Neurotica

by Sue Margolis

  She followed Dan into the hall. She watched him take his jacket from the hat stand and pick up a large canvas bag. It still had the flight tags on the handles from their Tobago holiday.

  He opened the front door and paused. After a few seconds he turned round.

  “D'you know what? The bugger of it is, I still love you.”

  After he had gone, Anna sat at the bottom of the stairs. She knew that if she had got down on her knees and begged him to forgive her she might have been able to persuade him to stay. But she couldn't bring herself to do it. Despite what he'd said about being ill, despite his plans to fight her for the children, she couldn't lie to him anymore and pretend she wanted to be with him. She was glad he had left her. She needed to find out if she had a future with Ed.

  Anna, will you wake up and smell the deep shit you've got yourself into?” Anna had gone round to Brenda's a couple of hours later, to pick up Amy and Josh. While the children played upstairs, Brenda was laying into her. “You're an arrogant cow, you know that, don't you? Nearly two months ago, you came round 'ere, you sat on the same chair you're sitting on now and tried to convince me that you were capable of living by Rachel whatserface's rules. Anna Shapiro had it sussed. Anna Shapiro reckoned she was capable of having affairs just for the sex, that Dan would never be any the wiser and that she would never fall in love. Surprise, fucking surprise, she fell arse over tit. Look at what you are doing, Anna. You're about to flush your marriage and two kids down the can, all for the sake of some slimy git with a long lens. I mean, you can't really believe he gave a flying fuck last night about your happiness or your relationship with Dan—God help me, I cannot believe I am having to explain this to a woman of nearly forty. Anna, read my lips, he just wanted to get 'is leg over. For Chrissake, you told me five minutes ago, the man is a serial shagger.”

  “Brenda, will there ever come a day when you stop telling me how to live my life? At least I haven't got myself up the spout.”

  “Maybe not, but at the rate you're getting through blokes these days, you might find yourself ending up with a nice dose of the clap.”

  Furious, Anna got to her feet.

  “For the first time in years,” she spat, “I've got a chance of some happiness. I agree, it may not work out with Ed, but at least I want to find out. What I could really do with just now is your support, but it seems that's not an offer.”

  Anna grabbed her car keys from the kitchen table and stormed out of the kitchen. Brenda heard her yell upstairs for Amy and Josh. A minute later the front door slammed.

  “Shit, shit, shit.” Brenda stood at the kitchen sink and chucked a dripping dishcloth at the window.

  C H A P T E R T W E N T Y-O N E

  ANNA WASN'T DUE TO SEE ED until Monday night. Barely able to contain her excitement at the thought of being with him again, she filled Sunday with relentless activity. This included writing the hen-party piece, which was scheduled to appear the following Sunday, cleaning out the bathroom medicine cabinet and binning a packet of condoms which had expired in 1994. She also made a dozen chocolate Rice Krispie cakes for the school bring-and-buy sale.

  Keeping busy meant that she didn't have to give any thought to what Brenda had said to her on Saturday night. It wasn't until she arrived at Ed's flat in Notting Hill that she began to question the wisdom of letting Dan walk out.

  The flat was small and a bit shabby, the kind of place twenty-two-year-olds rent when they get their first job. This didn't bother Anna. She knew Ed was broke. He was paying maintenance as well as the mortgage on the house he'd bought with Tilda. What moved Anna almost to tears was going into the living room and coming across the piles of legal correspondence covering his desk. She picked up a handful of letters. Some appeared to be from his solicitor, others were from Tilda's. Each related to his battle with Tilda over the children. It hit Anna that if she pursued her relationship with Ed, she would find herself being drawn into the battle. She would have to live it with him and support him emotionally, maybe even financially. What hit her even harder was realizing that if she allowed her marriage to end and Dan fought her for Josh and Amy, she would find herself fighting a similar battle. She could face months, if not years, of Dan's vitriol, legal brawling and court appearances. Christ only knew what effect it would have on the children.

  “You seem miles away,” Ed said, coming in from the kitchen with two glasses of wine.

