Nip 'N' Tuck (4 page)

Hugo seemed to be the only man in the wings who was not drowning in the pool of drool surrounding Britney Amore. The TV soap star had declined Hugo’s Chateau Grout Remover with a lecture on deadly pesticides. She then tried to prevent him sampling the hospitality meatballs.

‘Stop!’ she exclaimed. ‘Yer stomach may be sayin’ yes! But yer colon’s sayin’, “
Are you insane?
” ’

Looking her directly in the eye, my husband devoured three koftas in one bite. ‘Hitler was vegetarian. Enough said?’

Turning her back on him in apparent disgust, Britney proceeded to hold forth to the rest of us about her upcoming stage appearance at the National Theatre. ‘Actin’,’ her Texan accent had a velvety rasp, like the tongue of a big cat, ‘is ninety per cent talent and forty per cent brains.’

My husband snorted derisively. ‘Is that what you think? If you’ll pardon the exaggeration,’ he added, with disdainful suavity, handing me the beaker of tepid
vino
the actress had rejected.

Britney Amore shot him a wary look from beneath heavily beaded lashes – so thick it looked as though the tarantulas that were obviously nesting in her eyebrows were doing stretch aerobics with their many mohair legs.

‘Am I missin’ somethin’, hon?’ she turned to me, placing her manicured hands on her sticky-out hips and cocking one little foot up on to its towering heel.

‘I’m terrible at maths too,’ I explained, kindly, ‘But, um, I think you’ll find that ninety and forty is a hundred and thirty per cent.’

‘Ah-
huh
.’ She widened her eyes at me as though I were retarded. There was an alluring contemptuousness about her which took my breath away. ‘And that’s exactly what I give, honey-pie.’

Yeah, along with chlamydia,
honey-pie
, I thought, my good-will evaporating.

‘Acting these days,’ said Hugo a bit pompously, ‘is a hundred per cent about looks. Now that the National Theatre is in a state of collapse, the only way they can get bums on seats is by casting actresses from TV soap operas – preferably with a scene where they take off their clothes. I guess it was hard to find a Shakespearean role that required full-frontal nudity. Ophelia’s last swim, perhaps …?’

I giggled. ‘Can I Ophelia up?’

Britney met Hugo’s gaze with defiance. ‘I ain’t never had a red-blooded man complain about
my
bodkins forsooth.’

Her scrum of male admirers, having ignored my bad pun, laughed over-heartily at her worse one. Except Hugo.

‘Achievement doesn’t depend on physical perfection,’ he elaborated. ‘Beethoven was deaf. Milton was blind. Stephen Hawking is in a wheelchair. Physical perfection means, well, nothing much, actually.’

I gave him an imploring glance – one of those oh-there’s-nothing-wrong-with-my-partner-that-a-good-funeral-wouldn’t-cure looks, an expression perfected by wives over the centuries … He completely ignored it – a response perfected by
husbands
over the centuries.

‘We’re totally aware of racism and sexism these days. But “lookism” is one of the most pervasive, albeit most denied, prejudices.’ Hugo ran his hands through his tawny mane of hair, which reared back off his broad forehead. ‘Society confuses beauty with goodness. Police, judges, juries – they’re all more lenient towards pretty women.’

Britney snapped her gum belligerently. ‘Yeah, well,
sex
discriminates against the un-att-rac-tive.’ The elasticated twang to her Texan vowels jarred discordantly with Hugo’s rounded, ringing tones. ‘I reckon a lady’s gotta make the most of what she’s got, ya know?’

‘Well, here in
Europe
,’ he responded, pointedly, ‘we have a much more sophisticated approach to life. A woman who ages well is a thing of beauty.’ I can’t say I appreciated the way he draped his arm limply across the back of my shoulders, with all the passion of a beach towel. ‘And those who fight it, ugly.’

There was a baited quality to the air. The actress bristled. But before she could run him through with her stiletto, the last chorus of
The Vagina Monologues
faded. After the curtain calls, everyone was ushered upstairs for the post-show party.

