Neurotica

by Sue Margolis

  It turned out that Brenda's other half, Elvis, had done a bunk three weeks ago and was living in Leytonstone with an assistant supervisor from Do It All. Brenda had just moved back to Peckham to be near her mum and dad, and this had been her first appointment at the hospital.

  Apparently Elvis, who was a clerk with the Inland Revenue, went off with Dawn who did it all because he felt jealous and threatened when Brenda gave up hairdressing and started making a success of designing and making clothes.

  She'd studied fashion design at art school years before, but had never had the confidence to set up in business on her own. After art school, she'd just drifted into hairdressing. From the start, posh clients at the salon in Sloane Street began admiring what she wore and asked her where she bought her clothes. When Brenda said she designed and made them herself—even the Lycra bodies and skirts—she began getting dozens of orders.

  The first time she broke the five-hundred-pounds-a-week barrier, Elvis took off.

  Brenda and anna had been on the labor ward about an hour when Brenda's mum arrived, all hot flush and eau de cologne. Anna said a quick hello and decided she should leave them to it.

  The next day Brenda phoned to say that Alfie had arrived safely with Elvis's ears, but she thought she could learn to love him, and that apart from tits as hard as Contiboard and what felt like a net of satsumas hanging out of her bum, she was fine.

  After Josh was born, Anna and Brenda saw each other a couple of times a week. They would sit on the floor in Brenda's living room drinking wine, even though they knew that as breast-feeding mothers they shouldn't because it would get the babies drunk, and would try to work out why they were the only women they knew who thought the joy of watching their babies crawl, walk and talk didn't begin to compare with getting a new head of highlights.

  Anna said if Josh didn't stop screaming all day she was going to lock him in his room and he could only come out when he turned twenty-five or did something interesting, like get a record in the Top Ten.

  One evening, over a bottle of Chardonnay, they decided to form their own subversive breakaway postnatal support group. In order to join, mothers had to sign an undertaking to feed their children only dehydrated baby food from packets. Anybody found Mouli-ing up organic turnips or avocados would be expelled, as would mothers who were caught coming out of the Early Learning Center with boxes of flash cards about their person. Mothers who were deemed to be the type who would carry on breast-feeding their children until they were old enough to go to Guns N' Roses concerts would be flogged.

  They were trying to decide whether they'd get any response if they put postcards in the newsagent's window advertising for people to join when it hit Brenda that Anna had never seen any of the clothes she made.

  Anna knew very little about real couture, but she took one look at Brenda's exquisitely cut, hand-finished jackets and trousers and knew this came pretty close.

  “Blimey, Bren, I knew you were talented, but I had no idea you were Edina bloody Ronay. I can't understand why you're not making a fortune.”

  “I'll tell you why. I've got orders coming out of my ears, but I can't keep up, because I've got no staff, one rotten sewing machine in a flat not much bigger than a pair of Christina Aguilera's panties, not to mention fucking Goering here making twenty-four-hour-a-day territorial demands on my tits.”

  Anna, being an accountant's daughter, couldn't see the problem. Once Brenda had got Alfie on the bottle and into day care, all she needed to do was form a company, write a business plan, find a backer to put up half the money she needed and her bank would probably lend her the rest.

  “God, what planet do you live on? Find a backer? You may not be aware of this but you don't find too many ordinary daddies sticking around in Peckham—let alone sugar ones.”

  Driving home to Blackheath, with Josh asleep in his carrycot on the backseat and Dire Straits on the cassette player, Anna began running through a list of people who she thought might be able to come up with the kind of cash Brenda needed. In the end she decided the only person she knew who wasn't up to their eyes in mortgage repayments and didn't have the ladies from Barclaycard on the phone every five minutes over late payments was her father. He had the money from his mother's flat in Brighton sitting in a building society. But to convince Harry that investing in Brenda's business would be a sound move, she first had to convince her mother.

  Anna spent the next three weeks, in between breast-feeding Josh, on the phone trying to persuade her mother—directrice of Maison Gloria in Stanmore (Fabulous Fashions For the Fuller Figure)—to take a look at Brenda's work.

