Authors: Kathy Lette
I winced. While I’d retreated into books, Victoria ran away from our bleak, Nicholas Nickelbyed boarding-school at sixteen. She found work as a topless waitress in a Spanish tapas bar, followed by a stint as a ‘dancer’ in Sophisticats where she was spotted by a model scout. Sven’s first words to her were ‘
You
are 9.9999. If you were with
me
you’d be a perfect ten.’ This was her version of events anyway. Personally I think she could only have met her odious boyfriend in a police line-up. Hell, the man had handcuff tan marks.
Twenty years later, she’d now rekindled contact with this ‘love of her life’ and although he’d re-signed her to his agency, she was desperately hoping he’d marry her as well – a proposal she was busily promoting with sexual favours.
Sven (as in ‘Svengali’) had changed his name at twenty-two (from Terry Taylor) and had never looked back at his knick-knacked, pebble-dashed council-house past. He’d successfully transmuted a juvenile zeal for nicking women’s knickers from clothes-lines into a career as a model agent where women took them off for him. Proving that you can’t keep a bad man down, he became the European Head of Divine, one of the world’s largest model agencies with (as he endlessly boasts) a 100-million-dollar annual turnover. But his Christian Liaigre décor didn’t fool me. This was a flamenco spa five-seater Jacuzzi man if ever I saw one. Despite the copy of the
Financial Times
tucked permanently under one arm, I’m convinced his real reading material is limited to back issues of
Big Butt, Hog Tied
and
Latex Maiden
. He may have a voice as mild and cool as a kindergarten teacher, but I suspect that if Sven went swimming in shark-infested waters, the sharks would wear chain-mail suits.
I checked my watch and realized that I had exactly thirty seconds to remove squashed bananas from the bottom of gym bags, snap the Velcro fasteners on trainers, comb Julia’s hair for nits and leave for work. I could have asked my sister to drop off the kids, but she’d only accidentally leave them behind at the hair-dresser’s. To Victoria, children are like Ikea appliances – you have no idea how much assembly is required until it’s way too late. Despite having the maternal instincts of a guppy fish, my sister is the bewildered mother of the beautiful Marrakech. For the past fifteen years she’d been looking for a loop-hole in her daughter’s birth certificate.
I left my sister practically fellating her lover over the phone, herded the kids out of our Hampstead terrace house and was just about to hook myself up intravenously to a bottle of Valium for the school run, when my neighbour from the ramshackle, rent-controlled garden flat next door trampolined towards me on springy Nikes.
‘Happy birthday.’ Calim Keane grinned. ‘I have no idea how old you are but you certainly don’t look it.’ He plucked the car keys from my hand and replaced them with a plate of cupcakes bristling with candles. ‘How ’bout I do the school run?’
Calim was always coming to my rescue. He looked after my kids even when they were contagious and had earned their undying gratitude for teaching them how to make hilarious intestinal noises with their armpits. He’d assisted in the delivery of our guinea-pig’s babies. He even came with me to try on swimming costumes; threatening to kill anyone who attempted to get into the fitting room. I kissed his cheek. ‘Oh, Cal,
would
you? I am sooo late for work.’
Although he was a hard, Belfast man of thirty-one, a builder by trade, his pale skin was incongruously satiny – the sort of skin that can bruise from walking in the wind. He was also a poet on ‘L’ plates having published one very slim (to the point of anorexic) collection of verse. I looked affectionately into his speckled eyes, the eyes of a stray cat. And he
was
a stray, really.
‘Me ma drank, me da drank, Jaysus, me
dog
drank,’ he’d told me the day we’d met over the garden hedge, eight years previously. Abandoned by his father, he had been put into care at the age of four with his brothers after his mum died. When I’d asked him why he’d become a writer he’d replied nonchalantly, ‘Oh, huge psychological dysfunction.’ Not that he’d had much success. His only book had been published by Remainder and Co. I’m afraid Calim Keane is to literature what the Apollo 13 was to space travel. He was studying English Lit now, as a mature student at Birkbeck College, living on a student loan and working on a novel.
‘How’s the masterpiece?’
‘Me poetic licence has expired. Me muse is un-amused. Yep,’ he said self-depreciatingly, ‘I started out with nothin’ and I still have most of it left. How’re you doin’?’ the lanky, languid, lunatic Celt asked me now, ruffling my hair.
‘My sister reckons that thirty-nine is such a nice-sounding age I should decide to hold on to it for at least another decade.’
