Neurotica (12 page)

Gloria suddenly became aware that he could have been following
her since she left home that morning to go to the Tooth Fairy,
and that their simultaneous arrival in Sainsbury's parking
lot was no coincidence.

She was more furious than scared. Nobody in the group
thought for one minute that Gerald, at sixty-something and a
shambling five foot seven, would do anybody any harm.

Gloria decided she could either go over to the car,
scream at him and threaten to call the police, or she could
remain dignified and aloof and get on with her shopping. She was
determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing that she was
disturbed by his behavior. She decided she would do her best
to ignore him and confront him only if he followed her round
the supermarket.

In an effort to look fearless and bold, Gloria lifted her
chin and stuck out her plentiful chest. In one easy motion she
pulled a cart from the cart line and guided it round to face the
automatic doors. She stood still for a second or two and with
one hand pulled down on the hem of her short jacket. Then she
tried to make the first of what she intended to be huge, fearless
strides into the supermarket. Unfortunately she was wearing
a tight pencil skirt and four-inch heels.

Gerald Brownstein's eyes were getting tired without his
glasses. He took his face away from the windshield, picked up his
thick-lensed spectacles and positioned them on their usual spot,
a good inch down from the bridge of his nose. As his eyes refocused,
his mouth opened even wider than usual. There was a small but
unmistakable stirring inside his Aertex Y-fronts as he
watched Gloria wiggle and totter into Sainsbury's, looking about as
fearless and bold as a geisha girl.

Gloria pushed her cart towards the fruit and veg, trying
hard to force her mind away from Gerald Brownstein and back
towards Anna's shopping. As she picked up a bunch of seedless
grapes and stuffed a couple into her mouth to test them for
flavor, she decided she had to make some effort to stop annoying Anna
by bringing the children so many sweets. She decided the grapes
would do and put four bunches into the cart. To these she added
a couple of Ogen melons, several pineapples, two dozen nectarines,
some plums, a large bag of Granny Smiths, another of Cox's and
three nets of Jaffa oranges. She then moved on to the exotic
fruits, to the phylasses, the custard apples and kumquats.

After five minutes she had loaded her cart with enough
vitamin C to keep an entire shipload of eighteenth-century sailors
free of scurvy for six months. She knew she should make her way
to the checkout. Amy and Josh wouldn't love her any less,
she reasoned, if she bought them Cox's instead of Coke. But
suddenly Gloria was reminded of their gleeful little faces,
their wide eyes looking up at her as she handed out the jumbo
bars of Galaxy and six-packs of Crunchies. She forced the heavy
cart left into pastas and flour, wheeled it past the cook-in sauces
and headed for her usual stamping ground among the cans of Fanta,
high-fat yogurts with sprinkles on top and tubes of Refreshers.

A few minutes later, she was bending down into a huge deep
freeze to take out three or four banoffee pies when she sensed
somebody behind her. She knew exactly who it was. She could
hear the familiar soft snoring sound. Gloria straightened up,
but didn't turn round. For a while she stood facing the ketchup
and salad creams on the shelf above the freezer and took a couple
of deep breaths. Then she began to turn slowly.

First she saw the trilby hat, then the thick lenses and
unkempt mustache. Finally she noticed the cheap Man at Woolworths trench coat and even took time to wonder why people with money
were so often too mean to buy decent quality clothes. It must
have been several seconds before Gloria noticed that the front of the
trench coat was being held wide open to reveal two puny bare
legs and a pair of baggy Aertex underpants. Stuffed inside Gerald
Brownstein's underpants and exiting from the right leg as far
as his knee was a very thick and very red Bloom's
salami—without garlic.

M
um, I can't believe I'm hearing this.”
Anna turned away from
her mother for a second or two as she stretched across
the kitchen table and took out a couple of kumquats from one
of the Sainsbury's carrier bags.