  Harry had bought Gloria the shop over thirty years ago, when her need to repeatedly clean things—the Maudsley called it obsessive-compulsive syndrome—had reached a particularly worrying phase.

  One Saturday lunchtime, he had come home from synagogue expecting a nice bowl of borscht before he went off to see Tottenham. Instead he found Gloria on her knees removing bits of dirt from between the floorboards with a cotton swab while two of his best suits were soaking in a bath full of Parazone.

  Her psychiatrist at the hospital suggested to Harry in private that an outside interest would be a good idea.

  “Funny you should mention it, Dr. Mittelschmertz. I've been thinking maybe a few gentle rounds of golf now and again would do me good.”

  Dr. Mittelschmertz grimaced. “I mean for your vife, Mr. Shapiro, for your vife.”

  Harry began phoning estate agents.

  Maison Gloria seemed to have done the trick. Every day, Gloria glided around the shop, black velvet pincushion on her wrist, flogging mauve chiffon evening dresses to size twenty-two mothers-of-the-bar-mitzvah-boy who couldn't lay off the cheesecake.

  Anna knew that as far as Harry was concerned, Gloria was northwest London's answer to Coco Chanel. If Gloria thought Brenda was worth backing, he wouldn't hesitate to put his hand in his pocket.

  But persuading Gloria wasn't easy. Every time Anna brought the subject up, Gloria told her she was mad and obviously suffering from postnatal depression if she expected her to convince Harry to invest money in a total stranger—a shikseh no less—who at best needed a good elocution teacher and at worst might turn out to be a psychopath, only they wouldn't find out until they woke up one morning dead in their beds.

  Anna never quite worked out why—maybe her mother could no longer stand her continual badgering—but finally Gloria caved in and agreed to schlep over to Peckham.

  “There'll be dirt and litter and people in Acrilan. What should I wear?”

  “Pith helmet and puttees should just about hit the right note.”

  To placate Anna further she even took a present for Alfie.

  Gloria decided that as Brenda had been brought up in public housing and her gene pool probably left a lot to be desired, little Alfie's IQ might need a jump start, and so she bought him a times-tables tape. Furious, Anna made her take it back and exchange it for a furry duck.

  Even then, Brenda's taste in interiors was unconventional.

  “Tell me,” Gloria had said on the way home, “what sort of a person keeps her panties in a filing cabinet?”

  But, like Anna, she had been bowled over by Brenda's creations.

  Anna had never known Gloria to be silent for so long. She was like a little girl gazing at her first party dress in the days when they were pink and frothy with rosebuds and bows.

  Gently, she ran her fingers over Brenda's seams. Analytically, she squinted at her buttonholes. Approvingly, she stroked the outside of her sleeves. Anna knew they'd got it sorted when, finally, Gloria took off her glasses and declared that the last time she had seen lapels like these was on her uncle Manny at the end of the war. Apparently, Manny had been a petty East End crook who had once come into possession of a vanload of Savile Row suits. Although he never got nicked for the suits, he went on to do six months in Wormwood Scrubs for black-market onions.

  Gloria got home, marched into the kitchen where Harry was munching
on a pickled cucumber and reading the Social and Personal column in the Jewish Chronicle, and informed him that he was about to invest £30,000 in Brenda's business.

  Harry carried on reading.

  “Harry, put the paper down, stop making that awful noise and listen to me. You've heard of Christian Lacroix. If you invest in this Brenda Sweet person, I'm telling you, overnight you'll become Yiddishe Lacroix.”

  Harry did as he was told and even prepared Brenda's business plan for the bank. Three months later Sweet FA-UK was born.

  Tenyears on, Brenda had a personal fortune of well over four million, plus an eight-bedroom house in Holland Park. Harry had made enough money to retire at fifty-five, and he and Gloria had bought a smart holiday flat in Eilat where they spent three months every year. Gloria brought in an assistant to help her run Maison Gloria, but refused to sell the shop because she adored chatting and getting to know her customers. Over the years the business had become her social life. Without it she would have been lost.

  Brenda always said she would never be able to put into words how grateful she was to Anna. Anna said she needn't bother—a couple of free suits a year said it all as far as she was concerned.