He snorted. ‘Liz, you can’t be poised on the cusp of forty for ever. You’ll be in a zimmer frame. You know, people will notice.’ He tossed the car keys high and snatched them out of the air.
‘And
you
can’t stay cooped up inside scribbling all the time. You need to be more outgoing. I mean, the home shopping channel operator is starting to recognize your voice.’
‘I am outgoing … only inwardly. Which is why I was kinda hopin’ you’d come to the university ball with me. It’s too humiliatin’ to go alone.’
‘You have
got
to get a girlfriend, Cal. Otherwise the Pope is going to start asking you for tips on celibacy.’
‘What woman is goin’ to be interested in me? A man who’s listed in
Who’s
Not
Who
?’
I shook my head wearily and tucked a ginger-coloured curl behind his ear. Cal’s motto in life is ‘If at first you don’t succeed, give up.’ ‘Of course I’ll go with you, you big Irish bastard.’
‘Thanks, shug.’ He always called me that. It was a Belfast-ism, short for sugar.
The kids tumbled into Cal’s battered Volkswagen. I nosed my orthopaedic people-mover past the snaggle-toothed Dickensian buildings that make up our cobbled cul-de-sac and headed towards the BBC. I’d won my journalistic spurs during the fall of the Communist regimes in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. First for CNN. Then for the BBC. At twenty-nine I might have been jumping out of helicopters, but at thirty I was jumping into maternity clothes. Once pregnant, the Beeb had shunted me sideways into
The World News Today
, desk-jockeying behind an autocue. Resigned to Mother Mode, I’d opted for the lunchtime shift so that I could be home in time for the kids.
When I got to the office my girlfriends gave me a card that read ‘What can you give the woman who has everything?
Shelves
.’ My work was no longer filed on the floor but stacked neatly on a new bookcase.
And I laughed because I
did
have everything, damn it. I was the luckiest goddamn woman in the world.
I’d just come off the air when Hugo rang to say he’d be delayed for my birthday celebration. And what life-threatening complication would be keeping him from me
today
? I bantered, affectionately. A tracheotomy and an air rifle bullet lodged behind a child’s eye. He promised to meet me at the theatre later.
If I’d known then what I know now, I would have screamed, ‘Don’t come! Let’s cancel. Better still, let’s leave the city and go open a cute little craft shop in the Cotswolds.’ But, oblivious to Fate’s landmines, I just smiled. ‘Sure, catch me up when you can, darling. I’ll be holding Vicky’s hand backstage.’ It was my birthday and I felt blessed with a family life the Waltons would have killed for. I felt suffused with contentment; cocooned by love. ‘It’s the Old Vic, don’t forget. I’ll take my car, okay? There’s plenty of parking.’
I blew a kiss down the phone, totally unaware that once I drove over Waterloo Bridge, I would find myself double-parked in a parallel universe …
3
Medics! We Have Incoming!
OTHER THAN WHEN
having sex or giving birth, most women pretend not to have a vagina.
The Vagina Monologues
(no, not a very unusual ventriloquist act) was a theatrical event designed to raise female consciousness as well as loads of cash for battered women.
At London’s Old Vic theatre, an assortment of famous actresses, models and writers were performing pieces based on different aspects of the vagina: ‘If Your Vagina Could Speak, What Would It Say?’; ‘My Angry Vagina’; ‘Reclaiming Cunt’; ‘Because He Loved To Look At It’.
My sister doesn’t have a political bone in her under-nourished body. She thinks ‘arms control’ is some kind of biceps-toning exercise. But this was a chic media event, osmotically providing intellectual kudos plus loads of influential men to lust after her. (The sudden conversion of chauvinistic blokes to feminism had nothing to do with the opportunity to hear Winona Ryder, Calista Flockhart, Brooke Shields and the Kates, both Blanchett and Winslet, talking dirty, of course!) Victoria, a B list celeb, was not pleased therefore to find herself sharing a dressing room with A list Hollywood soap star Britney Amore, totteringly perched atop two needle heels, whimpering and simpering in a little-girl-lost voice about her gorrrrgeous new boyfriend. While the men backstage marvelled at Britney’s butterscotch body and emerald green eyes, her female co-stars were more ruthlessly objective. ‘Her thighs are so liposuctioned, it looks as though she had one leg amputated and just split the other in half,’ hissed my sister.
But nothing aroused more speculation than the Case of the Disappeared Bottom.