“What do you mean,” she continued, shivering with
revulsion at the bitterness of the kumquat, “by saying there's
no need to involve the police. This Brownstein creep has been
stalking you, for Christ's sake. Heaven knows for how long.
There you are standing with a banoffee pie in each hand and an
old Jewish man comes up to you and starts playing with his
salami. Brenda, would you please tell my mother she is completely
barking.”

Brenda, who was staying with Anna and Dan for a few days
in order to escape the reporters she assumed would be camping
outside the Holland Park house any minute over the Giles Hardacre
business, said that as far as she was concerned not going to the
police went beyond Barking and was, in fact, getting on for
Dagenham and even Upminster. With that she put a slice of custard
apple into her mouth, decided she couldn't swallow it and got
up to look for some paper towels while at the same time
mumbling something about it being no mistake that the
conquistadors brought back oranges from the tropics and not
custard apples.

“Look, he ran off sobbing his heart out. I'm convinced
he felt terribly ashamed. Maybe I'll have a word with him next
week at the group. I can't go to the police. They'll charge
him with indecency and throw him into a cell. He could even end
up spending months on remand. Anna, people commit suicide on
remand. What if he killed himself? How would I feel? And think
of the headlines in the
Jewish Chronicle.
”

“Yeah,” said Anna, suddenly seeing the funny side.
“ ‘Salami Stalker Found Sliced in Cell.' ”

Then the three of them broke into giggles and began making
up dafter and dafter headlines, culminating in “Salami Madman
Goes from Bad to Wurst.” When Dan, who had spent the day working
at home, came into the kitchen five minutes later to get a cup
of coffee, they were all sitting round the kitchen table laughing
their heads off like anally obsessed seven-year-olds in the
grip of the latest turd howler.

Dan asked who was for coffee, but nobody took any notice
because they were all still having hysterics. Anna took even less
notice because she was laughing and at the same time trying to
yell at Amy and Josh. For the last half hour they had been
charging round the kitchen demanding to know where Anna had hidden
the Hula Hoops and Twixes and going yuk, puuuke, when she
suggested they help themselves to some of the wonderful fruit
Grandma had brought.

Dan filled the kettle to the top anyway. While he waited
for the water to boil he propped himself against one of the
kitchen units, and started to smile. He couldn't remember the last
time he'd seen Anna laugh. He thought how beautiful she looked
and how much he loved her. Dan knew that after everything he'd put
her through in the last couple of years she had every right
to leave him. As quickly as it had appeared, the smile vanished.

He'd spent ages in his first session with Virginia Livermead
telling her how scared he was of Anna leaving him, and how he
really had tried his best to stop himself worrying about
getting ill and dying. In fact, he had been so nervous when he
arrived at Virginia's flat that he had started to blurt it all
out while standing in her hallway wearing that ridiculous hat
the cabby had given him. She had simply smiled briefly, nodded
and started to lead him into her consulting room. It was only
when he caught sight of himself in the hall mirror that he
realized he was still wearing the hat. He did an emergency stop
in midsentence and ripped the thing from his head. It was then
that he saw what was written across it. In an instant he was
hit by the full humiliating horror of turning up to see his
shrink wearing a kiss-me-quick hat. For a split second he thought
of running away. Then he looked up. Virginia appeared utterly
composed and unruffled as she stood holding open the door
of her consulting room waiting for Dan to go through. He decided
the reason she seemed so relaxed was either because she was
used to dealing with loonies and could tell he wasn't violent,
or because the flat was fitted with umpteen panic buttons connected
to the local jail, and she knew an armored police van was
already on its way.

He glanced sheepishly at Virginia Livermead, who was in
her late fifties and wore her gray hair in a severe crop. He
mumbled an apology for the hat and said it was a long story.
Then he stuffed it into his pocket.

The room was small and bright. The off-white walls were
covered in paintings, mainly abstracts done in vivid reds and
greens or brilliant purples slashed by black. French doors
overlooked a pretty and well-tended walled garden and let in
the early-evening sunlight. In the middle of the room, two
black leather high-backed armchairs stood facing each other
about six feet apart. At the side of one of the chairs was a
small, square aluminum-and-glass table. On this stood a thin
white vase containing half a dozen yellow freesias. Next to
the vase was a box of tissues and a small digital clock.

