Nip 'N' Tuck (26 page)

We all stood rigid, holding our breath as the surgery door squeezed open momentarily, then began to suck shut. That’s precisely when Sven, who was only half sedated, gurgled and gave one long moan.

The hinges made a hiss before the door sprang open once more. Light immediately flooded the theatre, the pitiless scrutiny of fluorescent tubes freezing us in the frame. One fluorescent was faltering, spasmodically, like a dying fly. ‘What thuh fuck’s goin’ on?’

Britney Amore had a voice that sounds very nice to people who’ve been deaf since birth. Her piercing tones could cause nerve damage at a hundred paces, which is why I heard her before I saw her.

When my blinking eyes adjusted to the light, I was looking down the stubby barrel of a 34-calibre Smith and Wesson.

29

Premature Cremation

OUR SMALL GATHERING
looked more surprised than the congregation at Michael Jackson’s wedding. As my eyes adjusted to the searing light, I was blinded a second time by the perfect row of white-picket-fence teeth that were gnashing before me.

‘What thuh fuck’s goin’ on?’ Britney demanded again, all pretence at actressy glamour obliterated.

There really is no good way to say to a woman that her fiancé has been abducted and deformed by homicidal maniacs.

My sister rallied first, probably because the gun was now aimed at her head. ‘Your husband-to-be’s getting in touch with his Inner Model,’ she said, evenly.

Britney’s eyes then registered the freshly augmented patient lying comatose on the operating table. Sven’s magnificent, though bruised, breasts which had recently increased from zero to a bouncing, bountiful 34E in defiance of all gravity and gender specifics, rose spectacularly ceilingward. His new and improved appendage protruded with surreal menace. Her mouth dropped open. ‘You – you evil fucks! You’re all goin’ to the Chair!’

Bruce the Tooth snickered. ‘This ain’t Texas, ma’am.’

‘An’ zaccley who thuh fuck are
you
?’ Britney trained her gun in Bruce the Tooth’s direction. With her other hand, she wrenched the gaffer-tape off my mouth, taking half of my top lip with it. ‘Elisabeth? Who is he?’ She untied me from the radiator.

My brain was busily trying to jump-start my heart. ‘Marrakech’s prison pen pal,’ I said finally, discreetly checking I hadn’t peed my pants. ‘The one she rescued off Death Row.’

‘Couldn’t she just have adopted a
zoo animal
?’ She eye-balled Bruce, disdainfully. ‘Although, then again … I guess she
did
.’

I watched with apprehension as the cords on the sides of Bruce the Tooth’s neck swelled to the thickness of cables.

‘Call the cops,’ Britney brayed, rummaging one-handed through her bag for her cell-phone. ‘Then get an ambulance.’ She tossed her mobile at me. I froze. ‘Didn’t ya hear me? If ya don’t move I’ll shoot the crap out of ya’ll.’

‘You
can
call the police, Elisabeth,’ my grim-faced sister spat, scarlet-rimmed eyes burning with hate. ‘I want to tell them how Sven had my beautiful daughter butchered against her will to make her breasts twice as big.’

‘Only because she ain’t got the brains to make that decision herself,’ Britney snarled. ‘Y’all obviously both come from a long line of first cousins.’

I dug my fingernails into the pads of my palms. Bruce the Tooth’s neck veins were starting to throb.

Britney, oblivious, blundered on: ‘If only Marrakech’s old man, whoever
he
was, had just settled for a blow-job, eh?’

The eruption, when it came, was Vesuvial. Howling like a chainsaw, and with no terror of death, Bruce the Tooth lunged at the actress’s larynx.

He was still mid-air when Britney’s finger squeezed back on the trigger and the bullet thudded into his chest. It was like watching the dynamited demolition of a tower block. The big man collapsed, taking the medical tray with him. Surgical shrapnel scattered in every direction. Victoria made a sound not dissimilar to an above-ground nuclear test before flying to his side.

Hugo used the general mayhem to chop his hand down hard against Britney’s wrist. The gun scuttled across the polished floor. Britney’s retaliatory knee was in his groin before he could say, ‘Castrati.’ Hugo concertinaed to the floor. Unarmed and outnumbered, Britney decided to dash for it. Down the Corinthian-column-lined corridor she ran, high heels gritting on the ornamental gravel.

I bent down to pick up my fallen idol. ‘Hugo, for God’s sake, we’re all in this together! You see to Bruce. Victoria, you get Sven out of here. I’ll try to catch Britney.’ Keen not to go to prison for something I hadn’t done, i.e. run fast enough, I found that despite my previous contempt for muscle-toning ventures, I could sprint down the stairs two at a time. The back door leading on to the cobbled mews yawned open. Hurtling through the lane I crashed on to Harley Street, breathing hard.

