Nip 'N' Tuck (23 page)

The red cone atop the tracking camera ignited and the floor manager cued me to start oozing charisma for the three minute news update. I just stared at the plasma screen. My eyes tightened and ached as I tried to read the autocue about Jeffrey Archer’s escape from prison. And then it just hit me. Reality aftershave. A slap of it, right in my refurbished face.

‘May I have your attention for an important news bulletin.’

The cameramen, floor managers and makeup artists turned their receptive countenances in my direction.

‘Some of you might have been wondering about my return to the news desk. You might assume it’s because I’m good at my job and because the producers have respect for mature women viewers. Well, actually, I’m only back in front of the camera because of
this
.’

I ripped open my shirt and flung it floorwards. This produced a flurry on the studio floor. Crusoe and Dweezil, looking stunned, spoke rapidly into headsets while above, in the control room, Raphael gesticulated wildly. Then he flicked a switch and bellowed emphatically into a mike. Too late. I had torn out my earpiece. With no alternative but to stay on me for the allotted three minutes, all three cameras pivoted and bowed in my direction, lights ablaze.

‘I mean, are these plastic tits really going to make me a better news-reader? What do
you
think?’ I unhooked my bra and sent it, slingshot-style, straight at Camera One. ‘Would you look at these ri
dic
ulous boobs?’ I prodded at my chest. ‘They’re not breasts. They’re an awning. I could put patio furniture under there. I mean,
look
at them. They’ve given me the relaxed spontaneity of a … I dunno, a store mannequin. And actually that’s
exactly
what I’ve become. Women who have implants are always bleating on about how they did it for themselves. Well, it’s bullshit! We do it for men.’ Hot juicy tears plopped off the end of my nose. ‘I did it for my husband because – because he was cheating on me.’

Rage welled up inside me. I snapped off my acrylic nails. People were streaming into the studio now … but a tidal wave of temper swept me up and hurtled me forward. I kicked off one vertiginous shoe in the direction of Camera Three. I wriggled off my leather mini-skirt and over-armed it at Camera Two. I tugged at my hair extensions, weeding them from my skull and scattered them, Ophelia-like, on the studio floor. Panting with exertion, I harrumphed back on the chair in nothing but my hot-pink knickers.

‘Here are my demands. I want Britney Spears’ and Pamela Anderson’s original boobs mounted in a museum somewhere. With Cher’s missing rib. Yes! And all the gallons of fat that’s been sucked out of Roseanne – along with her humour, for Chrissake. It’ll be a museum dedicated to female stupidity. And it will be funded by all those shitty magazine articles and TV adverts that have “Beautiful People” practically
forni
cating with their
face
creams.’

The side door of the studio suctioned open and three bald security guards scurried in. Through the jangle of urgent, whispered conversation, I could hear one of them asking if I was armed. Possibly because I was obviously on the brink of a nervous bloody breakdown, I found this extremely funny.

‘Do – do you – do you know what’s going to happen?’ I sputtered, between huge, snorty laughs, ‘In this age of boring, airbrushed women, imperfections will become hugely refreshing. A Barbra Streisand nose, a Hillary Clinton thigh.’ I was laughing so hard that my naked boobs were pogoing up and down on the news desk. With Herculean effort I regained control. ‘But what if we just stopped? Hey? What if we just stopped being age-ophobic? Imagine the relief if we all just
let go
. Just accept that women come in different shapes and sizes. As
we
damn well accept the bloody blokes in our lives, with their beer bellies and bald bits …’

The vinyl seat had stuck to the backs of my hot and sweaty bare legs. Every time I squirmed, half my thighs stayed behind – finally following me with a reluctant, sucking, smacking sound.

‘Men can get older – who cares? Women get old and we’re fired off the femininity stakes.
I
was fired. Did you know that? Oh, yes. For the crime of being
thirty-nine
and flat-chested. And I only got rehired when I opted for this superannuated porn-star look.’ I gestured at my bimbo cast-offs scattered haphazardly around the studio. ‘Why the hell can’t women come of age in the public arena with wrinkles and self-esteem intact? Like bloody blokes do. Why do Jack Nicholson and Michael Douglas still “get the girl”? What is it? A charity engagement for “Help the Aged”? Puh-lease! If time flies, then
they
have frequent airmiles. Why is it that for men, every cloud has a silver-haired lining?’

