Nip 'N' Tuck (20 page)

‘What’s that on your penis, Hugo?’ I asked. ‘Oh, look! It’s my sister’s mouth. Let me guess,’ I wailed at my half-sibling. ‘You were just launching your new face. A face-warming party.’

‘Liz,’ blurted Victoria, ashen-hued, ‘I’m … oh, God … It’s …’

On the screen their bodies shifted once more in a blurry jump-cut so that we could clearly see my husband’s hand between Victoria’s legs. Snatching the remote, I freeze-framed the image. The realization of their betrayal was like a sudden photographic flash – the negative image imprinted on the backs of my eyelids and seared into my brain.

‘Um … would you believe I was taking her temperature?’

‘With your finger? Um … no.’

Something cracked open inside me then – open heart surgery, a gaping wound. I’d thought we were just going to watch a holiday video. But
this
was a disaster movie.

‘We need to talk,’ Hugo mumbled, diving for the remote control, and fizzing the television screen into silence.

‘Sure,’ I replied, in a high-pitched voice I didn’t recognize, ‘if you can manage to extricate your tongue from my sister’s twat.’ I turned to Sven and Britney. ‘Would you mind leaving now, because I seem to be in a Greek play all of a sudden?’ Inside I was wailing, screaming, sobbing, to the accompaniment of wrists being cut, but outside I was all crass sarcasm.

Britney tittered maliciously as I shoved them outside. The door to our room clicked shut behind their snickering forms. And then we turned, we three, to stare, in horror, at each other.

‘If you weren’t father to my two children and a brilliant surgeon, you’d be nothing but a philandering bastard, do you know that?’

‘Look,’ my husband busked, in his most authoritative, diagnostic voice, running his hands through his thick mane, ‘I … um … I was just helping your sister with some intimacy issues and things got a little out of hand …’

But I wasn’t interested in any of
his
feeble explanations. Instead, I rounded on my sister, who had taken up the foetal position in the corner of the couch.

‘It’s your fault!’ my sister sobbed. ‘You threw us together. That night you got Hugo to drive me home after the dinner party from hell. You ordered us to kiss and make up! We got talking and—’

I gasped. ‘All this time I’ve been accusing you of sneaking around with Britney, you were sneaking around with my own sister?’

‘I’m sorry, Lizzie,’ he grovelled. ‘I was thinking about
you
the whole time. It’s just … she’s so like you. You without the worry lines and leg stubble … A more glamorous version of you.’

I glared at him. ‘Glamorous? Victoria? You’ve turned her into a bloody patchwork quilt. There are bits of her body that you’ve operated on that don’t go with the bits which
haven’t
been. Her arms are over four decades old and her lips, two weeks. She’s sitting on one brand new butt cheek while the other half of her arse is forty-two.’

‘It’s just so unfair,’ Victoria bawled, in an attempt to get me to feel sorry for her. ‘At twenty I looked younger than I was. And at forty I look older.’

‘Oh, yes, it’s on a par with ethnic cleansing on the scale of unfairness,’ I shouted back.

‘I don’t want to be too old to die young!’

‘That’s good because I am going to kill you!’ I lunged at her.

‘You don’t know what it’s like!’ She swatted at me. ‘I’m slowly becoming invisible. I’m slowly being airbrushed out of life – like an ex-chum of Stalin’s.’

My voice wavered. ‘You’ve never had to try, Victoria. Life has just fallen into your lap. Since we were kids there’s been a two-year waiting list to get into your address book. While I’ve had to juggle and struggle and learn Latin roots and trigonometry and new languages to get noticed, all you’ve ever had to do is enter a bloody room.’ I got hold of my voice again. ‘You’ve had everything just handed to you on a plate. But that wasn’t enough. You had to have my husband too!’ My voice gave way again.

‘Oh, go comb your eyebrow, Elisabeth.
You’re
the one who’s had Life fall into her lap. You were Mother’s favourite. The intellectual of the family. You’d swot all night for a cervical-smear test! And yes! I was jealous of you and your happy marriage. I always have been!’ She coughed this confession up like a fur ball. ‘Plus, I got fifteen thousand pounds’ worth of surgery for nothing.’

I stared at her, uncomprehendingly. ‘You have no heart, Victoria. Do you know that? If Hugo X-rayed your chest cavity he’d find nothing. Just a hunk of lung. All this bloody time you’ve spent changing your exterior but your interior’s still the same. Inside you’re the ugly, spoiled, cruel little girl you always were.’

