Nip 'N' Tuck (21 page)

He took a deep breath. ‘To
fall
in love, you actually have to take a
step
first.’ Cal turned the car into a quiet cul-de-sac. ‘And I’m kinda crippled that way. In fact I’m a foundin’ member of the Fear of Intimacy Support Group.’ He cut the ignition.

I protested as he turned off the radio. ‘Hey! I was wallowing in self-pity to that.’

He swivelled to face me. ‘But I think you might be the cure.’

‘Me?’

His eyes were opaque, and every muscle in his body was tensed taut, about to snap. ‘Liz, please suspend your disbelief for the duration of this next sentence. It’s you I love, Lizzie.’

There was a beat of stunned silence while I took in this information. The thin smoke of our breath evaporated before us.

‘I wanted to wait till things were over with you and Hugo before I told you. Liz, look, I know I’m a chain-smokin’ failed novelist. I’m an amoral piece of lapsed vegetarian scum. I’m guilty as charged. But I adore you. I always have and always will. You are the warmest, wittiest and most sexy woman in the world.’

I tried to speak but my uvula seemed to be in spasm.

‘On my organ donor card, it says, “For Lizzie Only”.’

My face in the visor mirror was a stupefied mask.

‘Um … Now would be a good time for you to say somethin’ nice about me.’ He smiled shyly.

I just looked at him, flummoxed. ‘You mean, the whole time you’ve been telling me to leave Hugo, to give up on my marriage, you’ve – you’ve had this other agenda?’

‘All right, maybe I tried to influence you a wee bit – that doesn’t make me a Serbian war criminal, does it? Can’t you forgive me?’

‘A
wee
bit? I thought you had my best interests at heart. I mean, you’re my best friend. Yet all that time, you had this … this … ulterior motive.’

‘Lizzie, I’m sorry. I’m gonna move into a geodesic dome, say, someplace in the Lake District, where I can take up an obscure religion and try to forget that I wasn’t honest with the woman I adore. But the truth is, I would have encouraged you to leave Hugo whether I adored you or not. Because he doesn’t deserve you, shug.’

‘But
you
do?’ I kept my expression neutral – as though trying to remember whether or not I’d left the iron on – while desperately concentrating on not rupturing a neck vein. ‘Isn’t the truth of the matter that you couldn’t get Victoria so why not go for second best?’ This was a pain too far.

‘You’re not second best! Though Hugo has made you feel that way. Your man doesn’t get you at all. And I’ve never fancied Victoria! The woman only has sex because she looks thinner lying down! My “mystery woman” has always been
you
. Can’t you see it, Lizzie? We’re so alike. We make the same jokes. We know each other inside out, Liz. We even finish each other’s—’

‘No, we don’t!’

‘I know what you’re thinkin’ before you even say it!’ ‘Well, then, I’m sorry you had to hear that,’ I blurted. ‘Please take me home. I just can’t talk about this. It’s too much right now.’

‘Liz …’ His eyebrows collided on his forehead.

‘No. Just take me home, okay?’ I said, in a voice as flat as Holland.

We drove in silence, finally twisting our way through the cobbled claustrophobic lanes of Hampstead. At the door of my house I clambered out of the car. ‘I’ll be in touch soon, okay? I promise, by tomorrow – or maybe next millennium.’

* * *

For the first time I felt the true vertiginous terror of losing my foundation, my rock, my husband, my Hugo. As an abandoned, unemployed mother of two, there was only one course of action. It was lit up with runway lights to guide my approach and I was on auto-pilot.

Entering the cosmetic-surgery clinic in Knightsbridge, a surge of exhilaration flooded my chest. I felt ethereal, airborne. The brittle, helmet-hairdo-ed nurse talked me through the procedures.

‘Insertion through the armpits or belly button reduces scarring. Pre-filled devices reduce leakage. Of course, implants have to be removed if there are ruptures. Or if a tough capsule of body tissue forms around the …’ she searched for the right euphemism ‘… device. It’s my duty to warn you that about one in ten implant patients need a second operation within five years.’

You might be thinking that the only rational response at this moment was to run screaming into the streets. But I was no longer a rational person. I was on the brink of forty and my husband was fucking my sister. ‘Book me in,’ I said.

The day of my operation, I awoke with one thought in my head, that inside every older person is a younger person screaming, ‘
Get me the hell outta here!
’ Why is it, I ask you, that just when a girl starts getting her head together, her body falls apart? That Mother Nature sure is one bitter, cynical ’n’ twisted, monumentally fucked-up, pre-menstrual malicious psycho.

