Nip 'N' Tuck (2 page)

Is it any wonder that once you hit thirty-nine a woman’s IQ halves when she’s within the vicinity of a new beauty product? Why we huddle around the latest anti-ageing cosmetic like an underground movement in touch with the free world?

For females, turning forty is more dangerous than a beach thong in a big surf.

I blame Mother Nature (two-faced bitch!) and Father Time (bloody bastard!). Yep, those misogynistic killjoys have cut off my pocket money and left me grounded. With those two authoritarian heavyweights ganging up, what chance does a woman have, I ask you? … Which is how I ended up here, halfway through my thirty-ninth year, in a pastel-wallpapered, Muzak-saturated hospital recovery room, pulverized, puking and punch-drunk on painkillers. Mummified in bandages, I’m like a Christmas present waiting to be oohed and aahed over at my own unwrapping.

But will I ‘ooh’ and will I ‘aah?’ Or will this be the day I’m going to wake up, look at the algae wrapped around my abdomen and the raspberry enema pipe stuck up my bum and say to myself, ‘You fucking idiot’?

Bristling with needles and woozy from the anaesthetic, I try to swim back up into consciousness, but am weighted down by the enormity of what I’ve done. So much has happened over the past year to propel me here – adultery, incest, death, divorce … an accident with a do-it-yourself Brazilian Bikini Home Waxing Kit …The facts keep toppling down on me. I dimly recall that it all began last June, on my birthday. That’s when I first felt that my age was forcing me to hitch-hike on the hard shoulder. And Life was the lorry that had just zoomed by …

2

Are You Sure You Need Only
One
Cake For All Those Candles?

THE THIRTY-NINTH BIRTHDAY
began much as any other day – a cup of cold coffee and a guinea-pig-poo pellet. As I tell my BBC news producer, the reason I’m often ignorant of the latest political development is that my kids always use the morning paper, before I’ve read it, to line the hamster cage. I have the best-informed rodents in the western world.

My husband Hugo handed me a hurriedly wrapped weed-whacker, for the newly landscaped garden – which had no weeds. ‘And they say romance is dead.’ I laughed. He was dashing to the hospital to save some poor bastard who’d blown out his carotid artery by driving into a lamp-post and self-ejecting face first through his sunroof.

But in truth, it was this very quality of altruistic dedication that had first attracted me to him. God, what was it now? Ten – no, eleven years ago. I’d smashed my jaw to smithereens when I’d fallen off the Berlin Wall. The only casualty of the Velvet Revolution. (What can I tell you? It’s a
gift
.) My then employers CNN flew me back to the London Hospital where I spent the next two weeks watching Hugo Frazer stride purposefully from ward to ward, as though on invisible skis. You see, my husband is a cranio-maxillo-facial surgeon. He jigsaws together landmine victims, excises cancerous tumours or corrects horrendous Elephant Man birth disfigurements, mostly in gruelling twelve-hour operations. His confidence is as broad as his shoulders, broad enough to advertise on. With his big build, blue eyes and engagingly craggy face (as though in training for the vacancy that will be left when Robert Redford’s arteries harden), it took me exactly two examinations to fall in love.

We quickly discarded professional ethics and gave in to a passion so hot, so intense that I worried it would affect the global climate. ‘We can only hope that Saddam Hussein is not developing a passion like this,’ I panted, post-coitally.

Hugo said that he was so elated, so
high
, that he kept expecting air-traffic controllers to ask him to relay his position – which, at that precise moment was on the middle shelf of the medical supply cupboard.

It was clear why I’d fallen for him (basically, Hugo was just like any other bloke you’d meet in a Greek myth). But what I could never work out was why
he
’d fallen for
me
. I think it had something to do with the serious academic circles he frequented at the time. We’re talking bookish females. We’re talking piles of dandruff forming around their ankles. Which, he said, was why he loved my low laughter threshold. My breezy ability to cut through bullshit like a scalpel through epidermis – something he put down to my being half American and living in the States until I was ten. I think he was also intrigued by my job: the coups; the collapsed dictatorships: me, flak-jacketed, a slick of lipstick on a sooty, sleep-deprived face, bouncing along in my bulletproof bra. ‘This is Lizzie McPhee reporting …’

It may also have helped that when we first met, I was accidentally wearing my paper hospital gown, back to front – you know, the one with the
big gaping hole
.

