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IT WAS ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK THAT finally did it. Anna was standing in her red Cystitis Awareness Week T-shirt that she wore in bed, rubber gloves and Day-Glo-pink nylon slippers, trying to wash up and at the same time fry sausages and eggs for Amy and her two friends who had slept over, when "Release Me" came on the radio.

She knew she had finally scored a personal worst in sexual fantasy, but it was a measure of her frustration when, for a few minutes, she imagined being carted off to some tropical island by Engelbert. She even refused to snap out of her reverie when her rational brain reminded her that sad old medallion-man crooners were much more time-share in Tossa del Mar than beach house in Barbados. But it didn't matter. Dan hadn't made love to her last night--even on electrical appliance night.

Usually when he'd had some good news from some specialist or other, Dan was all over Anna. He would cuddle up to her on the sofa, hold her, hug her and flick her bangs with his fingers. This would be followed by the sorry-I've-been-such-a-bastard-to-you-I-promise-finally-and-forever-that-my-obsession-with-my-health-is-over-and-wouldn't-it-be-great-if-we-put-the-kids-in-kennels-and-got-away-for-a-few-day speech.

Anna would usually respond with her shit-Dan-we've-been-here-a-million-times-before-and-I-can't-live-like-this-any-more-unless-you-see-a-shrink speech. Dan would then assure her that he would definitely get help if she ever found him imagining symptoms again.

Anna always caved in and by ten o'clock they would be in bed, Dan promising her the orgasm of her life. By 10:45 Dan would start whispering in her ear that he was getting carpal tunnel syndrome in his middle finger and could she hurry up. But Anna found it almost impossible to come when she was still so angry. So she held her breath, thrashed her head about a bit, let out a long sigh and said, "Thank you; that was lovely." She then let Dan have his turn. Two minutes later they would both be asleep.

Last night had been the same, up to the children-in-kennels bit, which he'd got to while they were watching Newsnight. Some impenetrable European Monetary Union item came on, and Anna got up to make herself a cup of tea. While she was waiting for the kettle to boil, she thought she'd unpack the John Lewis bag, which was still on the kitchen table.

Inside were two boxes, one containing the blender (that made four they now owned), while the other was from a medical supplier in Wigmore Street.

Anna ripped into the bubble wrap with some kitchen scissors and pulled out a square, wallet-sized plastic device. It had a tiny screen at the top, and a round opening at the side. The only instructions were in Spanish or Norwegian, but from what Anna could make out from the diagrams, this was some kind of newfangled home blood pressure machine. You put your index finger into the anuslike hole, which automatically tightened round it. The electronic sphygmomanometer then gave you a digital readout of your blood pressure.

A few months ago she would have gone screaming into the living room, ranting and raving at Dan as if he were an alcoholic and she had just found three bottles of whiskey hidden in the toilet tank. But last night she had been so bloody worn out with it all, so tired of the pleading and begging, that she simply put the sphygmomanometer back in its box, finished making her mug of tea, yelled goodnight to Dan from halfway up the stairs and climbed into bed.

When Dan came up twenty minutes later she was still sipping her tea and reading. He gave her another hug and told her he loved her, but there was no mention of orgasms. Anna put her book on the bedside table and turned out her light. Dan had his back to her and was pretending to be asleep, but she could sense that under the duvet he was feeling his pulse.

As she gave the sausages another turn, Anna decides she had no choice. If she didn't find some fun soon, not to mention some decent sex, she would shrivel up and die. She tore off her rubber gloves, threw down her spatula and dialed Alison O'Farrell's home number.

"Alison, it's Anna. Sorry to ring so early on a Saturday morning, but I just thought I'd let you know, I'll definitely do the Rachel Stern piece."

What she didn't tell Alison was that the stories would be genuine, but instead of belonging to three interviewees, they would all be hers.

Anna Shapiro, thirty-seven-year-old mother of two in desperate need of a tummy tuck, breast lift and open-pore surgery, was about to spend the next eight weeks committing adultery--just for fun.

Brenda Sweet, single mum from Peckham turned millionaire fashion designer, dunked a bit of buttery croissant into her coffee, and watched as globules of fat started to appear on the surface.

"But what I don't understand is why you can't make do with solo sex for the time being? I mean, Dan's bound to recover the use of 'is pecker eventually."

"First, because "eventually' might mean forty years from now when he's got cataracts and incontinence pads, and second, because when I get up to heaven with all the other Jewish mothers, St. Peter, or whoever my people's equivalent is, will read out that summary of what everybody did with their lives. There will be Naomi Fishman who planted a thousand trees in Israel, Melanie Greenberg who, despite being blind and having no arms or legs, stuffed fifteen million chicken necks and won prizes for her chopped liver sculpture, then there will be me, Anna Shapiro--who wanked.  OK, so I do it when I'm desperate, but believe me, adultery is much more respectable."

Brenda said she took the point and topped up their coffee cups, which were round and metallic, like sputum bowls with handles. Apparently they'd cost nearly twenty quid each from some Japanese shop in Covent Garden, but because Brenda was her best friend, Anna made allowances for her interesting taste in crockery.

Brenda's kitchen, on the other hand, went well beyond interesting into the outer suburbs of downright peculiar.