‘Have you suffered from raised blood pressure, rheumatic fever or heart trouble?’ asked another coolly efficient nurse – this one seemed to have a Danish pastry on her head.

A
broken
heart – yes. ‘No,’ I said automatically.

‘Any other diseases or illnesses?’ the pastry asked, ticking off black boxes.

What about addiction to a certain medic? Did that count? ‘No.’

Stop! I told myself, as she stripped me down to a pair of paper panties and the surgeon drew dots and dashes all over my chest with a felt-tip. Run! This is ridiculous. Did I really want to become a graduate of the Inferiority Complex Institute? What the hell happens to women once they hit forty? It was a question worth repeating. What the hell happens to women once they hit forty? I had read Proust – well, a couple of pages. I could sight-read Puccini. I’d interviewed Putin, Pinochet, Steinam, Mandela … I gazed agog at the doctor’s blue geometry. Yet in ten minutes I would be out cold on the slab. And this man would be slicing off my nipples with a carving knife. You know that bridge you’re always going to cross when you come to it? Well, I was at that bridge. At the doors of the operating theatre, the doctor paused, smiled, then led the way into surgery.

And I meekly shadowed him.

Going over the Niagara Falls at forty – there really is no choice but to get a bloody barrel.

23

Shopping and Tucking

A WOMAN PLANNING
to have breast implants is advised to follow a few simple procedures. By taking a couple of minutes the day before the operation to do these practical exercises you will be totally prepared for the surgery.

First, remove top and bra. Next lie down upon the street, placing your breasts directly behind the back wheels of a ten-ton lorry. Shout, ‘Reverse.’ Or simply detach the safety guard from a household electric fan and hurl yourself chest forward into the rotating blades. To complete the preparation process, locate nearest boxing ring. Remove upper garments, and permit the use of your breasts as punch-bags until they are black and blue and bruised all over.

You are now prepared for the augmentation experience. Enjoy!

Motes of darkness swarmed around me as I came to. The first thing that hit me was the pain. Giving birth without an epidural did not come close. My lungs scrambled for air. I made a groggy reconnoitre of my ribcage, which was tightly strapped in bandages. Two clear tubes ran out from the sides of my chest and dripped into buckets. This cocktail of yellow slime and blood would have had me fainting in revulsion, except I could not at this stage crane my head to look into the bucket. Even miniscule movement sent me screaming for morphine.

The doctor had ordered me to keep the bandages on for a week. But as soon as I got home the next day curiosity got the better of me. I stood before the mirror. The trembling weakness in my limbs made every movement an aching effort. But little by little I peeled away the dressings. In horrified fascination, I examined the puffy, weeping red skin, mottled in technicolour bruises and the angry, throbbing stitches carved beneath each nipple. I’d been warned that I wouldn’t be able to shower or sleep on my stomach or fit into any of my clothes. But no one had ever mentioned the cruellest restriction; that I wouldn’t be able to cuddle my kids. The children were unsettled and anxious because Hugo had moved out – he’d been sleeping at the clinic since Antigua. On my return from surgery Jamie and Julia ran down the front path to me with open arms – and I had to push them away. I had never felt so sick, so sorry and so, well, wrong. Joan Crawford had nothing on me. Worse still, glancing up I saw Cal leaning against his kitchen door, arms folded, watching this humiliating ‘Mummy Dearest’ moment.

I immediately rang the surgery and booked in for liposuction of the neck, chin, stomach, hips, thighs and buttocks, along with eyelid surgery, lip implants and a facial peel.

A cheating husband will do that to you. I had to win him back, any bloody way I could. My self-esteem was threatening to contact Amnesty International – but, still, I dialled.

24

Ladies and Gentlemen, Due to Illness, Tonight the Part of Lizzie McPhee Will Be Played by Pamela Anderson … Now Sit Back and Enjoy the Show

TWO MONTHS AND
one complete ideological U-turn later, I’d nipped, tucked, sucked, plucked, bobbed, boobed, peeled and pilled. There was not much of the old body left. It had been exchanged, bit by bit, for the body of a teenager. I’d had eyes lifted, neck lowered and legs lipo-ed. I’d been collagened and botoxed and lasered to Bride of Wildestein standards.

