Cake or Death (20 page)

We women can cope with magazines like this, mainly because we have to. That’s all there is. The fact that you’d expect much much more of
The Observer
, is, well, it’s just bloody typical.

But this week, the cover was a wrinkle-free eighteen-year-old with perfect infant skin encased in headband and dark glasses and bound by Band-Aids. Yes, it was “How Do I Look? Confessions of a Botox Convert.” But it was written by an intelligent feature writer whose articles
I can generally count on to be good. She’s someone to be taken seriously. I trust her. She entertains me. She does everything a good journalist is supposed to do.

Change all that to past tense.

For she, disgracing everything she has ever believed, had herself injected with Botox, had unseemly skin patches lasered away and the rest of her skin treated with Retin-A. She was also given cleanser, sunscreen and eye cream (and it must be said that these last three were new to her, so fair enough).

We are shown three honest shadowless white-light photos, before Botox, five days after, and ten days after. And she looks worse in each picture. Which isn’t even the point, but we’ll get to that.

She looks dreadful. She has been dragged through a hedge backwards three times, she is coated in Botox snake venom, her hair is filthy, she has pores you could dip a soup ladle into, and she has a lard-pie face. That means a big piece of splodge that spills over at the edges because she is a big comfy fatty woman. She’s an overstuffed sofa of a human, and yet this doesn’t save her face, as they tell you. (Skinny bodies mean clawlike faces; well-upholstered bodies mean fat, unwrinkled faces. Once you hit fifty, choose one or the other.)

I show the pictures to my husband and ask him how old he thinks she is. After the customary bickering, he hunkers down, studies the three photos and says “Oh, fifty.” Which is what I thought as well.

She is thirty-six.

And he’s right. She looks fifty in every photograph.

Evangelical Christians preface their conversations with “Have you heard the good news?” (It’s not the news you expect, which is why they irritate people.) Have you heard the bad news? It isn’t dieting or buying expensive unguents or even a professional makeup application (though the bored cosmeticians always consult the 6-foot, 7-inch bony green-haired black man, mid–skin bleach, who’s running the show, and then gives you purple lips, in my experience) that makes a woman look good. It’s being born good-looking that does it.

Look at this poor woman, noodged into this by a pushy editor who loves it when female journalists can be suckered into poisoning themselves. She is homely. Fact. She must have been born that way or she wouldn’t be looking so haunted and awful by magazine standards, and so utterly average by human standards.

In the first photograph, she looks like someone trying to stay brave after the death of her father, which in fact she was.

In the second, she has just been told that her life sentence in a Bangkok jail for being caught with a coke balloon up her arse at Passport Control has been commuted to 39.5 years.

In the third, she looks wary, pale as bleached canvas, as you do in a mug shot while you’re trying to tell the police officer it was all a horrid misunderstanding. You thought you ran over a cat. Turns out it was a human grandma.

And when she is loaded with makeup, shoved into zebra-striped sandals, fishnet stockings, a gauzy grey dress that conceals her bulky contours, and is finally
made to wash her hair and grin manically, she looks tragic. The be-suited dermatologist who’s behind all this lolls on a modernist white plastic chair (not his fault; those chairs are positively dental in their recline) staring at her bemusedly, frowning. It is the male gaze and it is troubling.

I love you, journalist woman, I say. I love everyone who’s unknowingly being humped by a real pack of grossly overpaid pretentionists. You’re a good writer and a good person. I will continue to enjoy your writing and your clever mind. It doesn’t matter that you were intimidated into letting a payer of fees urge you into this public stripping. Oh, and is it a coincidence that now you write a column saying you no longer think the statue in Trafalgar Square of the armless, legless artist Alison Lapper is a great work of art? You’re more interested in conventional beauty now.

But back to the bigger problem.

When was the last time you saw a truly stunningly beautiful person? Or even a strikingly attractive one? Those women can walk around wearing anything, without makeup, and their smile is like a light bulb for their face. I know. I’ve seen about two of them.

We humans are not beautiful. Or else we are, so we developed impossible standards for beauty just to make life more spiky and difficult. What the woman journalist’s sad article reveals is that only those born beautiful can be genuinely beautiful. For the rest of us, it is not going to happen. I think we should just aim for hygiene, a scalp not layered with sebum, an ear not sprouting sticky hair.
One honest plastic surgeon told the journalist that the first thousand pounds should go on a good haircut and a makeup session. He’s right.

There’s really nothing that can be done if you aren’t born with that magic mix on your face that equals beauty. Intelligence and wit enhances it. Good bones really do matter. In fact, good bones can do it all. You’ll be interestingly gorgeous at eighty.

But women have been trained not to want that. They’ve been trained to want artificial beauty. They cannot have it.

I never wanted it, and I can’t quite understand the reason. Perhaps I knew it was impossible. I do groom myself excessively. It’s work, work, work, talk about your Magdalen Laundries, just washing, exfoliating, moisturizing, facializing, cutting, conditioning, self-tanning, removing hair, filing, ridge-filling, painting/lining/blending and spending countless thousands on a fine wardrobe appropriate to my own odd little body of which I am fond.