  “Sorry. I'm OK, just a bit knackered. It's only beginning to hit me that Dan has actually gone. I've also been worrying about what to tell the children. I've said he's away on a story, but I can't keep on lying. I keep imagining their little faces when they find out the truth.”

  “I know, it'll be nasty, but you mustn't do it alone. Dan's their father. He should be there too. Come on,” he said, putting his arm round her shoulders, “I've got something that'll cheer you up.”

  Anna followed him into a tiny, windowless room. A naked bulb mounted on the wall cast a soft red light. She recognized the acrid smell of photographic fixer from school, where she had once dabbled vaguely in photography.

  “This used to be a walk-in larder, but I turned it into a darkroom. Take a look in the tray.”

  Anna took a sip of wine and bent over the white plastic tray. Floating in the colorless chemical were a couple of ten-by-eight black-and-white prints. They showed Anna, her face swathed in panic, being led up onstage by Tor the Lover Boy.

  “God,” she said, putting down her wineglass and picking up one of the photographs with a pair of tongs, “it's Imelda Marcos and she's just discovered Freeman Hardy Willis have gone bust. You really are a bastard, Ed.”

  “I know,” he said softly.

  As she continued leaning over Ed's workbench, looking at the prints, she felt him rub his hand slowly over her bottom. The weather had turned very warm and she was wearing a summer dress and no pantyhose. He pulled the straight skirt up to her hips and began stroking the inside of her thighs. She inhaled deeply and let go of the tongs as he made her lean even farther over the bench. He slipped his hand inside her knickers and began stroking her bare behind. A moment later her panties were round her knees and he was sliding his fingers between her buttocks towards her clitoris.

  At the time Anna had no idea what made her do it. All she knew was that in a split second her feelings towards Ed had changed. The only person she could think of was Dan. She reached out and grabbed Ed's wrist, forcing him to stop.

  “Ed, I'm sorry. I can't do this just now,” she said, turning round and reorganizing her clothes. “Please forgive me. Suddenly this, us, doesn't feel right. I need to go home.”

  She barely glanced at Ed's face. She knew it would be full of shock and anguish. Instead she pushed past him, grabbed her bag from the living-room floor and tore down the stairs into the street.

  It was only as she sat in the black cab on the way back to Richmond that the penny dropped and she understood why she had run out on Ed. She knew she'd started to have doubts about getting involved with him the moment she saw all the legal correspondence on his desk, but that was only part of the reason.

  She had run away because, unlikely as it seemed, in that five minutes in the darkroom, she had begun to recapture her feelings for Dan. As Ed had started to caress her and touch her, she had suddenly been reminded of the afternoon Dan had dragged her away from Amy's birthday party to make love to her.

  She remembered it vividly. The day had been baking, just like today. In her mind she could feel the way Dan had lifted up her skirt, bent her over the desk in the bedroom—just like Ed had forced her over the workbench—and tugged at her pants. She remembered Dan reaching for the baby oil and dripping it onto her buttocks.

  Anna swallowed hard, trying to force back the tears. She wished more than anything that she was going home to Dan. She wanted him to hold her, to make love to her. She'd always wanted Dan to make love to her. If it hadn't been Dan she'd wanted, why had she nagged him for so long about going into therapy? He knew as well as she did
that she'd only taken lovers out of frustration and desperation. Now it was too late. She'd made the crucial mistake of believing she was in love with Ed. High on romantic euphoria, and virtually ignoring the possibility that Dan could be seriously ill, she'd allowed him to leave. When she should have been offering him her love and rocklike support and trying to share his burden, she was letting him walk out of the door. Anna had never really understood the meaning of self-hatred, but she was coming close.

  The taxi continued along the Upper Richmond Road. As they drove through Sheen, Anna stared out of the cab window. She could see couples eating and laughing in the Café Rouge.

  She grimaced and made a tight fist. Her agony was turning to fury. There was only one person who had got her into this mess—Rachel fucking Stern.

  Anna was ready to write her article for Alison O'Farrell.

  Her original plan, eight weeks ago, had been to disguise her personal account of becoming a clitoris-centered woman by inventing three women who committed adultery for fun and pretending to have interviewed them.

