Neurotica

by Sue Margolis

  While Anna carried on speaking Dan didn't move a muscle. For a few seconds he was concerned that she had found out he was seeing Virginia Livermead. Once he realized this was not the case, he turned over to face her.

  “Anna, I'm fine, really.” His voice was gentle and soothing. “I promise I'm not ill. It's, it's just that I've been making a real effort lately to stop imagining symptoms. The thing is, I think the strain of trying not to worry is really getting to me and that's why I've been a bit odd. Do you think worrying about trying not to worry can actually make you ill?”

  “Christ, you need a bloody shrink, you know that, don't you?”

  Dan turned over and grunted.

  Anna was no fool. She knew there was something Dan was keeping from her. Nevertheless, she sensed he was telling the truth when he said he wasn't ill.

  She picked up her book, read a few paragraphs and then put it down. She couldn't concentrate. In the space of a couple of minutes all the fear she had been bottling up for days had turned to relief, and then to elation. Dan wasn't dying. That meant she was free to carry on with her “research.”

  The sex with Charlie had been sublime. Just knowing that he fancied her had made her feel more beautiful and more alive than she'd felt in years. She knew she was behaving like some soppy heroine in a Mavis de Mornay novel. She also knew that truly liberated women didn't have to depend on men fancying them in order to feel good about themselves. Over the last few days, Anna had come to the conclusion that edicts such as this were nothing more than the crazed rantings of a bunch of jealous bull dykes.

  Even though she had been worried sick about Dan's health, Charlie Kaplan had brought some old-fashioned fun and joy into her life which had been long overdue. Anna wanted to feel that again. Soon.

  Charlie had phoned her a couple of times from Los Angeles to apologize for the dreadful way their final meeting had ended, how distraught he'd been that there hadn't been time to say good-bye and to tell her how much he missed her. He also added that he had no idea when he would be in London next.

  Anna closed her book. She calculated she had just over five weeks before she would have to sit down and write her article on clitoris-centered women. She realized she was unlikely to see Charlie in the near future; her short affair with him was probably as good as over. It was time to move on. Excitement at the prospect of her next exploit shot through her like steam from a cappuccino machine; this, she was almost ashamed to admit, was fun.

  Anna jumped out of bed and went into the bathroom. She opened the door under the basin. Reaching over the deodorant cans and shampoo bottles, she picked up the box of Tampax which contained the telephone number for Liaisons Dangereux.

  C H A P T E R E L E V E N

  “RONNIE, REGGIE! MUMMY WON'T tolerate any more of this fraightful racket!” Reenie Theydon-Bois, director of Liaisons Dangereux, had broken off momentarily from her telephone conversation with Anna.

  “Sorry about that, may deeah, my little shih tzus can be such naughty boys sometimes.”

  The woman's voice, full of high-pitched social pretension, had definite overtones of John Cleese doing the parrot sketch.

  “Now then, where were we?” Reenie Theydon-Bois paused. Anna sensed she was drawing deeply on a cigarette.

  “Ah, yes . . . Ay tell you what to do, my deeah. You give me your Visa number and then I'll fax you a list of all the male clients Ay've got on may books. I guarantee you won't be disappointed with the service I offer. I think it would be fair to say that in the fayve years Ay 'ave been presaiding over Liaisons Dangereux, none of may ladies or gentlemen 'as hever once got the 'ump.”

  Anna decided Reenie Theydon-Bois was, without doubt, an ex-tart, probably from Ilford or Romford, who had struck it lucky and been set up in a mews house in the West End by a wealthy client. She pictured her as plump, probably in her mid-fifties, wearing a bright-yellow Versace suit with too many gold buttons, heavy lip liner and a sunbed tan. Anna could almost smell the Coco.

  Liaisons Dangereux, Reenie explained, catered exclusively to respectable married people who, as she put it, felt a bit neglected in the bedroom department, and who were looking for someone to make them feel pampered and special. She kept on stressing that none of her clients had any intentions of divorcing their husbands or wives and thus discretion was of the “hutmost.” So if Anna understood all that and had no more questions all Reenie needed from her now was her seventy-five-pound initial joining fee.

