Nip 'N' Tuck (12 page)

‘Men never even knew about cellulite until we started whining on about it. I hate exercise. My tights may run, but not me.’

But that night Hugo was four hours late coming home. And worse: he came home cleaner than he’d gone out. I had to ask myself some hard questions. Like, why shower at a conference on Ludwig’s angina? Even more unsettling, wasn’t that a new blemish on his buttocks caused by sheet burn? The kind of sheet burn that only comes from making love on inferior linen? Let’s just come out and say it:
cheap motel linen
.

And it was time to don the Lycra leotard.

13

What Am I? A
Hamster
?

VICTORIA IMMEDIATELY PUT
me on an exercise regime so stringent it made a cross-country Iron Man triathlon look like a walk in the park.

‘All right! So, how far did you run, sweetie?’ My sister clicked off the stopwatch as I hurtled, asthmatically, to the ground at her feet on Hampstead Heath.

‘I – believe – at – one – point – I – passed Greenland.’

By the end of October, the slick of wet autumnal leaves made it too dangerous to run on the Heath. I was forced instead to pound up and down the nearby streets. But a few days of that were quite enough. ‘If God had meant us to run on roads, he’d have given us four-wheeled toes,’ I reprimanded my sister.

When winter descended we retreated indoors. All the women at the gym on Finchley Road seemed to be in some secret, snazzy-leotard competition, the straining thongs lifted and separated their butt cheeks into startlingly strange new formations. I watched my sister leg-scissoring and arm aerobicking on the cross-country ski machine, her pale ponytail jauntily boing-boinging behind her with each happy step. She seemed oblivious to the terrifying warnings plastered across the machine. ‘IMPORTANT – See Your Doctor Before Attempting To Mount This Machine’; ‘Use at Own Risk’; ‘Stop Immediately Whenever You Feel Faint!!!’

‘If you become a quadriplegic, I am
not
going to spoon-feed you for the rest of your life. Is that clear, Victoria?’

I preferred the ButtMaster session. The trick was to find the most crowded class and wedge yourself between two female athletes, allowing them to do all the bouncing and jumping and simply carry you along.

Yoga also appealed – mostly because I tend to like any exercise that allows you to lie on the floor and go to sleep.

By the end of that first week, I was lacerated by Lycra rash on bits of my body primarily reserved for giving birth. I was aching with tit-chafe from all that jiggling. I had cycled, run and rowed to nowhere hour after exhausting hour, enough to make Sisyphus’s ground-hog day of boulder-pushing-up-that-bloody-hill seem relaxing. It was then, after all this, that I stepped on to the scales, with Victoria craning expectantly over my shoulder. We both stared, excitedly, then dumbstruck, at the luminous green numbers.

‘You’re the only person I know in the world who puts
on
weight while exercising,’ she said finally. ‘Come on, sweetie. You mustn’t give up!’ she encouraged, following me as I stormed out of the gym.

I was so busy yelling at my persecutor to stop pursuing me, that I didn’t see Cal until I bumped smack bang into him coming out of Books Etc. He steadied me, gripping my forearms. ‘Hey,’ he joshed my sister, ‘haven’t I grovelled pathetically at your feet somewhere before?’

But my sister looked at Cal with no sign of cognition. ‘Be a slob and lose your husband, Lizzie. See if I care.’ Now it was her turn to stomp off.

‘Vicky!’ Cal teased. ‘I’ve slipped myself some of that date-rape drug, Rohypnol, so you can have your way with me, okay?’ He flung back his arms dramatically, closed his eyes and puckered his lips.

But my sister didn’t look back. Even I was too demoralized to laugh. Enticing aromas were wafting over from the book-shop café. The thing about exercising to lose weight is that it makes you so damn hungry. I dragged Cal into a chair. ‘I want to talk to you about Hugo.’ Calim suddenly looked as wilted as a roadside salad. ‘But first I want a fat-laden, I-don’t-give-a-stuff-what-I-eat-because-I’m-a-liberated-woman, mono-sodium-saturated-fat-fat-fat-gooey gorgeousness with some pesticide-coated grains harvested by oppressed migrant labourers on the side,’ I told the waitress. ‘Same for you, Calim?’

The wilted roadside salad shrugged.

‘As certified by the Albanian Food and Drug Administration,’ I added, in an effort to cheer him up. ‘What? No quip? No rejoinder? No pun?’