  In fact, Brenda did much more than supply Anna with clothes. When Amy got pneumonia just after she was born, it was Brenda who phoned one of her clients, who just happened to be a professor of pediatrics, and persuaded her to have a look at the baby; when Dan began going peculiar, it was Brenda she cried to and got drunk with, and Brenda who listened. Now that she was about to cheat on Dan, it was Brenda she had come to, partly for advice on how to go about it, and partly because, despite her determination to go through with it, she realized she still needed somebody to give her permission.

  “God, Anna, you make me feel like the Mother Superior in The Sound of Music. What do you expect me to do, burst into song and tell you to climb ev'ry mountain until you find your dream so that you can waltz out of 'ere in some poxy brown burlap jacket and silly hat singing to all and sundry down Kensington Church Street that you have confidence in bleedin' sunshine and rain? I don't think so. Anna, have you any idea what you'll be risking if you go on this shagathon? I mean, what if Dan finds out? You could lose the kids.”

  “But that's the whole point of the exercise,” Anna said tetchily, annoyed that she wasn't getting the lavish approval from Brenda she had hoped for. “According to Rachel Stern, you can only do it if you know you have the wit not to get found out and the strength not to tell. Perhaps the cow's right.”

  “And you reckon you've got all that?”

  “Yes. Look, I don't want heavy, I'll-show-you-my-angst -if-you-show-me-yours-type relationships and then we fall in love. I just want their bodies.”

  There was a very long pause. Finally, Brenda licked her middle finger and began flicking through a copy of the Evening Standard which had been lying on the kitchen table.

  “If it really is only the sex you're after, you might find this useful. I noticed it last night.”

  Brenda stopped flicking and reached for a ballpoint. Anna could see she was ringing one of the personal ads.

  “What is it, Bren? If you think I'm going off with some sad creep who has to advertise, you can think again.”

  “Don't read it now. Wait until you get home.”

  Brenda tore out the page, folded it over a couple of times and slipped it into Anna's jacket pocket.

  Gloria was convinced that if the light caught Anna's marble-topped coffee table at a certain angle, she could see a small raised mark. It was either a spot of Superglue, probably spilled by Dan when he was mending one of Josh's Lego men, or a flaw in the marble.

  By holding her head slightly to the right she could keep the mark in her sight and move in on it very slowly. The tiniest movement and it would disappear. Then she would have to move back and start again.

  It was definitely Superglue. She started alternately spraying it with Pledge and picking at it with her thumbnail. After ten minutes, it still wasn't shifting. The thought of having to leave it filled her with terror.

  Desperate for another cleaning fix, she got up from her knees and ran into the kitchen. She opened the cupboard under the sink, took out a bottle of Ajax Liquid and poured nearly half of it into a bucket. As she dipped her J-Cloth into the bucket she could feel her heart rate coming down and the tension easing. Gloria had just begun to wipe down Anna's worktops when she looked up and saw Anna standing staring at her in the doorway.

  “My God, Mum, you don't get any better. Am I the only sane one in this bloody family? Would you mind telling me what you are doing? Mrs. Fredericks came in yesterday. The place is spotless.”

  It turned out Gloria was on her way to her obsessive-compulsive group's annual bazaar, an event which had looked like it was never going to happen. Apparently their group therapist had been forced to postpone it three times because all the obsessive compulsives had been too busy obsessively and compulsively cleaning the hall and checking the wiring to organize the actual event.

  Gloria had popped in to see if Amy and Josh had wanted to come, but when she arrived they'd been on their way out to the roller disco with Dan. He'd said she was welcome to stay, as Anna was due back just after one.

  “Oh, and there's something else you ought to know,” Gloria said to Anna. “I got a phone call last night. Your uncle Henry died yesterday.”

  “Good Lord. I had no idea he was still alive. He must have been a hundred and six.”

  “A hundred and two. Just dropped dead out of the blue. The funeral's three o'clock Thursday. They've had to delay it a few days because there has to be a postmortem if you haven't seen a doctor in the past two weeks.”

