Authors: Kathy Lette
‘That really is an interesting skin complaint’ decodes as ‘Excuse me while I go throw up my lunch.’
‘Nothing to worry about’ means you’ll be dead in two weeks.
And the old favourite, ‘There’s good news and there’s bad news’? Well, in Hugo’s case, the good news had to be that he was having an affair with a famous daytime TV soap diva. (Well, the symptoms were definitely pointing to that dismal diagnosis.) The bad news was that
I
was the one who was going to have to suffer for it.
Christmas and New Year I spent boldly going nowhere. Life had put me on hold. I know I vowed to give Hugo some emotional distance. But nobody had said anything about physical distance. As out of sight can be out of mind, I found a million reasons to discuss children, household insurance, storm gutters. I determined to make each contact pleasant. (Valium helped.) By smiling, laughing at his jokes and looking my most seductive (although, believe me, wearing a Wonder-bra is like volunteering for a car crash – it strangles your breath and crushes your ribcage), I hoped that he wouldn’t remember only the God-awful moments – and compare them unfavourably to the fabulous times he was having with
her
.
I was like Doris Day on acid. One morning I toasted my hand, spread strawberry jam on it and placed it on Julia’s plate. My bewildered nine-year-old suggested that perhaps it was time that I went back to work.
‘Oh, good idea, Julia,’ I said sarcastically. ‘So, tell me, do you think I’m too old for a paper round?’
Jamie provided the answer after serious consideration. ‘Yeah, I think so.’
‘Do you really want to spend your entire childhood locked in your bedroom with only green vegetables to eat and educational TV?’ I snapped, as if competing for the Dysfunctional Mum of the Year award.
But as the winter squalls battered our Hampstead home, I convinced myself that we would weather the Britney storm. The clinic had been important to Hugo, sure, but he would soon realize that it wasn’t worth losing his marriage over.
When my spirits flagged, I reminded myself that I was making all this effort for the greater good – getting my man back where he belonged. I made an inventory of all the things I loved about him and recited them daily as a matrimonial mantra. We’d got each other through chickenpox, lost luggage, the death of relatives, the guinea-pig’s pneumonia, flat tyres, a brush with salmonella and a bomb scare. Yes, we’d been bacteria to each other, but also penicillin.
When Hugo didn’t make it for Christmas lunch (a surgical SOS as usual), Cal and Victoria began to lecture me stereophonically about the joys of living alone.
‘Why won’t you leave him, Lizzie? I mean, think of the money you could save on anti-depressants,’ Cal insisted.
‘I love him.’
‘But how do you know?’ Cal flumped down beside me on the wooden bench in the hall, from where we could watch the children disappearing up the stairs with the babysitter between their teeth.
‘Well … when he cuts his finger while grating the truffles, I wish it were me, you know?’
‘Oh, that’s gotta be love,’ Cal mocked, firing up a fag. ‘The point is, if your husband gets any more selfish, he’ll make a footnote of himself in a medical journal.’
‘We’ve been through so much … I didn’t even kill him during flat-pack furniture erection when we were first married – grounds for homicide normally.’ I tried to make light of things. ‘And, there’s the suntan lotion, there are parts of my back I just can’t reach … And we’ve just landscaped the garden …’
Victoria emerged from the kitchen, her crocodile-skin heels castaneting on the pine floors, her sharply tailored satin pant suit shimmering. ‘So, are you kicking the creep out?’
‘No,’ replied Cal, on my behalf. ‘They’re stayin’ together for the sake of the plants
apparently
.’
They both looked at me quizzically. It hadn’t come out right. Love is complicated. Even Einstein had never managed to explain it. ‘Look, I’ve saved my marriage. Aren’t you even going to look happy for me?’
‘Aren’t I looking happy?’ My sister prodded her frozen forehead, benumbed with botox.
‘Hello, I’m your sister,’ I extended my hand. ‘Lizzie McPhee. I don’t believe we’ve met. If you have any more “procedures”, Victoria, I’m no longer going to be able to pick you out in a crowd!’
‘Sven likes it … Where
is
he?’ She checked her watch. ‘He was supposed to pick me up hours ago.’
‘Why on earth do you want him so badly? Everyone he’s ever dated has ended up in rehab or a nunnery.’