‘It’s crap about humour bein’ a woman’s favourite element in a man,’ Cal said with melancholic acerbity. ‘I’ve quipped. I’ve
bon
-ed. I’ve
mot
-ed. And nothin’. Not a thing! Not even a peck on the cheek. I mean, my lips are getting’ grovel-chafed.’

I didn’t like the fact that it seemed to be Victoria who’d brought on this precipitous mood plunge. My leg jerked as though hit by a neurologist’s hammer. ‘Your Mystery Woman,’ I probed, trying to neutralize my horrified inflection. ‘She won’t go out with you?’

‘For her I don’t exist. I’m too dull, aren’t I? Maybe I need to adopt an inner child – as long as it has references. I must know whether or not it’s gonna clean up its room.’

My
inner child was about to throw up. I’d encouraged Cal to ask my sister out but hadn’t thought he’d get serious about her. ‘You know, the hardest part of addiction is admitting that you have a problem.’

‘I am addicted to this certain girl, it’s true. She’s fantastic. I want us to use really insipid pet names in public. I want us to talk to each other in totally irritatin’ baby voices. I want people to roll their eyes whenever we’re around.’

‘Um, can I get you something. A beer? A glass of wine? A
psychiatrist
?’

‘But what woman would want me? I’m skint. The only lucrative form of writing is ransom notes. Maybe it’s time I stopped wankin’ and went back on the building sites.’

‘But isn’t that why you became a writer? Chiefly on the grounds that it didn’t involve heavy lifting?’

‘Yeah, but, you know, money talks and what I want to say is “Hi, I’m from Planet Shag.” ’

‘Excuse me.’ I snagged the sleeve of a passing book-shop assistant and drew her attention to the adjoining stationery section. ‘This man has just been diagnosed as a clinically depressed masochist, the same day his best friend has decided to kill him for giving up on himself – have you got a Hallmark card to cover all of that?’

‘Stayin’ with a husband who sleeps around on you – actually I think
that
way clinical depression lies,’ Cal said, stuffing his hands into his pockets and loping out of the bookshop.

‘Do you think staying with a husband who sleeps around on you – well, do you think that’s the way clinical depression lies? I do
not
want to be like Mum,’ I confided to my sister later that day, in her minimalist Conran kitchen, a completely superfluous room in her Regent’s Park apartment. My sister looked at me blankly. ‘Oh, I know our childhood wasn’t tough. Not in that walk-barefoot-twelve-miles-to-school-while-foraging-for-roots-and-churning-your-own-butter way.’ I made another verbal stab at it. ‘But it was, in a bitter and miserable and rather pissed-off way. Don’t you think?’ I was pacing now. ‘Because we were a couple of fathers short. I don’t want that for Jamie and Julia.’ Victoria gave an almost imperceptible nod. ‘Hellooo?’ my sister seemed to have taken a Stepford Wife pill. ‘What is
wrong
with you today?’

‘Botulism,’ she said mechanically, her lips barely moving. ‘Inject … into facial … muscles. Stop … wrinkles.’

I rifled through my brain. ‘Isn’t that the bacteria the Home Ec teacher told us to avoid in canned goods? Quick!’ I dragged her towards the stove. ‘The only cure is to boil you for fifteen minutes.’

‘Paralysis short term,’ she monotoned. ‘Book for treatment. My spa,’ ventriloquized the Android. ‘Procedure only … good till Department of … Health gets … wind and closes it … down.’

‘You’d make an Easter Island statue look animated, do you know that?’

Her stilted voice squeezed through lips set in invisible cement. ‘Sweetie, I only wish it had been available the
first
time I turned forty.’

I looked at her, stupefied. ‘Botox is a poison! In the Gulf War Saddam Hussein squirted it on the Iranian troops! He used it to kill Kurds.’

‘… At least they would have looked lovely.’

‘Victoria!’ I slapped her. ‘Call me old-fashioned, but I have never really thought there’s much point in being beautiful if you’re like,
dead
.’

‘Want … to … keep … man … interested … sexually … got … to … do … body … maintenance.’

‘Really?’ I replied jadedly. ‘I’ve never noticed that it was very difficult to get men to have sex. With anything.’

‘Good … ’cause I’ve seen your armpits … You’re not woman … You’re yeti.’

‘Victoria, there was a period in my life when I had no cellulite, varicose veins or unsightly body hair. Of course, I was
eight
at the time.
This
,’ I gestured at my body with its curves, creases and baby marks, ‘is what women look like … Real Women. I mean, fifteen and a half million size twelve British women can’t be wrong. I will wax by tomorrow,’ I assured her. ‘Or
maybe next summer
.’

