Neurotica

by Sue Margolis

  Gloria wanted to get her own back by introducing Millie to Anna, whose journalistic achievements she had embellished considerably over the last few hours to the extent that Anna had not merely interviewed Maureen Lipman, but they had become best friends and now even shared the same gynecologist.

  Aunty Millie, who was in her eighties but seemed to have been in them for as long as Anna could remember, had, along with an arthritic hip and a mustache, the white powdery lips people get from sucking too many indigestion tablets, as well as traces of lipstick on her teeth. With one arm in Gloria's and the other leaning heavily on a three-pronged metal walking stick, she maneuvered her way slowly and deliberately across the room towards Anna and Charlie. On her arrival, she gave Charlie the kind of haughty look old Jewish ladies give to the sons of fathers who married out. Charlie's response was to give her a sexy wink, which she pretended to ignore. Millie then squeezed Anna's cheek, gave her a kiss which was all Rennies and mustache, and said she too had begun to put on a little weight round her hips in her late thirties, but made no mention of Anna's relationship with Maureen Lipman. She did, nevertheless, register a modicum of interest in what Anna did for a living:

  “Anna, darling, I want to ask you about something that's been troubling me for a while,” she said, a tiny bolus of airborne spittle accompanying her inquiry. “These journalists who work for Sunday newspapers, tell me, so what do they do the rest of the week?”

  With that Aunty Millie let out a very lengthy and very noisy fart. Instead of allowing her to stay to hear Anna's reply, Gloria put her arm round the old lady's shoulders and began steering her gently towards Uncle Henry's downstairs bathroom.

  Anna had never met an airline pilot, but judging by that old-fashioned Roger-Wilco-and-over voice the British ones always used to welcome passengers, an accent which invariably sounded like a cross between Kenneth More doing Douglas Bader and the Radio 3 cricket commentary, she had always suspected they fell into one distinct personality type. They were private school chaps on that indefinable cusp between Purley and Prince Andrew, who didn't own an emotion to speak of and were, fundamentally, dull. By rights, they should have been driving company Scorpios back to five-bedroom executive houses with up-and-over garage doors, except that because of some weird genetic fluke, they had been born with an extra derring-do chromosome, and a Ray-Ban Aviator fixation.

  As Anna and Charlie sat chatting and nibbling on bagels and fishballs in the corner of Uncle Henry's lounge, as well as working their way through what remained of the thimbles of whiskey, Anna was forced to admit that Captain Kaplan didn't fit her stereotypical image of an airline pilot, although she suspected that should the need arise, he was perfectly capable of assuming full Dambuster mode and landing a sick 747 in a South American jungle clearing no bigger than a squash court while at the same time removing his own appendix. For a start he'd been educated at a public secondary school in Dublin, followed by drama school and some time living on a hippy commune in Cornwall.

  “I spent a couple of years helping to run—wait for it—the King Arthur Crystal, Dowsing and Tarot Co-operative in Tintagel. You should have seen me. There I was, this emaciated New Age vegan weed with a ponytail and crushed velvet flares, sitting behind the counter burning joss sticks and reading up on corn circles, then one day in came a gang of shaven-headed Cro-Magnon look-alikes straight off the beach, each of them wearing little more than a chest full of tattoos and a can of Special Brew. Like a fool, I told one of them I could unblock his chakras and did he know that amethyst was traditionally believed to cure drunkenness. His response was to call me a fucking fag. Then he pissed over a box of amethyst I'd just had delivered, after which he and his six mates took it in turns to hit me over the head and generally beat the bejasus out of me with a giant piece of Brazilian quartz.”

  Charlie had decided finally that, because neither his astrological chart, the tarot nor his palm had predicted the attack in the shop, there was, without doubt, a lot less to life than most people could possibly comprehend. One night in September, he took all his New Age books, crystals and paraphernalia and threw them into the sea. A few weeks later, he began studying for a degree in maths at Trinity. Three years on he came out with an upper second and was accepted immediately by Aer Hibernia for pilot training.

  “So, what about your parents?” Anna asked. “The family certainly seems to have given them a rough ride over the years.”

