Face Value (32 page)

“So, what brings you here, Trish?”

Trisha beamed, that same beam she’d seen a million times at the end of each news item, announcing the serious story with a humorous twist, the “and finally” moment where the viewer could relax and think that all was well with the world because a family of ducks had held up the traffic in Tokyo for an hour, or a cat had survived the spin cycle of a washing machine.

“Well, in a funny way, I owe it all to you, Kate!”

She hadn’t expected gratitude from Trisha of all people.

“Well, not all to you. Obviously years of experience, my qualifications, my unique personality—coupled with my sense of fun, which gives me the confidence needed to appear on reality TV shows, and thus gain popular appeal and notoriety—has a lot to do with it too, but . . .” She hammered out each word slowly and earnestly, then giggled, nervously. That wasn’t like her. Kate realized with some degree of satisfaction that Trisha was actually nervous around her.

“Well, as I was saying,” she continued, “things have changed in the last couple of months or so, since you wrote that story about me. That awful man I was seeing, Donald Truckell, well, I started seeing the director-general of the BBC and Donald didn’t like that so he outed me to one of the Sundays. Can you believe it? I mean, nobody knew, and what harm did it do?”

Darleen’s eyes looked as if they were about to pop out of her face. It was a relief to see that she could still make such expressions. Kate wondered if the Botox was preventing them from popping out altogether.

“But all’s well that ends well. The dog had to resign. His bitch of a wife kicked up such a fuss, such a shame! Anyway, they gave me a new job, anchorwoman for BBC World News, so now I’m, well . . . worldwide, which is great.” A sudden wave of anger flashed across her face before the screen returned to normal. “Oh, all right, being taken off national news and put to that late-night news show that people only see in hotels might be perceived by some to be a somewhat lateral career move, but it could have been worse! People watch me all over the world, can you believe that?”

Kate stared at her blankly.

“And, well, obviously, I saw your story on CNN. It’s fantastic, Kate, a real rags-to-riches type of piece, and as a Maidstone girl, I really think you owe it to your community to let yourself be interviewed by me for tomorrow morning’s show. So that’s why I’m here!”

“Rags to riches?”

“I want the exclusive, Kate. We’ll send a car to take you to our London studios, and”—she said London as if Kate had never set foot out of town before—“and obviously there’s a fee to cover your expenses. The interview shouldn’t take more than an hour. And it’s great exposure!”

“A fee?” Suddenly she had an idea, a way to make this work for herself. “How much?”

“Five thousand pounds. We don’t usually pay anything, but . . . I’m funding this one myself.” Trisha assumed a puppy dog pose, her eyes widened, and for a split second Kate thought they were actually welling with tears. “Please, Kate, I really need this break!”

“Trisha, I’m wary of the press.” She sat down on the third chair and motioned to Trisha to sit down, too. She hastily did as she was told, smoothing out the creases in her dogstooth check jacket. It looked cheap; the buttons were a nasty black plastic. Perhaps doing the graveyard shifts at the BBC was taking its toll. Her hairstyle had changed subtly, with more wings around her face, and her eyebrows were arched and rigid, as if she was surprised, permanently. “You know how it is, Trisha. By the way, I’ve never known, am I calling you Trish, or Trisha?”

“Oh, whatever you prefer!” Trisha smiled, enthusiastic, needy.

“You see, in my experience,” continued Kate, “they’ll promise you anything, promise you a bleeding trip to the Bahamas, a Balenciaga, anything to get their story.” Trisha looked pained. She fidgeted uncomfortably.

“So we’ll do it my way. Make it ten grand. Cash on the day, please. And I want the car to take me straight on to Heathrow in time for my flight. Okay?”

“Oh, that’s just great! Thank you so much!” Trisha jumped up from her seat and clapped her hands gleefully. Darleen looked at her with a worried expression on her face. Even she could see the woman was unhinged.

“I’m sorry, but I have to go now. Call me to let me know what time the car’s coming, won’t you?” Kate stood up, shook Trisha’s hand, and left the room. She walked upstairs to her bedroom.

She could hear her mum showing Trisha out.

“Well, that went well, didn’t it?” Darleen said, politely, patiently holding the front door open. She was wearing a pair of gold mules and a Juicy Couture look-alike tracksuit. Kate realized her mum had taken the week off to spend with her. In the circumstances, she’d been very understanding about hardly having seen her. She knew Lise would have to take priority for now.

“Oh, yes, I’m so, so happy. We’ll look after her tomorrow, Mrs. Miller, or can I call you Darleen? Do you think Kate will be donating the money to a charity?”

“I haven’t the foggiest, dear.”

The front door clicked shut.

Kate looked around her bedroom, aware that soon she would be leaving it again, that the room that had for so long been her sanctuary, her den, was no longer needed. Posters on the walls—of the Greenpeace ship
Rainbow Warrior
, a Flaming Lips tour that she’d never managed to afford tickets for, Bowie’s
Ziggy Stardust
album cover—spoke volumes to her of another lifetime. There was a brown wicker chair in the corner, upright, stiff-looking, that Darleen had half attempted to restore following a few stints at an evening course in basket weaving and wickerwork. It was this chair that Kate pulled out now, dragging it in front of her desk. Piles of unopened mail sat on the right; bank statements she’d not bothered asking to be sent on, knowing her salary was to be paid into her new American account; a couple of good luck cards from Tania and Lianne at the office. Briefly she thought of them, wondered when she’d see them next. Hopefully not too long. But was that correct? Did she really hope it wouldn’t be too long, or was that just some platitude people said to not feel so bad about not missing others? She opened each one, her fingers bluntly shuffling through the fold at the top of the envelope.

Don’t forget us!
wrote Tania.
Because we won’t forget you!