It was situated, stylistically speaking, somewhere between morgue and sluice room. The cupboard doors were brushed aluminum, the stainless-steel sink was conical, its metal U-bend exposed, and the floor was covered in those industrial nonslip concrete tiles which usually surround public swimming pools. The only object which bordered on the ornamental was a six-foot-by-four-foot grainy black-and-white photograph, which took up most of the space on the wall at the far end. It was of some poor terrified bastard strapped in the electric chair minutes before his execution.

"Fuck me, Bren," Dan, who could be witty in a sardonic way when he momentarily forgot he was dying, had said the first time they were invited to dinner in the new kitchen. "You certainly do a great line in concentration camp chic. S'pose the Mengeles are just outside parking the car. Hope they've remembered to bring a bottle."

To give Brenda her due, she laughed, but she was obviously a bit put out, because she called Dan "a bleedin' Philistine," whose idea of style didn't extend beyond a matching bread-bin and mug-tree set.

Brenda was very good at putting people in their place. Anna saw her do it the day they met and became friends. It was at the antenatal clinic, ten years ago, when she was expecting Josh and Brenda was expecting Alfie.

The hospital made all the women sit in the waiting room in their maternity dresses, but minus their knickers and pantyhose. These they kept on their laps in wire supermarket baskets. Humiliating as this was, none of them challenged the ruling. These were National Health Service patients, who treated doctors like feudal lords, and in place of a forelock to tug, practically curtsied at the end of their examinations before walking out of the consulting room backwards. The tatty notice on the wall, written in green felt tip, explained that it speeded things up if the doctors had instant access to patients' nether regions.

Anna, however, did make some small effort to assert herself.  Along with her wire basket, she always took a copy of Ulysses into the consulting room and placed it purposefully on the doctor's desk, like a poker player revealing his hand. This was her way of ensuring that whichever supercilious, patronizing git of an obstetrician she was about to see spoke to her in words of more than two syllables--and didn't refer to her as Mum.

A few weeks before Josh was due, Anna was sitting in the waiting room, wire basket on lap, working her way through a bag of Everton mints, when Brenda walked in, eight months pregnant and a size ten, wearing suede heels and a black Lycra minidress under a biker's jacket. Even her tidy, pert bump looked like a casually calculated fashion statement. Anna took one look at her and was just descending into one of those "Omigod, I look like someone turned the liposuction machine to blow" moments of self-hatred, when Brenda started bellowing at the middle-aged woman on the appointments desk.

"Look 'ere, you daft mare, if you think I'm sitting for two hours with a draft up my jacksy on the off chance some doctor'll decide a poke around my privates is in order, you can bloomin' well think again."

"I'm sorry, it's hospital policy."

"I don't care if it's the soddin' Common Agricultural Policy. It's bloody degrading and I'm not doing it."

With that, Brenda turned on her four-inch stilettos, saw there was an empty seat next to Anna and started to make her way towards it. Anna couldn't help thinking that had this been New York, the whole waiting room would have started whooping, applauding, waving their urine samples in support and queuing up to high-five Brenda. But this being Dulwich, everybody kept their heads buried behind their Good Housekeepings, and the only sound was of embarrassed buttock shuffling.

As Brenda neared her, Anna had the same feeling--without the sex part--she'd had the night she met Dan at Beany Levine's party, of stumbling across a like-minded soul. She knew she was on the point of making a friend.

Brenda was about to plonk herself down onto the empty seat and Anna was about to whisper, "Well done; not many people would have taken on that menopausal old bag" and "Where do you think she gets her tank tops?" when Brenda looked down and murmured:

"Oh fuck. It's curtains for me Manolo Blahniks."

She was standing in a small puddle of broken waters.

Brenda looked at Anna. "Christ, what do I do now? After that performance, I suppose the old bag'll have me down for a triple enema and a shave with a blunt razor."

Anna laughed. "Don't worry, you scared the control pants off her. I'll see if I can find one of the midwives."

A calm, motherly midwife called Iris found Brenda a wheelchair and took her up to the labor ward. As Brenda hadn't started having contractions yet, she said Anna could stay to keep her company. "Just until we locate your other half."

Brenda said she would rather the hospital contacted her mum.

It turned out that Brenda's other half, Elvis, had done a bunk three weeks ago and was living in Leytonstone with an assistant supervisor from Do It All. Brenda had just moved back to Peckham to be near her mum and dad, and this had been her first appointment at the hospital.

Apparently Elvis, who was a clerk with the Inland Revenue, went off with Dawn who did it all because he felt jealous and threatened when Brenda gave up hairdressing and started making a success of designing and making clothes.

She'd studied fashion design at art school years before, but had never had the confidence to set up in business on her own.  After art school, she'd just drifted into hairdressing. From the start, posh clients at the salon in Sloane Street began admiring what she wore and asked her where she bought her clothes. When Brenda said she designed and made them herself--even the Lycra bodies and skirts--she began getting dozens of orders.

The first time she broke the five-hundred-pounds-a-week barrier, Elvis took off.

BRENDA AND ANNA HAD BEEN ON THE LABOR WARD ABOUT an hour when Brenda's mum arrived, all hot flush and eau de cologne. Anna said a quick hello and decided she should leave them to it.