Twenty thousand blackheads had been squeezed, forty billion hair strands dyed, forty-five thousand acres of cellulite pummelled, three trillion body hairs tweezed, ten whales’ worth of blubber Hoovered. I had so much tanning-bed exposure my
eyelids
had melanomas.

Did I mention I was now a dumb blonde too? A peroxy-moron, you might say. Yep, I was totally bleach-dependent. Extensions made my hair look longer and stronger. A profiterole of lavish curls crowned my newly blonded cranium. It was a beehive piled so high it was dangerous to walk under bridges bearing Maximum Height signs. This was a hairdo that could survive a direct nuclear hit with no adverse effect on its buoyancy.

By systematically starving myself I was soon able to show off my new solarium-tanned limbs in dresses the size of a postage stamp. A very gaudy postage stamp. Believe me, I made Elton John look underdressed. It was not possible to walk, stand or sit without revealing primary and secondary sex organs.

My dresses were cut low to show off a pair of exuberant breasts. My new boobs were so huge it would be more appropriate really to say that my
chest
had had a
Lizzie McPhee
implant.

By joining the jut-set I had stepped through the mirror, into another world. I was now the Empress of a new-found land called Beauty. I was straw Rumpelstiltskinned into gold. I suddenly found myself surrounded by silent, staring men – from security guards to taxi drivers, they just stood there, ogling my boobs and blonde hair. They winked, they wolf-whistled, they offered to sacrifice their firstborn to cop a feel. When shaking my hand, they tickled my inner palm with a suggestive forefinger as though inducting me into a secret society.

Every sentence I uttered was greeted by men as the wittiest
bon mot
since Dorothy Parker presided over the Round Table. And it was so damn easy. Victoria was right. Any girl can be alluringly intelligent. All you have to do is stand still and look brain-dead.

Now I was ready to see Hugo. One bright April morning, all pink blossoms and perfumed air, I sailed majestically into his office at the Longevity Clinic. (I had not seen him since Antigua. Marrakech, who had temporarily moved in, had been kindly ferrying our bewildered offspring back and forth to the clinic to see their father so that I wouldn’t have to face him.) Agog, my husband took in the New Me. Hugo beamed so maniacally, he looked like a man who’d forgotten to take his medication.

‘These are not my real breasts,’ I assured him. ‘I’m just breaking them in for a friend.’

‘Wow! Wow! Wow!’ Hugo was more excited than he’d been by the births of our babies. I thought he might take out an ad – ‘I would like to announce the birth of a new chest. Mother and boobies doing well.’

Some medical practices tell you the bad news to your face. Others send the bill my mail.

I’d come, ostensibly, to persuade my husband to settle my accounts. When I mentioned the £4,300 cost of the implants – ‘What the hell are they made of?
Caviar?
’ Hugo flourished his chequebook. He also moved home immediately, much to the children’s delight, showering us with gifts paid for by the money pouring into his Longevity Clinic. Jamie stopped being savaged by nightmares that his Batman and Robin sheets were trying to attack him. And Julia no longer left her toy horse’s decapitated head in my bed. Nor were Hugo and I in the non-smoking restaurant section of marriage any more either. We were now in the Hot Curry, Cigars Welcome, Extra Butter With Everything, Deep Fry It All, High Cholesterol, All You Can Eat, Heart-attack Diner.

And a heart-attack is what I thought Hugo might have upon discovering that he was not the only man to find me attractive. When other men flirted with me, my husband sported a range of facial expressions more commonly seen on a bull, mid-castration. When I flirted back it became Hugo’s turn to lie lachrymosely awake, worrying over what – or who – I was doing.

I even got my old job back.

At the theatre one night I bumped into Raphael, my X-generational ex-boss who proceeded to choke on his own superlatives.

‘Lizzie! Darling, hi. Well, wow, sweetie, you look, well, wow! A-bloody-mazing. In-fucking-credible!’ He was like an estate agent on amphetamines. ‘Whatcha been up to?’ he said excitedly to one breast. ‘Been keeping busy?’ he said to the other.

‘Oh, unattaching various facial protuberances from my skull and having them re-upholstered helped to pass a month or two. What about you?’

‘You know what?’ He addressed both breasts. ‘I see an opening for you back at the Beeb.’ (He pronounced ‘Beeb’ as if it were the plural of ‘boob’.) At least I now understood why men are so bad at making eye contact. Tits don’t have eyes.