Nip 'N' Tuck (8 page)

‘And just to establish that she’s not a bimbo, she’s chosen to appear nude in various men’s magazines.’

‘Only
Playboy
, darling,’ he teased my clitoris with his fingers, ‘and they interviewed her because she is actually disarmingly intelligent.’

‘Meaning she faked rapt attention while you bull-shitted on,’ I decoded, fuming as I rolled away from him.

‘She seemed very interested in my work … and, she’s written a book.’

‘What kind of book?’ I looked at him amazed.

‘A cookbook.’

I laughed violently, convulsively. ‘An
actress
who’s written a
cookbook
? What does it say: “Take fingers, put down throat, regurgitate”? “Take one line of cocaine, place on paper, snort”?’

‘She’s going to give you a copy—’

‘I bet it lists the calorific value of sperm from various movie moguls. The Casting-couch Special,’ I hooted.

‘—when she comes for dinner,’ he interjected, tentatively, propping his head on his folded arms. ‘The week after next.’

I leant up on one elbow and gawped at him, uncomprehending. ‘Dial-A-Mattress is coming to dinner? And when exactly did you issue this invitation?’

‘When I rang Sven today – to discuss a project –
she
answered.’

‘Listen,’ I said stonily, ‘just because I’ve lost my job doesn’t mean I’m going to become a professional wife.’

‘You lost your job? Why?’

I hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that. ‘I’m too old,’ I grieved, my bravado evaporating. ‘Apparently they’re tearing down buildings that are younger than me.’ I clutched a pillow to my abdomen. ‘Next time I get on a bus, the
driver
will offer me his seat.’

‘Darling, that’s preposterous. I’m appalled. Tell me what happened.’

‘Anyway, why on earth would you be interested in any of Sven’s projects?’ I probed suspiciously, but the fight had gone out of me. The crushing humiliation of losing my job had left me limp as an eighties perm in a sauna.

‘It’s a business proposition he put to me at the party last night.’

‘What business?’

‘Sven’s agency is going to donate some money to my charity for landmine victims …’ His eyes shifted, evasively. ‘And anyway, we need a little “lifestyle surgery”, you and I, starting with some entertaining. It may have slipped your attention, darling, but I am a highly respected surgeon. I need to be part of a “power couple”. Plugged into the social socket. When we first met you were so dynamic! Maybe losing your job is a blessing in disguise. You could devote your energies to becoming one of London’s leading hostesses. A Domestic Goddess. A Trophy Wife!’

I looked at him aghast. Oh, where was my husband? My lovely, gentle man? My steady, wise and witty Hugo? The holder of the World Indoor Record for Lovely Husbandliness?

‘As a couple we could give credibility to an idea Sven has had for a … health clinic.’

‘A
what
?’

The phone rang then – something to do with an airlift of Chechnyan children who needed immediate surgery – and, moments later, Hugo was reinstated in his suit and headed back to the hospital. ‘Have a think about the cuisine,’ he called, from half-way down the stairs.

I tugged the blankets over my head. Anxieties clung to me like a wet shower curtain. He wanted me to be a suave and dynamic dinner-party hostess? Just on the very day I’d become a newly signed-up member of Losers Anonymous? Why didn’t I become a sophisticated ‘Trophy Wife’? A ‘Domestic Goddess’? Why didn’t
he
just plop on to some shore and evolve?

Bugger it, there was no way I would play little wifey at a dinner party for
her
. Apart from the fact that Britney had recently devoured my husband, it should be illegal to have to cook for someone who’s written a cookbook. Anorexic women like her should be skewered on a toothpick and eaten as an hors d’oeuvre. That’s what I would tell Hugo when he got home. End world hunger – eat an actress.

Besides which, catering wasn’t my forte. (Even though I could now grate Parmesan on my pubic area.) I’d only ever once attempted anything beyond cold cuts and then I’d nearly fallen into the blender and made a crudité of myself. No bloody way would I do it. Domestic Goddesses who say they get high on housework have obviously been inhaling too much cleaning fluid. Definition of a ‘hostage’? A woman who has to cook for damn visitors.

7

When You Wish Upon A Michelin Star

THE NOTION OF
wives doing all the cooking and housework is no longer publicly fashionable. But I know for a fact that it goes on behind closed doors.

