Neurotica

by Sue Margolis

  She typed another couple of sentences and broke off yet again. She didn't know why she was bothering to go to the funeral. She hadn't seen Uncle Henry or Aunty Yetta for donkey's years, but on the phone the day before, Gloria had laid on the guilt, saying that she should go for Bubba's sake. Anna pointed out that Bubba had been dead for eleven years and, as a former person, had forfeited all rights to a sake. Gloria, who was desperate to show Anna off at the funeral and introduce her to Uncle Henry's family, who hadn't seen her for years, as “my daughter the important Fleet Street journalist who once interviewed Maureen Lipman,” then instantly changed tack. Suddenly she became an expert on funeral etiquette, a sort of sarcophagal Miss Manners, and warned Anna ominously that if you didn't go to people's funerals, they wouldn't come to yours. Faced with this priceless piece of Gloria-esque logic, Anna gave in.

  She wasn't surprised when Dan announced he would not be coming. He'd given her some involved explanation about having to drop off a stool sample at the doctor's surgery and then having to go on to Newport Pagnell for lunch with a trade delegation from Venezuela. As soon as Anna heard the words “stool sample,” her eyes glazed over and she stopped listening.

  Anna took another look at her watch. It was just after one. She bashed out a lackluster final paragraph and faffed irritably with the modem, which, as ever, threw a wobbly and refused to work if she was in a state any more stressful than one of sublime, bucolic repose; indeed, to function properly, the modem would have preferred Anna to be sitting with her feet on her desk, straw in mouth and humming “One Man Went to Mow.” After fifteen minutes of sending and resending, roughly as long as it would have taken to dictate the story to an old-fashioned copytaker, Anna's article was finally ingested by the Globe's computers.

  She took her latest Sweet FA black jacket out of the wardrobe and put it on over a tight white top and boot-cut black pants. She decided, even though she was going to a funeral, that the outfit needed a bit of a lift. She also retained an adolescent urge to shock at important family do's. So she went to her jewelry box and took out a brightly colored four-inch-long wooden brooch she had bought a couple of years ago at a market when she was on holiday with Dan and the kids in Tobago. It was a carving of a naked, dreadlocked African painted in ANC colors with a huge red erection and a joint. She pinned it to her left lapel, patted it and giggled. Then she grabbed her bag and keys off the desk, bolted downstairs and out to the car.

  Dan thought a stroll might calm him down. As he turned left out of the Vanguard's office and headed down Kensington High Street towards Holland Park, he realized he had never been so humiliated in his life. It was nearly four hours since the incident in the doctor's surgery, but his entire body was still bright red with embarrassment. Even his internal organs felt as if they were blushing. He couldn't face lunch. It was just as well the Venezuelans had canceled.

  The day had begun routinely enough. He had dropped in at the office just after half past eight to check his messages from the previous night, before popping out to hand in the stool sample at the surgery round the corner. There was nothing on the voice mail. All that had come through overnight was the fax from the Venezuelans postponing lunch until the following Tuesday, but inviting him to a performance of Die Meistersinger at Covent Garden that evening, as they had been given some free tickets. He sent back a fax confirming the new lunch date, but politely declining the opera as Wagner always gave him this irresistible urge to annex the Sudetenland.

  Ten minutes later he had strolled into the crowded doctor's waiting room. He realized it had been months since he had actually set foot in the surgery because Dr. Harper, the kindly middle-aged lady doctor, had of late taken to discussing his symptoms with him on the phone so that she could dismiss them there and then, rather than waste her time and his with a pointless visit to the surgery.

  Last Monday evening, just as Dr. Harper thought she had dealt with her last patient of the day, the receptionist had put a call from Mr. Bloomfield through to her, as she did three or four times a month.