Even after all these years, as I watched Hugo cross the bedroom to pucker up for my birthday kiss, I felt a wave of love wash over me. If I went to see a doctor myself, that’s what they’d diagnose – unfailing love of MD.

My kids – Julia who’s nine and Jamie, seven – were my next birthday well-wishers. As I slathered Marmite on to their tepid toast, they tore themselves away from brightly coloured cereals with cheerily abbreviated names like Fruit O’ Yes! to honour me with a collection of tiaras made out of old loo rolls, which I praised as though they’d just presented me with the Dead Sea Scrolls.

‘Mummy, did they have television when you were alive?’

Hugo slapped his hand playfully over our daughter’s mouth. ‘Do you remember how thrilled we were when they learned to talk?’ he asked, shaking his head but smiling indulgently.

Jamie was investigating whether the electric fan would be a good way to slice up his Weetabix more finely.

Hugo, mopping milk from his brow, bend down to give me a curdled kiss. ‘Don’t worry. When they become teenagers,
we
’ll turn to heroin, okay?’

‘Do you think that will be strong enough?’ I asked, picking a soggy Nut O Wow! from his lapel.

But he wasn’t angry. Hugo adored his children. When we went out to the opera, he’d call home on his cellphone before we’d even made it to the bottom of the street to check they were okay. He knew without looking which child had stuffed the Malteser up the other’s nose. He
never
lost his temper with them, not even on the terrifying occasion when they accidentally pulled the inflate tag on the bouncy castle in the back seat of our moving car on the motorway. Not even when he’d been paged urgently in the middle of surgery because the kids had just washed the cats and wanted to know what setting to use on the tumble-dryer.

As he cupped their tiny chins to kiss them farewell, I watched the love spill and ripple across his face and felt a tingling shiver of happiness.

Hugo hastened off to the hospital and the kids trooped reluctantly upstairs to get changed for school, while I attempted a quick clean-up. My kitchen, like me, was comfortable with its lot in life. Chipped skirting-boards from indoor scooting, coffee rings on every surface, a chaos of kitsch magnets attaching homework schedules to an emphysemic fridge. I was just removing the brown blobs in the sugar bowl made from wet cereal spoons, when my older (although she’d never admit that to the outside world) half-sister Victoria breezed in for a quick hit of caffeine on her way to the beauty parlour.

‘Oh, shit,’ Victoria over-enunciated so that her red lipstick wouldn’t come into contact with her perfect teeth, ‘it’s your birthday. Darling, I forgot. Thirty-nine! Well, for God’s sake,’ she lowered her voice conspiratorially, as she shrugged off a light suede coat made from many cute, adorable woodland species – no doubt endangered, ‘don’t tell anyone. Take it from me, the twenty years between thirty-five and forty are the most fascinating of a woman’s life!’

I laughed with a mixture of affection and despair. ‘You’re really sad, do you know that? Really sad and pathetic. You may not have noticed but “growing older” is a Major Lifestyle Trend.’

Victoria is a model and, believe me, this is the woman who put the ‘cat’ into ‘catwalk’. Her
décolletage
is the deepest thing about her. She was humungously famous in the 1980s, but once she hit thirty, her star-wattage dimmed. It had been a good ten years since her face graced the label of a shampoo bottle. Her modelling assignments have now dwindled to shows scheduled in, say, Helsinki, around, oh,
four-thirty a.m
. And her shoots seem increasingly dangerous – you know, the ones that nobody else would touch, Somalia, Belfast, or into the wildest depths of Birmingham. The cold hard truth? My sis was ageing faster than a pair of Prada platforms.

‘Actually,’ I prised my arm free of her crimson talons, ‘I think I’ll like the anonymity of cronedom. At forty you can stop worrying about it all and just quietly go to seed.’

My sister eyed me haughtily. ‘Don’t be rid
ic
ulous darling,’ she replied, peering into a diamanté compact to retouch make-up manufactured by Trowel and Co. ‘Turning forty is the major cause of old age.’ She flopped on to a kitchen stool and shuddered. ‘Age to women is like Kryptonite to Superman.’

‘God, Victoria, you make me feel like I’m about to open as the next Norma Desmond in
Sunset
bloody
Boulevard
!’ I said, exasperated, hurling celery and carrot sticks into the kid’s lunch-boxes.