I sprang up, toppling the news desk over. ‘Why do older women have to become invisible, damn it?’ Stiletto in hand, I then executed a wounded elephant charge across the studio floor, and smashed the vanity lights around the makeup mirror, which exploded like popcorn in a pan. The glass shards splintered televisually through the studio lights, like snow.

Now
that
had TVQ.

After being released without charge from police custody some five hours later, I went home to leave my husband.

‘What about the children?’ Hugo asked, dumb-founded. ‘How can you sabotage their mental well-being?’

‘I’ve decided it’s pointless even trying to be a perfect mother. Because you know what happens? Your kids grow up and start whingeing. “Why didn’t you screw me up more, when I was young? I’ve got nobody to blame now!”’

‘Lizzie. Calm down. You’re not in your right mind–’

‘You’re right … And I diagnose disenchantment with husband. Although you probably know it by its more technical name –
DIVORCE
.’

‘You can’t divorce me. We’ve been through thick and thin—’

‘More like ‘thin and thin’ of late, pal. I would have loved you for ever, Hugo,’ I said, suddenly overwhelmed by sadness, ‘till jowls, golfing cardigans, bingo tournaments and bald shins where the hairs had been rubbed away by the nylon of your sad old socks do us part. But you threw us away.’

‘You really don’t love me any more?’

‘Let’s just say that the hallucinatory drugs finally wore off.’

‘But I can’t live without you, Lizzie. You can’t divorce me! On what grounds?’

‘Irreconcilable differences. We seem to have different ideas about dental hygiene. I mean, you seem to think it’s okay to put my sister’s genitalia into your mouth.’ I handed him his suitcase. ‘On behalf of the Academy, we would like to offer you this award for the best fake marriage.’

Then there was only one thing left to do.

25

‘I’m a Natural Blonde, So Please Speak Slowly’

HOW DO YOU
make five pounds of fat look good? You stick a nipple on it.

When I turned up at the Longevity Clinic the next day, there were breast augmentations booked all morning. A mastoplexy was scheduled for twelve p.m. Suction lipectomies for one. Eyelid, neck and brow lifts at two-fifteen. Four p.m., a nose job. Three-ish – a ‘lip flip’ (for that bee-stung look). Three-thirty, a designer vagina. Body-fat transfers from thighs to cheeks at four o’clock. Three litres of fat liposuctioned from buttocks and a brow suspension at five. And then me: a Bimbo Reversal. To counteract bad publicity, Britney Amore was at the clinic doing an interview for
Hello!
magazine. She reared her head suspiciously like a cornered cobra. ‘What do
you
want,
Blondie
?’

‘I want to go back to being my old self.’

Taking me aside, Britney delivered the cruellest cut of all – that the explantation would cost more than the augmentation.

‘Um … I’m a natural blonde, so please speak slowly.
What
did you say again?’

‘It costs more to take ’em out than to put ’em in.’ She laughed scornfully and put out her palm. ‘That’ll be five and a half thousand quid.’

Lying in the operating theatre, I informed the nurse that I was already anaesthetized. I had, after all, been married for twelve years. She jabbed me anyway. At first I thought the drugs weren’t working. But then I considered the purple poodles prancing on my forehead. And why were they reading Balzac? Oh, and what was my name again? One thing remained clear; soon, I would be my old brunette, nine stone, small-breasted slobby self again, wearing whatever I liked, no matter how unflattering; clothes which looked as though I’d just thrown them on – and missed. ‘Give me back Lizzie McPhee,’ I said deliriously to the surgeon. (I’d requested the only other surgeon Hugo had told me wasn’t a quack.) ‘Oh, and while you’re in there, take out a couple of organs I can sell to pay for this operation, okay?’

But, on reflection, it had all been worth it in a way. I’d mastered one of Life’s most important lessons. (Apart from the truism that any woman wearing real pearls is having fake orgasms – and
vice versa
.) The very best thing about us is grey: the substance between our ears. That is the only unique part of our bodies.

And then I plummeted under.

26

The Boobed Job

AFTER MY LIVE-TO-AIR
meltdown, during which I bared to the nation my silicone implants – and the fact that my husband was a liar and an adulterer – I felt like a road accident. Friends slowed down to look at the gory details, then sped on, horrified, without stopping.

