Altar Ego (6 page)

‘Hey! What the …’

‘Retin A peels away at the skin …’ Her voice rasped insistently, a wasp caught against a window pane.

‘Eats away at the skin? Jesus. What is it? Eboli in a jar?’

She handed me a refining gel tester for the thigh zone. With that bizarre combination of humiliation and desire that is central to every make-up purchase, I looked at the price tag on the tube … Christ Almighty. How could a cream cost more than a dream retirement home?

‘There’s always liposuction,’ Anouska suggested helpfully.

‘“Fridge-o-suction” would be more useful,’ I said half-heartedly. ‘Just suck the food right out of the refrigerator, you know. Go right to the source, Can you believe this woman?’

Anouska eyed me critically. ‘Well, doll, your lycrapanel days are kind of over, ya know?’

‘I am
not
descending into tan medical hose cronedom quite yet, thank you very much. Come on, I’m outta here.’

The make-up assistant smiled at me; a complicit, grinning jackal. ‘Have a nice day.’

‘Sod off,’ I told her. ‘I’ve got other plans.’

Having come in for one lousy tube of moisturizer, I left Selfridges ten minutes later so laden down with pungent unguents, enzyme creams and crater-fillers, that I had to sign the credit-card slip with a pen clenched between my teeth. Now all I needed was some shaving foam for the handlebar moustache I seemed to have sprouted, like Jack’s beanstalk, over bloody night. It was just as well I didn’t want children because I’d obviously be giving birth to a litter of she-wolves. A compulsory broomstick was no doubt waiting for me at Customer Services.

And there was worse to come. Anouska left me with an air kiss on the corner of Regent Street. She was off to prepare for her date with the dreaded Darius. Preparation would involve her usual DIY lobotomy.
Anouska’s
technique for getting a man was to act happy, busy and swallow at all times. Not a technique that had ever worked for me. Hell, Julian says my neuroses are the only interesting thing about me. (Besides my ability to hook my legs behind my head.)

‘If I don’t ring by nine tonight, sub-let my apartment, okay, doll?’

I continued my walk to work unaware of the body blow awaiting me. As I approached a building site, I prepared for the sexist onslaught. I mentally rehearsed my barbed ripostes … And then it happened – or rather, it didn’t. Not one whistle. Not even an ‘Oy!’ I told myself the builders must have been engrossed in some high-tech, hydraulic manoeuvre demanding maximum eyeball riveting – and retraced my steps. I sashayed past again, this time with a little more swing in my hips. Nothing. Zilch. Having raged against building-site harassment my whole life, when it didn’t happen I felt inexplicably devastated. I was also devastated about
why
I should feel devastated. But there was no time to dwell on the hypocrisy of the situation. The lack of male response had tapped into a vein; a varicose vein. A few hours ago I’d been vibrant and invigorated. But how could I be feeling my oats and my varicose veins at the same time? Maybe that wretched assistant was right? Yes, the evidence was mounting up. Hadn’t I actually gone to bed last New Year’s Eve? Why else would I hate jungle music? And hey. You
know
you’re old when
you
no longer laugh at the concept of electrolysis.

Suddenly, here I was in Margaret Rutherford mode. A tweed cape and bicycle beckoned. Any minute now, I’d find myself tremendously exercised about my bowels.

If I were a building, I’d have subsidence. Hell, I’d be listed. If I were a tree in Yellowstone National Park, whole girl-guide packs would be hiking through me. But there was even worse to come.

Reaching the Mall, I stood outside the white, wedding cake of a building housing the Institute of Contemporary Arts and sighed resignedly. The truth of it is, I’m a bit of a shirkaholic. I’m convinced that historians will look upon this era as the Dark Ages Mark 2. All the women I knew were ricocheting from one nervous breakdown to another, leaving a trail of feral, nanny-reared children in their wake, juggling dinner parties and Prozac overdoses and extramarital affairs (because their workaholic husbands are too tired for sex), gushing all the time from their psychiatric-unit beds that they’d be bored if they didn’t work. I, on the other hand, have vocational cancer. My ambition’s in remission. The only thing I wanted to be when I grew up was young.