  Dan, standing alone at the kitchen phone, began describing his symptoms. This time it was gripping stomach pains, and frequent loose bowel movements, which had a greenish tinge together with reddish streaks which could have been beetroot from the beetroot salad he'd bought from the deli on his way home from work the night before, but then again could have been blood. All this, in his opinion, and he felt sure she would agree, suggested several possibilities:

  “Colitis was my first diagnostic port of call, although I'm not sure I've got the characteristic mucus in the blood. I'd have to take another look. Then of course it could be Crohn's disease or diverticulitis. I know that patients bleed with both of those, although I understand people with diverticular disease can remain asymptomatic for years, but certainly severe cramps are a symptom of both. Of course there is an outside chance it could be Whipple's disease—I do have the chronic low-grade fever. Then there is . . .” Dan hesitated before saying the word, “. . . cancer. But of course you'll know better than me,” he added as a deferential afterthought.

  That afternoon Dr. Harper had dispatched a burst appendix and a suspected ectopic pregnancy to hospital, visited a senile chap who thought his wife was in a coma, but by the look and smell of her she had been dead for at least a fortnight, and had a two-year-old with measles vomit over her new Mansfield suit. She was tired, irritable and in no mood for malingerers like Dan Bloomfield.

  “Me know better than you, Mr. Bloomfield? You flatter me,” she spat sarcastically down the phone. “But, with your permission, may I offer just a couple of suggestions? Have you considered Norwalk virus infection or shigella bacillus?”

  Dan's heart didn't just skip a beat—it skipped an entire drum solo. He was about to faint.

  Somehow, while still holding the phone under his chin and maniacally scrambling through the Home Doctor index trying to find N for Norwalk, he managed to get himself onto the kitchen floor and raise his legs a few feet off the ground. After a second or two the blood began to return to his head.

  “Good God, what the hell are they?”

  “What they are, Mr. Bloomfield, are nasty little so-and-sos which give you an upset tum. You probably have a mild case of food poisoning, nothing more. Simply take plenty of fluids. If you insist, you can bring in a stool sample tomorrow morning and I'll send it off to the lab for analysis. Good-bye, Mr. Bloomfield.”

  Dan did insist. However, in all the years that he had been one of Dr. Harper's patients, he had never given a stool sample and wasn't quite sure how one went about it. Dr. Harper had cut him off without giving him any instructions. Would the lab want a whole turd, or just a slice of turd, and what should he put it in?

  The first receptacle that sprang to mind as being vaguely the right shape was the Habitat spaghetti jar standing next to him on the kitchen worktop. Dan picked up the glass container, which was full of spinach fusilli, adopted a squatting position and placed it over his jeans in roughly the right position. He realized straight away that it was going to be much too tall to fit between his backside and the bottom of the loo, as well as too large to go in his briefcase. Crucially, it also had no lid, although he supposed he could cover it with clingfilm.

  Then, as he rifled through the kitchen cupboards in search of something expendable, it occurred to him that a pickled cucumber jar might be just the ticket. Once a week, Dan schlepped to Golders Green to buy bagels and a couple of jars of his favorite new green cucumbers. New greens had a distinctive sour taste, which he preferred to the sweet-and-sour taste of ordinary pickles. New greens were also longer and darker. In fact, size and shapewise, they were not dissimilar to the average healthy stool.

  Dan reached up and took one of the sturdy screw-top jars down from its cupboard. It was slightly shorter than he'd thought, but he hoped the turd he produced would be of a consistency to curl up and hunker down. He tipped the pickled cucumbers into a Tupperware container and soaked off the Mrs. Elswood label under a hot running ta
p. He reckoned that pickles were probably pretty sterile, but thought he'd boil up a kettle of water and rinse out the jar just to be on the safe side.

  Harvesting the sample was no problem as he still had the trots. He waited until Anna was watching a Tenko rerun on UK Gold and then went up to the bathroom to deliver his payload.

  Afterwards Dan quickly screwed on the jar lid. He decided that the sample had to be kept fresh until the next morning. He put it at the back of the fridge in a brown paper bag and prayed that Anna wouldn't be overtaken in the night by a desperate yearning for a new green cucumber. For added protection, he ring-fenced the jar with some items he was pretty confident his wife would not be seeking out over the next twelve hours. These included a bottle of infant Calpol, some homemade chutney they'd bought at the school summer fête six months ago and a bottle of the most disgusting no-fat salad dressing.