While we’d been in the clinic, the storm had broken. Frantically I looked up and down the wind-whipped streets. Gusts howled along deserted pavements, banking rubbish against the buildings. My eyes raked left to right as the leaves circled and scuttled underfoot like giant cornflakes. And then I saw her. She was at her Porsche, car keys rattling against her ridiculously long stiletto nails. Hearing my pounding footsteps she fumbled desperately, dropping her keys down a grating. In her urgent bid to escape me, she abandoned her precious Blahnik heels and streaked towards Marylebone Road. But at this hour the carriageway was deserted. My quarry skidded across bitumen, slick with rain.

The deluge beating hard against my face blurred my vision. I dashed across the cement apron and, on instinct, sprinted towards Regent’s Park – just in time to catch sight of her squeezing through a gap in the iron railings to disappear into the conspiring shadows. Where the hell was she heading? I wondered. Then, with a sickening thud in my guts, I realized: the police station at Chester Gate. And what a cock-and-bull story she had to tell them –
literally
. If I didn’t catch her and force her to see sense, we’d all be stamping due dates in a prison library pronto.

Leaving the lozenges of street lamplight behind me, I plunged into the pitch black of the park. The storm had grown melodramatic, trees keening and shuddering beneath the onslaught. The sky was boiling. Clouds writhed like black sacks full of eels. A crack of lightning razored through the dark canopy of leaves – as if God was signing autographs. And there she was, darting between sculptures and flowerbeds, her legs flashing like scissor-blades as she cut through a clearing. As I stampeded after her, a stitch sliced into my side. Thick skeins of water seemed to be draped across the trees. I would need an outboard motor to catch her.

The path gave way to a sweep of luxurious lawn where the rain fell in sheets. My eyes skittered across the field. No Britney. Just menacing dark. Another great jagged prong of light split the sky, affording me a strobing glimpse of her as she darted for shelter beneath a tangle of trees necklaced in silver lightning. It had turned into an Old Testament of a night. Rainwater was sluicing in rivulets down the back of my neck. And I needed windscreen wipers on my eyes. I crashed to the ground. Winded and soaked, my body was begging to pack it in. I was just not equipped to be a criminal. Hell, I didn’t even know my nylon stocking head size. But I was so fuelled with anger for that giggling, pouting, mincing, quivering, venomous, silicone-pumped-up, ice-covered volcano of devil’s spawn that I was propelled up on to my jellied legs again, and tearing after her.

I was gaining ground. My advantage was simply this: when scrambling up an embankment a pair of jeans is more practical attire than a little leopardskin Prada dress, which was snugger on
her
than it had been on the leopard.

At Queen Mary’s Rose Garden, I leapt forward, snaring her hair extensions with my fingers. I just hung on, no longer running but skiing after her on the soles of my sneakers. She reeled around – kicking, biting, scratching. Nails like flick-knives shrieked down the side of my face. I could taste the blood running into the corners of my mouth. We rolled and wrestled in the muddy ground. That was when the lightning hit.

The closest I’ve ever come to an out-of-body experience was when Dr Hugo Frazer MD first kissed me. Being on the receiving end of a lightning rod is not dissimilar – except for the third-degree burns. The jolt lifted me up off the ground where I seemed to hover ablaze, as terror licked like flames all over me.

The last thing I remembered before being pulverized into darkness was the smell of singed flesh. It was Mother Nature’s electrolysis machine – a premature cremation.

30

That Was Then, This Is Noir

I THINK THEREFORE
I am, but I can’t hoist open my eyelids. I seem to be listening to an arrangement of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for accordion, pan-pipes and kazoo. I try to move but my body is like a bucket of cement. My mouth is sour; my throat feels raw; a metallic taste is bubbling on to my tongue. I become blearily aware of someone mopping my brow. One leaden eye squints open.

‘Where am I?’ I rasp, in a voice that sounds as though it’s been sandpapered.

‘Hospital, Lizzie darling,’ says my sister.

There’s a searing pain in my chest, neck and shoulders. I realize that my torso is swaddled in bandages. ‘Good God! I’ve had more plastic surgery, haven’t I?’ I say groggily, trying to focus through befogged synapses. But it’s a regular NHS hospital. Not the clinic in Harley Street, I realize, with relief.

‘You were hit by lightning, Lizzie.’