The next day Brenda phoned to say that Alfie had arrived safely with Elvis's ears, but she thought she could learn to love him, and that apart from tits as hard as Contiboard and what felt like a net of satsumas hanging out of her bum, she was fine.

After Josh was born, Anna and Brenda saw each other a couple of times a week. They would sit on the floor in Brenda's living room drinking wine, even though they knew that as breast-feeding mothers they shouldn't because it would get the babies drunk, and would try to work out why they were the only women they knew who thought the joy of watching their babies crawl, walk and talk didn't begin to compare with getting a new head of highlights.

Anna said if Josh didn't stop screaming all day she was going to lock him in his room and he could only come out when he turned twenty-five or did something interesting, like get a record in theTop Ten.

One evening, over a bottle of Chardonnay, they decided to form their own subversive breakaway postnatal support group. In order to join, mothers had to sign an undertaking to feed their children only dehydrated baby food from packets. Anybody found Mouli-ing up organic turnips or avocados would be expelled, as would mothers who were caught coming out of the Early Learning Center with boxes of flash cards about their person. Mothers who were deemed to be the type who would carry on breast-feeding their children until they were old enough to go to Guns N' Roses concerts would be flogged.

They were trying to decide whether they'd get any response if they put postcards in the newsagent's window advertising for people to join when it hit Brenda that Anna had never seen any of the clothes she made.

Anna knew very little about real couture, but she took one look at Brenda's exquisitely cut, hand-finished jackets and trousers and knew this came pretty close.

"Blimey, Bren, I knew you were talented, but I had no idea you were Edina bloody Ronay. I can't understand why you're not making a fortune."

"I'll tell you why. I've got orders coming out of my ears, but I can't keep up, because I've got no staff, one rotten sewing machine in a flat not much bigger than one of Princess Di's clutch bags, not to mention fucking Goering here making twenty-four-hour-a-day territorial demands on my tits."

Anna, being an accountant's daughter, couldn't see the problem. Once Brenda had got Alfie on the bottle and into day care, all she needed to do was form a company, write a business plan, find a backer to put up half the money she needed and her bank would probably lend her the rest.

"God, what planet do you live on? Find a backer? You may not be aware of this but you don't find too many ordinary daddies sticking around in Peckham--let alone sugar ones."

Driving home to Blackheath, with Josh asleep in his carrycot on the backseat and Dire Straits on the cassette player, Anna began running through a list of people who she thought might be able to come up with the kind of cash Brenda needed. In the end she decided the only person she knew who wasn't up to their eyes in mortgage repayments and didn't have the ladies from Barclaycard on the phone every five minutes over late payments was her father. He had the money from his mother's flat in Brighton sitting in a building society. But to convince Harry that investing in Brenda's business would be a sound move, she first had to convince her mother.

Anna spent the next three weeks, in between breast-feeding Josh, on the phone trying to persuade her mother--directrice of Maison Gloria in Stanmore (Fabulous Fashions For the Fuller Figure)--to take a look at Brenda's work.

Harry had bought Gloria the shop over thirty years ago, when her need to repeatedly clean things--the Maudsley called it obsessive-compulsive syndrome--had reached a particularly worrying phase.

One Saturday lunchtime, he had come home from synagogue expecting a nice bowl of borscht before he went off to see Tottenham. Instead he found Gloria on her knees removing bits of dirt from between the floorboards with a cotton swab while two of his best suits were soaking in a bath full of Parazone.

Her psychiatrist at the hospital suggested to Harry inprivate that an outside interest would be a good idea.

"Funny you should mention it, Dr. Mittelschmertz. I've been thinking maybe a few gentle rounds of golf now and again would do me good."

Dr. Mittelschmertz grimaced. "I mean for your vife, Mr. Shapiro, for your vife."

Harry began phoning estate agents.

Maison Gloria seemed to have done the trick. Every day, Gloria glided around the shop, black velvet pincushion on her wrist, flogging mauve chiffon evening dresses to size twenty-two mothers-of-the-bar-mitzvah-boy who couldn't lay off the cheesecake.

Anna knew that as far as Harry was concerned, Gloria was northwest London's answer to Coco Chanel. If Gloria thought Brenda was worth backing, he wouldn't hesitate to put his hand in his pocket.

But persuading Gloria wasn't easy. Every time Anna brought the subject up, Gloria told her she was mad and obviously suffering from postnatal depression if she expected her to convince Harry to invest money in a total stranger--a shikseh no less--who at best needed a good elocution teacher and at worst might turn out to be a psychopath, only they wouldn't find out until they woke up one morning dead in their beds.

Anna never quite worked out why--maybe her mother could no longer stand her continual badgering--but finally Gloria caved in and agreed to schlep over to Peckham.

"There'll be dirt and litter and people in Acrilan. What should I wear?"

"Pith helmet and puttees should just about hit the right note."

To placate Anna further she even took a present for Alfie.

Gloria decided that as Brenda had been brought up in public housing and her gene pool probably left a lot to be desired, little Alfie's IQ might need a jump start, and so she bought him a times-tables tape. Furious, Anna made her take it back and exchange it for a furry duck.

Even then, Brenda's taste in interiors was unconventional.

"Tell me," Gloria had said on the way home, "what sort of a person keeps her panties in a filing cabinet?"

