Nip 'N' Tuck (15 page)

The very first person I ran into was Al Pacino.

‘Hello, Al Apecia,’ I said.

The shrill prattle of over-refreshed PR people fell silent. It was then that my plastic breast pouch flopped out of my fringed leather bra cup and landed at the movie star’s feet, where it wobbled forlornly like a stranded jellyfish.

There was a hiss of amusement among the guests punctuated by a shriek of cruel laughter from Britney. Only Hugo was silent. His expression suggested a dawning realization that he’d married the only living brain donor in human history.

Obviously I’d been reading
The Sylvia Plath Guide to Love, Life and Living Happily Ever After
.

On my way home, alone in the taxi, I tore out my hair, gnawed my nails, downed a bottle of tequila … Stopped to buy a machete and combed the cabbie’s
A to Z
to find out where She lived …

If only I hadn’t gone to
The Vagina Monologues
that night, I wept. If only I hadn’t taken Hugo with me. If only I hadn’t found that grey pube and cropped my pudenda. If only I hadn’t set fire to my own kitchen. If only I’d not gone to Sven’s model awards ceremony. If only I’d worn flat shoes tonight with no breast enhancers. If only, if only, if only …

Of late, I had gambled with fate and lost so many times, I had roulette rash.

What’s more, I had a terrible feeling there were a lot more spins left in that wheel …

16

With a Husband Like Mine, Who Needs Enemas?

ONE OF LIFE’S
great mysteries, apart from the fact that TV weathermen get a clothing allowance and still look the way they do, is why women continue to stand by their cheating husbands. I mean,
men
don’t stay in a relationship when they don’t think it’s working. Stephen Hawking walked out on
his
marriage and the man has no
legs
.

As I lay in bed later that night I tried to fathom when exactly Hugo had turned into the sort of person who insists on being seated in the first-class section of a lifeboat. I had met him shortly after he graduated with distinction from medical school. He would talk passionately, then, about making the world a better, kinder place. So why had my dedicated fountain-pen-pushing, poetry-quoting man taken to using expressions like ‘multi-tasking’ and ‘out-sourcing’ and other buzzwords, like, well, ‘buzzwords’?

When did I first notice that he was turning into the sort of bloke who wore pinstriped condoms? I think it was about the time he became famous helping to reconstruct the faces of children injured in Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka. Princess Diana even came to watch him operate. She was so impressed that one of her charities funded his floating hospital which was moored off the West African coast, providing operations on deformities caused by landmines and machetes. Success had put him in danger of Taking Himself Too Seriously. He’d always been such a cautious man – passing scissors handle-first, not running with a glass in his hand, not getting out of his seat until the aircraft had come to a complete standstill. To be leaping into a business venture with these vultures, well, it was like Britain without a food scare, or I dunno, Britney without her hymen, just totally out of character.

At one a.m. I stopped pretending to read page 2789 of Cal’s new manuscript, picked up the phone, which was still sticky with Jamie’s breakfast Nutella, and dialled Hugo’s mobile. He was at the hospital, he’d said – emergency brain-tumour op. I wanted to believe him. But after it clicked over to his messaging service, I placed the next call to Calim, begging baby-sitting favours.

Minutes later Cal, sockless and crumpled, was at the back door, tugging a tattered T-shirt over his tousled head. ‘You’re really leavin’?’ he asked excitedly.

I looked at him, aghast. ‘Leaving? No! I’m fighting.’

His sleep-creased face fell. ‘Oh, Lizzie,’ he said wearily. ‘Tryin’ to save your marriage is like tryin’ to refloat the
Titanic
.’

‘Hugo’s the most brilliant, handsome man I’ve ever met. Can
he
help it if women hurl themselves at him? When he takes a woman’s temperature, the nurses have to adjust it down a notch to compensate for the rush of excitement from his touch!’

‘Come on, Liz, admit it. You only married Hugo because you have no da.’

‘You think Hugo is my “father figure”? Of course he’s a father figure.
To my children
,’ I said angrily, snatching the car keys off the peg.

Cal looked stricken. ‘Hey, makin’ shallow snap judgements is what I’m good at. It’s important never ever to pay attention to anythin’ I say,’ he called after me apologetically.

