Further Under the Duvet (13 page)

Which brings me to my problem. How do you break it off with your hairdresser? There is no etiquette in the Western world for cleanly and unequivocally ending a relationship with anyone other than a lovair. Has anyone ever sat down with a same-sex friend and said gently, ‘It used to be great but, out of nowhere, you’re boring as fuck. All you talk about is your children. I’m looking for someone who cares about shoes and
Big Brother
.’

Likewise, there’s no mechanism for ending it with a dentist, an optician or, in my case, a hairdresser. What can you do? Give them the ‘I’ve met someone else’ speech? The ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ riff? They’d think you were mad.

My only option was subterfuge. I deliberately began to make appointments on Jimmy’s days off. ‘Oh Jimmy’s not in then, is he not? That’s a shame. Well, er, would Christian be available instead?’

The day came, of course, when Jimmy caught me. I’d been becoming more and more careless. You could almost say I wanted to be caught, that all that dishonesty and sneaking around was getting too much.

It wasn’t pleasant, how could it be? Jimmy, though he hid it well, was hurt and humiliated and Christian and I were wretched with guilt.

Even now, occasionally, I still catch Jimmy watching me with wounded eyes. But Christian is officially my hairdresser, everyone knows it. All the angst and anxiety? Well, it was worth it.

First published in
Cara,
December 2003
.

I remember the first time I discovered my face didn’t fit. I was six and had a smiley, chubby-cheeked little brother and a toddler sister who was a dark-eyed angel, a real beauty. A distant cousin of my mother who was about to get married met us and decided my exquisite sister would make an adorable addition to her wedding party. Train-bearer, perhaps, or mini-bridesmaid. However, on account of not being exquisite, I wasn’t required. Until the distant cousin discovered that my sister was not only beautiful but dangerously strong-willed (they often seem to go together. Does plainness make us meek?) and mightn’t be relied upon to march up the aisle at the appropriate time. So a token position was created for me (flower girl, as I recall, although what I really was was a bouncer) to be on hand to keep my baby sister under control. Of course I should have told them to get lost. But hey, I was six, there was a long dress involved, my hair was going to be ‘up’, I got to carry flowers…

This episode, although terribly upsetting, didn’t come as a complete shock. Even before then I’d always hated having my photograph taken and used to make horrific faces for the camera on the questionable pretext that if I made myself super-ugly they wouldn’t notice the ordinary, workaday ugliness lurking beneath.

God only knows where such neurosis comes from. I’ve been over my life with a fine-tooth comb, searching for trauma, for that one moment when I began to hate myself and, to my great disappointment, I’ve found nothing at all. I had a stable, perfectly ordinary upbringing and whatever notions I’ve developed about my appearance I’ve got to take responsibility for myself.

I carried this self-hatred through my teenage years (aarrghh!) and into adulthood, where it sometimes got easier but never went away. Okay, it’s not all my fault. We live in look-tastic times and are bombarded with unreachable standards of beauty. Unformed adolescent girls are used to sell clothes to thirty-something women. Images of models are photographically enhanced so their skin is inhumanly translucent and their bodies drastically elongated and thinned down. Indeed, Cindy Crawford was quoted recently as saying, ‘Some mornings even I don’t wake up looking like Cindy Crawford.’ On my good days I know none of it is real but, even on my best days, I can’t help trying. Or at least having the decency to feel wretched when I fail dismally.

I’ve never met a woman who was entirely happy with her appearance, there always seems to be at least one thing they’d change, but – and it shocks me to admit it – I like almost nothing about mine. Not that I waste time raging against it, at least not all the time – just when I’ve PMT, or need to buy an outfit for a wedding, or meet someone I was in school with who’s had three children but is still a size ten…

Over the years I’ve done enough therapy and picked up enough pop-psychology to know that none of this is about what I look like, but how I feel about myself. I’ve learnt that
most ‘ugliness’ is in the head, that even people who objectively speaking are dazzlingly beautiful have it, but actually there are tons of things that really
are
wrong with me. Kicking off with – tricky ears. People sometimes complain of having big, sticky-out ears. In fact a good friend of mine (a babe, always was, always will be) had a spell of Sellotaping her ears to her head every night for about a month when she was twelve. Then she stopped, coming to her senses at the same time as she ran out of Sellotape. But I don’t have sticky-out ears. No, it’s worse. I have sticky-out
ear
.