But, like Anna, she had been bowled over by Brenda's creations.

Anna had never known Gloria to be silent for so long. She was like a little girl gazing at her first party dress in the days when they were pink and frothy with rosebuds and bows.

Gently, she ran her fingers over Brenda's seams.  Analytically, she squinted at her buttonholes. Approvingly, she stroked the outside of her sleeves. Anna knew they'd got it sorted when, finally, Gloria took off her glasses and declared that the last time she had seen lapels like these was on her uncle Manny at the end of the war. Apparently, Manny had been a petty East End crook who had once come into possession of a vanload of Savile Row suits. Although he never got nicked for the suits, he went on to do six months in Wormwood Scrubs for black-market onions.

Gloria got home, marched into the kitchen where Harry was munching on a pickled cucumber and reading the Social and Personal column in the Jewish Chronicle, and informed him that he was about to invest 30,000 in Brenda's business.

Harry carried on reading.

"Harry, put the paper down, stop making that awful noise and listen to me. You've heard of Christian Lacroix. If you invest in this Brenda Sweet person, I'm telling you, overnight you'll become Yiddishe Lacroix."

Harry did as he was told and even prepared Brenda's business plan for the bank. Three months later Sweet FA-UK was born.

Ten years on,Brenda had a personal fortune of well over four million, plus an eight-bedroom house in Holland Park. Harry had made enough money to retire at fifty-five, and he and Gloria had bought a smart holiday flat in Eilat where they spent three months every year. Gloria brought in an assistant to help her run Maison Gloria, but refused to sell the shop because she adored chatting and getting to know her customers. Over the years the business had become her social life. Without it she would have been lost.

Brenda always said she would never be able to put into words how grateful she was to Anna. Anna said she needn't bother--a couple of free suits a year said it all as far as she was concerned.

In fact, Brenda did much more than supply Anna with clothes.  When Amy got pneumonia just after she was born, it was Brenda who phoned one of her clients, who just happened to be a professor of pediatrics, and persuaded her to have a look at the baby; when Dan began going peculiar, it was Brenda she cried to and got drunk with, and Brenda who listened. Now that she was about to cheat on Dan, it was Brenda she had come to, partly for advice on how to go about it, and partly because, despite her determination to go through with it, she realized she still needed somebody to give he permission.

"God, Anna, you make me feel like the Mother Superior in The Sound of Music. What do you expect me to do, burst into song and tell you to climb ev'ry mountain until you find your dream so that you can waltz out of 'ere in some poxy brown burlap jacket and silly hat singing to all and sundry down Kensington Church Street that you have confidence in bleedin' sunshine and rain? I don't think so. Anna, have you any idea what you'll be risking if you go on this shagathon? I mean, what if Dan finds out?  You could lose the kids."

"But that's the whole point of the exercise," Anna said tetchily, annoyed that she wasn't getting the lavish approval from Brenda she had hoped for. "According to Rachel Stern, you can only do it if you know you have the wit not to get found out and the strength not to tell. Perhaps the cow's right."

"And you reckon you've got all that?"

"Yes. Look, I don't want heavy, I'll-show-you-my-angst-if-you-show-me-yours-type relationships and then we fall in love. I just want their bodies."

There was a very long pause. Finally, Brenda licked her middle finger and began flicking through a copy of the Evening Standard which had been lying on the kitchen table.

"If it really is only the sex you're after, you might find this useful. I noticed it last night."

Brenda stopped flicking and reached for a ballpoint. Anna could see she was ringing one of the personal ads.

"What is it, Bren? If you think I'm going off with some sad creep who has to advertise, you can think again."

"Don't read it now. Wait until you get home."

Brenda tore out the page, folded it over a couple of times and slipped it into Anna's jacket pocket.

Gloria was convinced that if the light caught Anna's marble-topped coffee table at a certain angle, she could see a small raised mark. It was either a spot of Superglue, probably spilled by Dan when he was mending one of Josh's Lego men, or a flaw in the marble.

By holding her head slightly to the right she could keep the mark in her sight and move in on it very slowly. The tiniest movement and it would disappear. Then she would have to move back and start again.

It was definitely Superglue. She started alternately spraying it with Pledge and picking at it with her thumbnail. After ten minutes, it still wasn't shifting. The thought of having to leave it filled her with terror.

Desperate for another cleaning fix, she got up from her knees and ran into the kitchen. She opened the cupboard under the sink, took out a bottle of Ajax Liquid and poured nearly half of it into a bucket. As she dipped her J-Cloth into the bucket she could feel her heart rate coming down and the tension easing. Gloria had just begun to wipe down Anna's worktops when she looked up and saw Anna standing staring at her in the doorway.

"My God, Mum, you don't get any better. Am I the only sane one in this bloody family? Would you mind telling me what you are doing? Mrs. Fredericks came in yesterday. The place is spotless."

It turned out Gloria was on her way to her obsessive-compulsive group's annual bazaar, an event which had looked like it was never going to happen. Apparently their group therapist had been forced to postpone it three times because all the obsessive compulsives had been too busy obsessively and compulsively cleaning the hall and checking the wiring to organize the actual event.

