Nip 'N' Tuck (25 page)

‘Jesus Christ. He
is
going to kill me!’ Hugo recoiled, eyes swivelling around the bar for witnesses, or preferably a SWAT anti-terrorist squad.

‘“Police Find Plastic Surgeon’s Head. Body Still Missing”,’ I said, rattling a spoon around my cup. ‘Now that’s what I call a headline.’

‘A headline. I geddit.’ Bruce snorted.

‘Listen, my good man, whatever my wife has offered you, I can treble it.’ Hugo steepled his hands, fingers entwined in that doctorly way, as though about to make a diagnosis. ‘I have always found Americans to be so reasonable, so good with people … I’m sure we can do a deal.’

Although my ex-husband extended his hand, Bruce the Tooth pointedly refused to shake it. His muscular tattooed arms remained firmly knotted across his heavily furred ribs. ‘Hey, do I look like a fuckin’ people person? Pardon my French, ma’am.’

‘Yes, it’s probably best for a man like you to keep your arms folded. Otherwise your knuckles would drag on the ground as you walk.’ Hugo slid abruptly across the booth.

‘Fine, don’t help us, Hugo,’ I said nonchalantly. ‘As long as you’re prepared for the testicular trauma and compound fractures that will no doubt follow.’

‘Don’t you worry,’ Bruce the Tooth drawled. ‘I ain’t never castrated a man I didn’t like.’

‘Don’t try to intimidate me. The answer is
no
,’ said Hugo, recoiling from Bruce the Tooth’s natural marinade of oil and onions. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a vat of penicillin I need to go and soak in …’

We watched him stride through the squalid foyer into the dusk. Then we followed him past bag-ladies holding animated conversations with invisible aliens and participants in what appeared to be a public urination festival against the eastern wall of the British Library. The air was gauzy with heat and car fumes. Beyond the towers of St Pancras, welts of grey cloud bruised the sky. A summer storm was simmering on the horizon.

Hugo was walking faster and faster, glancing furtively over his shoulder. Bruce the Tooth panthered behind him, weaving in and out of shadowy doorways. I reached my car and skidded out into the traffic. By the time I caught up with them, Hugo was virtually sprinting. Scrabbling to open his car door, my husband only had time to turn and scowl like that famous bust of Stalin before he was star-fished on the pavement. As I drew up, Bruce the Tooth flicked my husband effortlessly over one shoulder and threw him, as if he were a bag of golf clubs, into the back of my people-mover.

Rent a psycho: believe me, every girl should have one. Bruce the Tooth had attitude – and he knew how to use it. But then again, so did my half-sister. I’d left Victoria alone with Sven who was tethered helplessly to an operating table. I floored the accelerator. I’d known for a long time that life didn’t imitate art. But I had a curious feeling that mine was about to imitate
The Jerry Springer Show
.

28

Relying on the Kindness of Passing Serial Killers

AS A GENERAL
rule, ‘Do you know who I am?’ is almost always the wrong thing to say when you’re being held hostage by a six-foot-five felon with a switchblade.

These pompous words ensured that Hugo got another punch to the guts before being dragged through the basement stairwell of the Longevity Clinic, thrown into the lift and hauled into the fourth-floor surgery. It was a Sunday evening, and Harley Street was empty – no one would hear the muffled moans that were emanating from the operating theatre. I muscled open the swing doors to find Sven spreadeagled, stark naked, on the slab, arms and legs strapped down. Despite the gaffer-tape gagging his mouth, there was a scream of dismay in his terrified eyes. White curlicues of depilation cream had been squeezed across his eyebrows.

Victoria, skirt rucked up, spatula in hand, was sitting astride his bare tethered thighs, hot-waxing the model agent’s bikini line. Little runways of pale flesh had been mown through his pubic growth and upper thigh forestry. They looked red and raw and prickled with blood.

‘Do you think I should go for the full Brazilian? He likes shaved pussies. A little “beetle bonnet”, he calls it, don’t you, sweetie?’ she reminded her ex-lover. Sven began to writhe on the table, struggling against his restraints. All this time I’d thought he was a top-order predator, the male equivalent of the Great White Shark, but Sven looked more like a Great White Prawn. Victoria pointed at his shrunken appendage, which seemed to wither even more. ‘Now
that
’s why you’re supposed to judge people on their personalities. Scrub up, Doc,’ my deranged sister ordered Hugo, her tangled hair falling over her flushed face. ‘It’s time for Sven here to get in touch with his Inner Model.’