But when, in my early twenties, I saw a plastic surgeon about a deviated septum that was causing me to breathe out of just one nostril, he said, “I’m not supposed to say this to patients, but do you want your nose fixed while I’m in there?” I did not. I have a prominent hooked nose. But I knew even then that I wasn’t going to be beautiful. I was aiming more for interesting, because that might be achievable. It had been achievable thus far.

He ran the burns unit. I always imagined him caring for third-degree burns patients, crusted and weeping salt
tears that worsened the pain, knowing they would be forever hideous if they lived. Did he not rather despise silly people like me with my little breathing problem, as he arrived an hour late after treating a freshly barbecued patient, to pull what looked like 20 metres of bloody gauze out of my left nostril like a clown hauling endless handkerchiefs from his sleeve?

I had thought he might, but I changed my mind in the recovery room where a young woman had had her breasts enlarged at his hands. “Are you in pain?” he asked her. “Remember, you have to suffer pain for beauty.”

But you don’t, Doctor. You have to be born with beauty. What’s more, with the kind of beauty that will last: a strong jaw, good cheekbones, interesting eyes that are never vacant of interest or knowledge, a face that radiates strength and kindness.

The woman writer has snake poison in her face now. Where do women draw the line at what can enter through a needle? Offal? The bane of the pork industry, the pale reddish “exudate” that leaks from mushy pig meat? The sweat of a jogging George Clooney or a huntin’ Dick Cheney, free-flowing and slightly yellowed? I wouldn’t want to kiss a face full of that.

She says the frown groove between her eyebrows is gone, but despite rumours, she can still frown although the lines are scant. So why struggle to frown? It’s not as though the salesperson who sold you the wrong ink cartridge for your printer is going to notice or care. So she will now have to rely on her eloquence the next time her editor asks her to invite a million people to laugh at her.
She won’t be able to do what I do: frown, lift one eyebrow and slant the lip so as to create a full-face sneer that remains dignified yet dismissive to a perfect chisel-end of contempt.

I remember once sitting in the office of a newspaper editor I normally got along with. I was furious. I bubbled and seethed, I popped and frothed. Eventually he extracted the problem from between my locked teeth; it was not fair that the designer of my page, a really talented woman, was being paid less than someone brought in from outside.

You’re one of those people who can radiate intense feeling from your face and body without saying a word, he said calmly. It’s rare.

It’s useful to be able to do that. It gets you ten grand in salary that a merely pretty face wouldn’t get you. The journalist began her article describing her face in the morning. Every part of her face sags. Her mouth is turned down.

Didn’t anyone tell her the Nancy Mitford secret from
Love in a Cold Climate?
Before entering a room, say the word “brush.” One will appear before the crowd with a mouth that looks as one would wish.

There is no need for snaky liquids.

You are not beautiful. Almost no one is. We start with the race already halfway run and then we age to boot, so get used to it.

Try to be interesting, and work on the content of your character, not the pallor of your skin. Oh, and wash your hair.

There’s a corner of my garden where things go to die. No, that’s not right. Plants spread but they don’t actually travel. What I mean is that when I prepare the soil—a huge hole with compost, top-soil and some peat, properly mixed—and place the plant in it, it dies, sometimes within weeks or even days.

(Don’t worry; this isn’t an essay about gardening.)

Now I know that plants placed up against a stone wall live in dry grey conditions that cause death. And one side of the death triangle is indeed a stone wall. I amend that
soil. I water with care and attention. So it’s not that. Few plants can cope with the speckled shade of that corner. It has a lilac tree hanging over it that also conceals the detritus of the neighbour behind us, as well as the orange plastic sheeting that covers his trucks in all seasons.

I choose plants that prefer almost total darkness. Still, they turn yellow, limp, brown, sometimes blackish. Even hardy shrubs like weigela, and euonymus for fuckety’s sake, get skint and thin. They turn pale. They fail to thrive, like the children of overly attentive parents.

How does a pine tree die? Right now, I’ve shaved the trunk of every protruding failed stick. On top there’s a sort of shag bit. I give the thing a bucket of water a day in a hollowed-out circle around its central stick—you can hardly call it a trunk—and after ten years, the thing is, oh, five feet high.

What survives in that corner is a brushed steel obelisk and a huge round Dutch-blue ceramic pot that is, needless to say, empty. For this corner is not for the living. Were it not for my hatred of tweeness, I’d shove more dead objects in there—a little red wagon, a stuffed meerkat, anything at all that can’t die because it’s already dead.

You can see the metaphor coming, can’t you. The death triangle, easily visible from my bedroom window, is the corner of the garden on which I lavish the most care and worry. It was only when I gave up on the fern corner that it began to flourish and now the borders are filling in with a lavishness not commensurate with the care I took with them. I don’t believe in harsh pruning, as S. does, and the garden is dotted with a circle of little green sticks
that he feels certain are about to explode into foliage. I remain calm. Foliage will not there be. If you’re going to nurture false hopes, why don’t you stick with the non-flowering peony, now aged seven, or the trumpet vine that has never squawked, much less trumpeted. As for the honeysuckle, it’s just a green thing that snakes up the pergola for no purpose that I can see. I have grown to love twining it around itself.

S. sneers. No flowers, he says. Yes, I say, but it has foliage. All I ask of a plant is a little greeny bit.