  Suddenly, Anna had changed her mind. It was fear of losing her professional dignity which had persuaded her in the beginning to fictionalize the article. Two months on, she'd lost her husband and could even lose custody of her children. Her dignity was of no consequence.

  Anna was ready to go public. She wanted the whole world to feel her agony and torment. She wanted the whole world to know that Rachel Stern was a liar and evil trickster who was conning women into believing they could spend their lives committing adultery without ever paying the price.

  When she got home, she managed to hold back the tears long enough to say cheerio-see-you-in-the-morning to Denise, her baby-sitter. Then, sobbing almost loud enough to wake the children, she went into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee.

  She put the coffee down on her desk, switched on the Anglepoise and began to get undressed. Dan's dressing gown was lying on the bed. She picked it up and held the soft, worn cotton to her face. As she breathed in his smell, she realized her entire body was aching for him.

  Sitting at her desk wearing the dressing gown, Anna waited for the computer to boot up. Moments later her fingers were darting over the keyboard.

  C H A P T E R T W E N T Y-T W O

  ANNA PUT DOWN HER KNIFE AND fork. Her amuse-gueules were distinctly unamusing. She'd chewed on dental X-ray plates which possessed more humor.

  Alison O'Farrell had insisted on taking Anna out to lunch to cheer her up. She also wanted to discuss the Clitoris-Centered Woman article, which Anna had modemed to her at the Daily Mercury first thing that morning.

  Alison had suggested trying the Bisto Tower, an expensive and oppressively trendy restaurant in South Kensington which had won awards for its ultramodern interior design.

  Anna glanced round the crowded room and then back at the remaining bits of chopped charcuterie on her plate. Clearly nobody had pointed out to Mr. Bisto, or whomever, that cold, hard and minimalist didn't work for food.

  “This is an absolutely knock-out piece of writing,” Alison said, putting down Anna's article and downing the last of her kir royale. “I don't know what to say. This is the third time I've read it and I still think it's outstanding, truly outstanding. I've just got a few teensy thoughts.”

  Anna always felt bilious when features editors said this. It usually meant they wanted a complete rewrite.

  “Look, Anna, I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but although it's brilliant—and it is absolutely brilliant—it's just a tad miserablist.”

  “Of course it's bloody miserable,” Anna exploded. “The bitch has just destroyed my marriage. . . .”

  “Anna, please try to calm down . . . I also think it needs toning down a little. The bit about Rachel Stern being a rank pus-filled boil on feminism's rotten underbelly really is a bit OTT. But don't worry, I'll sort it. I think all we need to say there is that, just like the rest of us, she gets the odd pimple at certain times of the month. I'll get somebody to phone her to find out about her beauty routine. Maybe we could include a few of her skin-care tips at the end of the piece—or even better, get someone from Clarins to advise her on concealers. We could do some before-and-after pictures.”

  Anna nearly choked on her spritzer. She'd always credited Alison with being bright. Suddenly it was like talking to Campbell McKee. Worse: in Campbell's case, buffoonery was an act. Alison didn't seem to realize she was being stupid.

  “Alison, we're meant to be exposing Rachel Stern, not exfoliating her. The woman is a quack academic and a cheat. People need to be told.”

  “Yes, I understand that,” Alison said, lighting up, “but what you've given me is so heavy. I was expecting something a bit more racy. Originally you were going to interview three adulterous women and I was going to have an entire page of bonk-and-tell. I have to be honest, Anna, in this piece you sound like one of those angst-ridden middle-class tarts on the Guardian women's page debating whether or not to get their kids grief counseling now the gerbil has died.”

  “So you're not going to use it then?” Anna said curtly.

  “Anna . . . Of course I'm going to use it. But I will have to make some changes. You'll just have to trust me.”

  Realizing that she had no option, Anna shrugged her agreement.

  Their gazpacho arrived. It was all ice cubes and virtually no soup.

  For a few minutes they ate in awkward silence. Anna was suddenly in a serious quandary.

