab driver turned round to ask Anna if she minded him playing a tape of northern Turkish folk music. The sound of goat herders playing their pipes, he said, reminded him of the village where he grew up. Hoping that this would mean he wasn't going to make conversation, Anna said she didn't mind at all.

  As the goat herders began their atonal piping, Anna folded a stick of Wrigley's into her mouth. She found herself wishing for the umpteenth time that afternoon that she hadn't agreed to do the hen-party feature. She still hadn't got over the trauma of Alex's heart attack and the last thing she needed was an overnight in some seedy B and B with Monalisa Blake.

  Monalisa was acknowledged as one of the best newspaper photographers in the country, but the woman gave Anna the creeps. She wore black lipstick, thirties hats with veils and white goatskin gloves. She also talked incessantly, loudly, and usually over dinner, about her passion for photographing human cadavers. What Monalisa didn't know about lighting a corpse's face in order to eliminate shadow and create a flat monotone effect wasn't worth knowing.

  When Campbell had first suggested doing a three-parter on hen nights, Anna had immediately assumed that, as a reward for all her hard work on the Mavis de Mornay piece, she would be accompanying the yuppie contingent, which she imagined would be heading off to the Gritti Palace in Venice or the Royalton in New York. It turned out that this wasn't what Campbell had in mind for her.

  “Sorry, angel,” he'd said, “I've got Tiara Bulmer-Pilkington covering the posh leg of the story. 'Er and a gang of Sloanes are jetting off to some steak house in Tirana. Apparently cuisine chunder is the latest fad with the uppers. They have competitions to see who can chuck up the food first and then, totally slaughtered on the local cognac, they go lurching through the streets singing “Jerusalem' and taking the piss out of Albanian haircuts. . . . No, angel, I thought you would appreciate going off on something a bit more challenging, something with a bit more—what's the word?—depth. Yeah, that's it, depth. Angel, I can see your piece now, and believe me I'm thinking poignant social critique here, a piercing indictment of life as she is lived in rural England . . . sort of Panorama meets Emmerdale.”

  It was then that Campbell outlined his plan for Anna to accompany a butter churner from Dorset on her hen night. Apparently the butter churner, who was called Kelly, and twenty of her mates had booked to see the Lover Boys at the Starlight Club just outside Poole. The Lover Boys, he explained, were the West Country's answer to the Chippendales.

  The cab crossed Kew Bridge and pulled up at the Chiswick roundabout traffic lights.

  Anna took the gum out of her mouth and began rolling it contemplatively into a ball. God only knew what a group of Dorset butter churners would make of Monalisa, particularly if she started passing round her photo album of corpses.

  Still, a night in the company of Monalisa Blake was the least of Anna's worries. There were other, far more important issues troubling her. First, she was feeling exceedingly guilty because she hadn't been to see Alex in hospital. Alex had forbidden her to visit in case she came face-to-face with Kimberley, who had been at his bedside almost round the clock since the heart attack.

  As soon as Kimberley had found out that Alex's heart attack had been caused by his bad diet, she'd gone out and bought a cookery book full of low-fat recipes. Every day she would come onto the ward carrying a wicker basket. It contained a low-cholesterol treat for Alex and cakes and pies wrapped in red-and-white-check gingham for the staff. While Alex munched on a malted oat finger, Kimberley would stand at the end of the ward cutting up slices of Hummingbird cake topped with extra-thick cheese frosting and urging the doctors and nurses to sample her corn pones.

  As Anna couldn't visit Alex in hospital, she had insisted he phone her a couple of times each day. Over and over again he thanked her for saving his life and over and over again Anna said she'd done nothing other than call an ambulance. He said he felt terribly guilty for frightening her and she said she felt guilty because she thought she was to blame for his heart attack.

  “In what possible way?” he asked.

  “You know . . . the sex. It clearly put a strain on your heart. If we hadn't made love the attack would never have happened.”

  “Don't be so daft.” Alex ch
uckled. “According to my consultant, it was a heart attack simply waiting to happen. I was just lucky you were there. I could have been on my own somewhere and dropped dead. Anna, I owe you so much. I promise, as soon as I'm up and about, we'll have dinner and I shall say thank you properly.”