Having run away from school at fifteen, I have, in my time, scraped the bottom of the job barrel – from bedpan emptier to buxom serving wench. While putting myself through art school, I’d worked nights inserting colour supplements into newspapers just so
that
I could tell people I was a ‘hand inserter’. I’ve been a kissogram, a cabaret singer and dressed as a human street sign for a gym in Woolloomooloo, Sydney, which is where I’d met Kate. How could you not bond with someone when you’re both parading around in promotional sandwich boards that read ‘Fat and Ugly? …
Want to be just ugly?
’

Ever since the United Nations had declared her love life a disaster area six years ago, Kate had worked at the ICA. When she was promoted to Artistic Director, junior only to God and the Great Barrier Reef, she’d help me fail upwards into a job in the PR department. Although I tried to persuade the nude poets and Mutant Nymphet Sculptresses of the benefits of working without the pressure of success – I still had to turn up at the office occasionally.

The staff were mostly of the ‘all sex is rape’, ’snot fair Millie Tants variety. What the sign outside the gallery should have read was ‘Danger. Extremely Hormonal Females For Next Mile’. I didn’t so much receive a wage here. It was more like combat pay. Especially when an exhibition was being mounted.

I pushed through the glass doors and negotiated my way over the layers of artists’ legs, woven backpacks, ethnic papooses and the seven vehicle pile-up of prams. My arrival silenced the buzz.

‘So?’ greeted Kate, readjusting her red-framed glasses. ‘How did Julian take it? Did he go ape-shit?
Did
you tell him you didn’t love him enough? I suppose you couldn’t tell him the truth; the male suicide rate is high enough already, right?’

‘I
do
love him enough … It’s just …’ I glanced at the expectant, eager faces around me. Was I really going to strip off to my emotional knickers here? Like hell I was. ‘It’s just that there are three billion other men in the world whom I’d like to see naked, you know?’ I said glibly.

I trailed Kate to the main gallery where she was supervising the unpacking of the latest exhibition – a feminist collection entitled ‘What Women Want’.

I picked up the glossy brochure I’d help design. On the front was a penis photographer dedicated to fighting patriarchy through her series of nude male ‘skinscapes’. ‘In close-up, from certain angles, the male armpit bears an uncanny resemblance to the female pubic area’, read the artist’s blurb.

‘For the curator of a feminist exhibition, Kate, you really know nothing about women. Women, all women, worry about three things only. Bad Hair Days. Shoe Shopping. And Thinner Thighs. If you renamed the feminist struggle as The Struggle For Thinner Thighs, Firmer Hair Mousse and Perfect Arch Support While Wearing Stilettos, membership would soar, you know.’

Kate laughed. Insulting an Aussie is no fun. It’s like water off a duck-billed platypus’s back. ‘We want for women what women want for themselves,’ she said
sickly
, pointing impatiently at the photographs she’d instructed me to enthuse about for a television arts programme later that day.

What we want for ourselves? Jesus. What
did
we want? A man
and
to be single. A job
and
to be free. Children
and
to be childless. A sensual encounter on a train with a witty, poetry-quoting stranger that leads to a romantic dash by private Lear jet to a Tahitian island so remote it’s not in the atlas … And then other times, just a quiet night on my own watching
Seinfeld
and eating Mars Bars in flannelette pyjamas. And not to age, ever. One thing today had taught me: I may be young at heart, but apparently I was middle aged in all the other places.

This was confirmed when the Channel Four team arrived and Kate pushed me in front of the camera. The producer, one of those pubescent trendoids who make films that are about as interesting as watching paint dry (he once actually
made
a film about paint drying), looked at me through the lens then asked Kate if she had a presenter who was not so ‘chronologically gifted’.

Kate and I looked at him blankly.

‘Experientially enhanced?’ We still had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Look,’ he said frankly, ‘the exhibition is about young artists, right? And I don’t think Ms Steele’s giving the right impression.’

My geriatric blood froze in my clogged veins. ‘Yeah? Well you’re not giving the right impression of a
producer
either. The only thing
you
could produce is a urine sample.’

Kate dragged me into the foyer before I could do any more damage. ‘What the hell’s eating you? We need the publicity!’

‘It’s a sore point, okay? The Beauty Führer at Selfridges this morning suggested that I’m old, ugly and too fat.’

‘So?’ said Kate. ‘Get a wider mirror.’

It didn’t make me feel any better. Nor did the Super Babe with skyscraper heels and the shoulder-padded silhouette of an American quarterback that the producer conjured up to replace me. How could any woman look that young? She’d obviously been drinking embalming fluid.