There was no bottom
. Ms Amore was hindquarterly challenged. It’s a mystery as to how the woman sat down. Since the buttocks had been sliced off and the brain was missing as well, my sister and I gigglingly deduced that we had a new definition for ‘lobotomy’. Nor was the irony of her appearance at the fundraiser lost on us. With all of Britney Amore’s rhinoplasty, liposuction and silicone mutilation, well, if
that
’s not a Battered Woman, hell,
what is
?
Although it was a feminist event, nothing makes women bond faster than having another woman to bitch about. As Britney took her cue to go on stage, the other female performers in the wings were cackling and chortling. The only thing missing was a cauldron.
‘You know how you get a huge mouth like that?’ my sister sniped. ‘You have fat from your bum injected into your lips.’
‘Then the woman is literally talking out of her arse,’ I volunteered. Cue more cackling. Tittering, we peered through the gloom, shielding our eyes against the theatre spotlights, to see the daytime drama diva, famous for her stethoscope-fondling as head nurse in the soap opera
Tell Me Where It Hurts
, cooing to the audience about what her vagina would wear if it could. But I was more intrigued by what
she
was wearing. Britney was the reverse of an iceberg: ninety per cent of her was visible, most of it between her clit and her clavicle.
‘That’s not a dress,’ I murmured to Victoria. ‘That’s a cocktail napkin.’
My sister, who favoured the husky-voiced Lauren-Bacall-tightly-belted-mackintosh-narrow-waisted-pencil-thin-skirt-defined-shoulder-pour-me-a-martini-rhinestone-studded-cigarette-lighter look, ran her critical eyes the length of my body before quirking a tweezed brow. ‘
You
can talk. So, what is it? Hideously Awful Polyester Pants Day?’
What
I
saw as a well-tailored pants suit, Victoria saw as appropriate for a Stalanist machine-gun parade. I watched her slide one long leg through the slit in her starkly tailored dress. ‘Who designed your outfit exactly, Elisabeth?
Blind people in a dark room?
’
I bridled. ‘I’m a news journalist. I don’t think it would be appropriate to start purchasing my clothing from the –’ I prodded a finger in Britney’s direction, ‘– Aspiring-Actress-Unbelievably-Revealing-Figure-Hugging-Clothing Shop.’
Britney sashayed towards us in the wings to the sound of lusty applause. Her metallic blue mini skirt was so tight you could see the three-course raisin she’d had for lunch.
‘It’s not a female,’ I murmured. ‘It’s a pool cue.’ I smiled politely at her as she passed. But Britney was not a woman’s woman. With Herculean effort, her mouth moved into some kind of lipsticky grimace. It was a smile that could have irradiated soft fruit.
There were so many celebrities in the cast that most of the friends and family of the performers had elected to schmooze backstage rather than actually to see the show, resulting in an impromptu party. The pool cue made her way towards the hospitality table in the wings, walking at a deliberate tilt, hips thrust forward to accentuate her slim thighs, leaving behind a trail of gawking males. I saw Hugo arrive, dump his briefcase then beat the other men to hand the actress a glass of the warm Spanish wine (otherwise known as Grout Remover) obligatory at charity events.
‘So,’ goaded my sister, ‘does Hugo
play
pool?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Victoria,’ I scoffed. ‘The woman’s blouse is as sheer as her brain … I mean,
look
at her.’ I gestured towards Britney Amore, who was pouting her collagened lips in my husband’s direction. ‘She’s just a charisma wrapping a vacuum. Hugo says that the brain is the greatest erogenous zone. Well, a woman like
that
has got the IQ of a lower primate. Hugo loves me for my mind,’ I asserted smugly, ‘not because of my butt buoyancy.’
My big sister gave me that irritated stare siblings reserve for each other. Victoria could never find the time to nag her only family member as often and as effectively as she would have liked, especially about Letting Myself Go.
‘You’re letting yourself go, Elisabeth.’
‘You’re the one who’s letting herself go – mentally,’ I called out as she donned a red feather boa and glided majestically towards the stage to take her place in the Vulva Chorus. ‘At least I’m well-read.’
‘Yes,’ she said, over her shoulder, ‘but your ass is as broad as your mind.’
‘Well …’ I groped for a comeback ‘… your mind is as narrow as your waist.’
But my barb did not have the desired effect. ‘It
is
narrow, isn’t it?’ she gloated, before sailing into the limelight.