  Anna took her Barclaycard out of her wallet. As she read the number down the phone, it struck her for the second or third time in the last few minutes that Reenie Theydon-Bois, with her daft accent and ridiculous surname, was a phoney, that Liaisons Dangereux didn't exist and that the whole thing was simply a way of extorting money from gullible people in celibate marriages. The likelihood was, thought Anna, that she would pay her joining fee and never hear another word from Reenie Theydon-Bois.

  It wasn't losing the money that bothered her. Joining Liaisons Dangereux counted as research for her newspaper piece and she would simply add the fee to her list of expenses. What she really hated was the thought of being duped.

  She finished reading out the Barclaycard number. Reenie said she would fax over the client list in the next few minutes or so and Anna should give her a call when she had two or three prospective gentlemen in mind.

  Five minutes later, as she sipped her coffee and munched on a low-cal rice cake, she heard the faint creaking sound of the fax machine as it spewed out paper onto the bedroom floor. Reenie Theydon-Bois had not scarpered after all.

  Dan leaned back in his office chair and put both feet up on his desk. The Vanguard newsroom was almost empty. Everybody had disappeared to the pub over the road for lunch. Dan had decided to give it a miss because even though he always promised himself he would stick to mineral water, he inevitably ended up having a couple of beers and spending the afternoon fighting to stay awake. Instead, he had popped into Tony's, the sandwich bar next door to the Vanguard building.

  As he finished chewing on another piece of bacon bagel and took a suck of thick chocolate milk shake, Dan began thinking about his therapy sessions with Virginia Livermead. He had to admit that despite his misgivings about the woman, he had been feeling much better since he'd started seeing her.

  Slowly, Dan was beginning to make the connection between his mother and his hypochondria. Virginia explained what Anna had been trying to get through to him for years, that even though his mother was dead, she still had such a hold on him that each time he tried to rebel or break away from her, he experienced feelings of profound guilt. As a consequence he punished himself by developing imaginary illnesses which he believed were going to kill him.

  Making loud, childish sucky noises through his straw, Dan drained the last of his milk shake and dropped the cardboard container into the wastepaper bin under his desk. He had eaten only half of his bacon bagel. He stared at the bit he had left and reflected that this was by no means the first time he had deliberately eaten a Jewish roll filled with nonkosher meat and then compounded the heresy by drinking milk at the same time.

  If he thought back, he had been consuming forbidden food since his early teens. Instead of shouting and screaming at his mother and telling her precisely what he thought of her whenever she humiliated him, he had invariably dealt with her abuse by disappearing to the greasy spoon down the road and demolishing a bacon-and-egg fry-up.

  Dan was aware that this was the first time in his life he had not felt guilty after doing something which he knew his mother would deplore. It further occurred to him that if Virginia Livermead had got it right and his imaginary illnesses were nothing more than a way of punishing himself for upsetting his mother, this might also mean the end of his hypochondria. If he felt no guilt, Dan reasoned, then there was no need to punish himself.

  Dan bent down and reached under his desk for his briefcase. Neatly stowed inside were his fire extinguisher, his electronic blood pressure machine, a stethoscope, the li
ttle sticks he used to test his urine for sugar and a few sterile essentials necessary for draining a collapsed lung. These included a yard of plastic tubing, a couple of kidney-shaped bowls made of gray eggbox card and a scalpel.

  Looking round to check that nobody had come back into the office, Dan took each piece of his medical paraphernalia out of the briefcase and placed them on his desk. Slowly he ran his hands over every item. He lingered over the fire extinguisher, caressing and stroking its smooth, curved body as if it were a lover. Then he placed his finger inside the small opening on the side of the blood pressure machine and felt the familiar tightening.

  For the first time in years Dan dared to believe he might be fit and well. If that were the case he didn't need to keep monitoring his health. He didn't need this apparatus. The thought of losing his beloved crutches and failsafes filled him with terror.

  He reminded himself of what Virginia had said as he got up to leave at the end of their last session: “You know you're not ill, Dan. You are simply angry and guilty—and perhaps a little confused.”