  It was the “I owe you so much” bit which was still doing circuits inside Anna's head. It would have been unspeakably selfish of her to put Alex under pressure by asking him if he'd had any more thoughts about dishing the dirt on Rachel Stern's cosmetic surgery. Nevertheless, she had barely slept in over a week, so desperate was she to get a decision from him. If he agreed to the interview and she got her timing just right, she could even ensure that the story appeared on the same day that Rachel Stern was due to give her keynote address at the League of British Feminists' annual lunch.

  Today was Friday. Alex was due out of hospital tomorrow. Anna decided to leave it until Tuesday and then she would phone him.

  As she wrapped the ball of gum in a Kleenex, Anna found herself thinking about Dan.

  The feeling she'd had a couple of weeks ago as they lay in bed that he was keeping something from her hadn't gone away. If anything, it had grown stronger. She had even wondered whether he was having an affair. She'd dismissed the possibility almost immediately, on the grounds that the irony was too ridiculous for words, and it made her feel like a creature in an Aesop fable who was about to get its comeuppance.

  Added to Dan's air of secrecy was his latest neurotic symptom: he had started interrogating Anna about her movements. Every evening when he came home, he demanded to know precisely how she had spent her day. When she told him that the hen-night story would involve a night away he had spent half an hour quizzing her about where she was staying, which photographer she was going with and what time she would be home on Saturday. Anna, supremely confident that she had furnished him with not even the slightest evidence of her adultery, had simply smiled patiently and answered all his questions calmly and without fuss.

  She had wondered if his hypochondria was becoming so severe that he was transferring his anxiety onto her. Could it be, she'd thought, that he was now petrified that she was going to get ill while she was away from him? This had made sense until it began to dawn on her that Dan appeared to be becoming a little more relaxed about his health. Last week when she'd suggested he see the doctor about his cough, he had shrugged and said he was sure it would clear up on its own. Barely looking up from the West Ham game he was watching on Sky, he said he might go to the doctor about it “sometime.”

  She realized he could be starting to overcome his hypochondria. She supposed she should have been delighted. Instead she'd been horrified. If Dan got better that meant he would want to have sex with her—not that she wouldn't welcome that, but it meant that she would have no justification for her adultery apart from the rather flimsy one of a piece she had to write for a newspaper. Despite Alex's heart attack and despite Charlie disappearing and only ever sending her one chewed-up postcard from New York in which he hinted heavily at a burgeoning romance with a nursery nurse from Cork called Fidelma, Anna had got into the swing of extramarital sex. She had no intention of stopping.

  Not, at least, until she'd scored her hat trick.

  The cab pulled up outside the Globe on Sunday office. As Anna reached into her bag for her wallet she sensed there was something a bit different about the music coming from the car cassette player. Although the northern Turkish goat herders were still playing their pipes, they appeared to have completed their repertoire of northern Turkish folk music. They had segued into “Ferry Cross the Mersey.”

  C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N

  ANNA LOOKED AT HER WATCH. She'd been sitting in reception at the Globe on Sunday for nearly half an hour. There was still no sign of Monalisa Blake. After twenty minutes, she'd asked the girl on reception if she could use the phone.

  Anna thought she'd ring the picture desk first to see if they had any idea where Monalisa was. The temp who answered the phone said she'd never heard of her. When Anna said she'd try Campbell, the girl said not to bother as Campbell and his PA had gone tearing out of the office an hour ago. When she asked her if she knew when they were due back, the temp had said she couldn't say, but she wouldn't be at all surprised if they were gone for the rest of the day.

  Apparently a crisis had arisen on the photo shoot for Campbell's “Who Really Bonks Big Girls?” supplement. The twenty-stone mother of seven from Ipswich whom Campbell had conned into being photographed naked wrapped in the trunk of a male elephant had become hysterical and was threatening to walk out because every time she went near the animal he either dropped a colossal heap of steaming dung or tried to mount her.

  Anna thought it unlikely Campbell would need all afternoon to calm the woman. If she knew Campbell, he would put a comforting arm round her, toss her a large box of Ferrero Rocher along with a couple of tickets for Cats and the promise of a free nosh-up for her and the family at the Harvester of their choice and she'd be, to quote one of Campbell's favorite phrases, “sweet as a dipstick coated in sherbet” in three minutes flat.

