Free Neurotica by Sue Margolis

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.
       
    C harlie 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