  “Just a bit, I suppose.” He sighed. “But it got better once Grandad started coming over to Dublin for visits. After that a couple of the aunts and cousins began to send Jewish New Year cards, but we never got invited to weddings or bar mitzvahs or any family celebrations. It was strange as a kid, growing up and the truth slowly dawning that you were pariahs. But to be honest, I find it hard to get angry. What could you expect from a Jewish family in the early sixties? The war had been over barely twenty years, and in their eyes Dad going off with a Roman Catholic was simply finishing Hitler's work.”

  “That's an astonishingly generous attitude,” Anna said, feeling anger on his behalf. “I think if I were in your position, I would have found it very hard to come here today and make polite conversation with the family who had ostracized me.”

  “I needed to do it,” he said thoughtfully. “Even if he hadn't been on holiday, Dad would never have had the courage to come, and he wouldn't have considered bringing my mum. Even after forty years of marriage, he still can't bring himself to introduce the shikseh to the family. For me, turning up at Grandad's funeral has been like coming out of the closet. I think it's about time this family started to acknowledge my existence. I'm fed up with hiding in the shadows . . . and to give everyone their due, they've been remarkably friendly today.”

  Anna had been extremely moved by Charlie's story. As she watched him knock back the last of his whiskey, she realized her eyes were filling with tears. She was desperate not to let Charlie see her cry, which for the woman who sobbed when Pebbles Flintstone went into labor took some doing. It wasn't that she was afraid of showing her emotions, it was just that tears would make her foundation go streaky and she was buggered if she was going to let Charlie Kaplan see her thread veins.

  “And the other reason I had to come,” Charlie continued, apparently oblivious to Anna's watering eyes, “was because I felt it was only decent there should be a blood relative here to say a prayer for the old fella.”

  “Speaking of which . . .” Anna said, nodding her head towards the rabbi who'd just arrived to conduct evening prayers.

  As copies of the battered black funeral prayer books were passed round, the atmosphere at once became more somber. Gloria ran around collecting up the last of the dirty plates, the old people heaved themselves out of their seats and brushed their crumbs onto the carpet, and the men put their hands to their heads to adjust their yarmulkes. Charlie, who up until now hadn't been wearing a yarmulke, produced a brand-new black velvet one from his pocket and placed it self-consciously on his head, just a touch too far forward so that it looked like something he had just pulled out of a rather expensive Christmas cracker.

  Rabbi Hirsch cleared his throat a couple of times to indicate that he was ready to begin as soon as he had complete silence.

  Anna opened her book at the mourners' prayers, and then handed it to Charlie, who was struggling to find his place, having opened his from the left rather than the right. As was usual on these occasions, the prayers proceeded in breakneck-speed Hebrew, with all the men and a few of the women bent over their books, rocking and swaying and reciting the words out of sync, as if each of them was doing their head in to some totally arse-kicking heavy-metal track which only they could hear. The result was that one person's amen could be as much as three minutes behind or in front of another.

  Charlie was following the service from the English text which appeared on each opposite page of the prayer book. Anna stood next to him wondering what he looked like naked. She made no attempt to join in the prayers, partly because she was
feeling far too sexually aroused to concentrate, and partly because she couldn't read Hebrew.

  As a child she had constantly and successfully skipped Sunday-morning religion classes. While most of her Jewish friends had their heads down learning the Hebrew alphabet, Anna could be found sitting in the Wimpy bar stuffing her face with chips, or wandering aimlessly round the local park with her co-skipper Melanie Lukover.

  Fearing that people, meaning her mother, might notice if she carried on gazing adoringly at Charlie, Anna turned towards Rabbi Hirsch. He was probably no more than thirty, but with his scholarly pallor and shiny greenish-gray suit, as well as his huge wiry beard which gave the impression that God had stuck the minister's pubic hair on to the wrong end, looked much older. Anna wondered if she might interest the Jewish Chronicle in a feature on rabbi makeovers. She was trying hard, but having little luck, to imagine him after a few sessions on a sunbed and a trip to a decent barber, not to mention an introduction to an electric nose-hair trimmer. It was then, from about two feet behind her, that there came the distinct trill of a mobile phone.

