Neurotica (16 page)

“Do sit down. I'm Alex. Alex Pemberton.” He waved his
hand towards the chair in front of her. Anna spotted a gold
signet ring on his little finger. She also noticed his
nails were buffed and manicured. There wasn't a loose end of
dried-up cuticle in sight. She lowered herself into the chair.
For a paranoid schizophrenic, she thought, Alex Pemberton
was certainly very well groomed.

Anna decided that her first impression of him, outside
the restaurant, had been spot on. The man looked like a Nazi.
There was no doubt in her mind that the six-foot-three frame,
the square jaw, pale-blue eyes and flaxen hair belonged at a
Nuremberg rally.

His was the look she had been brought up to fear and revile.
She had been out with twenty or thirty boys before she met Dan.
They had all been dark. Even the non-Jewish ones looked vaguely
Mediterranean. None of them had been more than five foot ten.
Despite Anna's youthful defiance, she had found it hard to shake
off her parents' prejudices about all things German. As late
as two years ago, when she and Dan had bought a Bosch
fridge-freezer, she had felt like a traitor. It had taken her
a fortnight to pluck up the courage to tell her father what
she'd done.

The likelihood was, Alex Pemberton had no German blood
in his veins whatsoever—and so what if he had?—but
this logic made no indentation on Anna's emotions. As far as
she was concerned, tonight she would be eating with the enemy.

While they waited for their drinks, they finished the
popadoms and compared notes about Reenie Theydon-Bois. Alex
had met her a couple of times and said she was a mercenary old
baggage, but otherwise quite straight.

“So what made you place the Quasimodo ad?” Anna asked.
“I mean, it was very funny, but it did occur to me to come armed
with a posse of social workers, in case you went barmy during the
coffee and After Eights and needed to be sectioned.”

Alex laughed and explained that he'd placed traditional
ads in the past and had ended up with one miserable, lonely
woman after another. Nearly all of them, he explained, were the
type who'd spent years being martyrs to their husband's infidelities
and had finally decided they wanted to get their own back by
sleeping with other men.

“But when it came to it, they just wanted to talk about
their husbands' affairs, have a good cry and give me detailed
accounts of how they'd tried to top themselves.”

Anna imagined a long line of sour-faced middle-aged women
with perms, calf-length skirts and day returns from Bexleyheath.

“So you placed the wacky ad in the hope of attracting someone
a bit more upbeat.”

“Something like that,” he said, grinning and pushing back
his hair again, as the waiter delivered two cold Cobras.
“Plus writing it reminded me that, hopefully at least, I still
possess a sense of humor. I get seriously fed up playing the
sober-suited consultant.” He began to fiddle repeatedly with
his leather watch strap, twisting it nervously round his wrist
in short, sharp half-turns.

Anna drank some of her beer. Instead of the arrogance she
had anticipated in a consultant surgeon, there was a diffidence
and charm about Alex which she liked. She eyed his exquisitely
tailored charcoal-gray pinstripe with its hand-stitched lapels.
The conservative Savile Row suit, the posh tie and gold signet
ring gave him a gentlemanly, almost aristocratic air. Old-fashioned
words like “dashing” and “debonair” sprang to Anna's mind. She
was beginning to see what Brenda was getting at when she said
he was gorgeous.

Although she was still hoping Alex might darken up and
shrink a little as the evening wore on, Anna could feel herself
slowly letting go of her prejudices.

She was daring to imagine what it would be like allowing
herself to be pounced on by this perfect example of Aryan manhood.
Even two years ago such a thought would have appalled her. Now
the wickedness excited her. Lust and guilt fought a brief duel
in her body. It was no contest. Guilt forgot to bring bullets.
There was little doubt left in her mind that she and her
rebellious streak were about to boldly go and explore their
final sexual frontier. She had a brief image of him giving her
an orgasm and then leaping out of bed to click his heels. But
it was only brief.

A
lex smiled at Anna. He looked as if he had just opened a mail
order parcel and realized to his joy and utter surprise
that the company had sent him precisely what he'd ordered.

Anna smiled back.