‘I was
what
? … Oh, God, I remember. Are the kids all right?’ I panic. The room is a gizmo-intensive enclave. Monitors murmur and blip neurotically.

‘Oh, yes. They’re both on the London Eye. With their dad. Hugo’s spent more time with them in the last five days than he has for the last five months.’

‘But the police?’ I panic. ‘Has Britney laid charges?’ My heart is dancing a fast fandango. ‘Where’s Sven?’

‘With
his
figure, he’s probably being signed up by his own modelling agency,’ Marrakech scoffs, moving closer to sit on the edge of the cot and stroke my hand.

‘And Britney Amore? Well,’ my sister takes a ragged breath, ‘she’s gone to the big Green Room in the sky, darling.’

‘What?’ My head clears instantly, as though I’ve dived into an icy pool.

‘You were both struck by a massive bolt of lightning, beneath the trees. And I’m afraid it was curtains for the actress. The doctor said Britney had burn marks on her chest, near the left cup of her underwired bra. The metal wires acted to conduct the charge to her heart. Unbelievable, huh?’

‘That a bra could kill you? I
know
,’ Marrakech marvels.

‘No. That the bitch had a
heart
. The coroner recorded a verdict of death by misadventure,’ Victoria reports neutrally. As she speaks Bruce the Tooth, who is also bandaged around his chest, spoon-feeds her from a tub of ice cream. ‘He said it was an act of God.’

Struck down by lightning! Holy hell, it is kind of biblical. All that’s missing is the burning bush.

‘Youse was both enveloped by this massive amount of electrical energy.’ Bruce the Tooth is now feeding Victoria chocolate mints. ‘I spent ten years on Death Row readin’ all about electric sparks. Me lawyers, see, they reckoned the electric chair was unconstit-chew-ional. The pathology of lightnin’, or keraunopathy, that’s what they done call it. Well, the contact voltage of a typical industrial electrical shock is, like, twenty to sixty-three kilovolts. Lightnin’ strike delivers about, oh, three hundred kilovolts. This lightnin’ was so damn strong it melted your clothes and fragmented. But ’cause you weren’t wearin’ no, um … foundation garment …’ The big man blushes and fidgets then looks towards my sister.

‘Because you weren’t wearing a bra,’ my sister decodes.

I struggle laboriously to a sitting position. ‘Are you trying to tell me that my small tits saved me?’ I’m really coming round now, my singed synapses snapping back like knicker elastic.

‘Well, yeah. I reckon that’s so, ma’am.’

‘We were right about Britney’s boobs too, sis. They
were
always getting bigger. She had implants with a valve just under the skin to pump them up with more silicone, whenever she wanted,’ Victoria clarifies. ‘The bra that killed her was a thirty-four double F.’

‘Any bigger and her bust would have been mistaken for a breakaway republic,’ Marrakech puts in.

‘At least she died happy,’ Victoria assures us. ‘The blinding flash of light … I’m sure she just thought it was a swarm of
paparazzi
taking her photo.’

I start to laugh hysterically; great haw-haw guffaws. ‘Yes! She finally was the – the – toast of the town.’ It’s such a shame that, being dead, Britney can’t savour the poignancy of fate’s twist. I laugh so hard they have to call a nurse to sedate me. But not before I take in the fact that my sister has eaten from Bruce’s hands ice cream, mints, a crème brûlée, two packets of crisps and a chocolate éclair. And all without regurgitating. My sister bounces towards me like a basketball. She is buoyant, winged.

‘Victoria,’ I croak, ‘you’re eating?’

‘Brucey likes me to eat more. He says he likes something to hold on to.’ I notice then that she’s wearing no makeup. When she raises her arms to hug the Tooth, I also glimpse armpit reforestation.

‘She’s got an appetite for life back, too, haven’t you, Mum?’ Marrakech puts her arms around her mother, who laughs heartily – without once worrying about lines.

‘An’ she’s gonna say bye-bye to her thirties for the tenth and last time.’ A newly dentured Bruce the Tooth pats my sister’s bottom. ‘J’hear me?’

Victoria plonks herself down on the bed and takes my hand in hers. ‘All my life I’ve been looking for a man who can meet my needs.’

‘What? A heterosexual
haute-couture
designer with a ten-inch tongue?’ I reply, perplexed.

‘Even though I’ve always thought my Mr Right would be an old guy who is really rich and quite ill – meeting Brucey, well, my oestrogen just whipped me into a hormonal frenzy. We have this amazing attraction, Elisabeth. I’ve finally found the perfect man.’