‘Because the only job offer I’ve had this month is to advertise a cream for
yeast
infections on daytime TV. The chance of brokering this gig into a movie career looks as slim as Britney bloody Amore. Have you any idea what I’ve been
reduced
to? Belgrade catwalks, where some mor
onic
designer whose collection is inspired by “negative space” and “airports” tells me to “be manly, butch, hot. It’s a jungle out there – but also lesbian”. The
next
day I’m told to walk a third of the way down the catwalk and then stop. Whinny. Stare at everyone, then go backstage. Ten years ago I was arriving at premières with Mick Jagger on one arm and a panther on a gold lead on the other. And
now
look at me!!!’ She shook me violently by the shoulders. ‘If he doesn’t marry me soon I am going to
shoot
myself, do-you-understand-me?’
My sister slid her pale arms into the satin lining of her raspberry coat sleeves. ‘Since Sven is obviously not planning to grace us with his presence, I’m leaving. Today has just been a total waste of makeup.’ She gave an elaborate sigh and then wove a sinuous trajectory around the kids’ bikes, skates and scooters to the front door.
I scanned Cal’s face for a flicker of tell-tale emotion. ‘How goes
your
love life?’ I probed.
‘On my good days I pray for death. Speaking of which, how tall are you, shug? I just need to know so that I can order
your
body-bag.’ Cal ground his butt into a pot plant. ‘’Cause this marriage is gonna kill you.’
‘Well, then, bury me in a herbaceous border somewhere. And, at the funeral, don’t let ’em play “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion.’
‘Good God, if only that woman had gone down with the
Titanic
.’ He sighed.
On New Year’s Day, when Hugo called my mobile to say he couldn’t make the family lunch at Richoux’s restaurant because of another emergency surgical procedure, my sister raised her crayoned brow like a dominatrix’s whip.
‘That just shows what a noble and good person he is,’ I said, defensively, ‘performing all this emergency surgery through the holidays.’
‘I’ve never heard butt-sag called an “emergency” before. Still, thank God all those self-sacrificing, philanthropic doctors who work in plastic surgery are there to help we women in our decade of need.’
I blinked neutrally. ‘He’s abandoning the Longevity Clinic.’
‘The clinic, you idiot, is a big success. Where do you think I’ve been getting all my procedures done recently?’ she announced.
Dismay skittered through my belly. ‘But … but I told him to choose between me and the clinic.’ A tiara of sweat beads adorned my brow. ‘In the end, I presumed he chose
me
.’
I was a glutton for punishment, I really was. I needed to join a psychological Weight-watchers to weigh up my excess emotions – yesterday two tantrums, the day before, three sulks; today, one nervous bloody breakdown.
With trembling hands, I lit up one of Victoria’s cigarettes. I hadn’t needed a smoke since my days as a foreign correspondent. Being married to Hugo Frazer MD I had, of late, found myself craving the peace and tranquillity I’d known caught in crossfire on the Gaza Strip. A French waiter swooped upon us. ‘Good afternoon. Would Madam prefer the smoking section?’ he asked, pointedly.
‘Actually, do you have a heroin-injecting, nervous-breakdown-having, suicide-while-you-wait section? Because that would do quite nicely thank you!’ I blurted, before shattering into hot, humiliated tears.
‘The Patient has no past history of attempted suicides but is constantly tearful. The patient refused a lobotomy … though suggested some serious drugs might help.’ Of course, the reason I didn’t need a lobotomy was that I already had one. It’s called a marriage certificate.
18
The Night Is Young, but
You
Are Not
HOW MANY ROADS
must a man walk down before he admits he is lost?
Stepping into the clinic was like stepping into
Austin Powers III
. An elaborate ziggurat of glass and marble behind a traditional Harley Street façade, it featured bleached walls, plinky-plonky Enya soundtracks and white-coated pod-people moving around efficiently with clipboards. Perhaps Sven was really Dr Evil. And Britney Amore his beautiful but deadly assistant. Perhaps they were secretly manufacturing giant hair-sprays in their subterranean caverns to rip the ozone layer and melt the poles so as to drown all the ugly people?
I pushed through the gilt-edged gates, macheted through the flowered vines tendrilling from the towering atrium and trekked for a mile or two around the ornamental lake in the foyer. It struck me how much the place
didn’t
look like the London Hospital. It gleamed with designer confidence. The windows sparkled. The Muzak pumped hypnotically. No dilapidated chairs, no corroded pipes, no shabby carpets, no despairing, overstretched nursing staff, no bacteria the size of mature elk. Here, beaming secretaries buzzed between filing cabinets and phone calls. Vibrant Christmas decorations were still strung festively in the foyer between sets of Corinthian columns and marble cloisters that would not have looked out of place in the late Caligula’s pleasure palace.