  Dan rammed everything back into the briefcase as fast as he could. He felt his pulse quicken. He took a deep breath. He decided he must have the courage of his confusion. He would ditch the lot. Right now. He realized he was probably cruising for a psychotherapeutic bruising from Virginia, who would doubtless have preferred him to take fifteen years gently building up to this moment, but he didn't care.

  Anna looped the yard of fax paper over her arm. As she took the scissors from her desk drawer she cursed herself for being such a cheapskate and not paying the extra fifty quid for a fax machine with a built-in cutter.

  Finally she stapled the pages together. There had to be at least a hundred men on Reenie's client list. None of them gave their names. Instead they used a reference number. This was followed by a seven- or eight-line personal résumé and a description of the kind of woman they were hoping to find.

  Anna scanned the first twenty or so ads and got bored after a minute. There appeared to be a standard form of words which she found dull, smug and predictable: “Professional male, late forties, some gains round waistline, compensating with losses round hairline, good sense of humor, married but physical side dead, seeks sensuous slender (size 12 max) twenty-something lady with firm, voluptuous bosom, to lift him from his despair and share uncomplicated passionate meetings and occasional overnights. Total discretion assured. Photograph appreciated.”

  Just then Anna heard the front door open. Brenda yelled a “Hi, I'm back” and came plodding up the stairs. She'd been to a meeting with Alfie's head teacher who was anxious to know where Alfie was and why he was missing so much school.

  Brenda plonked herself down on the edge of the double bed. Anna turned to face her. Brenda looked dreadful.

  “I'd forgotten,” she said, bending over to pull off her heavy-duty CAT boots, “ 'ow bad this morning sickness lark gets. Coming back from the school, I had to stop the car three times to puke. I think I might feel better if I knew when that bloody Hardacre woman was intending to make her move—I mean, it's been days since she threatened to sell her story. What's she playing at?”

  “Well,” said Anna, “I'm pretty sure she hasn't spoken to any of the papers yet. Dan and I still haven't heard even the faintest rumor that anybody's about to run it. That could mean she's got cold feet about dobbing you in. Alternatively she's a sadistic cow who is simply enjoying the thought of you sweating it out waiting for the shit to hit. Whatever the reason for her taking her time, it's allowing us some grace. What we really need to do is rake up some scandalous muck from the old bag's past which nobody knows about. Then you simply threaten to use it against her unless she backs off.”

  “Yeah, right. Easy. Listen, Anna, I'm barely coping with feeling sick all the time. I could do without the threat of being sent down for a five stretch for blackmail and giving birth in Holloway shackled to a couple of twenty-stone female screws.” Brenda had kicked off her boots and was on the point of going down to the kitchen to get a glass of Perrier to relieve the nausea when she caught sight of the fax lying on Anna's desk.

  “Christ, you don't waste much time,” she said, picking up the sheets of shiny paper. “That Charlie geezer's only been gone five minutes and you're already planning your next campaign. If you ask me, I reckon there should always be a decent period of mourning between one lover and the next. You know, three months when you live in the same pink velour tracksuit and gray saggy bra, don't wash your hair, and eat nothing but Twinkies and peanut butter from the jar. I used to do that years ago before I had Alfie and the business. I always found it helped me get my head together, even if I'd been the one who'd done the chucking.”

  Anna said that although it didn't look like it, she was missing Charlie. She was certainly missing his body, but he was commuting between Dublin and LA, and she was here. What was more, she continued, she was still living with a man who lacked any semblance of a sex drive, and added to this, there was the small matter of needing to get started on her piece for Alison O'Farrell, which was due in a few weeks.

  Brenda decided she was in no position to argue with Anna and get holier-than-thou, bearing in mind she'd got herself in the club after a one-night stand and had also been the one who'd introduced Anna to Liaisons Dangereux in the first place. She began looking down the list.

  “ 'Ere, look at this one. He reckons he drives a Testarossa. That means he's probably got a winkle the size of an oven chip. . . . Mind you, what about the next one down?”

  Keeping her finger on the ad, Brenda leaned forward and passed the list to Anna.

