Nip 'N' Tuck (14 page)

I snagged the sleeve of her lacy Moschino cocktail dress with my little finger. ‘Lock up your daughters, dogs and all house plants. Sven’s back in town.’

‘And your hostile, hateful point would
be
… ?’ my sister said brusquely, flicking a long blonde frond of her silken hair into my face.

I hooked a thumb in Marrakech’s direction. ‘Some men love that new car smell, you know?’

‘Sven’s in love with
me
. He does
not
have sex with underage models,’ she snapped.

‘Victoria, that man’s underpants could be inducted into the Hall of Infamy. He beds so many girls he needs a
placement
on his
pillows
.’

‘He’s just trying to help my daughter kick-start a career … Which is why I’m very pleased Marrakech wanted to come with me tonight.’

‘Victoria, no model can get into his books until she’s served the probationary two-year bulimia period.’

‘Actually Marrakech could do with losing a few pounds.’

‘Um … if Mother Nature had wanted our skeletons to be visible, I have a strong suspicion that she would have put them on the outside of our bodies. Look at them.’ I gestured to the room of surly-mouthed, sunken-eyed, slouch-shouldered, angular waifs. ‘They’re so weak with malnutrition it looks like they just escaped from a supermodel Mental Institution. Speaking of the mentally challenged, what makes you so sure he’s in love with you and not Britney?’

‘He only got engaged to her to attract publicity for the clinic. It’s a business thing. A publicity stunt.’

‘It’s only a business thing?’ A thick stew of doubt began to simmer in my subconscience.

‘Where
is
Hugo by the way? Gosh, I don’t see
Britney
anywhere either,’ Victoria added, in mock astonishment.

A spasm of anxiety darted raggedly through my skull as my eyes zigzagged around the party. ‘Hugo is
not
having an affair with Britney Amore.’

My sister gave me a pitying look. She dug down the front of her low-cut dress, extracted two breast-shaped pieces of silicone and flopped them into my lap, nipple side up, where they quivered like old-fashioned 1950s beige jellies. ‘Cleavage enhancers. That’s what you need, darling. Then perhaps you could keep your husband and find a job.’

This was a sore point. I had now been out of work for five months. I wasn’t being picky either – having rejected only pole-dancing and chicken-sexing as possible career paths. Flinching, I picked up the trembling blobs as though they were toxic, and stuffed them back down her
décolletage
in disgust. ‘Women ask for bigger breasts, but what they really should be asking for is a personality. A life, maybe.’

My panic attack was interrupted by two gay, nude, male synchronized swimmers who disrobed and slithered into the pool. With all eyes in the grotto riveted in that direction, Britney Amore chose that moment to emerge from the adjacent Jacuzzi. And who was hovering nearby with a towel, but my very own husband, Hugo Frazer MBChB, FRCS, MD, FDSRCS.

‘Oh, I see the Smut-o-gram’s here,’ Victoria hissed.

We watched as Britney’s breasts heaved into sight through the foam. They seemed to have grown even bigger. It looked as though she was trying to shoplift a king-size Guinevere waterbed out of a store by hiding it down her bikini top. ‘Oh, my God. Do you think she’s had them enlarged
again
?’ I asked, horrified.

‘Noooo,’ said my sister, with eye-rolling sarcasm. ‘She’s obviously a genetic mutation.’

Until then, the potential investors had adopted a convincingly professional ‘it’s-all-in-a-day’s-work’ façade of cheerful, slightly sweaty bonhomie. But at the sight of Britney’s stupendous spheres they ogled, they gape-jawed, they drooled. Breast implants are like TV evangelists: you know they’re fake but you can’t stop watching them.

Britney Amore caught my gaze. She gave a sleek, self-satisfied smile before planting a kiss on the lips of my husband. Actually it was more than just a kiss. It was a lower-lip sandwich.

I felt a fist clench in my abdomen. Maybe I could drown her by putting a mirror on the bottom of the Jacuzzi? My deep existential cleavage crisis was interrupted by Victoria barrelling back over, dragging Marrakech.

‘Do you know what my bloody daughter’s doing
now
? She’s writing to some
maniac
on Death
Row
. In
Florida
. That’s why she’s here. Not to sign up to be a model, but to get the rich and famous to sign her letter to the Governor of Texas asking for clemency for this …’ she seized a bystander’s cigarette and sucked in a lungful of tar ‘
inmate
.’