That’s right, just the one. The other ear is small and neat and flat against my head. I discovered the disparity when I was fourteen and examining myself in the mirror (I was a teenager, I did little else). Suddenly the horror dawned.
Where did my other ear go?

As a result I can’t have short hair or wear my hair off my face because my great aural lopsidery becomes laughably obvious. In fact, during another intense teenage inspection, I discovered that my entire face is asymmetrical. I can often get away with it in real life if I keep talking animatedly and never let my face settle into stillness. But in photographs, when I’m frozen in place, the horrible truth becomes evident and I look like something Picasso painted in his cubist period. (And I’m not looking for your pity here but in my line of work I have to get my picture taken
a lot
and I can’t tell you how many hours of my life have been wasted with photographers faffing about with lighting and lenses and angles, but no matter how much they faff the end result is always that I end up looking like Dora Maar.)

And that’s just from the neck up. Don’t get me started on
the rest. My body is a battleground and there are a couple of ‘friends’ that I’m trying to avoid seeing because the first thing they always do is ‘weigh’ me, with a scathing, gimlet-eyed once-over. Bad enough for me to judge myself, but I’m not going to take it from someone else. (I’ve a feeling this is a good thing, a sign of maturity.) Believe me, I
know
when I’m putting on weight – it usually coincides with me breathing. The thing is, I’m in a double bind because I eat sweets when I’m anxious and unhappy but when I’m at peace I don’t go to the gym. The result? Ever increasing girth where shopping for clothes becomes a torment. I love clothes, especially the ones the unformed sixteen-year-olds try to flog me, but I return from shopping trips in a blind fury, shamed and embarrassed at how strange I look in the merchandise. The only time I come home happy is when I’ve inadvertently tried on things in shops with mirrors that lean forward and knock ten pounds off my silhouette. Idiot that I am, I believe what I see – until I try the stuff on in front of my own un-forgivably upright mirror. (For some time now I’ve wanted to start a Name-and-Shame campaign of those swizz-merchant shops. Is anybody with me? Let’s storm the changing rooms!)

Misery with how I look is a bit like a flu. I can carry on happily for quite a while without feeling any symptoms, then it can hit like a ton of bricks. A couple of years ago I was suddenly assailed with my old trouble and a friend suggested I try hypnotism; she herself had gone and emerged one blissful hour later, floating with confidence, self-regard and inner peace. I couldn’t make an appointment fast enough. But mine was a different therapist and when I arrived at her office, instead of lying me on a couch and telling me I felt sleepy,
she sat me on a chair and asked me about my relationship with my father. Anxiously I told her I was here about the hypnotism, the instant fix, not another bout of therapy. Whereupon she told me there was no instant fix and that until she knew all about me, she couldn’t help me. At that point I almost wept, then got up to leave, so sulkily she agreed to try a bit of hypnotism. Still sitting in the chair, I closed my eyes, while she intoned, ‘You are going down, down, deeper and down. Down, down, deeper and down. Downdowndeeperanddown.’ At that point, I snapped my eyes open and it took everything in my power not to leap to my feet playing my air-guitar, singing that Status Quo song. (‘Down, down, deeper ’n’ down. Ner-ner-ner-ner!’ Shake those shaggy dos, baby!)

Anyway, the hypnotism didn’t work and, paradoxically, this whole business has got easier as I’ve got older. And not just because I feel that once I’m old people won’t care what I look like, that they’ll be far more interested in my personality. (Mind you, I’m sometimes tempted to lie about my age and say that I’m older than I am. If I tell people I’m fifty-two instead of thirty-nine, they’ll think I look great. They might even say, ‘You know, her figure isn’t bad for a woman in her fifties.’ See, context is
everything
.)

The stuffing has definitely been knocked out of my inner demons; maybe it’s all the therapy I did or perhaps I’m finally growing up. After all, obsession with one’s appearance is embarrassingly adolescent, and actually gets quite boring after a while. Not to mention time-consuming; frankly, these days I’m too busy to free up the time to hate myself.