  Uncle Henry wasn't Anna's real uncle. In fact, he was no relation at all. In 1901 Henry and Anna's grandma Esther had met and become inseparable on the boat bringing Jewish immigrants from Poland to England. Once the two seven-year-olds had found each other, it wasn't long before their parents became friends too, and when they arrived in the East End, they all lodged together in the same miserable, damp house off the Roman Road.

  From then on, the two families never lived more than a couple of streets apart, and Esther and Henry, who were both only children, became like brother and sister. Strangely, as they grew up, there was never any romance between them. As far as both sets of parents were concerned, it wasn't for want of trying.

  In the end Henry married a beautiful but half-witted girl called Yetta, and Esther married a young tailor called Saul, who owned three sewing machines and seemed to have above-average prospects. Nevertheless, Henry and Esther remained extremely close into old age. As a child, Anna had always received a ten-shilling note in her birthday card from Uncle Henry and Aunty Yetta, and always thought of them as part of her mother's family.

  Gloria put on her jacket, gave Anna's worktop another wipe, took a look in the fridge to check she had enough food in, kissed her and said, “See you Thursday.”

  Anna went upstairs to the bathroom, sat on the toilet seat and started to read the small ad Brenda had ringed.

  “Are you in a relationship or happily married, but would like a lover? Liaisons Dangereux is a dating agency with a difference.” Then there was a telephone number.

  Anna refolded the page, rolled it into a small cigar and slipped it inside a box of Tampax.

  C H A P T E R T H R E E

  “WE USED TO BE A HAPPY FAMILY before all this happened,' wept attractive mum of two, Dawn, 40, from the beamed mock-Tudor lounge of her apartment in Barking. “I used to enjoy going out for a Malibu and Coke with the girls of an evening. Terry used to look forward to a bit of a fight with his mates at the West Ham football matches. These days, all our friends have deserted us. We daren't even walk round the estate without the Rottweilers, because there's always some bastard pointing a finger at us. Sigourney and Keanu are wonderful kids since they came out of the detention center, but they're being bullied so much at school over this, they've been offered counseling.' ”

  A
nna was sitting at the word processor in her bedroom-cum-study, just getting to the end of a piece for the health pages of the Globe on Sunday about coping with nits—provisionally headlined “Lousy Mother's Nit Nightmare Shame”—when she looked down at her watch and realized that if she didn't get a move on, she was going to be late for Uncle Henry's funeral.

  The article should have taken only a couple of hours to write, but Anna was spending ages on it, because she had passed most of the morning staring out of the window trying to pluck up the courage to phone Liaisons Dangereux, but then decided she couldn't because they were bound to want her to deliver her romantic manifesto in some cringe-makingly embarrassing video. She knew the style, since she had done an article a couple of years ago on women who used dating agencies, and had sat in while some of them performed what one outfit referred to pretentiously as the client's “piece to camera.”

  The women fell into two groups. First there were the fat middle-aged divorcees with bad perms, who had just started some computer access course or other. Then there were the sad twenty-something lasses with eczema and brains the size of Cadbury's Creme Eggs, who sat in front of the camera and gabbled: “Hi, my name's Nicole and I come from Worcester Park. I work in personnel for a large company which specializes in intimate rubberwear. My ambitions are to meet Simon Cowell, to find a way to wax my bikini line without getting that embarrassing rash and to end world hunger. At this moment in time I am without a special someone in my life and I'm searching for a soulmate for walks, talks and maybe more. Are you the shining star who can brighten up my lonely nights?”

  With the possible exception of auditioning for Pop Idol in nothing but silver hot pants and a matching boob tube, Anna could think of no worse humiliation than making a dating agency video. Nevertheless, she couldn't help fantasizing about what she might say, should the occasion arise. She suspected she would dispense with the introduction and launch straight into: “Look, I live with a fucking lunatic who would rather spend his nights on an Internet Terminal Illness Forum exchanging information on symptoms and hospice facilities with fellow hypochondriacs in Kentucky than have sex with me. So if you own your own liver, your tap stops dripping after you've had a pee, or better still, you had yet to be weaned onto solids the night Kennedy was shot, I'm all yours.”