‘Don’t pretend you’re not worried, Elisabeth. Turning-forty
Angst
is required by international law. All women go through it. And
you
are no exception.’ She ate a crumb off the breadboard – which took care of breakfast – and lit up a fag. ‘With every other forty-year-old woman feeling used and abused and on the social scrap heap, why should
you
feel any different?’ She launched a halo of passively cancerous smoke. ‘You’ll only alienate all your other women friends.’

‘Look, on the Big Day I expect I’ll drink too much.’ I slapped the Tupperware lids on to the lunch boxes and burped them shut. ‘I’ll possibly cry and dance naked on a table or two. But I mean it. I like getting older.’

My sister rolled her heavily mascaraed eyes. With their tonnage of eye-shadow, it was a feat of optical weight-lifting worthy of Olympic status.

‘No, I
do
. I don’t feel scared of life, the way I used to. I don’t care if people like me or not. I like myself. And I know my limitations. I no longer expect to win the Nobel Prize for Astrophysics. I will never be an astronaut either. Or do a nude film scene. I will never have sex with Ben Affleck. I will never be beautiful. But one thing I’m
not
terrified of is wrinkles. Or death, come to think of it …’

‘Darling, wrinkles
are
death.’

‘Hugo loves me just the way I am.’

Victoria arched her topiarized brows. ‘Show me a woman who’s happy about her age and I’ll show you the electro-convulsive therapy scorch marks.’

I shook my head at her. As half-sisters Victoria and I love each other, but we’re insufferable friends. The only thing we have in common is our shared contempt for our materfamilias. Our mum, a B minus English actress on Broadway, survived a stormy six-minute marriage to an unpublished New York poet, thereby producing Victoria. The closest I came to finding out the identity of
my
father was during an attempt at a sex-education talk. ‘Where do I come from, Mum?’

‘Brooklyn,’ was all she’d said.

Victoria and I presume she only got pregnant as a useful distraction from daytime television. Whenever she was summoned to our headmistress’s office, she chose to go to the Caribbean instead. Finally she left us boarding in some scholastic hellhole in Surrey and took off – for ten years. Her favourite little quip was that she was so desperate not to have more kids that she’d put a
condom
on her
vibrator
. (Despite our mother’s endless warnings that ‘Men don’t make passes at female smartasses’, we’d both inherited her unattractive talent for tongue-lashing.) She is now ensconced in a Maximum Security Old Persons’ Home and has put out an injunction to stop us visiting her.

But apart from mutual disappointment in our mother, you couldn’t get two more opposite siblings. Victoria, with her slanted, luminous grey eyes and six feet of slender, photogenic flesh, doesn’t look anything like a sister of mine. While I’m a brunette, Victoria is a blonde – and prepared to go blonder. I’d always wanted to be tall and disdainful like her, but instead ended up just short and eager. And it’s not only in looks that we differ. Though
I
baked and broiled my way around the beaches of South East Asia during my gap year, I have never once seen my sister in direct sunlight. I tell people she hangs upside down to go to sleep at night. While I tend to think that my body is just there to carry my head around, my sister thinks that her head is just there to enable her to worry more about her body. After studying Liberal Arts at Brown University, I moved to Europe with the CNN job to discover my superficial sibling adorning the British fashion pages.

I caught sight of our reflection in the conservatory windows. I looked as flushed and dishevelled as my sister was coiffured and calm. In order to be ready to go out at nine a.m., she starts preparing at
four
. She’s not happy unless squeezed into a size double zero dress. In her
grave
, Victoria will still be wearing a collagen mask and an overnight rejuvenation cream.

I wrestled my electric mane of hair into a rubber band at the nape of my neck. Why was
I
the sister to fall out of the Plain Jane tree and get hit by every bloody branch on the way down, goddamn it?

‘Darling, don’t forget tonight.’ She flicked a blonde frond over her right eye, Veronica-Lake-like. ‘It can be your birthday treat.’

My sister was a member of the Vulva Chorus in a big charity performance of
The Vagina Monologues
. Although embarked on the inexorable slide towards the C list, Victoria was digging her acrylic nails in all the way. And appearing at a media-intensive event raising money for a women’s refuge was part of her publicity rehabilitation plan.

Her miniscule pink Nokia began to ring and her face lit up as she mouthed, ‘Sven,’ to me before purring huskily into the phone, ‘Darrrrrling, six weeks’ absence was
way
too long. My muff’s in a huff. So, did you find me any work in America?’