Two weeks later, on a hot Sunday night in July, with the kids still not bathed and in bed, I endured the usual hostess panic that since nobody was going to turn up there’d be too
much
food; or if they did show they’d have new lovers or lawyers in tow so there’d be too
little
; or everyone would have food allergies, which would mean either insulting me by
not
eating my dinner or eating the meal and throwing up over each other. I called for Cal to help me with the children and catapulted back into the kitchen just in time to catch the cats stripping the last of the sesame-seeded seared tuna out of the salad. All that remained was a little sad spag and a frond or two of wilted seaweed. Any hope of cordon-bleu sensation bit the gastronomic dust.

‘Listen, Cal,’ I said, when he bounced in five minutes later to find me desperately rummaging through the freezer, ‘I’m just not up to going to your uni ball any more. Why don’t you ask Victoria?’

‘
Victoria?
She’d never go out with the likes of me. This modelling business your sister’s in, well, it’s all about contacts. Right? Entrée into places. Stuff like that? Well, the only entrées I’ve got access to are on a menu. Oh, sure, I can get entrée … as in prawn cocktails and canned soup. I can get the power table at McDonalds’ with a minute’s notice.’

‘That’s all right. Victoria doesn’t eat in public anyway. Models live in a state of permanent terror that they might actually develop some muscle tissue.’

When Hugo arrived to find his wife armed with a hair-dryer trying to defrost eight chicken breasts, he gave me a homicidal look. I’m not exaggerating. If looks could kill, I would have been donating my organs to medical science right there and then. Actually I wasn’t sure if he was angry about the chaos, or that I’d invited Victoria without consulting him. (Victoria would never forgive me for denying her a Close Encounter of the Sven Kind.) Hugo says my sister doesn’t visit, she
invades
, which she was doing right now, cascading into the kitchen in a swirl of silk scarves and duty-free bags.

‘Alcohol! Quickly!’ She seized my glass of Pinot Grigio.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I have just spent the last week modelling muumuus for drunken electrical engineers in Dubai. If Sven doesn’t marry me soon, my next gig is glamour-posing for amateur photographers in Milton Keynes.’

‘Is that so bad?’

She slumped despondently over her wineglass. ‘Darling, it’s Kosovo without the perks.’

‘I know something that will cheer you up. Cal’s planning to ask you out.’

Now it was Cal’s turn to shoot me a homicidal look. ‘Ah … yeah.’ He nervously readjusted the worn leather belt on his Levi’s 501s.

Victoria placed her manicured hands on the hips of her spray-on snakeskin trousers. ‘Put it this way, Calim,’ my sister replied, ‘if I were naked, you’d bore the pants
on to
me.’

‘Victoria!’ I snapped. She might have severe PMT (Post Modelling Tension), but there was no need to take it out on my best buddy.

‘Okay, so it’s no to sex,’ Cal replied gamely. ‘How ’bout some indiscriminate heavy pettin’, then?’

‘I’m not being rude.’ Victoria sighed. ‘It’s just that you’re so insignificant.’

Beet-faced, my loyal friend took a small bow. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, that last act of abject humiliation was brought to you by Calim Keane. Excuse me, but I have a date to read bedtime stories.’ He left abruptly, bounding up the stairs two at a time.

Before I could shove my half-sister down the waste-disposal unit, Victoria exclaimed, ‘I suppose the fact that Britney has rather en
or
mous tits is a rather ex
as
perating detail.’

‘God.’ My stomach churned. ‘Is she really so brazen that she’s actually turned up?’

‘I just passed Jabba the Slut parking her Porsche. Forget the
chicken
breasts, Elisabeth, and just concentrate on your own.’ She thrust her hand down my bra and hoicked my tiny tits to the top of their lace cups. ‘Leave It To Cleavage. That’s the only show men are really interested in.’

I glanced in Hugo’s direction over by the wine rack, where he was scrutinizing vintages – my husband could put the bore into Bordeaux. ‘Victoria, Hugo is
not
a breast man!’

On cue, the largest pair of mammaries in the northern hemisphere glided into view. It was like a photo-finish in a blancmange bake-off. The female to whom the Siamese soufflés were attached followed some five minutes later. My husband’s eyeballs pogoed out of their sockets and boinged! into her bra cups, where they gambolled around in the throes of ecstasy before boomeranging back socketwards.

‘You were saying?’ crowed my sister.

When Sven waylaid Britney with kisses on the kitchen threshold, I thought it was an opportune moment to retreat with Victoria for some tandem toilet time.