Gloria had popped in to see if Amy and Josh had wanted to come, but when she arrived they'd been on their way out to the roller disco with Dan. He'd said she was welcome to stay, as Anna was due back just after one.

"Oh, and there's something else you ought to know," Gloria said to Anna. "I got a phone call last night. Your uncle Henry died yesterday."

"Good Lord. I had no idea he was still alive. He must have been a hundred and six."

"A hundred and two. Just dropped dead out of the blue. The funeral's three o'clock Thursday. They've had to delay it a few days because there has to be a postmortem if you haven't seen a doctor in the past two weeks."

Uncle Henry wasn't Anna's real uncle. In fact, he was no relation at all. In 1901 Henry and Anna's grandma Esther had met and become inseparable on the boat bringing Jewish immigrants from Poland to England. Once the two seven-year-olds had found each other, it wasn't long before their parents became friends too, and when they arrived in the East End, they all lodged together in the same miserable, damp house off the Roman Road.

From then on, the two families never lived more than a couple of streets apart, and Esther and Henry, who were both only children, became like brother and sister. Strangely, as they grew up, there was never any romance between them. As far as both sets of parents were concerned, it wasn't for want of trying.

In the end Henry married a beautiful but half-witted girl called Yetta, and Esther married a young tailor called Saul, who owned three sewing machines and seemed to have above-average prospects. Nevertheless, Henry and Esther remained extremely close into old age. As a child, Anna had always received a ten-shilling note in her birthday card from Uncle Henry and Aunty Yetta, and always thought of them as part of her mother's family.

Gloria put on her jacket, gave Anna's worktop another wipe, took a look in the fridge to check she had enough food in, kissed her and said, "See you Thursday."

Anna went upstairs to the bathroom, sat on the toilet seat and started to read the small ad Brenda had ringed.

"Are you in a relationship or happily married, but would like a lover? Liaisons Dangereux is a dating agency with a difference." Then there was a telephone number.

Anna refolded the page, rolled it into a small cigar and slipped it inside a box of Tampax.

'WE USED TO BE A HAPPY FAMILY before all this happened,' wept attractive mum of two, Dawn, 40, from the beamed mock-Tudor lounge of her apartment in Barking. "I used to enjoy going out for a Malibu and Coke with the girls of an evening. Terry used to look forward to a bit of a fight with his mates at the West Ham football matches. These days, all our friends have deserted us.  We daren't even walk round the estate without the Rottweilers, because there's always some bastard pointing a finger at us. Sigourney and Keanu are wonderful kids since they came out of the detention center, but they're being bullied so much at school over this, they've been offered counseling.'"

Anna was sitting at the word processor in her bedroom-cum-study, just getting to the end of a piece for the health pages of the Globe on Sunday about coping with nits--provisionally headlined "Lousy Mother's Nit Nightmare Shame"--when she looked down at her watch and realized that if she didn't get a move on, she was going to be late for Uncle Henry's funeral.

The article should have taken only a couple of hours to write, but Anna was spending ages on it, because she had passed most of the morning staring out of the window trying to pluck up the courage to phone Liaisons Dangereux, but then decided she couldn't because they were bound to want her to deliver her romantic manifesto in some cringe-makingly embarrassing video. She knew the style, since she had done an article a couple of years ago on women who used dating agencies, and had sat in while some of them performed what one outfit referred to pretentiously as the client's "piece to camera."

The women fell into two groups. First there were the fat middle-aged divorcees with bad perms, who had just started some computer access course or other. Then there were the sad twenty-something lasses with eczema and brains the size of Cadbury's Creme Eggs, who sat in front of the camera and gabbled: "Hi, my name's Nicole and I come from Worcester Park. I work in personnel for a large company which specializes in intimate rubberwear. My ambitions are to meet Noel Edmonds, to find a way to wax my bikini line without getting that embarrassing rash and to end world hunger. At this moment in time I am without a special someone in my life and I'm searching for a soulmate for walks, talks and maybe more. Are you the shining star who can brighten up my lonely nights?"

With the possible exception of receiving a Heart of Gold award from Esther Rantzen, Anna could think of no worse humiliation than making a dating agency video. Nevertheless, she couldn't help fantasizing about what she might say, should the occasion arise. She suspected she would dispense with the introduction and launch straight into: "Look, I live with a fucking lunatic who would rather spend his nights on an Internet Terminal Illness Forum exchanging information on symptoms and hospice facilities with fellow hypochondriacs in Kentucky than have sex with me. So if you own your own liver, your tap stops dripping after you've had a pee, or better still, you had yet to be weaned onto solids the night Kennedy was shot, I'm all yours."

She typed another couple of sentences and broke off yet again. She didn't know why she was bothering to go to the funeral.  She hadn't seen Uncle Henry or Aunty Yetta for donkey's years, but on the phone the day before, Gloria had laid on the guilt, saying that she should go for Bubba's sake. Anna pointed out that Bubba had been dead for eleven years and, as a former person, had forfeited all rights to a sake. Gloria, who was desperate to show Anna off at the funeral and introduce her to Uncle Henry's family, who hadn't seen her for years, as "my daughter the important Fleet Street journalist who once interviewed Maureen Lipman," then instantly changed tack. Suddenly she became an expert on funeral etiquette, a sort of sarcophagal Miss Manners, and warned Anna ominously that if you didn't go to people's funerals, they wouldn't
come to yours. Faced with this priceless piece of Gloria-esque logic, Anna gave in.