It was a white-knuckled drive as I careered through Camden, dodging unmuffled mini-cabs, bat-out-of-helled around the Old Street roundabout and swerved on two wheels towards Shoreditch, deep into the grimy gullet of London’s East End. The London Hospital, a decaying Victorian mausoleum, squatted, exhausted, to my right on the Mile End Road. I hung a suicide left into the filthy car-park, my heart sinking when I discovered that his BMW was not in its allotted place.

Pushing into the overheated hospital was like opening an oven door to check a roast. A wave of stale heat hit me. The clapped-out lift responded with a grudging snarl. Too impatient to wait, I bounded upstairs to weave my way past the disgruntled trolleys, which were clattering over the warped hall floors. Rock-climbing over a mountain range of contaminated waste dumpsters, uncollected since the last world war, I rattled the handle of Hugo’s office door. Locked. Heart palpitating, I peered through the oily glass. His briefcase was not on the desk. Where the hell was my husband?

What with eighty-hour working weeks, no sleep, financial cutbacks and waiting lists longer than the Great Wall of China, NHS doctors are a curiously uncommunicative lot.

‘Have you seen Hugo?’ I asked several I recognized. They grunted blearily and traipsed past me to their next emergency.

So I wandered the grim corridors down to Ward B, alone. The sticky linoleum sucked at the soles of my shoes, which squeaked defiantly as they pulled themselves free. Squeak. Squelch. Squeak, Squelch.

A nearby sign warned that if you contracted
Staphylococcus
from being too near contaminated people, well, it wasn’t because you hadn’t been warned. I cringed at the disclaimer.
Staphylococcus aureus
is a deadly bacterium that destroys you so swiftly you’ve barely got time to say ‘Hey, I wish I’d paid more attention to that sign about the dangers of being near people contaminated with
Staphylococcus
.’

Radiators rattled asthmatically. Machines rasped. Septic yellow light filtered down from neon bulbs attached to flaky ceilings, which had dandruffed on to balding carpets. God, I thought. Was it any wonder Hugo wanted to rattle the bars of his prison gate?

Once in Ward B, I snatched back the flimsy, faded curtains inadequately separating old men from teenage girls. His patients lay there, in the regulation drag pyjamas of hospital inmates. But no Dr Hugo Frazer in evidence.

I plunged up the fire escape. It was littered with rags, a baby’s bottle, a battered bong, a soiled sanitary towel. I took the steps two at a time, panic-stricken that Hugo was between the thighs of my nemesis. When I shoved through the swinging double doors to the theatre and found him scrubbing up at the urinal-shaped sinks, I thought at first I was having a hyperventilation-induced hallucination. Although kitted out in Listerine-green theatre pyjamas with his hair fetchingly bound in a blue shower cap and half his face shrouded in a surgical mask, he was still attractive. To me, he looked like a hero from a paperback romance. Relief washed through me.

‘Elisabeth!’ My husband addressed me formally.

‘Are you fucking her or not?’ I demanded in my best Bette Davis accent. The thick stench of disinfectant embalmed the room.

‘Oh.’ He groaned. ‘Isn’t there a statute of limitations on adulterous kissing guilt? Britney Amore was a temptation unsuccessfully resisted for two minutes. That’s all.’ A bright pink gloop squirted from the soap dispenser into his upturned palms.

‘Well, what about MSB?’

‘What, pray tell, is MSB?’ he asked, scrubbing his hands with methodical precision.

‘Maximum Sperm Build-up. When I was away at that stupid spa, well, you should have stored up loads of sperm and you hadn’t. Just a trickle.’ Tears pooled behind my eyes.

Hugo threw back his head and guffawed. ‘Oh, well,
that
’s scientific. Which learned medical journal did you get
that
out of?’

‘I base that statement on extensive scientific documentation in the form of something my sister told me.’

‘Oh, your
sister
. Of course it would be your sister. The Brain of Britain. Sperm is like breast milk, Elisabeth. The more you use, the more you have. It’s a supply and demand situation.’ Water spumed from the taps, which he abruptly turned off with his elbows.

‘Oh.’ At first I felt consoled and comforted. But then a shopping list of evidence started chalking itself up in my mind – the lower-lip sandwich, his increasing absences, the chafe marks and unexplained bruises on his body, the new aerobic sexual repertoire, Britney’s mysterious medical examination – and I felt the acid of doubt bite into my skin once more. I envisaged Britney Amore in his arms, all lithe and light and lean. Next to her I was lumpen and small, weighted down with worries. A sob choked out of me. My voice emerged in a croak. ‘Don’t deceive me, Hugo. I’m beginning to question my own bloody sanity.’

