Free Neurotica by Sue Margolis Page A

man
wearing a prayer shawl, apparently the one male mourner who didn't
know that they weren't required at a shiva by any known religious
authority or cultural tradition. As if this weren't drawing
sufficient attention, Bunny, his hand now in his pocket, was also
struggling to remove his mobile, which appeared to have become
wedged in by a huge bunch of keys and his wallet. The phone carried
on ringing .   .   . five, six, seven, eight rings now.
As Bunny dropped the bunch of keys, which landed with a clunk on the
floor, Anna shot him a
for-Christ's-sake-get-out-can't-you-see-we're-trying-to-mourn-here
look. Bunny, who wore his stupidity with the
same kind of pride as his handful of gold signet rings and
metallic-turquoise Roller, simply ignored Anna's filthy glance,
although he did make one feeble attempt at invisibility. As he began
speaking into the mouthpiece he moved to the back of the room and
pulled one-half of his prayer shawl over his head, as if he were
a bird about to go to sleep under its wing. From this position,
looking, Anna thought, like some overgrown ultra-Orthodox sparrow,
Bunny began to have a row at only slightly less than normal row
volume with a person she took to be one of his wholesale
suppliers.
    “Monty,” he said—although because Bunny suffered from
some kind of chronic adenoid condition this came out as Bonty.
    “You're a jerk, that's what you are, a jerk. What do you
mean, you're sending me eight gross in a size eighteen? Yesterday
teatime I spoke to Bildred in the office and she confirmed eighteen
gross in a size eight. .   .   . Go on then, you jerk, go and
fetch the bleedin' order form then. I'll hold.   .   .   .”
    While Bunny held, the hubbub of the badly choreographed
prayers continued like an anarchic Greek chorus. Then, after a
couple of minutes, Monty obviously returned with the order form and
Bunny started shouting and getting really angry with the poor chap.
Anna could hear him bashing his fist on the wall, but mostly he
just carried on calling him a jerk.
       
    F rom what Anna could make out, the barney was finally resolved by what appeared to be an unequivocal climb-down from Monty.
This was followed appropriately by a stream of uncoordinated final
amens from the mourners.
       
    G loria ran into the kitchen where two of the borrowed kettles and a stainless-steel urn had come to the boil
simultaneously, and Anna turned to Charlie and said in a perfectly
calm and casual voice that it had been great meeting him, but it
really was time she was getting back to her brats.
    As she began looking round the room trying to work out where
she had left her handbag, Anna was aware that she felt a bit sick
and that she could feel her heart beating so fast she suspected she
was having one of those tachycardia attacks Dan seemed to get every
other week, which usually ended up with her calling an ambulance at
three in the morning and him in casualty wired up to a heart monitor
for hours on end, only to be told there was nothing wrong with his
heart and that he had been having a panic attack.
    Anna knew that she too was panicking. Only hers was the sort
that would only go away when Charlie Kaplan confirmed that he
fancied her as much as she fancied him and that they weren't about
to say good-bye forever in Uncle Henry's shabby, smelly lounge.
    After all, they had spent the last hour or so deep in
conversation, maintaining the kind of lengthy eye contact people
make when they are attracted to each other. You didn't, Anna
thought, have to be Desmond Morris to work out that this behavior
was the equivalent of a couple of dating gorillas showing each other
that red patch on their bums.
    She tried to stretch out the hunt for her bag, which she'd
actually spotted immediately, for as long as she could. This, she
thought, would give him sufficient time to take her to one side
and suggest that, as he was going to be in London for a week or so
visiting all his newly discovered