Constant exposure to my limitations has brought me to
the point where I can see photos of myself, observe idly, ‘Christ, I look horrific,’ and move on. Instead I’ve got quite adept at focusing on the good in me. (Examples thereof: I often buy
The Big Issue
; I am kind to animals even though I’m afraid of them; I have never hit a photographer and I wish Cindy Crawford well.)

Most important, though, is a point my mother once made to me when I’d subjected her to a mad, energetic rant about my hairy legs. She listened patiently, nodded sympathetically, then answered, ‘At least you have legs.’ She’s right, of course.

First published in
Woman and Home,
May 2003
.

The nicest bit of news I got in recent years was that we’re not allowed to sunbathe any more. I never enjoyed it; the
boredom
of lying there with sweat running into my hair and I couldn’t even talk to the people I was with because they were devoted sun-lovers who believed that conversation cancels out the action of the sun’s rays. Anyway, sunbathing never worked for me. I seem to be the only person in the world who has different types of skin on different parts of the body, and this is how I took the sun: feet – golden; stomach – mahogany; shins – Germolene pink; face – bluey-white with an overlay of freckles. The cherry on the cake: my Red Nose Day nose. At the end of two weeks in the sun I looked like a patchwork quilt.

But now, courtesy of the hole in the ozone layer, I’m off the hook. (You see, it’s not all bad news, this ecological disaster stuff.) And this is where fake tans come in. (Except we’re not really allowed to call it ‘fake’ any more. ‘Self’ tanning or ‘sunless’ tanning is what it’s about.) However, it’s not always plain sailing. Let’s consider the following.

What do you hate the most?

a) the horrific smell

b) the curse of the orange paw

c) the tie-dyed effect on your heels

d) the hour of ‘Riverdancing’ in your pelt, as you wait to dry

e) the indelible brown stains on your clothes and sheets

f) all of the above

If I may come back to the horrific smell. The first time I ever ‘did’ myself, I went to bed, only to wake in terror in the middle of the night, wondering what the unspeakable stink was. Could it be the devil? Wasn’t he supposed to be preceded by dreadful, poo-type smells? Quaking with fear, I peeped over the covers, expecting to see coal-red eyes and a thick, forked tail, only to discover that the choking stench was none other than my freshly tanned self. In recent years, the cosmetic companies have been working hard on diluting the ferocious pong and now some brands even claim to have ‘a pleasant fragrance’. Yes, indeed they
do
have a pleasant fragrance. But mark me well here, that’s
as well as
, that’s
in addition to
, the extremely
un
pleasant fragrance that is the hallmark of all self-tanners.

I have made every fake-tan mistake in the book.

Elementary mistake number one: I was in a mad hurry for a colour and decided that one thick layer would do just as well as several thin layers. Forty shades of orange ensued and I couldn’t leave the house for a week.

Elementary mistake number two: Believing the claims of swizzy salespeople who care only about their commission and don’t give a damn about your tan. I won’t shame them by naming them, but I was persuaded by a flamboyant queen in
Los Angeles to shell out plenty on his brand. He used it himself, he told me, for ‘baking and browning’. (Himself, that is.) Convinced by his Tangoesque visage, I duly coughed up, but all I got was a mild dose of the streaks and the orangest palms I’ve ever seen; if I’d held them upwards, they could have been seen from outer space. I learnt two important lessons from this tragic encounter. One, I discovered surgical gloves. Not only will they save you from the curse of the orange paw, but you can have an
ER
moment when you snap them on. Two, the same brand doesn’t work the same way for everyone.

Elementary mistake number three: I decided to do it properly. I’d do wafer-thin layers and leave plenty of time to dry between applications. The only thing is, I got a little obsessive about it and it kind of took over my life. I’d apply a layer, then do some free-style dancing in my pelt waiting for it to dry, then I’d apply another layer and do some more dancing around my room, and when the colour still hadn’t come yet, I’d apply another layer. At some point, the end product of a tan no longer seemed to matter so much, it was simply the doing it that became important (which is how self-help gurus are always telling us to live our lives.)

So there I was, having a lovely time dancing and humming and thinking lovely thoughts, I’d even enlisted a floaty red scarf to waft about over my head, when Himself walked into the room and yelped, ‘Jesus Christ!’ I thought it was the free-style dancing and stopped abruptly, a little mortified by the scarf. ‘Look at yourself,’ he urged. ‘Look!’