If my sister could have arched an eyebrow, she would have. Instead, she thrust a thick piece of cardboard under my nose. It was an invitation to Sven’s Young Model of the Year party. ‘Hugo going – to impress investors,’ she said, with great effort. ‘Britney too … So should you … Looking sensational.’ Seeing me waver, she picked up the phone. ‘Book now … ’fore lose nerve.’

‘You already have. In your stupid face.’ I snatched up my bag. ‘I am never ever going to a spa with you. Is that clear?’ I declared, with invincible repugnance.

Of course Hugo wasn’t seeing Britney Amore. Their encounter was a meaningless aberration, I decided, as my car crawled uphill with the Hampstead traffic. Whereas
we
were devoted, long term. Didn’t we have joint pension schemes? Hadn’t we planted gingko bilobas? Weren’t we planning to spend our final years chasing the winter sun on a Caribbean cruise ship with a questionable cabaret?

But that evening, Hugo insisted on introducing new sexual positions into our R-rated repertoire. When my inner thighs had recovered from something I am positive he called the ‘Rotating Helicopter’, he then suggested the ‘Full Cream’. It was when I found myself flipped on top, my legs closed, facing the ceiling, with Hugo’s hips undulating against my butt, his hands nipple-twirling and clit-tweaking, that I started getting that who’s-been-sitting-in-
my
-chair-sleeping-in-
my
-bed-fucking-
my
husband feeling.

And the next day, when I was queuing at McDonald’s for the kids’ Happy Meals, I looked at the security camera TV screen to check my posture for permanent chiropractic damage. And I was shocked by what I saw. Losing your husband to another woman can lead to bad hair, bad temper and mutton-dressed-as-lamb looks, including too-tight jeans and too much eyeliner. I decided right then to follow Victoria to the Maharishi Tranquility Spa for ‘harmonizing beautification’. At best I’d get rid of my blackheads. At worst, I’d be inducted into a weird cult and offered up as a human sacrifice to some unforgiving God or other. Hey, what did I have to lose?

My capitulation might also have had something to do with the fact that later that afternoon I’d attempted a home leg and armpit wax because it was cheaper than going to a beauty salon.

Or so I’d thought.

Cost of salon waxing
: £25

Cost of home wax
: £865. Itemized as follows –

It was time to get in touch with my Inner Wallet.

14

Is That a Wallet in Your Pocket or Are You Just Pleased to See Me?

THERE IS A
very fine line between ‘beauty regimes’ and mental illness. Unlike a snake, I don’t enjoy the sensation of my skin crawling. But by the end of two days at Victoria’s beauty spa, witnessing acid peels, fat grafts and liposuction, I was positively reptilian.

The Tranquility Spa was a minimum-security prison, with palms. The manor’s crumbling façade cruelly mimicked the epidermal exteriors of the females filing through its portentous portals. It was situated in the manicured environs of the Chilterns. Inside, synthetic tinkle-tinkle harp music seeped serenely from the velvet-upholstered walls. Bovine, pampered Kuwaiti princesses bobbed comically in the heated pool, the fleshy bubble-wrap of their bloated thighs afforded round-the-clock protection by whippet-thin security guards.

The walls of its antiseptic treatment rooms were lined with posters featuring women just like us – except that they had
ENORMOUS
boobs with no hips, cellulite or body hair. Believe me, only chemo patients have less body hair than models. It was in these torture chambers that I spent my first day. I had my buttocks pummelled by a Swede called Igor and my lymphatics drained by what – judging by her white garb, austere smile and remote eyes – could only have been a high priestess, who asked me, as she snapped on rubber gloves, if I’d ever really been able to relate to my lip-liner?

On day two, when I was sure I didn’t have one remaining pore it would be possible to put your hands in and rummage around, Victoria bustled me off to a ‘Tranquility Suite’ where I marvelled at row upon row of embalming fluids glistening in glass sarcophagi. Surely there couldn’t be enough skin in the world to absorb all these moisturized globules? This place had everything to reverse time, bar a Tardis.

Another high priestess diligently began her application of a phantasmagoria of facial potions that were going to cost more than my wedding reception. They also hurt like hell.

‘Jesus Christ!’ I gasped, slapping her hand away. ‘Is that a moisturizer or a flame-retardant furniture treatment?’