Victoria’s dishevelment was at odds with the deep sense of purpose and determination radiating from within. ‘Good thing you finally made it, Hugo,’ my sister continued, conversationally, ‘because I was about to start the lipo without you. It seems quite easy. Just make a cut, shove a tube in, wobble it around until you hit a pocket of pale yellow globules, then suck ’em up through a straw, like a McDonald’s shake. Sluuuurrrrp. Right?’

Hugo’s head suddenly tilted backwards as though he feared his eyeballs might fall out. ‘Lipo?’

‘Yes. There’s a vacuum cleaner in the hall. But I didn’t want my patient to die from shock. Then I wondered if I should get started on the botox,’ she said, conducting an invisible symphony orchestra with a syringe.

‘Botox,’ Hugo repeated, dumbly.

‘Yes. I was all ready to inject him, but what if I gave him too much? Wouldn’t his larynx become paralysed by the bacteria? And then he’d stop breathing, right?’

Beside me, Hugo gasped.

‘And we don’t want to kill him – well, not quite yet,’ my sister decreed, and leaned forward to remove the depilatory cream with two deft sweeps of her pretty little hand. As Sven’s eyebrows came off on a tissue, he made a noise like a deflating tyre. ‘We’ll start with the breast implants, I think, as a payback for what you did to my daughter.’

Sven was shaking so much he looked to be in the advanced stages of Parkinsons.

‘Perhaps we could shave a little off his tailbone, Hugo? To give him the sort of slender waist he demands of his models.’

Bruce the Tooth snorted gleefully. ‘An eye for an eye …’

‘Yes! And a face lift for a face lift. Why not? The face is just peeled off the bone. They pull the skin right up over your head like a Spandex polo-neck,’ Victoria informed her victim casually.

‘The smartassed sonofabitch is a platinum-plated dick-fondler, right?’ said the Tooth, getting carried away. ‘Well, why not just give him a world-class dong? The biggest damn dong in the world.’

‘Oh, you evil genius!’ my sister thrilled. ‘The phallic equivalent of Pinocchio’s nose. When he gets out of bed in the morning he’ll have to be careful not to tread on his own willy. He’ll need a truss-fund!’ she cackled.

Sven made a squeak like a lost puppy. Rancid sweat was oozing from every terrified pore.

‘It’s a “preventative medicine”,’ Victoria explained to the rest of us, who were gazing on, aghast. ‘It’ll prevent him from ever again having sex with a woman and breaking her heart – or her body,’ she added bitterly.

Out of the corner of my eye, I became aware of Hugo crabbing his way towards the door.

‘I don’t advise you to do that, Hugo,’ my sister called out. She picked up Sven’s limp dick, brandished a scalpel and ran it along the shaft, menacingly. ‘Otherwise it’ll be the Plastic Surgery
That Needs No Surgeon
.’ Sven began to snivel with terror. ‘After all, you don’t actually need a penis to run a modelling agency. In fact, there’s no medical proof that you need any organ at all. Obviously a
brain
, complete with moral conscience, is not remotely necessary.’

Sven made some ugly grunting noises, which I imagine involved a quick conversion to religion.

An involuntary shiver shimmied up my spine. Revenge, I was realizing, is like unsugared coffee: it smells better than it tastes. In my living room, fuelled by whisky, the nimble rationalization had been easy – let us do unto the body fascist what he’d done unto his women. But we were only supposed to scare him. Seeing him chained to an operating table, eyebrowless, strips of hot wax hardening on his groin, my stomach began to churn sourly. Torturing was not high on my Fun Things To Do Today list. ‘Okay, Vick, I think we’ve made our point now,’ I interceded.

A clump of Sven’s pubic hair hung from Victoria’s waxing spatula like weed from an anchor.

An anaemic murmur emanated from beneath Sven’s gag. My husband gave me an imploring glance.

‘Victoria, look at his face,’ I pleaded. Tears were streaming from the man’s eyes.

‘They’re just crocodile tears, sweetie – droplets that squeeze out of the giant reptile’s eyes from the pressure of chomping their victims.’

‘We’ve scared the hell out of them. It’s enough,’ I entreated. Ignoring me, Victoria hurled a surgical gown at my ex-husband. ‘Don’t mess with me. I’m all out of oestrogen and I have a scalpel …’

We all looked at Victoria, and mentally debated the wisdom of a response.

‘Hurry up, Hugo. My next psychotic mood swing should be in about, oh,’ Victoria checked her watch, scowling, ‘five to six seconds. One, two, three …’

‘Look. You’re wasting your breath—’

So was Hugo because Bruce the Tooth walloped him once more, this time in the mouth.

‘Blood! Oh, my God.’ I squirmed. ‘Blood should definitely be on the inside. Okay Victoria. This has gone far enough.’