A slightly shell-shocked minister from the Department of Culture and Sport and the usual collection of Labour-supporting and toupée-sporting beer barons and tax exiles were approaching the benefit gala like draftees crossing a minefield. Feigning feminist sympathies, yet terrified that they were about to be savaged by a feral Fallopian tube, their smiles were snap-frozen on to bewildered faces. To unnerve them further, on the table in the centre of the room rose a six-foot cake in the shape of a pudenda. Between the two pink marzipan labia majoras pouted the particularly moreish, sugar-coated labia minora. The whole ambrosial, raspberry red cunt-fection was crowned by a delicated candied clitoris, which nestled temptingly beneath the piped icing pubes. Guests hovered hungrily, in lip-licking salivation … until they realized that they’d just been subjected to an account of infibulation from a Somali victim. It had been a harrowing monologue from her heart and what was left of her vagina, which had made complaints about western sexism seem trivial. Shuddering at the memory, nobody dared wield the knife to cut the cake. Eventually, ravenous guests unhygienically took to gouging out chunks with surreptitious fingertips.

‘I know he’s here
some
where.’ My sister anxiously scanned the throng, looking for Sven. ‘I couldn’t believe it when he said he was coming tonight. I mean, this is
not
his scene at all. I think he’s finally on the brink of proposing! The night before he left for the States he said we’d look cute on a wedding cake together! I so want to be happily married like you, Lizzie.’

I was about to point out that Sven was really not my cup of slime when a whiff of aftershave strong enough to dissolve igneous rock forewarned me that the patron saint of Fake Tan Man was in the near vicinity. I swivelled and, sure enough, Sven appeared, a gold chain glinting amongst the hairs of his toasted torso. Though thinning on top, he wore the prerequisite ponytail, which straggled down the back of a shirt darker than his tie. Inhabitants of the lower slopes of showbiz genuflected before him.

‘Well, here I am! What were your
other
two wishes?’ he oozed, in a silken voice.

‘Sven, darrrrrling.’ My sister kissed him proprietorially.

‘Vicky,’ he daubed his mouth with a satin hand-kerchief, ‘let me wipe off a place for you to sit.’ Sven’s easy charm was negated by his cold, slow, unblinking eyes – which he rested, in turn, on each woman in the room. The scrutiny was so intense, so calculated, it made me feel as if he was assessing which of us to eat first, were we ever adrift in a lifeboat.

‘What the hell are
you
doing here?’ I asked him icily. ‘Your views on women date back to the Jurassic period.’

‘I couldn’t miss out on seeing my fiancée in action.’

Victoria beamed at me. But when we turned back towards Sven it was to see him tentacling an arm around the miniscule waist of Britney Amore.

The atomic bomb on Hiroshima had less impact than this conversational detonation. My sister made a third-stage-of-labour face.

‘Your – your fiancée?’ she stammered, trying hard to digest the unsavoury information. (Probably all she’d eaten that day.) She was as crushed as the marzipan clitoris Sven had just circumcised from the cake with his penknife and was now devouring whole.

‘Christ, you’ve only been in the States for six weeks!’ I said, amazed. ‘I mean, where did you get her?
A fiancée-vending machine?
’

Victoria’s daughter, Marrakech, chose that moment to bound up to us. ‘Mum! You were amazing.’ She hugged Victoria with an enthusiasm usually reserved for foliage in the path of a bulldozer. ‘I’m so proud of you. You’re, like, finally using your fame to help the less fortunate …’ She kissed me too. It was like being greeted by a Labrador pup – all limbs, wet mouth and yelps of joy.

My niece, devoid of her Doc Marten boots, combat trousers and beanie, had at last allowed her thick golden hair to fall free. Marrakech, who is desperate to be Taken Seriously, is a bottle brunette. Much to her mother’s horror, she regularly dyes her blonde locks a mucky dull brown.

‘This is
your
daughter?’ Sven asked, amazed.

‘So they tell me,’ Victoria said, almost inaudibly. To preserve her unlined visage, my sister kept her emotional thermostat at a constant sixty-two degrees. And yet from the play of muscles beneath the surface of her face, I could see just how much Sven’s marital announcement had mortified her.

‘But she’s grown so much!’ Sven let his eyes slide down to focus on the teenager’s stupendous bosom. And it was more than a professional appraisal.

‘Yes. Who would have thought that beneath the chick-pea halitosis and hand-knitted bulky jumpers lurked a beautiful fifteen-year-old,’ Hugo teased.

‘
Thirteen
,’ my niece amended strictly, nodding towards her mum.

My sister’s anti-gravity precautions include not only bribing the Passport Office to allow her an airbrushed photo but also making her daughter pretend to be thirteen for the last two years.

‘Anyway, beauty is superficial crap, it just makes you into a decorative object. A vase with tits.’