My husband ripped off his mask, took me in his arms and pressed my head to his familiar chest. He smoothed me down as though I were a crumpled bedspread.

‘What
was
it about her?’ I searched his face. ‘Just because she’s in a famous medical drama, did you think that made it okay to play doctors-and-nurses?’

Hugo chuckled into my neck. I inhaled the clean, masculine smell of him. The aroma filled me with a hot, empty ache; I closed my eyes and held on to him for as long as his patience would allow.

‘Was it her body?’ I asked, when he pulled away. ‘But, for God’s sake, Hugo, the woman did a
Playboy
spread. That’s not a vagina between her legs. That’s a sperm Jacuzzi.’

Hugo affectionately chucked me under my chin.

‘I mean it can’t have been her
brain
. While signing autographs she has to stop and say to her fans “
What
’s my name again?”’ He laughed.

‘Was it …’ I didn’t want to say it. ‘Was it her breasts? Are you a “breast man”?’

‘Once and for all, I’m not a “breast man” … I am a “breast
person
”,’ my husband teased.

I raised my eyes to his, searching for a clue. I looked long and hard into his face. The face I knew so well and adored so much. ‘Well, if you look at her again, I’m going to wash your eyes out with soap. Is that clear?’

‘Elisabeth, she’s the future wife of my new business partner,’ he said, in a wearily patient tone. ‘I can’t just ignore her.’

‘Then don’t go into business with them.’

‘Lizzie, look around you!’ He gestured to the swinging, naked light bulbs. Their watery greyish light illuminated the blemished plasterwork and blistering paint. ‘This is
not ER
. There’s no glamour. Only exhaustion. My talents are wasted here. All I want to do is operate.’ His voice sounded so sentimental, so sincere, it could have been a film trailer. ‘Yet there’s no money for surgery. My cancer patients die before I can save them and all because of the inefficiency of the National Health Service.’

‘But it’s intellectual emasculation, Hugo. Sven and his girlfriend are low-lifes. They’re the Illiterati …’

‘I’ve done enough heroic self-sacrifice. I’ve worked the four-day shifts.’ He sighed discontentedly. ‘I’ve done the thirty-hour operations … Darling, do you realize how much money there is gushing out of the Fountain of Youth?’

‘Fountain? It’s not a fountain, Hugo, it’s a sewer.’ I dropped my hands away from his shoulders.

‘The worlds’ best Longevity Clinic. Not only cosmetic surgery, but egg-freezing to help women beat the biological clock, embryo research into the causes of Alzheimer’s … useful as well as lucrative. We could be set up for life. Let’s face it, now that you’re unemployed, how are we going to pay the school fees? And the cleaning lady. Not to mention our annual skiing holidays. We can’t afford to be poor! I’m doing this for
you
too, you know. Money isn’t everything, but it’s right up there with
oxygen
!’

In the sudden lull, I became aware of the thundering of hospital trolleys in the corridor outside. It seemed symbolic of all the routine chaos waiting to engulf him.

‘And if
I
don’t take this opportunity, some other surgeon will.’

‘But operating on underage models? Girls we don’t consider old enough to vote or buy a drink? And for what? To cater for some pathetic male fantasy? Hugo – I just don’t know what you stand for any more.’

‘At the moment, I stand for whatever the general public will fall for,’ he said dolefully, as the naked lightbulb above us sputtered and died. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to scrub up again.’

There was a thin, bare silence between us.

‘I’ll give up the cleaning lady. The kids can go to the state school—’

Hugo took hold of me one more time. ‘I am going ahead with the business, Lizzie.’

I stiffened in his arms. ‘Why don’t you travel light, Hugo, and leave your hypocrisy at home?’

‘And I expect your support,’ he added, sternly.

‘Then you’re going to have to choose,’ I replied, with grim finality, shrugging him off, ‘between me and Sven’s wretched clinic.’

‘How can you ask me to make such a decision?’

I turned crisply for the door. ‘Just ask yourself what Dr Jekyll would do.’

17

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Marriage! It Smells, Tastes, Looks and Spreads Like Marriage, but It Just
Isn’t

IT’S NOT ONLY
doctors’ handwriting that is indecipherable. Their language is equally cryptic. When a physician is examining you and says, for example, ‘Hmmmmm,’ what that really means is that he has no bloody idea what the hell is wrong with you but whatever it is it’s
disgusting
.