By the time I left the ICA later that afternoon, I was ready to buy some Vaseline Intensive Care, massage it in for about fifty years, then repeat. I was straight off for a boob and lube job.

Okay, so I was older than I thought. But it didn’t mean I could no longer bite off more than I could chew – it just meant that I had to chew more slowly.

But I wasn’t counting on what Life was about to dish up …

5
Bridesmaid Revisited

IT IS A
truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a husband. Which is why, a month later, all the usual suspects were gathered at St Andrew’s Church, Cliveden, for the society wedding of the season. Finally the Mountie had got her man.

The fact that Anouska and Darius would love and cherish
till divorce do us part
was not in question; Anouska had spent more time choosing her gown than her groom. Her only criterion now, hubbywise, was that he be aristocratic. Darius’s obligatory epiglottal lisp, combined with his invincible repugnance for everything and everybody, indicated that he possessed the perfect upper-class credentials.

But the trouble with upper-class wealth is that it doesn’t always vouchsafe money. The British landed
gentry
do have this tendency to leave their fortunes to retirement kennels for hunting canines and cat hostels. Darius came from a long line of dog orphanage donors. Anouska was a woman with money to burn. In Darius she had met her match.

I didn’t stop trying to talk her out of the marriage, even in the bridal car. ‘He just sees you as a meal ticket,’ I staccatoed, as we jounced over the cobbled country lanes. ‘… And believe m-me, A-Annie, D-Darius h-has m-made a lifetime r-reservation a-at t-the R-Ritz.’

‘How can you talk that way on my wedding day!’

‘… I so want you to be happy, Annie, but DARIUS DOESN’T LOVE YOU. Of all people, why
him
?’

‘I chose him chiefly on the grounds that
he’s a male
.’

‘Yeah, with a title. Well I can think of a few other titles he richly deserves. Like Free-Loading Bum.’

But Anouska had convinced herself it was love. After they’d vowed everlasting devotion in the eyes of the Lord, I watched as she folded back the lace veil to reveal a spectacular barnet of brunette profiteroles before turning her hopeful face up to his. Darius, with facial expressions by Taxidermy, went in for the kiss. Making the face of a child rejecting spinach, he dodged her lips and made minimal contact with her left ear lobe.

After we’d all been dandruffed in confetti and posed for photographs on the stone steps, Darius, silk top hat rakishly askew, approached we bridesmaids with
what
he thought was a swagger but merely looked as though his underpants were too tight.

Having air-kissed Tara, Tania, Tressida, Tabitha and Tessa (it’s illegal to be an It Girl unless your name starts with T) he paused before me – marooned, as I was, in a sea of maroon chiffon. ‘Ah, the Wedding Reneger. I can’t believe the church didn’t burst into flames as you approached.’

‘Congratulations,’ I said to him. ‘A wealthy wife … quite a labour-saving device. If
I’d
been marrying you, I’d have made you sign a pre-nuptial agreement you could make into a mini-series.’

‘Anouska, poppet,’ Darius drawled, beckoning his bride, ‘has it ever crossed your lovely little mind that your friends resent not being as rich as you? Perhaps it’s time you acquired some new chums in a higher-earning bracket?’

He flicked the swallow tails of his grey morning coat and departed with that mincing waddle. Annie, or rather Lady Anouska Gore, tethered to his arm, smiled helplessly over her shoulder.

The reception at Cliveden, a moss-flecked seventeenth-century stately home, set amid a glen and glade-studded Thames-side acreage big enough to support the entire population of Belgium, was doomed from the start. Darius’s
old
monied friends and Annie’s
new
, went together like, I dunno, caviar and Sara Lee cake.

The tribal dialect of the upper-class trough-monkeys – yawing voices honed by thousands of pounds of private education, clashed atonally with the strident raucousness of Mr de Kock’s Euro-trash coterie. I recognized a newly pardoned drug baron, a disgraced former President with humorous cufflinks, an asbestos magnate and Henry Kissinger.

After Julian’s matrimonial aspirations had gone into free fall a month ago, I’d been getting the old Trappist Monk treatment. If
he
did deign to speak to me over breakfast, he was excessively polite. ‘Please, after
you
.’ ‘No, no, I
insist
.’ ‘Would it be too much trouble removing your knife from my back?’