“So what branch of medicine are you in?” she asked.

“Good Lord, I'm surprised Reenie didn't tell you. She
usually can't wait. She seems to be under the impression that
what I do is terribly glamorous. Of course, it's not really. I'm
a plastic surgeon.” His hand went to his watch strap once more.

Had there been any beer left in Anna's mouth, she would have
choked on it. Instead, in one immediate reflex action her hands
shot up from the table to her breasts, and down again.

Although she disapproved of cosmetic surgery for all
the usual women-aren't-meant-to-have-bodies-like-Barbie-dolls, and
aging-isn't-a-crime reasons, she wasn't sufficiently confident
of her feminist stance to take off her clothes, fling a breast
insouciantly over either shoulder and jump into bed with a
cosmetic surgeon.

Her body could never be good enough for this man. He would
always be trying to change her. Instead of flowers he would bring
her implants. Instead of foreplay he would produce a protractor,
calipers and scientific calculator to assess her droop and sag
quotient. Anna saw them in their tender postcoital moments,
thumbing through nose catalogues.

She decided there was no point spending the evening getting
to know Alex. Sleeping with people meant getting naked, and she
was about as likely to get naked in front of Alex as her mother
was to give up her three-bottles-of-Jif-a-day habit.

She was on the point of making her excuses and leaving, when
she came to and realized Alex was speaking to her, apparently
oblivious to her horrified state.

“.   .   .   So you see it was one of the main
reasons,” he was saying, “I wanted to meet you.”

Anna apologized for appearing distracted and said something
feeble about being a bit tired as she'd had a particularly
busy day and could he say that last bit again.

Alex seemed quite happy to oblige.

“I was just making the point that when Reenie Theydon-Bois
told me you were a journalist and worked for the tabloids, it
struck me that we had rather a lot in common. I'm always having
to justify why, after the government paid for me to spend seven
years learning how to heal the sick, I am now devoting myself to
satisfying the vanity of the well heeled. I thought that working
for the tabloids you must receive your fair share of flack
from the broadsheet brigade.”

“You could say that,” Anna said with heavy irony. It was as
if the flag had gone up at the starting gate. She was off, rabbiting
on about how she loathed having to justify what she did for a
living. Barely pausing for breath or a sip of beer, she told him
how she only worked for the tabloids for the money, but had,
nevertheless, worked out this brilliant philosophical
justification for the existence of tabloid newspapers, based on
the fact that for years they had been the only part of the media
which had dared tell the truth about the royal family, had been
rubbished by the Establishment for doing so and proved ultimately
right down to the finest detail; they had simply outreported,
outresearched and outfaced the broadsheets, the BBC and the
rest of the pompous media, and should be proud of their muckraking,
not apologetic over it.

When she had finished, Alex said that he still got terribly
hurt when people laid into him about what he did for a living.
He said there had been two reasons for him becoming a plastic
surgeon. The first was that despite what most of the world said,
he genuinely believed he was helping people and improving the
quality of their lives. He said it wasn't all face-lifts and
breast implants. He regularly saw people with striking
imperfections which the National Health Service refused to
treat.

“Sometimes pinning back a teenage boy's bat ears can
cure him overnight of the kind of hang-ups and insecurities
it would take a therapist years to cure.”

For the sake of politeness Anna decided not to pursue
her argument that it was mainly women who had cosmetic surgery
and that in her opinion cosmetic surgeons were power-crazed
men who wanted to control women by mutilating them.

Instead she played safe.

“So what was the other reason?”

“Same as yours. Money.”

To Anna's complete surprise, it turned out that Alex had
been brought up by his widowed mother in a thirties row
house in Hounslow. His father had died when he was three and his
mother, who was a clerical officer at the public housing department,
used to eat jam sandwiches for supper and make a tea bag do for
three cups, in order to give him steak and piano lessons. When
he passed the exams for public school she did extra typing in
the evenings in order to pay the fees.

“Sometimes in the winter we would run out of coal. I
remember her holding my hand as we walked the streets just to
keep warm. From the age of about seven I knew I didn't just want
to be well off. I wanted to be very rich indeed.”