She wasn't surprised when Dan announced he would not be coming. He'd given her some involved explanation about having to drop off a stool sample at the doctor's surgery and then having to go on to Newport Pagnell for lunch with a trade delegation from Venezuela. As soon as Anna heard the words "stool sample," her eyes glazed over and she stopped listening.

Anna took another look at her watch. It was just after one. She bashed out a lackluster final paragraph and faffed irritablywith the modem, which, as ever, threw a wobbly and refused to work if she was in a state any more stressful than one of sublime, bucolic repose; indeed, to function properly, the modem would have preferred Anna to be sitting with her feet on her desk, straw in mouth and humming "One Man Went to Mow." After fifteen minutes of sending and resending, roughly as long as it would have taken to dictate the story to an old-fashioned copytaker, Anna's article was finally ingested by the Globe's computers.

She took her latest Sweet FA black jacket out of the wardrobe and put it on over a white body and short black skirt. She decided, even though she was going to a funeral, that the outfit needed a bit of a lift. She also retained an adolescent urge to shock at important family do's. So she went to her jewelry box and took out a brightly colored four-inch-long wooden brooch she had bought a couple of years ago at a market when she was on holiday with Dan and the kids in Tobago. It was a carving of a naked, dreadlocked African painted in ANC colors with a huge red erection and a joint. She pinned it to her left lapel, patted it and giggled. Then she grabbed her bag and keys off the desk, bolted downstairs and out to the car.

Dan thought a stroll might calm him down. As he turned left out of the Vanguard's office and headed down Kensington High Street towards Holland Park, he realized he had never been so humiliated in his life. It was nearly four hours since the incident in the doctor's surgery, but his entire body was still bright red with embarrassment. Even his internal organs felt as if they were blushing. He couldn't face lunch. It was just as well the Venezuelans had canceled.

The day had begun routinely enough. He had dropped in at the office just after half past eight to check his messages from the previous night, before popping out to hand in the stool sample at the surgery round the corner. There was nothing on the voice mail.  All that had come through overnight was the fax from the Venezuelans postponing lunch until the following Tuesday, but inviting him to a performance of Die Meistersinger at Covent Garden that evening, as they had been given some free tickets. He sent back a fax confirming the new lunch date, but politely declining the opera as Wagner always gave him this irresistible urge to annex the Sudetenland.

Ten minutes later he had strolled into the crowded doctor's waiting room. He realized it had been months since he had actually set foot in the surgery because Dr. Harper, the kindly middle-aged lady doctor, had of late taken to discussing his symptoms with him on the phone so that she could dismiss them there and then, rather than waste her time and his with a pointless visit to the surgery.

Last Monday evening, just as Dr. Harper thought she had dealt with her last patient of the day, the receptionist had put a call from Mr. Bloomfield through to her, as she did three or four times a month.

Dan, standing alone at the kitchen phone, began describing his symptoms. This time it was gripping stomach pains, and frequent loose bowel movements, which had a greenish tinge together with reddish streaks which could have been beetroot from the beetroot salad he'd bought from the deli on his way home from work the night before, but then again could have been blood. All this, in his opinion, and he felt sure she would agree, suggested several possibilities:

"Colitis was my first diagnostic port of call, although I'm not sure I've got the characteristic mucus in the blood. I'd have to take another look. Then of course it could be Crohn's disease or diverticulitis. I know that patients bleed with both of those, although I understand people with diverticular disease can remain asymptomatic for years, but certainly severe cramps are a symptom of both. Of course there is an outside chance it could be Whipple's disease--I do have the chronic low-grade fever. Then there is . . ." Dan hesitated before saying the word, ". . . cancer. But of course you'll know better than me," he added as a deferential afterthought.

That afternoon Dr. Harper had dispatched a burst appendix and a suspected ectopic pregnancy to hospital, visited a senile chap who thought his wife was in a coma, but by the look and smell of her she had been dead for at least a fortnight, and had a two-year-old with measles vomit over her new Mansfield suit. She was tired, irritable and in no mood for malingerers like Dan Bloomfield.

"Me know better than you, Mr. Bloomfield? You flatter me," she spat sarcastically down the phone. "But, with your permission, may I offer just a couple of suggestions? Have you considered Norwalk virus infection or shigella bacillus?"

Dan's heart didn't just skip a beat--it skipped an entire drum solo. He was about to faint.

Somehow, while still holding the phone under his chin and maniacally scrambling through the Home Doctor index trying to find N for Norwalk, he managed to get himself onto the kitchen floor and raise his legs a few feet off the ground. After a second or two the blood began to return to his head.

"Good God, what the hell are they?"

"What they are, Mr. Bloomfield, are nasty little so-and-sos which give you an upset tum. You probably have a mild case of food poisoning, nothing more. Simply take plenty of fluids. If you insist, you can bring in a stool sample tomorrow morning and I'll send it off to the lab for analysis. Good-bye, Mr. Bloomfield."

Dan did insist. However, in all the years that he had been one of Dr. Harper's patients, he had never given a stool sample and wasn't quite sure how one went about it. Dr. Harper had cut him off without giving him any instructions. Would the lab want a whole turd, or just a slice of turd, and what should he put it in?