  What Dan hadn't been able to see the next day as he opened the door of the doctor's surgery was a three-year-old boy, with a chesty cough and a stream of green snot hanging down from his nose, careering around the waiting room on a small wooden tricycle. At the exact moment Dan walked in, the child was a few feet away revving his handlebars and making irritating broom-brooming noises through his catarrh as he prepared to do a hit-and-run on a baby just old enough to sit up, and who was busy on the floor chewing on a Playmobil pirate. Hours later, Dan still couldn't remember precisely what happened, but in a split second, the baby's mother, sensing imminent danger, had scooped up her child, leaving the speeding toddler a clear path to crash into Dan and send both him and the cucumber jar flying.

  It took Dan a few moments to get his breath back and lift himself into a sitting position, but by that time the little boy had unscrewed the lid and had his nose deep inside the jar. He then proceeded to lift it high above his head and began showing it off like the Jules Rimet cup to everybody in the waiting room.

  “Look, man done a great big smelly poo-poo like my do. Why has man done poo in jar and not in va twoilet?”

  For a few seconds there was an ominous silence. This was followed by what can only be described as a universal waiting-room retch-in, after which the little boy's mother started to have hysterics. These involved her climbing up onto her chair, lifting up her skirt and screaming for somebody to remove that thing, as if Dan's turd were about to sprout legs and whiskers and start scurrying about the surgery. This led to a widespread panic among the pensioners, who all made a surprisingly aerobic dash for the door, but were forced to a halt when their walking frames, sticks and shopping trolleys ended up logjammed in the narrow hallway.

  In a matter of seconds, the receptionist had relieved the toddler of Dan's stool sample, but by that time Dan had escaped out of the emergency exit. Five minutes later he was back at his desk writing an intro to a piece on the effect on the FTSE-100 of recent profit-taking in Wall Street.

  Dan was just about to turn into the park and wondering how one went about changing GPs when he noticed a 1960 turquoise Ford Zephyr convertible pull into a parking bay on the other side of the road. A moment later, Brenda got out, looking as if she had completely lost her sartorial marbles.

  Anna was beginning to panic. The traffic on the east-bound lane of the North Circular was at a complete standstill. The roads had been clear until just after Hanger Lane roundabout, but for the best part of ten minutes she had moved no more than a few feet. She couldn't help thinking that if they still lived in Blackheath the journey to manor park would have taken no more than half an hour. Not that the proximity of Blackheath to Manor Park Jewish Cemetery was a reason for moving back. Anna had loved Blackheath and all the friends she had there and had been mightily pissed off with Dan for demanding they move simply because some examination league table or other had insisted that state schools in the London Borough of Richmond got some of the best General Certificate of Secondary Education results in the country. So now they lived on the outskirts of one of the poshest areas of London, and were struggling every month to pay a whacking great mortgage on an Edwardian town house, just so Dan didn't have to send his children to private schools and could pretend he was still an ideologically sound socialist.

  Anna had passed most of the time frantically twiddling the tuner on the car radio, trying to find the local traffic news, but kept getting some Talk Radio shrink doing a phone-in. The rest of the time she had spent staring at the room settings in Leather Universe, the furniture hypermarket, which was set back a few yards from the road. A particularly gruesome lounge setting caught her eye. This had, without doubt, been put together from artifacts plundered from Liberace's tomb, because it included a lavender suede three-piece, a zebra-skin hearthrug and a white-and-gold baby grand complete with four-branch candelabra.

  Anna took another look at her watch. It was nearly half past two. She was never going to get to the burial ground by three. She decided the best thing to do was to abandon any idea of trying to make it to the cemetery. Instead she would head straight for Uncle Henry's house in Manor Park, where everybody was due to come back for the traditional postinterment tea.