‘Your breasts remind me of Mount Rushmore … My face should be among them. I’m a president too, you see. Of your mother’s modelling agency.’ Sven winked at her. ‘You don’t mind a bit of tasteless humour, do you? I do so love to whip these liberals into a froth of indignation.’

‘I hate my boobs. They only attract one-track-minded creeps. Phallocrats. And penetration is oppressive.’

‘Marrakech,’ chided her mother. Victoria was holding herself very still, as if she were an overfull glass of wine that might spill at any moment. I winced for her. Despite our differences, there’s a fine silver umbilical wire uniting us. Something to do with all those childhood years of crawling to the bottom of the bed, shrieking with laughter about something ridiculous our mother had said, snorting, howling, muffling our hilarity with our nighties. Something to do with all those years whispering sad secrets beneath those covers, holding each other because nobody else would.

But Sven looked far from displeased at Marrakech’s feisty outburst. He’d made a career out of bedding women – two thousand at the last count (his). Running the European division of Divine put him in prime position to play the Cuntmeister. And working with teenagers allowed him never to grow up. At fifty-six, the man was a senile delinquent. Peter Pan with the Lost Girls.

‘Phallocrats, eh?’ Sven repeated, lasciviously. He eyed my niece hungrily. Think fluffy pink bunny, I thought, think python.

‘I agree wholeheartedly,’ said Hugo. ‘I’m so glad I married you, Lizzie. Men who marry beautiful women are heading for an early grave. Men married to plain women live an average of twelve years longer. Looks
can
kill!’

Victoria clucked her tongue in utter horror on my behalf. But I merely laughed.

I punched my husband’s bicep good-naturedly. ‘Thanks very much, you sweet-talking bastard. And on my birthday, too.’

‘So it’s ya birthday? How old are ya, hon?’ Britney came out of her sulk to miaow at me.

Victoria spluttered, unable to believe one female had asked another female that question in public. My sister maintained that the best way to tell a woman’s age was
not
to.

‘Thirty-nine,’ I stated, with matter-of-fact pride.

Britney who was approaching thirty, but I’m not sure from which direction, recoiled. ‘Hon, your cake must be
collapsing
from the weight of candles. Hell, you’ll need
two
cakes!’

Britney Amore obviously had some good points – if you like rottweilers. But before I could share this insight with her, the guest speaker from the women’s refuge, who were benefiting from the show, took to the podium. Terrified that any talk about women might make mention of cramps or secretions, the various well-fed corporate cowboys, so desperate to appear PC, could not disguise their drinking-straight-whisky expressions.

Next to me, Sven absentmindedly rearranged his testicles in their too-tight pants and murmured to Marrakech. It might have looked to others as though he was scratching his dick but, considering where he kept his brains, it was clear to me that the man was just thinking. Edging closer, I overheard him offer her a modelling contract. ‘Modelling agencies are ruthless and cut-throat … especially the good ones,’ he bragged, marinating in his own testosterone. ‘You are a 9.9999. If you were with
me
you’d be a perfect ten.’

Where had I heard
that
before? As he was a friend of her mother’s, Marrakech’s crescents of black lashes blinked back at him trustingly.

The heavy summer air seemed suddenly freighted with unbearable tension. As the speeches monotoned on (it was the turn of the Big Businessmen now: a particularly pinstriped one took the microphone to feign feminist sympathies in the talk version of karaoke – talkaoke) I grew a surface of awareness that made my skin crawl. Half an hour later I could feel the beginnings of a headache gnawing at my temple. Was there a doctor in the house? I looked around for my husband. When I couldn’t see him, I decided to brave the backstage labyrinth of corridors, locate Victoria’s dressing room, fetch my bag and flee. I planned to call Hugo’s mobile once I was in the car. He had probably zipped off to an emergency op. As I pushed past the throng, the party seemed like a movie set. My mind was zooming in and out, the shutter of my eye’s lens clicking and whirring.

If I really
had
been in a movie, though, water would have started shaking in a glass to warn me that something Very Big and Scary was about to happen. Completely oblivious to the fact that my life was about to change for ever I pushed open Victoria’s dressing-room door. When the door swung wide to reveal a naked Britney tongue-kissing my husband I saw stars. And I don’t mean the Melanie Griffith, Glenn Close, Gillian Anderson performers either. Oh, no. In that split second I discovered more celestial firmaments than an astronomer with a Hubble telescope.