‘Aunty Liz,’ Marrakech sighed, resignedly, struggling to free herself from her mother’s ferocious grip, ‘do you think it’s too late to put myself up for adoption? Mum, you’re just mad ’cause I’m not following in your footsteps down the catwalk.’

‘I’m mad because I
believe
in capital punishment,’ my sister fumed indignantly. ‘Where would Christianity be today if Jesus had got seven to ten years with time off for good behaviour?’

Sven, who’d been eavesdropping, sidled up and checked the skirt label on the inside of Marrakech’s waistband. ‘Yep,’ he schmoozed. ‘“Made In Heaven”.’

‘My
daughter
has become a piece of
fly
-paper for
freaks
,’ Victoria explained to Sven, through gritted teeth. ‘We’ve decided to find it charming.’

Sven smiled in Marrakech’s direction – the way a cobra would smile if a cobra could smile. ‘How coincidental! I won’t sign any girl who only wants to be a “face”. We do insist on all our little girls developing a yen for human rights or at least showing an interest in Ecuadorian literacy projects or the Disabled Olympics. We have public-appearance days built into our contracts.’

‘Really?’ Marrakech drank in his words with open-mouthed amazement.

‘It’s so easy to morph from a model into a
spokes
model,’ Sven elaborated, oozing sincerity. ‘We have six UN goodwill ambassadors on our books. Tell me about this poor innocent man,’ he sympathized, placing a ministerial arm around her shoulders.

‘I’ve started a fighting fund for Bruce “The Tooth” Jackson. He’s in Gainsville Maximum Security Institution. He’s been on Death Row for, like, nineteen years. Unless he gets an appeal he’s going to the chair …’ Marrakech shuddered. ‘But I only earn, like, five quid an hour.’

‘Jesus. Where are ya working? A
rice paddy
?’

‘Um. No. Babysitting. For Aunty Liz mostly.’

‘I could offer you a thousand quid an hour …’ He looked at my niece. It was that calculated expression again – of a predator surveying his prey. ‘… to use your natural assets to make money to save the life of the innocent Mr Tooth – that way you can really “give back”,’ he said, employing the current buzz-phrase of the Bill Gates-Ted Turner super-rich.

‘Yes I’m sure it must be fulfilling to know what comfort Britney’s swimwear work has brought to men in maximum-security prisons.’ But my catty remark was drowned out by a poolside melodrama involving the generously beloined synchronized male swimmers. The nude amphibians had an act that featured a substantial amount of backstroke but unfortunately Sven had turned off the heat in the pool for fear that the humidity would damage his African art works. The shrinkage factor in our pouting nautical supremos was greeted with dismay. Their duet suddenly included a lot of front crawl to reach the pool’s edge, where they flounced out to sulk in bathrobes. The ensuing kerfuffle ensured that it was five minutes before I noticed that Britney and my husband had disappeared from the grotto.

I darted my hand deep inside my sister’s brassière, appropriated her plastic tits, shoved them down my own bra then dashed from room to room, trying to find Hugo, as fast as my idiotic stilettos would carry me. I flung open door after door, with my sister chasing me, until I finally, pantingly, located my husband in the ornately decorated upstairs drawing room. It was all leatherbound books (which nobody ever read) and bow-legged antique bureaux – (carved, of course, from the trees of endangered rainforests) tottering on legs so spindly they looked as if they might canter off across the Persian carpets.

But instead of finding Hugo
in flagrante
, I had caught him prostituting himself in an entirely new way.

A cluster of wide-eyed angular models (we’re talking Hail-a-Bimbo) and prospective investors were gathered respectfully around my husband.

‘Let’s face it,’ Sven was saying, ‘no one’s gonna employ you if they’ve seen better heads on a pimple. Are they, Doc?’

Hugo frowned at my arrival and turned his back slightly, excluding me, before moving his heavy medical artillery into intellectual place. ‘Personal experience
is
a vital consideration at job interviews. In the chronically anxious future, people may feel they cannot afford
not
to be surgically restructured,’ my husband essayed knowledgeably.

The audience hung on his every word, smiling radiantly at Hugo’s genius. My husband glittered. He shone. He was like a deity. A Doc-o-crat. When did doctors get to rule the world like this? I wondered, hovering outside the circle. I listened, nauseated, as he went boldly where bad taste and banality had never gone before.

‘Ageing is like a clock. At the Longevity Clinic we can’t turn it back but we can stop it ticking.’ His voice was sepulchrally deep, steeped in intellectual weight and authority.