‘Well,
you
spent all that time changing your interior – reading books, getting degrees – while neglecting your exterior. You can’t blame me that you lost your husband!’ Victoria retorted, stomping her foot.

I buckled at the knees. A gushing, roaring pain flash-flooded through my body. Hugo took my arm and lowered me on to the couch.

I looked up at my husband in dismay. Some men play hard to get. Well, Hugo played hard to
want
. But damn it all! He was the man I loved. I know what you’re thinking. Why, in God’s name, did I continue to adore him? Why was I so determined to be a member of the UK Married Women’s Drowning Team? I dunno. Maybe my solar panels were directed at the moon.

‘Do you want me to leave?’ asked my husband, sombrely.

‘We have a loving, contented, supportive family, Hugo Frazer, and you, you cheating, moronic ratbag, are not going to fuck it up!’

‘Look, we can sort this out,’ my half-sister placated.

‘Chaos, tragedy, heartbreak.’ I opened the door for her. ‘I’d say your work here is done.’

‘Lizzie—’

‘Shut up. I never, ever want to see you again.’ I slammed the door in her face, and collapsed on the floral settee in the middle of paradise. As I sobbed I realized I had learnt a very important lesson: it’s a good idea to love your enemies. Just in case your friends and family turn out to be two-faced, low-down, rotten, lying mongrels.

22

Sigmund Freud Floor – Neurosis, Psychosis, Paranoid Schizophrenia, Delusions of Normality And Ladies’ Lingerie, All Exit, Please

TO BE A
successful wife you need a degree in Animal Behavioural Psychology. Without this education, the only possible way to put a husband’s affair into perspective is to consume boxes of chocolates, pints of vodka and pass out on the next available plane back to London, squashed up at the back near the economy toilets.

When I came to, eight hours later, the scene from the plane window as we circled Heathrow resembled a page from
Where’s Wally
? only I was more lost than Wally ever was.

If there were a Self-loathing Chart for wives, then seeing your husband between the thighs of a much prettier woman with huge bazookas who also just happens to be your older sister would have to be at the top. At the bottom of the chart, it would say in small print, ‘Expect crying, total insecurity and talk of breast implants for about, oh, the next decade.’

I hadn’t felt old until my husband started having an affair. Then, suddenly, it was as if the warranties had simultaneously expired on all of my internal organs. By the time I staggered down the gangway, there were a few give-away signs that I was becoming slightly deranged. In the immigration queue, I noticed that the date stamped on my passport was 14 February. I composed a Valentine’s Day message for my husband. ‘Hugo, please be so kind as to pick up your scalpel, turn it on your own chest and plunge it in and out repeatedly until dead. Love from your wife, Lizzie.’ When the officer took too long inspecting my passport, I snapped at him to hurry up. ‘I’ve got a lot to do – children to raise, dry-cleaning to pick up, husbands to kill …’

I fantasized about replacing Hugo’s KY-jelly with a tube of superglue – that would fix them – but in reality there was no fight in me. Wrestling my club-wheeled baggage trolley through Customs, I felt as stale as the aeroplane odour emanating from my clothes.

‘I got your message,’ said a voice in my ear. Cal whistled through his teeth and shook his head sympathetically. ‘Did a gypsy put a curse on you at birth, Lizzie, or what? You must have been gutted.’

‘Put it this way, a paramedic and a defibrillator would not have gone amiss. Who’s got the kids? And why are you wearing a tie? What? Are you on
trial
for something?’ I was still angry at him. Hell, I was angry with all men. I was in that if-you-can’t-say-something-bad-about-men-then-don’t-say-anything-at
-all
phase.

‘Um … I believe “nice to see you” is the internationally accepted formal welcome of choice.’ He smiled. ‘The kids are with Marrakech.’ He commandeered the stroppy trolley and pushed it through the revolving door into the Arctic air. After Antigua, London was as cold as a giant meat locker. ‘You’ve
got
to get rid of him, now,’ Cal advised. ‘This is more proof, not that you needed more, that marriage should go the way of other archaic traditions, like human sacrifice – which, interestingly enough, also takes place on an
altar
.’

‘Calim, I am only leaving this marriage at gunpoint.’

‘Your man has proven himself to be a pig, a total snake, a rat. If you’re so in love with animals, you should go open a sanctuary someplace and, I dunno, suckle a wombat.’

‘Why is it that everybody has a marriage-guidance book within them? And why are they so keen to Let It Out?’

‘He’s a greedy, opportunistic liar. Apart from those few shortcomings, your man’s a prince.’