But judging by the reckless look on my sibling’s face, she wanted to go much, much further. Hell, she was in the kind of mood where she’d accept a car ride from a Kennedy.

Hugo drew himself up. ‘How dare you?’

Before he could say any more, Bruce the Tooth whacked him again, right in the solar plexus. ‘Now, fuckin’ scrub up, like the lady fuckin’ tells you,’ he growled, in his native brute vocabulary, ‘’cause you’re really startin’ to frost my shorts.’

‘You can’t do this to me! I’ll press charges!’ Hugo said, querulously, mopping at blood trickling from his split lip.

‘What? Under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act?’ my sister snarled.

‘You’re a man!’ Hugo implored. But the Tooth just stood impassively, arms now folded. ‘How can you allow this mutilation to happen?’

‘Listen, pal, I spent ten years on Death Row. I was twenty-four hours from gettin’ fried by Old Sparky, all for a crime I never done. Though, okay, I done a few like it.’ His accent was so thick it sounded as though he were constantly chewing. ‘An’ that little gal! She was the one who raised the dough to pay for real lawyers – not them lousy public defenders who screwed up at my trial. Marrakech got me freed. And that fucker,’ he pointed at Sven, ‘hurt her bad.’

‘I won’t do it,’ Hugo stood firm. ‘You can manhandle me all you want.’

‘Tell me, Hugo, did your plans for this evening involve living till morning?’ My sister turned the scalpel towards my ex-husband.

I clapped a hand to my mouth. I felt like the sidecar attached to an out-of-control motorbike. ‘Victoria, come on, let’s all calm down.’ My hand extended to take the weapon from her as my sister and I gyred around the operating table.

With impeccable calm, Bruce the Tooth bent my arm up behind my back. ‘You ain’t goin’ over to the Dark Side, is ya, sis?’

‘Lizzie, you have the right to remain silent so, for God’s sake, SHUT UP,’ Victoria ordered.

Bruce shackled my wrists with his belt and, as I struggled, gaffer-taped my lips together. ‘Thank you, Bruce sweetie,’ Victoria said, serenely, the operating light directly behind her bonfiring her hair.

‘My pleasure, ma’am.’

Victoria, a bubble of berserk laughter hiccupping from her lips, slid open a drawer in which fake breasts puckered, like row upon row of sun blisters. ‘So, which cup size?’ She began rooting through them, frisbeeing implants floorward until she found a size 34E, which, I remembered, was exactly what Sven had forced upon Marrakech.

‘I
can’t
operate.’ Hugo insisted. ‘It’s not sterile.’

Bruce the Tooth, who had bound me to the radiator with surgical cord, rolled up his sleeves and said, ‘Lemme do it, then. I washed me hands, after lunch.’

‘Why not? It should be easy enough,’ my sister enthused. ‘After all, the patient is spineless, gutless and totally heartless.’

‘If you do it you’ll kill him,’ Hugo said sternly.

The Tooth grunted severely through his missing molars. ‘Yeah, and then I’d have to kill a hostile witness, wouldn’t I?’ He took the scalpel from Victoria and pointed it at Hugo. ‘Death can seriously damage your health you know, Doc. So, would you like to meet your Maker before or after?’

The drawback of dying, of course, is that your life will never be the same again. The morality of choosing one deformed life rather than two deaths finally got through to Hugo: slowly he nodded his head before it slumped into his hands. ‘God, I’m going to regret this in the morning,’ he murmured.

‘So?’ shrugged my demented sister. ‘Sleep in.’

After the anaesthetic had kicked in (a syringe drip cocktail of short-acting barbiturates), Hugo began to operate, his face pinched into a mask of concentration. I grimaced as he sliced open the skin beneath the pectoral muscle then tried to insert a balloon of saline through the slit beneath Sven’s nipple. It was like an airline passenger attempting to shove an inappropriate object into an overhead baggage compartment. Watching Hugo wrenching the flesh with grim determination made me cringe with revulsion. The next time I dared peep towards the operating table, I saw the bruising that had erupted across Sven’s mangled torso. He was half man, half aubergine. Hugo then began the extension to Sven’s penis. This was achieved with a long silicon rod. An hour later the model-agent’s dick was so inflated it could have appeared in the Macy’s Parade. Now Sven really would be a
hardened
criminal. Hugo was just finishing up when we heard the bell on the lift door, chime loudly.

Bruce the Tooth hit the lights. In the gloom the poisonous green rays of the monitors blipped and blinked eerily in a Morse code that signalled danger. All I could see was the inevitable prison sentence stretching endlessly before me. My internal organs felt as though they were in a blender. I thought I might be going into labour – except I wasn’t pregnant. Believe me, being caught giving breast implants to a man has to be the ultimate laxative.