‘For God’s sake, don’t let on that you know about Britney and Hugo. He told me not to tell you. He wants me to be suave,’ I bleated, plonking my posterior on the lavatory seat. ‘I can’t be suave.’

‘Of course you can, sweetie. All you have to do is stand still and look brain-dead … Hurry up, I’m
bursting
.’

‘I have a degree. I can’t look brain-dead.’ I washed my hands while Victoria took her turn to pee.

‘Try winsome, then. Britney does a terrific winsome.’

‘How?’ I handed her a toilet roll.

‘You just look like a neutered dog. You keep looking at him till he pats you – and then you take his leg off. That’s my number one Useful Girlish Tip,’ she philosophized, pulling the chain. ‘The only other way to keep a man happy are a few Martha Stewart Moments in the kitchen. Oh, and some feminine mystique.’ She paused to fart before sashaying out of the bathroom. ‘Men love that.’

WANTED
– Suave, sophisticated, winsome, discreet, dynamic ‘Trophy Wife’ with enormous cleavage. Must be an experienced Michelin Star cook and general Domestic Goddess, appropriate for Power Coupling. Applicants without feminine fucking mystique will not be considered.

I fastened my face. It was going to be a bumpy night.

8

Many a True Word Is Spoken Ingest

THERE IS ONLY
one certainty in life: things always get worse before they get worse.

And so it was that the woman who made Jessica Rabbit look two-dimensional was now wriggling into the kitchen in a pair of leopardskin pants – Britney Amore wore so much jungle print clothing you really couldn’t date her without taking malaria tablets. ‘Hi, y’all!’ she said, with such euphoric bubbliness that it was impossible that class A narcotics weren’t causally related.

‘You remember my
husband
,’ I said coldly (posts-cripting a mental mutter, ‘last seen sprinting up Mount Lust’).

‘Hel-
lo
,’ enthused Hugo, almost concussing himself on the elevated pan rack in his hurry to stand up.

‘So, where are the kiddos, hon? I was simply
dyin
’ to play with them.’

God! Not content with stealing my husband, she now wanted to win over my children! My throat was on fire with misery. And what, I wondered bitterly, would a dumb-ass broad like her play? Remedial Scrabble? Join the
Dot
? ‘They’re in bed,’ I said, primly.

As Hugo congratulated Britney on the critical reception accorded her extended nude scene in the National Theatre’s production of
Hamlet
, I tried not to look at her bra-less chest. They weren’t breasts. They were speed bumps. And they had all the men at the party – Hugo, Sven and some low-life Italian friend of his whose handshake left me begging for Dettol – crawling over to the social kerb.

‘Do you think she’s had a boob job?’ I whispered to my sister.

‘Noooo.’ Victoria rolled her eyes sarcastically. ‘Under her clothes she’s obviously wearing some kind of anti-gravity device.’

‘I mean, what’s holding her up?’ I marvelled. ‘Wire? Glue? A team of specially trained fleas?’

‘Now, boys, don’t let me monopolize y’all. It’s embarrassin’, isn’t it?’ Britney confided to Victoria and me, in mock camaraderie. ‘If only I could make myself less desirable.’ She looked me up and down, enquiring solicitously, ‘How do
you
do it darr-lin’?’

I was only half recovered from my coughing fit when Marrakech breezed into the kitchen. Britney immediately fell upon the teenager, kissing her ardently on both cheeks. ‘Well, I am now officially a lesbian because
you
are so
gorg
eous! No wonder Sven’s offered you a modellin’ contract. I can see why!’ She stepped back to appraise her young rival. ‘How old are ya, Princess?’

Marrakech shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. I’ll check. How old are you today, Mum?’

I held my breath.

A curtain of blonde hair fell languidly over my sister’s smoky left eye. ‘Thirty-one,’ she announced confidently.

There was a collective throat-clearing at this revelation.

‘You don’t believe me, do you? … You just can’t believe I’m that old.’

Sven grabbed my sister’s photogenic butt. ‘Tell me,’ he chuckled smuttily, ‘is this seat taken?’

I would have liked to grip him warmly too –
by the throat
. Hugo, nervous about Sven’s presence, laughed with exaggerated heartiness. It wasn’t like Hugo to be so sycophantic. Would he really feel so guilty over just a
kiss
? With my chest tightening, I whacked the half-thawed chicken into the wok and stir-fried the shit out of it – not exactly what you’d call a Martha Stewart Moment – and downed my glass of wine in one long gulp.