Anna asked him if he had achieved his aim. He gave a
self-mocking chuckle and admitted he was getting there.

She couldn't help wondering why, with all his money, he
had brought her on such a cheap date.

Just then the waiter came to take their order. He was
extremely matey and called Alex by his first name. They clearly
knew each other very well. When the waiter had gone Alex explained
that he ate at the Bhaji on the Bush at least four times a week.
This was partly because ever since working at a hospital in
Bradford years ago, he had become a curry-holic, and partly
because he couldn't face going home.

Over chicken spinach, lamb passanda and pilau rice with
fluorescent pink bits, Alex told Anna about his miserable
marriage and why he had joined Liaisons Dangereux.

His wife, he explained, was American. Her name was
Kimberley. She'd kept her maiden name, which was Tadlock. As they
hadn't had sex for over a year, Alex had nicknamed her Padlock.
He laughed as he said this, but Anna could almost taste the
sadness behind the laughter.

Kimberley, he went on, came from the American Deep South.
He had met her in 1981 while he was doing a year's internship
at a hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. She was a theology student
at UAB—the University of Alabama, Birmingham. Kimberley
was also a part-time waitress at Vinny's Diner, a famous
roadside eatery a few miles out of town.

“We met there one Saturday lunchtime in August. The day
was so hot and humid it could have steamed peas.” He put down
his fork and stared past Anna into the distance.

A group of them, all male doctors at the hospital, had
driven out to Vinny's in an open-top fifties Chevy. They had
been driving along the same empty stretch of country road for
ages, going through one identical village after another. These
had names like Nectar and Locust Fork. The small houses on either
side of the road were wooden, single-story affairs with white
picket fences and porches. Alex and his four mates were beginning
to think they must have accidentally driven past Vinny's when one of
them noticed the huge 7UP sign ahead. It came towards them,
shimmering in the heat haze.

Vinny's turned out to be a huge painted shack with dozens
of wood-effect Formica tables and red plastic bench seats. The
place was sweltering. The rows of ceiling fans did little more
than rearrange the heat.

Alex said that walking into Vinny's felt like walking
into a Steinbeck novel. Being a weekend it was full of families,
mainly white farming people. Everybody was wearing denim
dungarees.

Alex and his friends stood waiting to be seated and watched
huge plates of fried catfish or Southern-style chicken with
candied yams being set down at the tables. Most of the waitresses
were middle-aged, motherly women with thick ankles and rear
ends as wide as Mobile Bay. The skirts of their pink nylon
waitress uniforms hugged their hips like taut shrink-wrap.

There were two or three young, pretty waitresses. They wore
their skirts short and their eyeshadow thick. After a couple of
minutes one of them came smiling towards them.

She was about twenty, with freckles, excellent teeth and long
red hair tied into a ponytail. She cocked her head to one side
and said, “Hi y'all, Ahm Kimberley. I'll be your waitress
fur today.” Then she turned to Alex and in a voice that was
pure Blanche Dubois she whispered, “How're ya doin', sugar?”

There was a wiggle in her walk as she led the group to their
table. Alex could see she was undoing a couple of the buttons down
the front of her blouse. They sat down, and as she bent over
Alex's end of the table to hand them the menu and go through the
specials, he could see her huge breasts spilling out of a skimpy
flesh-colored bra. In those couple of minutes, he fell in love.

According to Alex, over the weeks that he kept driving out
to Vinny's on his own every Saturday and Sunday, Kimberley fell
for his accent, navy blazer and brogues.

So it was that Alex and Kimberley started dating. After
four lust-filled months they married in a tiny Baptist church in
Locust Fork and came back to England.

They bought a Victorian house in Hammersmith which they
did up. Kimberley went a bit overboard by buying four rocking
chairs and trying to cover all the available wall space with
cross-stitch samplers, but Alex didn't mind because he knew they
reminded her of home. She bore him two ginger-haired, freckled
children called Brandy and Jim Bob, filled the freezer with
Mississippi mud cakes and pumpkin pies, and became a devoted
fan of the Queen Mother and cream teas.