The first receptacle that sprang to mind as being vaguely the right shape was the Habitat spaghetti jar standing next to him on the kitchen worktop. Dan picked up the glass container, which was full of spinach fusilli, adopted a squatting position and placed it over his jeans in roughly the right position. He realized straight away that it was going to be much too tall to fit between his backside and the bottom of the loo, as well as too large to go in his briefcase. Crucially, it also had no lid, although he supposed he could cover it with clingfilm.

Then, as he rifled through the kitchen cupboards in search of something expendable, it occurred to him that a pickled cucumber jar might be just the ticket. Once a week, Dan schlepped to Golders Green to buy bagels and a couple of jars of his favorite new green cucumbers. New greens had a distinctive sour taste, which he preferred to the sweet-and-sour taste of ordinary pickles. New greens were also longer and darker. In fact, size and shapewise, they were not dissimilar to the average healthy stool.

Dan reached up and took one of the sturdy screw-top jars down from its cupboard. It was slightly shorter than he'd thought, but he hoped the turd he produced would be of a consistency to curl up and hunker down. He tipped the pickled cucumbers into a Tupperware container and soaked off the Mrs. Elswood label under a hot running tap. He reckoned that pickles were probably pretty sterile, but thought he'd boil up a kettle of water and rinse out the jar just to be on the safe side.

Harvesting the sample was no problem as he still had the trots. He waited until Anna was watching a Tenko rerun on UK Gold and then went up to the bathroom to deliver his payload.

Afterwards Dan quickly screwed on the jar lid. He decided that the sample had to be kept fresh until the next morning. He put it at the back of the fridge in a brown paper bag and prayed that Anna wouldn't be overtaken in the night by a desperate yearning for a new green cucumber. For added protection, he ring-fenced the jar with some items he was pretty confident his wife would not be seeking out over the next twelve hours. These included a bottle of infant Calpol, some homemade chutney they'd bought at the school summer fete six months ago and a bottle of the most disgusting no-fat salad dressing.

What Dan hadn't been able to see the next day as he opened the door of the doctor's surgery was a three-year-old boy, with a chesty cough and a stream of green snot hanging down from his nose, careering around the waiting room on a small wooden tricycle. At the exact moment Dan walked in, the child was a few feet away revving his handlebars and making irritating broom-brooming noises through his catarrh as he prepared to do a hit-and-run on a baby just old enough to sit up, and who was busy on the floor chewing on a Playmobil pirate. Hours later, Dan still couldn't remember precisely what happened, but in a split second, the baby's mother, sensing imminent danger, had scooped up her child, leaving the speeding toddler a clear path to crash into Dan and send both him and the cucumber jar flying.

It took Dan a few moments to get his breath back and lift himself into a sitting position, but by that time the little boy had unscrewed the lid and had his nose deep inside the jar. He then proceeded to lift it high above his head and began showing it off like the Jules Rimet cup to everybody in the waiting room.

"Look, man done a great big smelly poo-poo like my do. Why has man done poo in jar and not in va twoilet?"

For a few seconds there was an ominous silence. This was followed by what can only be described as a universal waiting-room retch-in, after which the little boy's mother started to have hysterics. These involved her climbing up onto her chair, lifting up her skirt and screaming for somebody to remove that thing, as if Dan's turd were about to sprout legs and whiskers and start scurrying about the surgery. This led to a widespread panic among the pensioners, who all made a surprisingly aerobic dash for the door, but were forced to a halt when their walking frames, sticks and shopping trolleys ended up logjammed in the narrow hallway.

In a matter of seconds, the receptionist had relieved the toddler of Dan's stool sample, but by that time Dan had escaped out of the emergency exit. Five minutes later he was back at his desk writing an intro to a piece on the effect on the FTSE-100 of recent profit-taking in Wall Street.

DAN WAS JUST ABOUT TO TURN INTO THE PARK AND wondering how one went about changing GPs when he noticed a 1960 turquoise Ford Zephyr convertible pull into a parking bay on the other side of the road. A moment later, Brenda got out, looking as if she had completely lost her sartorial marbles.

ANNA WAS BEGINNING TO PANIC. THE TRAFFIC ON THE Eastbound lane of the North Circular was at a complete standstill. The roads had been clear until just after Hanger Lane roundabout, but for the best part of ten minutes she had moved no more than a few feet. She couldn't help thinking that if they still lived in Blackheath the journey to Manor Park would have taken no more than half an hour. Not that the proximity of Blackheath to Manor Park Jewish Cemetery was a reason for moving back. Anna had loved Blackheath and all the friends she had there and had been mightily pissed off with Dan for demanding they move simply because some examination league table or other had insisted that state schools in the London Borough of Richmond got some of the best General Certificate of Secondary Education results in the country. So now they lived on the outskirts of one of the poshest areas of London, and were struggling every month to pay a whacking great mortgage on an Edwardian town house, just so Dan didn't have to send his children to private schools and could pretend he was still an ideologically sound socialist.