  On the third ring, Anna, who seemed to be the only person who could hear the phone, swung round to see Bunny Wiener, Aunty Millie's other grandson (the dumb one who had, surprisingly, made a fortune in ladies' separates, as opposed to the one who became a West End accountant), fiddling with his prayer shawl in an attempt to get his hand inside his jacket pocket. Bunny was the only man wearing a prayer shawl, apparently the one male mourner who didn't know that they weren't required at a shiva by any known religious authority or cultural tradition. As if this weren't drawing sufficient attention, Bunny, his hand now in his pocket, was also struggling to remove his mobile, which appeared to have become wedged in by a huge bunch of keys and his wallet. The phone carried on ringing . . . five, six, seven, eight rings now. As Bunny dropped the bunch of keys, which landed with a clunk on the floor, Anna shot him a for-Christ's-sake-get-out-can't-you-see-we're-trying-to-mourn-here look. Bunny, who wore his stupidity with the same kind of pride as his handful of gold signet rings and metallic-turquoise Roller, simply ignored Anna's filthy glance, although he did make one feeble attempt at invisibility. As he began speaking into the mouthpiece he moved to the back of the room and pulled one-half of his prayer shawl over his head, as if he were a bird about to go to sleep under its wing. From this position, looking, Anna thought, like some overgrown ultra-Orthodox sparrow, Bunny began to have a row at only slightly less than normal row volume with a person she took to be one of his wholesale suppliers.

  “Monty,” he said—although because Bunny suffered from some kind of chronic adenoid condition this came out as Bonty.

  “You're a jerk, that's what you are, a jerk. What do you mean, you're sending me eight gross in a size eighteen? Yesterday teatime I spoke to Bildred in the office and she confirmed eighteen gross in a size eight. . . . Go on then, you jerk, go and fetch the bleedin' order form then. I'll hold. . . .”

  While Bunny held, the hubbub of the badly choreographed prayers continued like an anarchic Greek chorus. Then, after a couple of minutes, Monty obviously returned with the order form and Bunny started shouting and getting really angry with the poor chap. Anna could hear him bashing his fist on the wall, but mostly he just carried on calling him a jerk.

  From what Anna could make out, the barney was finally resolved by what appeared to be an unequivocal climb-down from Monty. This was followed appropriately by a stream of uncoordinated final amens from the mourners.

  Gloria ran into the kitchen where two of the borrowed kettles and a stainless-steel urn had come to the boil simultaneously, and Anna turned to Charlie and said in a perfectly calm and casual voice that it had been great meeting him, but it really was time she was getting back to her brats.

  As she began looking round the room trying to work out where she had left her handbag, Anna was aware that she felt a bit sick and that she could feel her heart beating so fast she suspected she was having one of those tachycardia attacks Dan seemed to get every other week, which usually ended up with her calling an ambulance at three in the morning and him in casualty wired up to a heart monitor for hours on end, only to be told there was nothing wrong with his heart and that he had been having a panic attack.

  Anna knew that she too was panicking. Only hers was the sort that would only go away when Charlie Kaplan confirmed that he fancied her as much as she fancied him and that they weren't about to say good-bye forever in Uncle Henry's shabby, smelly lounge.

  After all, they had spent the last hour or so deep in conversation, maintaining the kind of lengthy eye contact people make when they are attracted to each other. You didn't, Anna thought, have to be Desmond Morris to work out that this behavior was the equivalent of a couple of dating gorillas showing each other that red patch on their bums.

  She tried to stretch out the hunt for her bag, which she'd actually spotted immediately, for as long as she could. This, she thought, would give him sufficient time to take her to one side and suggest that, as he was going to be in London for a week or so visiting all his newly discovered aunts and cousins, they might have lunch together.

  But he didn't. As Anna picked up her handbag from underneath the drinks cart, she saw that Charlie was now over the other side of the room talking animatedly to Bunny Wiener. With a lump in her throat the size of a honeydew melon, Anna went over to them. She glared at Bunny and then extended her hand formally towards Charlie Kaplan, repeating how much she had enjoyed meeting him.