During my recovery period, the doorbell became a signal to hide upstairs. My doormat read ‘Welcome. Now Go Away’. Not that I was depressed – the opposite, in fact, because even during the worst of the post-op pain, I was elated. With the hideous plastic expunged, I felt lightweight and floaty; relief flooded my empty chest like a cool, oxygenated blast of air.

As the summer ripened, the botox and the collagen wore off, and I could see my old face again. I was no longer travelling under an assumed mane either; the peroxide grew out and my crown of unruly curls sprang back. Oh, the relief of no longer pretending to be a tooth-flossing abcruncher. I embraced my previous, pore-clogged self with joy. I delighted in shaving my legs only to skirt length. At night I wore a flannelette pyjama top that didn’t match the bottom and fell asleep in full makeup. I was free to suck the soft centres out of chocolates then put them back in the box; to sniff the armpits of T-shirts in the laundry basket to see if they could be worn just one more time – they were the kind of T-shirts that said things like ‘My Other Body Is In The Shop’. Once in them, I shook my upper arms like fleshy maracas, without giving a damn. It took a lot of self-control and determination, but I even managed to give up dieting!

Ironically, with my new notoriety came a deluge of job offers – a case of ‘thanks for the mammaries’. Every satellite station in Europe and, of course, Channel 5 was bidding for me, but I wasn’t venturing out in public yet – well, only to pick up the kids from school. At the gate I could feel the furtive glances of the other mums behind my departing back. But Julia and Jamie welcomed the return of their old mother with the kind of fervour that could have resulted in hairline fractures.

So, I had lost a husband (Hugo had moved permanently into a flat above the Longevity Clinic) and a half-sister, but I had recovered my self-respect. When friends asked where Victoria was, I said I hadn’t seen her since Antigua. ‘She may be dead or she may be modelling,’ I’d shrug.

One evening after I had got the kids to bed – a parental exercise that makes you understand why some members of the animal kingdom eat their young – there was a tentative stutter of knuckles on wood.

I opened the door with some trepidation to find Victoria huddled in the portal. In the dim illumination, I could see she had been beaten up quite badly. She was weeping from a face twisted with pain. Was this the same woman who kept her emotional thermostat at a constant sixty-two degrees? Who showed no feelings as to do so would only lead to lines?

‘Jesus, Vick!’ I forgot my anger and a deep wave of pity washed through me. I led her gingerly inside. Holding on to me for support, she lurched down the hall. Without her elegant hairdo and elaborate makeup, my sister resembled a coat-stand, her clothes swallowing her gaunt frame. Her face seemed to have stopped trying. For the first time, I noticed the lines etched on to her complexion; the shadows beneath her haunted eyes, the fragile erosion of her upper lip, the grey roots in her flattened hair. Crying had matted her lashes together like the legs of a crushed centipede.

After guiding her into a chair in the sitting room, I returned with antiseptic swabs and knelt before her. ‘Vicky,’ I tried to keep my voice calm as I pressed a cold flannel to her tattered cheek, ‘who did this to you?’ Her lip was split and scratches raked across her forehead.

With great effort she managed to speak. ‘Sven.’

‘What?’ I reeled, rocking back on my heels. ‘But
why
?’

‘Marrakech and Sven did a deal. He paid the US lawyer to bring a case for that Death Row convict. And agreed to give her a breast reduction. In exchange she would do some modelling for him.’ In a dead-pan monotone, her words blurted out like a printer. ‘But instead of reducing her, he – he made her bigger. He told me that advertisers are requesting fewer super thin models and more buxom girls. And that Marrakech could be the most busty of them all. Thirty-four E. He just altered her, Lizzie. Like an unsatisfactory dress.’

It was not news to me that Sven was a chauvinist pig, but this double-cross was a feat unparalleled in porcine history.

‘And I— I signed the consent form.’ Victoria made a pained, flinching expression, as though her face was being sucked out the back of her skull. ‘I thought it was a permission form for her to model.’

‘Didn’t you read it?’

‘I trusted him.’

‘How could you trust a rat like him?’

‘Because we have a love-hate relationship. I love him and he … he hates me.’ She buckled forward, her voice broken and juddering. ‘What kind of mother am I? Why didn’t I protect my little girl?’

I poured us tumblers of whisky and pressed one into her trembling hand. ‘We’ll bring charges,’ I said, staunchly.