  “Sounds like he might be the business,” she went on. “Not that I approve, mind you. I still think you're playing with fire. Or in your case, shagging with it.”

  With that Brenda ran to the bathroom, her hand over her mouth. Ignoring the dreadful sounds of retching and heaving coming from inside the lavatory bowl, Anna started reading the ad.

  “ ‘Frustrated Quasimodo look-alike seeks his Esmeralda. Small fat ugly guy with hairpiece and own hump, drives brown Datsun Cherry, wife finds him sexually repulsive due to ongoing psoriasis, wants to make bells ring with any woman brave enough to reply to this ad. Use of beach hut in Shoeburyness.' ”

  Anna giggled, read the ad again and wondered how on earth she'd missed it. By the time she'd finished reading it for the second time, she'd come to the conclusion that Quasimodo was either a regular bloke with an excellent sense of humor and a huge amount of self-confidence who had decided to write an eye-catching ad, or a deformed weirdo with scabs and an anorak who kept a selection of kitchen knives and nylon rope in the trunk of his Datsun Cherry.

  Ignoring the continuing retching sounds coming from next door, Anna picked up the phone, hesitated for a moment and dialed.

  Dan came tearing out of the office and stood hovering by the lifts for a few seconds. He knew if he hung around too long he might change his mind about dumping his medical equipment. He decided to take the stairs. Once outside, he crossed the road to the Oxfam shop. He dashed in and without even pausing to acknowledge the blue-rinse lady in a floral shirtwaist who was stacking shelves, dumped the briefcase on the counter and darted back out into Kensington High Street. As he strolled back to the office, he hoped his treasured brood would find a good home with a caring couple of hypochondriacs in the country.

  It had taken Anna over an hour to get through to Reenie Theydon-Bois because Reenie's line had been constantly engaged. When Anna finally managed to speak to her and said she might be interested in meeting Quasimodo, Reenie almost choked on her cigarette. It was clear to Anna he wasn't the most popular client on Reenie's books.

  Anna immediately confessed her doubts about Quasimodo. She said that for all Reenie knew he could be some homicidal maniac taking a correspondence course in garotting studies. Reenie, whose concerns were centered entirely on the substantial amount of folding money she raked in each time she set up a meeting between two clients, went in search of her sincere
, reassuring voice, and found it in a trice.

  “You ab-so-lutely must not worry, my deeah. Ay vet all my clients person'ly. 'Ee does 'ave a somewhat idiosyncratic sense of humor, I admit. I keep telling 'im it puts the ladies off, but he refuses to listen.

  “Look, Ay shouldn't be revealing this so early on without having obtained his say-so, but he is actually a medical gentleman. As a matter of fact, he's a Harley Street consultant.”

  Anna's first thought on receiving this information was that if she agreed to meet him, she would at least know to address him as Mr. Modo and not Dr. Modo.

  Her second thought was entirely sexual. She had always half believed that because doctors knew so much about human anatomy it followed that they had to be brilliant in the sack. She'd never told a soul, not even Brenda, that the majority of her sexual fantasies involved groups of wondrously handsome male doctors in white coats undressing her, strapping her onto an examination couch, forcing her legs into stirrups and taking it in turns to do unspeakably perverted things to her with their speculums.

  She knew that this was a particularly outrageous fantasy, not because it was depraved, but because in her experience most medics were imperious, bombastic idiots, whose Godlike position in society rested almost solely on having got an A in A-level chemistry, who lacked both humor and compassion and whose sex appeal would barely cover the bottom of a specimen bottle.

  Nevertheless, like many women, Anna tended to develop crushes on her gynecologists, especially the odd chap who flirted with her. She remembered one in particular. She had gone to him for her postnatal checkup, six weeks after having Amy. What felt like his entire hand had been deep inside her for a full five minutes. Finally he looked up from between her legs and told her in a voice which, in this case, was definitely soft and sexy that for a woman who had delivered two very large babies, she possessed particularly tight vaginal muscles. When he added the bit about this being vital to good sex because the muscles needed to support the shaft of a man's penis, Anna knew this was more than mere medical observation. She didn't know whether to jump on him or report him to the BMA for gross misconduct.