Virginia indicated that Dan should take the chair nearer
to the table.

They both sat down. Virginia sat bolt upright in her chair,
her feet placed precisely together in front of her. Dan noticed
she was wearing brown lace-up walking shoes. She placed her hands
neatly in her lap, but remained silent. It was clear she was
waiting for him to start. After his initial clumsy outpouring
in the hall, Dan couldn't think of a thing to say. Virginia
sat patiently. As a therapist, she was perfectly at ease with
long silences. As a neurotic, Dan was not.

“So,” his blustering began, “you're partly Freudian
then, but I bet you're still Jung at heart.” Dan laughed nervously
at his own weak joke. Virginia's hard, chiseled features showed
no emotion. When she spoke her tone was quiet and solemn.

“Sometimes people spend their lives making jokes so that
they don't have to confront their emotional pain,” she began.
“If they are too busy laughing they don't have time to cry or
get angry. Perhaps the reason you have come here is because you
have reached a point in your life where you feel strong enough to
face your pain and begin to deal with it.”

Dan decided this was therapist speak for shit or get off the
pot. He took a deep breath and began.

For the next hour he told Virginia Livermead everything
about his imaginary illnesses, his umpteen visits to Harley
Street specialists, his nonexistent sex drive and how scared
he was that Anna might leave him.

Virginia made the occasional note on a foolscap pad as
she listened to his story. After a while she began, as Dan had
predicted, to ask him questions about his childhood. He told her
how terrified he had been of his mother, how desperate he had
always been for her approval and how she had never given it,
but instead had done everything she could to humiliate him. He
found himself telling Virginia about how she made him sit on the
bucket of chicken soup.

“You must be feeling such anger towards your mother,”
she said when he had finished. Her voice was full of empathy
and caring.

Dan said he occasionally got furious with her, but he never
allowed the feeling to last very long. Getting angry, he said,
seemed pointless. She was dead. It was too late to tell her how
he felt.

Before Virginia had a chance to reply, another dreadful
incident involving his mother, one that Dan had probably kept
buried deep inside him for well over twenty years, leaped into
his mind.

It must have happened, he said, when he was about twelve. He'd
just experienced his first wet dream. The next day when his mother
was stripping his bed she found the evidence of
her son's spilled
seed. She stopped dead in her tracks, pulled
off the bottom
sheet and sat staring excitedly at the semen stain.

She remembered reading an account somewhere of how the
servants of the young Louis XIV found his semen-stained sheet and
realized the stain was shaped like the map of France. They decided
this was a sign from God that he would become a great and powerful
king. The sheet was put on public display and great rejoicing
and jubilation followed.

When Lilly looked more closely at Dan's stain, there was
no doubt that she could see a map of the Middle East with the Negev
and the Dead Sea quite clearly outlined. Was it possible that
she too was being sent a sign from the Almighty and that Daniel,
her Daniel, who with his B pluses and A minuses was never going to
be the academic genius she craved, was actually destined for
great things? Could it be that she, Lilly Bloomfield, had given
life to a future prime minister of Israel?

D
an took his handkerchief from his trouser pocket and blew his nose. Virginia Livermead reached across and touched
his hand. Behind her severe silver-rimmed granny glasses, her
eyes were nearly bulging with excitement.

“I can feel so much repressed rage coming from you,”
she said, clenching both fists in front of her bosom. Her voice
was deep and trembling, making her sound like some third-rate
Shakespearean thesp. “I think over the next few months we
need to start working towards bringing this to the surface.”

With that she glanced at the clock and said that unfortunately
their time was up. She went on to say she would be happy to see
Dan at the same time next week so long as he felt sure they
could work together. Dan said next week would be fine. As he
got up he handed her the fifty-quid check in a white envelope.