‘And when, ya know, should ya, like, start?’ Despite the automatic smile, Heroin Chic had a remote, taxidermied look in her eyes. Sven should have just whacked her up on the wall, really.

Sven touched her pale, fragile cheek. ‘Angel, it’s advisable to avoid all lines – except Cunard. You’re so beautiful, babe, but breast implants could really bring out the woman in you, you know. Augmentation’s no big deal. It’s just like trimming your split ends.’

A look of contemptuous sarcasm shrieked across my face. I hadn’t realized that you needed an anaesthetic to have a haircut followed by two weeks’ bed rest. But, under strict instructions to ‘blend in’, I just radiated a numb silence
.

‘J’know why the space between a woman’s tits and hips is called a “waist”?’ Sven chortled. ‘ ’Cause you could fit another pair of boobs in there! … In and out. Home in one day. And it doesn’t hurt, either. Not with the famous Hugo Frazer MD wielding the scalpel.’

I gawked at Hugo. He’d obviously forgotten to pay his brain bill. It was clearly time to have my husband sectioned under the Mental Health Act
.

‘I do aim for minimal discomfort.’

‘
Minimal discomfort’, ‘quantum health’, ‘accelerated empowerment’, ‘wellness technology’, ‘facial rejuvenation’ – I listened distastefully, as Hugo and Sven dazzled the crowd with the obfuscatory jargon of cosmetic surgery
.

‘Dr Frazer?’ I blurted. ‘Isn’t “discomfort” the word plastic surgeons use to describe the excruciating agony of waking to find your tits all purple and oozing pus?’
Oh, when was I going to learn not to wear my heart on my sleeve? Hell, it’s so hard to accessorize
.

My husband’s eyebrows pyramided like a couple of copulating caterpillars. The select circle of cadaverously pale ‘posh modelling totty’ and prospective investors regarded me with sullen intensity. Sven scowled like a stage villain. I might as well have gone swimming in shark-infested waters while menstruating.

‘If implants make a woman feel better about herself, why not?’ Hugo preached, with evangelistic zeal. ‘It’s all about having control over your own life. Isn’t that what feminists are always saying?’

‘Here’s the choice, gals,’ Sven coaxed. ‘You can rail at an imperfect, male-dominated world – or you can go get yourself a great pair of bazongas. So what’s it gonna be?’

I realized then that it wasn’t the models I hated (I mean,
modelling
, it could be learnt by an advanced rodent) but their vampiric manipulators.

‘I’ll have y’all know that Hugo Frazer is an artist.’ Britney, still bikini-clad, wriggled next to Hugo and touched his arm in an overly familiar way. ‘The doc here, well, he makes better boobs than God!’

I felt something tearing inside me. The extremely irascible wolverine was back, trying to claw its way out of my abdomen via my throat. I threw my eyes up to the ceiling. ‘Actually you’re on a waiting list for canonization, aren’t you, Hugo?’ I ridiculed. (
Oh, yes! Public humiliation. Now
that’s
the way to win back one’s husband. I was obviously depriving some poor village somewhere of its idiot
.)

When Hugo concluded his sales pitch, he came over and seized my upper arm. His mouth had pinched up like an irritated anus. ‘It so happens,’ he whispered, though gritted teeth, ‘that since women already have fewer opportunities than men to get ahead professionally, an attractive body is a real asset.’ Then my husband delivered the killer blow. ‘Maybe then you wouldn’t have lost your job, Elisabeth.’

It was a solar-plexus punch, which left me reeling. His words just cut me down. I had to escape. Oh, where was a pair of ejector knickers when I needed them? Teetering unsteadily in my unaccustomed footwear across the treacherous antique rugs, I tripped, stumbled, buckled at the knees, and splattered, spreadeagled, on to the floor. Did I know how to ‘blend in’ or what?

And just to drive home the fact that Britney Amore was the ingrown pube in the bikini wax of my life, I caught sight of her from my recumbent position, placing an arm proprietorially through my husband’s. They looked, I realized dismally, the very image of a Power Couple.

Anger and indignation bubbled up inside me. Okay, models and actresses may all be gymmed and slimmed – but they need Personality Trainers to get their mental muscles into shape. You might be able to use my photo as a birth-control device, but I had a radiant personality. My personality was so radiant, I was positively giving myself melanomas.

Rehoiking my plastic tit-enhancers, I straightened up, shrugged off Victoria’s consoling hand and marched back into the middle of the room to dazzle my husband with virtuosic wit and aerobic wordplay.