  The bugger of it was that because she had missed the actual burial, Gloria had undoubtedly lost important daughter-parading time. Now she would have to make it up to her mother by hanging around until after the rabbi had been to the house to conduct evening prayers. These probably wouldn't start until after seven, which meant she wouldn't be back until ten. Anna reached into the glove compartment for the mobile phone. As she dialed home, she hoped desperately that this wasn't Denise's night for her line dancing, and that the baby-sitter could be bribed with the promise of a few extra quid in her pay packet to stay on until Dan got home.

  It took over an hour for the traffic to crawl up to the Brent Cross turnoff, where for no apparent reason it melted away. Anna put her foot firmly on the accelerator. She could see a set of traffic lights a few hundred yards down the road. They had just turned green. She decided if they stayed green until she had gone through them, then she would find a lover within the week and she wouldn't have to phone Liaisons Dangereux and make an awful video. They did.

  Brenda was wearing a short red-and-white-checked gingham dress with puffed sleeves, white ankle socks and red sparkly shoes. She'd got her bleached blond hair in two wiry plaits held in place by glittery ribbons, which matched her shoes. A Yorkshire terrier puppy yapping under her arm completed her grits-and-hominy ensemble.

  She hadn't seen Dan because she was busy trying to control the puppy, which was wriggling and squirming to get down onto the pavement, probably to cock its leg up a traffic warden. At the same time, Brenda was attempting to rummage through her brown leather school satchel for parking meter money.

  Dan, although baffled, had taken one look at Brenda's getup and experienced an immediate lightening of his mood, together with a temporary restoration of his sense of humor. He decided to sneak up and surprise her.

  He approached Brenda from behind on what would have been tiptoes had he not been wearing a pair of brand-new Oxford brogues which were still rock hard and almost impossible to bend even when walking normally.

  By now, Brenda had put a pound in the meter, but still had her back to him as she stood thumbing through a Nicholson's Streetfinder. Dan tapped her twice on the shoulder.

  “What's the problem, Bren? You and Toto having trouble finding the Yellow Brick Road?” To Dan's disappointment and annoyance, Brenda didn't flinch. She'd clearly caught sight of him as he crossed the road.

  “Wrong film, stupid,” she said, reaching up to kiss him on both cheeks and nearly squashing the dog in the process. “F'your information, this is the prototype for the Sweet FA Pollyanna look I'm gonna be launching in Milan next summer. Me and the team thought it was time we got a bit more cutting edge—more Vivienne Westwood.”

  Dan couldn't help thinking that if Brenda wasn't careful, all she would be launching next summer would be a new range of straitjackets together with the latest sweet fa fragrance, Eau de Largactyl. But for the time b
eing, she sounded fairly sane, even if she didn't look it. She was on her way to do a home fitting with the actress-model wife of some worn-out millionaire rock star. She said she had twenty minutes or so to kill, and did Dan fancy a cuppa?

  He held the yapping hound, who was called Keith, while Brenda hauled up the car's white-canvas hood. She locked Keith in the Zephyr, and she and Dan headed for a Café Rouge two or three hundred yards down the road. The young Aussie waiter couldn't take his eyes off Brenda's outfit. As he showed them to a table by the window, he seemed unable to prevent his thoughts becoming words. He pulled out a chair for Brenda. “You wouldn't prefer a tuffet, I suppose?” he asked. Brenda pretended not to hear. Dan ordered a decaf cappuccino (caffeine gave him palpitations) with skimmed milk (full fat gave him heartburn). Brenda asked for a Perrier with extra slices of lime.

  The waiter went to the bar. “One Perrier, extra lime, one Why Bother,” Dan heard him say.

  Dan watched Brenda chew silently on her bits of lime without so much as wincing and then drop the bright-green crescent skins into the Ricard ashtray. Her mood seemed to have changed since coming into the restaurant. She had become very quiet and hadn't said a word for over a minute. In all the years Dan had known Brenda, he had never seen her looking so nervous and unsure of herself. It was as if she were trying to pluck up the courage to say something, but couldn't. Dan decided to help her out.