  C H A P T E R F I V E

  RODGERS AND HAMSTERSTEIN SAT on the pine kitchen table transfixed as Anna belted out “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” while doing a rising trot round the kitchen and at the same time gripping imaginary reins with one hand and holding Amy's old pram sun canopy over her head with the other.

  After a minute or two she segued into “I'm Just a Girl Who Cain't Say No.” Twirling the sun canopy over her shoulder like a parasol, she skipped over to the cupboard under the sink and took out a new bag of fluffy white hamster bedding.

  Whenever Anna cleaned out the kids' hamster cages—which wasn't very often, as she usually got Denise to do it—she always felt it was somehow appropriate to familiarize them with all those daft the-corn-is-as-high-as-an-elephant's-eye lyrics written by their Hollywood songwriter namesakes.

  But there was more to Anna's tone-deaf outburst this morning than a tutorial on mediocre melodies for two rodents who were unlikely ever to hold a tune. The precise reason for all the singing, the gallivanting around the kitchen and the performing of unnecessary domestic tasks was that last night, just as Anna was walking away despondently from Uncle Henry's house, Charlie Kaplan had finally got round to asking if he could see her again. Her impromptu musical celebration, which had begun as soon as Dan and the children left the house at eight o'clock, opened with her leaning on the breakfast bar, pushing an imaginary Stetson to the back of her head and launching into “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.”

  Anna was feeling a lightening of her spirits which she hadn't known since a particularly significant Sunday night at a Jewish youth club disco in Edgware when she was fourteen. That night Anna had her first ever French kiss, with a zit-encrusted boy named Stewart Levinson, who smelled of TCP and didn't seem to know how to arrange his teeth when he kissed her. Against all the odds, however, she found herself rather enjoying the experience. At the same moment, her crush on Jane Hickling, who was a prefect in the Upper Sixth, ended; Anna realized that her prayers had been answered, and that God had finally decided she didn't have to be a lesbian after all. Now, more than twenty years later, the Lord had answered another prayer and decided to let Anna sleep with Charlie Kaplan.

  After she had shaken hands with Charlie at the end of the prayers for Uncle Henry, Anna knew she had to get out of the house and into her car as fast as she could, because she wasn't sure how much longer she could stop herself from blubbing. She was in no mood for another of Aunty Millie's hairy-lipped kisses, so she waved a quick good-bye to h
er from across the room. Then she poked her head round the kitchen door and did the same to Gloria, who barely acknowledged her since she was giving Murraine a telling-off for pouring out tea without using a strainer. A moment later Anna was walking down Uncle Henry's garden path. As she turned round to close the little wrought-iron front gate, she could see Charlie was behind her, obviously trying to catch up with her.

  “Come on,” he said. “I'll walk you to your car.”

  She felt the melon in her throat disappear in an instant and once again hope began to spring internal throughout her nether regions.

  As they walked to the car, Anna could sense Charlie's unease and that he was trying to get up the confidence to ask her something. For a second, she thought she might have to take the upper hand by suggesting they meet up in town one day next week. But she couldn't bring herself to do it. Although in her head she was Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer rolled into one, in her heart she was the sort of unreconstructed eighteenth-century heroine who dashed around Catherine Cookson novels in a hooped skirt, coyly dropping lace handkerchiefs at the feet of Heathcliff look-alikes. She desperately wanted Charlie to take the lead and make the first move. Finally, after a few more moments' hesitation, he did.

  “Listen, Anna, I've really enjoyed your company today. It seems a shame to say good-bye. I thought you might like to have lunch next week. . . . Perhaps Tuesday?”

  Anna immediately blurted out, “Yes, great, Tuesday would be brilliant,” so nervously and overeffusively that she must have come across like some lust-sick teenager finding herself face-to-face with Liam Gallagher in Boots. But Charlie appeared not to notice. He was too busy giving her another one of his long, sexy looks. Anna felt that if her nipples got any harder or larger they would, in the next few seconds, burst through her bra cups like a pair of horny Scud missiles.