‘He’s also my husband,’ I was practically screaming as we rattled over the faded zebra crossing, into the car-park lifts, ‘so do you mind if I delude myself just a little longer?’

Cal backed off. ‘That’s my moral position. But, hey, don’t worry. If you don’t like it, I have plenty of others,’ he joshed, fidgeting for a fag.

‘Let’s face facts. A thirty-nine-and-three-quarter-year-old divorcee with two children and no job. Who’d want me? I’ll end up choking to death on people’s leftovers in some tacky little eatery in King’s Cross where nobody knows the Heimlich manoeuvre.’

Cal fed a five-pound note into the surly mouth of the automatic parking machine. ‘You’re a sound woman, Lizzie,’ he said earnestly. ‘Loads of men would want you.’

‘Yeah, right.’ I trailed leadenly after him. ‘All my life I’ve been second best to Victoria. All my life I’ve had her hand-me-downs. Everything I wore she’d already sweated in. Including my husband, now!’

‘Relative humidity,’ Cal quipped, in an effort to cheer me up.

I flung myself into the V Dub and slammed the door against the gnawing cold. ‘The worst thing is she’s right. If only I hadn’t “let myself go”. I mean, look at me! I’m rusting. I’m corroding.’ I slapped the dashboard. ‘If I were a car, you’d trade me in, you’d strip me down for parts. Hell, you’d scrap me. And yet the only mechanics who can fix me cost a thousand bloody bucks an hour.’

‘
Fix
you?’ Cal queried, contorting behind the wheel.

‘Yes, starting with breast implants.’

Cal’s hands fell off the steering-wheel as though it was scalding hot. He scrutinized me with such intensity I wondered if I’d forgotten to take off my airline socks or something.

‘Lizzie, implants eat away at your immune system. They cause neurological problems and memory loss – although, hey, you’re obviously sufferin’ from that already ’cause you seem to have forgotten you’re a feminist.’

‘Hey, walk a mile in my Wonder-bra and then we’ll talk.’ My seat-buckle made an irritated click as it snapped across my puny chest.

Cal looked at me dubiously. ‘That is
you
in there, isn’t it, Lizzie?’

‘As long as a woman’s pretty, that’s enough for most men. A brain is optional.’ I thumped the heater without success. Despite the freezing chill, I had to wind down the window to get some respite from Cal’s cigarette fumes. ‘In some languages, German, Hungarian, Spanish, Swahili and Zulu, beautiful actually means “good”. Which is why I’m also going to have a face lift,’ I said, gulping oxygen.

Pulling out of the car-park, my best friend’s forehead was corduroyed with concern. ‘Lizzie! No. You’re a beautiful-lookin’ woman – in a lovely, natural way.’

‘Calim, after a certain age a woman realizes that “natural” is a euphemism for “haggard and old and not getting laid any more”.’

‘No! You’re grand just as you are – with your life’s experiences there on your gorgeous face. People can read between your lines.’ Cars lurched backwards and forwards in a hoe-down of sixteen-point turns as we all manoeuvred our way out of the airport. ‘What about
je ne sais quoi
?’

‘French for crêpy necks and crows’ feet.’

‘Wit and wisdom are just as important as beauty in a woman. Actually more important. Beauty comes from within.’

‘Yeah. Within a jar marked “Estee Lauder”. Women are as close to being appreciated for our personalities as Myra Hindley is of getting a job in a school nursery.’

We merged into the bobbing black sea of taxis ebbing towards central London.

‘Well, speaking for your family and friends, we love you as you are. And to have anything removed certainly makes you less than we bargained for.’

‘Same goes for you when you lose a lung.’ I took the cigarette from between his lips and stubbed it out in an ashtray already submerged in butts.

‘I am not smokin’ too much,’ Cal insisted, fishing in his pocket for another fag.

‘You are too. In the middle of smoking a cigarette, you stop for a cigarette break. What are you so nervous about?’

‘Imagine it. If I had a tracheotomy, I could smoke two fags simultaneously!’ he said, igniting another. ‘One thing I’ve learnt about Life, Lizzie. None of us get out of it alive. And happiness – well, it’s unexpected. It’s the cigarette you shouldn’t smoke. It’s the cold Guinness you forgot was in the back of your fridge on a hot day. It’s the book of your enemy bein’ remaindered. It’s realizin’ that the love of your life is right under your nose.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said dismissively, fiddling with the radio dial. I’d just found an appropriate song, Whitney Houston’s ‘I—
I
— I Will Always Love Youuuuuuuuuuuuuuu’, and was madly emoting to it, when Cal unexpectedly pulled off the motorway.