She had forgotten them. Hadn’t made any effort to keep in touch, and had barely thought of them. They’d been there for her. Working at
Maidstone Bazaar
hadn’t been awe-inspiring, the offices were by definition parochial, the work sometimes ridiculous, but it hadn’t been such an awful place, had it? The people were nice, lovely, brilliant. Even Brian had his good points.

She sat down, reached for the phone. All was clear in her head now.

There was work to be done.

twenty-eight

It was interesting, Kate mused as she stood by the window of her bedroom looking out onto the street, how little sleep one needed when the fires of adrenaline burned so vehemently inside. The brown light of dawn was starting to push away the blackness from the streets, easing the eye gently into another day. It was 5:00 a.m. She’d seen the whole night through, been its companion from dusk until dawn as she sat by her laptop, made calls, found answers to questions she needed answering from the Internet, and even handwrote cards to Tania and Lianne at her old office. Everything was set. She could hear her mum downstairs making cups of tea, three. She’d filled her in on what she planned to do, and Darleen had stared at her flabbergasted, shocked at her daughter’s sudden confidence in transatlantic travel arrangements.

The car would be here in thirty minutes, just enough time to do a quick reread of the most important article she had ever written in her life. Funny that; she’d thought her original article, the one that had got her into all this trouble in the first place, about Patty, was the most important article. But this one, this one had to do a lot of things, answer a lot of questions, explain a lot of truths, and, most importantly, answer questions of her own.

“Some Kind of Beautiful” she’d called it. Which it was. An essay about the rights and wrongs of plastic surgery, and whether that was still a question worth asking today. She found herself coming back time after time to that very definition of beauty that Alexis had challenged her with way back when. She hadn’t been able to answer that question then; was she any closer to answering now? What was beauty?

As if searching for answers, she looked into the mirror, studying her reflection as she had all those months ago when she’d first got the call from Alexis. Her views had changed, even her looks had changed, but was she was still searching for answers, or did she have them, somewhere inside? She sat down at her desk again, looking at the article. So . . . what was beauty?

For Trisha Hillmory and every other insecure woman in the world, it was about conforming to a look, an idyll of beauty that they would never in their own eyes achieve. For her mum, it was about being in love, having great sex with someone who loved her. It was about enjoying her face, defying age in a spirited, life-affirming way. For Jean-Paul, it was about his art, about creating something that made him stand out from the crowd. For the children who JK worked with, for the children Paracato had worked with, it was about getting through life without being teased, hurt. Self-preservation. For JK himself it was about taking pride in his work, beauty as a means to an end.

For Lise, beauty was life itself.

And for Kate?

She pulled down a photo album from a dusty shelf above the desk. When you were an only child, the pictures tended to be all of one person. You. There she was, gawky, funny, cute, as a child. Her nose was a button nose, her tummy, even then, a little potbellied. She wondered if JK would have found her beautiful then. She knew the answer to that one. He loved children. Three pages on, there she was a few years older, tiny breasts forming lumps in her T-shirt, breasts she’d been embarrassed about, breasts that had grown into only slightly bigger lumps in her T-shirt that she was still embarrassed about. Would she have them surgically enhanced if she could? Like Petruschka’s? Maybe not now . . . but maybe one day?

She was still in the skinny black jeans she’d worn all day. She looked cool, she thought to herself, if not beautiful, then, a woman finally in charge of her look, not afraid of it anymore.

Her eyes scanned down the page of her finished article. Paragraph three. She’d reflected on Naomi Wolf’s polemic "The Beauty Myth.” Published in 1991. Had she been too controversial in suggesting that it was time to move on from this position? That in the early ’90s, being a feminist just as surgery was gaining popularity was understandably a frightening time for women. She’d wanted to interview her on the subject but hadn’t had time. But she couldn’t help thinking that yes, women had moved on since then, and what was the difference between highlights, makeup, a decent moisturizer, and what we did now in the name of beauty—having a few little injections every so often to preserve our youth?

Had Kate’s views changed that much since she had arrived in New York? She still didn’t feel comfortable with surgery, or injectables. She knew Botox wasn’t for her. She was convinced they still didn’t know enough about it. And besides, if coffee was a toxin, something you weren’t supposed to drink because toxins might lead to cancer, what the hell was Botox? But Botox was right for some women, making them feel confident, happy about their looks and their lives, in the same way that her skinny black jeans made Kate feel now. The one thing that told her was that she didn’t have the right to judge. So, she didn’t care if she grew into some ancient craggy rock of a woman. But some women did care, did worry, and okay, sometimes, often in fact, they took it too far, but who was to say what other demons they faced in their lives?

She opened up her laptop one more time. There was something else she needed to add. Something about Lise. She felt her eyes filling with tears and as they rolled down her face, she started to type furiously. Fury was a force to be reckoned with, she thought to herself, and it really was fury she was feeling. Why had cancer happened to Lise? Why?

The paragraph fit neatly at the end, after the bit about bad-looking surgery and women looking like Barbie dolls. It needed this ending, needed something personal. After all, what was more personal than cosmetic surgery?

She wrote:

Was that too harsh? Not really. She continued:

She stood up again, looked out of the window. Her neighbor’s cat prowled around the bottom of their oak tree, chasing after a bird, then gave up, sat down, and started licking itself. Like Paracato had said, even animals lick themselves clean. Even animals take a pride in their appearance.

The last sentence. It came. Like it always did when she needed it most.

Kate shut her computer down. Satisfied. She took one last look around her little room and gathered her bags to take them downstairs, her precious laptop clutched under one arm. Her eyes were red, but it was nothing she couldn’t fix with a couple of eyedrops and some YSL Touche Eclat in the shadowy hollows underneath.