Anna had passed most of the time frantically twiddling the tuner on the car radio, trying to find the local traffic news, but kept getting some Talk Radio shrink doing a phone-in. The rest of the time she had spent staring at the room settings in Leather Universe, the furniture hypermarket, which was set back a few yards from the road. A particularly gruesome lounge setting caught her eye. This had, without doubt, been put together from artifacts plundered from Liberace's tomb, because it included a lavender suede three-piece, a zebra-skin hearthrug and a white-and-gold baby grand complete with four-branch candelabra.

Anna took another look at her watch. It was nearly half past two. She was never going to get to the burial ground by three. She decided the best thing to do was to abandon any idea of trying to make it to the cemetery. Instead she would head straight for Uncle Henry's house in Manor Park, where everybody was due to come back for the traditional postinterment tea.

The bugger of it was that because she had missed the actual burial, Gloria had undoubtedly lost important daughter-parading time.  Now she would have to make it up to her mother by hanging around until after the rabbi had been to the house to conduct evening prayers. These probably wouldn't start until after seven, which meant she wouldn't be back until ten. Anna reached into the glove compartment for the mobile phone. As she dialed home, she hoped desperately that this wasn't Denise's night for her line dancing, and that the baby-sitter could be bribed with the promise of a few extra quid in her pay packet to stay on until Dan got home.

It took over an hour for the traffic to crawl up to the Brent Cross turnoff, where for no apparent reason it melted away. Anna put her foot firmly on the accelerator. She could see a set of traffic lights a few hundred yards down the road. They had just turned green. She decided if they stayed green until she had gone through them, then she would find a lover within the week and she wouldn't have to phone Liaisons Dangereux and make an awful video. They did.

Brenda was wearing a short red-and-white-checked gingham dress with puffed sleeves, white ankle socks and red sparkly shoes.  She'd got her bleached blond hair in two wiry plaits held in place by glittery ribbons, which matched her shoes. A Yorkshire terrier puppy yapping under her arm completed her grits-and-hominy ensemble.

She hadn't seen Dan because she was busy trying to control the puppy, which was wriggling and squirming to get down onto the pavement, probably to cock its leg up a traffic warden. At the same time, Brenda was attempting to rummage through her brown leather school satchel for parking meter money.

Dan, although baffled, had taken one look at Brenda's getup and experienced an immediate lightening of his mood, together with a temporary restoration of his sense of humor. He decided to sneak up and surprise her.

He approached Brenda from behind on what would have been tiptoes had he not been wearing a pair of brand-new Oxford brogues which were still rock hard and almost impossible to bend even when walking normally.

By now, Brenda had put a pound in the meter, but still had her back to him as she stood thumbing through a Nicholson's Streetfinder. Dan tapped her twice on the shoulder.

"What's the problem, Bren? You and Toto having trouble finding the Yellow Brick Road?" To Dan's disappointment and annoyance, Brenda didn't flinch. She'd clearly caught sight of him as he crossed the road.

"Wrong film, stupid," she said, reaching up to kiss him on both cheeks and nearly squashing the dog in the process. "F'your information, this is the prototype for the Sweet FA Pollyanna look I'm gonna be launching in Milan next summer. Me and the team thought it was time we got a bit more cutting edge--more Vivienne Westwood."

DAN COULDN'T HELP THINKING THAT IF BRENDA WASN'T careful, all she would be launching next summer would be a new range of straitjackets together with the latest Sweet FA fragrance, Eau de Largactyl. But for the time being, she sounded fairly sane, even if she didn't look it. She was on her way to do a home fitting with the actress-model wife of some worn-out millionaire rock star. She said she had twenty minutes or so to kill, and did Dan fancy a cuppa?

He held the yapping hound, who was called Keith, while Brenda hauled up the car's white-canvas hood. She locked Keith in the Zephyr, and she and Dan headed for a Cafe Rouge two or three hundred yards down the road. The young Aussie waiter couldn't take his eyes off Brenda's outfit. As he showed them to a table by the window, he seemed unable to prevent his thoughts becoming words. He pulled out a chair for Brenda. "You wouldn't prefer a tuffet, I suppose?" he asked. Brenda pretended not to hear. Dan ordered a decaf cappuccino (caffeine gave him palpitations) with skimmed milk (full fat gave him heartburn). Brenda asked for a Perrier with extra slices of lime.

The waiter went to the bar. "One Perrier, extra lime, one Why Bother," Dan heard him say.

Dan watched Brenda chew silently on her bits of lime without so much as wincing and then drop the bright-green crescent skins into the Ricard ashtray. Her mood seemed to have changed since coming into the restaurant. She had become very quiet and hadn't said a word for over a minute. In all the years Dan had known Brenda, he had never seen her looking so nervous and unsure of herself. It was as if she were trying to pluck up the courage to say something, but couldn't. Dan decided to help her out.

"C'mon, Bren, speak to me. What's up?"

Brenda looked at him without a trace of a smile or mischief on her face. She began picking at the lime skins.

The truth was that ever since giving Anna the newspaper ad for Liaisons Dangereux, she had been tormented by thoughts of how unspeakably wicked and disloyal she had been to Dan. Now she had bumped into him out of the blue, she felt she owed it to him to at least give him a vague hint that Anna might be up to something.  The problem was that she was frightened of saying too much and spilling all Anna's beans.

Excerpted from Neurotica by Sue Margolis
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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Neurotica

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