I’d come with Victoria, who was to feature in the ‘before’ and ‘after’ segment of a promotional video. The star presenter was Britney Amore. At the sight of me, Britney made a face like the heroine in a horror movie who has just seen the Creature.
‘Nice to see you too,’ I mumbled. It may have been my imagination, but her breasts seemed more gigantic than ever. It looked as though she’d just dragged her buttocks through her legs and strapped them into her bra cups. ‘When you’re eighty those thirty-two double D-cup silicone jobs are going to cramp your swing in the Seniors’ Golf Tournament, you know.’
‘This is a private shoot,’ Britney barked brusquely. ‘PR people only.’
A loving kiss on my hot cheek distracted me. ‘Marrakech! What dark satanic forces brought
you
here?’
‘Um … I came with Sven.’
Enough said.
Sven was busy beguiling the young, overawed models, including Heroin Chic, in the waiting room. ‘Can I take your picture? That way Santa will know
exactly
what I want next Christmas!’
‘An obsession with teenagers just proves how truly ignorant you are.’
Turning, Sven bestowed on me a warm and pleasant smile; the sort of smile that immediately put me on guard. It was disarming – like a cat toying with a canary before devouring it.
‘Women don’t even reach their sexual prime until their forties.’
‘Yeah,’ he responded casually, ‘but who’d wanna fuck ’em?’
‘Really? Have you pointed this out to my
sister
?’ I said coldly.
Smiling with sinister obsequiousness, Sven moved out of earshot of the others, beckoning for me to follow. ‘Oh, look,’ he boasted, as I approached, ‘I just made you come with one finger … Now, piss off out of my clinic.’ He clamped me on the shoulder. (Whenever he did this, I was always surprised to discover it wasn’t a knife blade.) He then steered me – propelled me, really – towards the outer marble corridor. ‘This place is for babes only. Babia Majora.’
‘Marrakech!’ I called her, my blood boiling. ‘Come on.’
Sven’s left arm snaked around my niece’s waist.
‘I think I’ll stay,’ she said. ‘Sven promises that beautiful egg donors can sell their eggs to, like, the highest bidder.’
‘That’s enough, babe,’ he ordered, placing a finger to her lips.
But she kept trotting along beside me. ‘He’s auctioning our ova on the Internet. You know. To parents who want a beautiful child.’
My niece had just taken an IQ test … and failed … ‘What?’
‘One model got a bid for fifteen thousand squids! It’s kinda off, but do you know what that sort of dosh could do for my Bruce? It’s going to pay for the lawyers who can help get him off Death Row.’
So Sven really
was
Dr Evil. And his twisted mind wasn’t just hatching plots, but also the eggs of super-models to breed Beautiful People. ‘You’re selling your eggs?’ I asked Marrakech, horrified. ‘What are you? A
chicken
?’
‘Yeah. Free-range,’ triumphed Sven. ‘Meaning she’s free to make up her own mind.’ He strong-armed me towards the glass door leading to Harley Street.
And that bastard would have bounced me too, except that Britney Amore was busy ushering in the camera crew and public-relations people who were making the promotional video. Sven immediately turned his strong-arming into a friendly, affectionate embrace.
‘Welcome!’ he said expansively. ‘Refreshments, anyone? A little New Year cheer?’
After all the deafening mwah-mwah cheek kissing synonymous with PR execs, I watched Britney do her opening scene to camera. ‘Welcome to our Longevity Clinic. Soon, we’ll be known all over the world – and other places. We’re gonna sweep the country like wild flowers!’
Jesus Christ. One more neurone and Ms Amore would have a synapse.
‘All women are unique, just like all other women.’
It was clear that
this
woman had spent her Texan childhood playing with plutonium. The lieutenant of the Space Cadet Academy then introduced her partner, ‘in business and plea
surrrrrre
’ she rolled the R in her mouth, positively fellating it.
Sven took the cue and, helped by a large idiot board, lapsed into one of those ‘I really do
care
about women’ monologues to which the modern man is distressingly prone. His smile was greasy enough to fry kebabs.
‘Tell them about the eggs,’ I heckled. ‘And the underage models.’