  She hadn't banked on Alison's less-than-euphoric reaction to her piece. Over lunch, she had planned to drop the bombshell about Rachel Stern's cosmetic surgery. It was now occurring to her that Alison might not be particularly interested. She could see her ignoring the feminist hypocrite angle on the grounds that Mercury readers wouldn't get it.

  “Come on, Anna,” she could hear her saying. “The women who read the Mercury are uneducated working-class girls with a vocabulary of about two hundred words and most of those are connected with alcohol. They do not understand words like “feminist' and “hypocrite.' The only thing they would be interested in reading about would be how Rachel Stern felt about not being able to pull when she was a thirty-two A and how her life changed after her implants.”

  Anna took a mouthful of soup and crunched one of the pinkish ice cubes.

  The thought of Alison not being interested in Rachel Stern's cosmetic surgery was particularly galling to Anna, since she'd spoken to Alex that morning and he had agreed to go on the record and tell his story.

  He explained that if Stern complained to the General Medical Council, he could get struck off for breach of doctor–patient confidentiality, but bearing in mind that he had decided to give up medicine because the strain had clearly made him ill, and go back to Alabama with Kimberley to start a cotton farm, he didn't give a monkey's about the GMC, and the two-faced bitch could do what she liked.

  Anna finally decided that she should at least have a go at convincing Alison that Stern's plastic surgery would make a cracking story. She waited for Alison to stub out her cigarette.

  “By the way, I discovered an intriguing twist in the Rachel Stern saga which I thought might interest you. . . . It's—”

  She got no further. She was interrupted by a terrible din coming from the next table. Anna and Alison turned to see a pretty woman in her early thirties, with a large bust, a mass of shoulder-length coppery curls and the cutest turned-up nose, giving the waiter hell.

  “For crying out loud. . . .” The woman's New York accent rose up through a throat full of ball bearings, “I'm only gonna say this one more time, buster.” She thumped the table. By now the entire restaurant was watching. The woman's female companion retreated into the huge menu. “I would like some tofu and vegetables gently sautéed in olive oil and garlic, hold the tamari. I would also like a side order of quinoa.”

  “Quinoa, madam? I don't think—”

  “Yeah, you morahn, quinoa. It's a grain. Great for cleansing the spirit. The Mayan Indians cook with i
t.”

  “I'll see what I can do, madam.”

  “Oh, and waiter, one more thing. The olive oil, how do I know it will be extra virgin?”

  The waiter, who was tall and had a certain Jeevesian air about him, decided he'd had enough. “Oh, that's easy, madam,” he replied. “All our olive oil is submitted to a rigorous vaginal examination before use.” With that he walked away.

  The American woman's face turned beetroot red, clashing exquisitely with her hair. She looked as if she was about to bust a gut with fury. Sensing this, her companion got out of her seat, put her arm round the woman's shoulders and did her best to calm her down.

  “Christ, what a witch,” Anna said.

  Alison looked at Anna and laughed.

  “You don't know who she is, do you? Come on, Anna, look at the hair?”

  Anna looked.

  “Christ, it's her, isn't it?”

  “Yep. And she's three days early. According to the press release she's not meant to be here until the nineteenth. Thank God you've written the article. I'll probably run it tomorrow.”

  While Alison disappeared, like she always did, to chuck up in the loo, Anna glanced surreptitiously towards Rachel Stern's table. Having been presented with her food, Stern produced a pair of chopsticks from her handbag and began picking up individual snow peas or slices of zucchini, scrutinizing them and then putting them on the side of the plate. Every so often, a piece of vegetable passed muster and made it to her mouth.

  After a while, Anna's eyes were drawn towards Stern's taut-expressioned companion. Anna realized she recognized her. It was Bryoney Keen. Anna knew Bryoney from years ago when they were trainees together on the Hemel Hempstead Gazette. Bryoney had gone on to the Guardian, and left to do a course in television production shortly before Anna went freelance. She now owned her own production company, Keen Productions, which produced a dreary but worthy breakfast show for Channel Six called At the Crack with Tim and Heather. It was as plain as the plastic nose on her face that Stern had been invited to appear on the show.