  Although Anna anticipated Campbell's imminent return, she knew she couldn't depend on it. She and Monalisa should have left by now. It was essential she speak to Campbell right away.

  She opened her handbag and took out her Filofax. She found Campbell's mobile number in a matter of seconds, then went back to the reception desk and dialed. All she got was the answering service.

  “Fuck.” Anna slammed down the receiver and picked up her Filofax from the desk. As she turned to go back to her seat she noticed the automatic doors part and a man come running in, a canvas camera bag slung over his shoulder. She recognized the breathless, puffing chap at once. It was Ed Brzezinski, one of the Globe's staff photographers.

  “Anna . . .” He was coming towards her, his hand raised in recognition.

  In the newspaper world, Ed Brzezinski was a superstar. In the ten years before he joined the Globe, he had made a name for himself throughout Europe and America as a brilliant and gifted war photographer. Several severe bouts of malaria he first picked up in Rwanda had finally forced him back to London and into taking a less intrepid newspaper job on the Globe.

  Although he was almost forty, he was tall and slim with a bum like two nectarines. The sight of Brzezinski, hard-bitten and chain-smoking in his tatty Levis, beaten-up tan suede jacket and heavy stubble, had most women in the Globe office crossing their legs with frustration.

  And for a lucky few, the frustration was relieved. Ed was known throughout the Globe on Sunday as the Steeplejack. “On account,” Campbell had explained to Anna when she inquired about the nickname soon after she'd started writing for the Globe, “of 'im always bein' up something, if you get my drift.”

  Anna had only ever worked with Ed once. That was almost two years ago. Although they bumped into each other occasionally in the corridor, or by the coffee machine, for no reason in particular their professional paths hadn't crossed since.

  The job they had worked on together had entailed going to Isleworth to doorstep a King Charles spaniel who could howl “Don't Cry for Me Argentina.”

  Ed had driven them to Isleworth in his clapped-out Mini. It had been an uncomfortable journey, due partly to the Mini's decrepitude and partly to Ed looking angry and sullen and doing little more than grunt in response to Anna's attempts at conversation. There had been no doubt in Anna's mind that he considered the singing-dog story to be beneath him. It wasn't until they were almost there that Ed finally allowed his anger to erupt. He called Campbell, on whose orders the pair had been dispatched to Isleworth, a buffoon and tabloid tosser. He began spluttering and taking his hands off the steering wheel to wave his arms around, saying that he had no idea how the man could even consider demanding that someone with his experience and talent go on such a tacky story.

  Anna had to bite into the side of her cheek in order to stop herself saying that Ed could always bugger off to the nearest war and wi
th a bit of luck he might step on a land mine.

  By the time they arrived in Isleworth, she had come to the conclusion that although Ed Brzezinski was, with his swept-back brownish-auburn hair and face full of boyish freckles, severely fanciable, he was a precious git with a grossly inflated ego.

  Suddenly, all the office gossip about him made sense. The Steeplejack had a preference for nineteen-year-old girls, usually nineteen-year-old Japanese girls. This was a man, Anna realized, who couldn't abide being contradicted or challenged—particularly by women.

  During Ed's outburst on the way to Isleworth, Anna decided she would rather eat a pile of her toenail clippings than give him even the vaguest hint that she found him intimidating or attractive. She was determined to assert herself and stand up to him.

  She began almost at once. As they walked towards the small group of reporters and photographers standing outside the small terraced house which was home to the King Charles spaniel, Anna noticed that Ed appeared to have brought only one camera with him. It was an old Leica, most of its black enamel chipped off, which she'd noticed him stuff crossly into his jacket pocket as he got out of the car. She pointed out all the other photographers with their Nikons and Canons strung round their necks and informed Ed curtly that compared to his colleagues, he wasn't very well hung.

  Ed ignored the remark, but there was little doubt in Anna's mind that he had been furious with her. On the way back to the office he did his best to pick an argument with her. First he tried goading her by suggesting that a reporter's life was much easier than a photographer's.

  “If the story doesn't pan out, or the interviewee does a bunk, you lot can bugger off back to the office and make it up. If I come back empty-handed, there's a dirty great hole on page seven and I'm dog food.”