The Life and Loves of a She Devil (24 page)

New teeth were implanted, one by one, in the jaw prepared by Mr Firth, using a method so tedious and painful it was seldom used. The dental mechanic working from the photograph of Mary Fisher found the teeth were not totally regular; but the imperfections charmed. Bold, strong, even teeth can frighten: they are clearly made for biting, rather than lisping.

Now the nose loomed large, hooked and horrific in Miss Hunter’s sweet face. The head seemed small in proportion to the body. It was to be expected.

Miss Hunter paid cheques, monthly, promptly, writing the figure without wincing, although sometimes any physical movement, however small, would cause her exquisite pain. It was as if she insisted that money should be the basis of the transaction between them and not the caring, sharing pleasure of a joint endeavour. It hurt him.

She agreed to fly back to her own country to have her nose seen to. Mr Roche offered to fly to her, but she said, no, she had business to attend to at home. She went on a stretcher, accompanied by medical orderlies.

They reported back to Mr Ghengis later that, although in great pain, she had appointed agents and seen to the purchase of a property: a dilapidated lighthouse on the edge of a cliff a long way from everywhere.

‘I do hope,’ remarked Dr Black, ‘that after all this she isn’t going to hide her light under a bushel.’

‘She’ll do what she wants,’ said Mr Ghengis. ‘She’ll get what she wants. She is remarkable.’

They were both half in love with her. They admitted it to one another. They longed for her return. They did not trust Mr Roche to do the work properly, worrying that he would be revenged upon her, the way men in positions of medical power are so often revenged upon the women who depend upon them: or so women claim. They had heard it often enough. Naturally enough, they exempted themselves as doctors from this. Dr Black had a gamine little wife who raised money for the preservation of endangered species all over the world: she was energetic and forthright. He could exercise no power over her, he told Mr Ghengis, even had he wanted, since she felt more for animals than for humans. A reproachful look from her corgi upset her more than one from her husband. Husbands were two a penny where she came from; they were instantly replaceable and in infinite supply. Mr Ghengis, of course, was not married. The reason he gave to Dr Black was that he knew he would, sooner or later, succumb to the urge to make his wife more physically perfect, and that once he had achieved perfection with her he would lose interest. It was the journey, so far as women were concerned, that satisfied. The arrival was anticlimax.

They had a model of Miss Hunter before them as they talked, made in a new transparent substance called flexi-wax, threaded through with plastic sinews and veins and bones: they played with it, pinching out flesh here, adding it there, working their way to perfection. They thought they might have to alter the position of the kidneys, so that they lay one above the other, not side by side. It was easy enough. The working parts of the body must be properly linked; their actual position was immaterial.

Marlene Hunter returned to the desert, on a stretcher, but with a small tip-tilted nose and delicately curved nostrils. The face was a mass of bruising and the eyes lay in black hollows, but she could already be seen to be strikingly pretty.

‘I suppose it isn’t rather
ordinary
?
’
worried Dr Black.

‘If you have been extraordinary all your life,’ reflected Mr Ghengis, ‘just to be ordinary must be wonderful.’

‘But we don’t want to make her like the others who come in here.’

‘Why not?’ asked Mr Ghengis, who prided himself on his perception. ‘Since that is what she wants; all she has ever wanted is to be like other women.’

That June they started on her torso. They fined down and abbreviated the shoulder blades. They made the breasts smaller. They removed flesh from the upper arms and drew the loose skin up into the armpits. They liquidised and drew off fat from the dowager’s hump that had developed at the base of her neck. They moved downwards. They tautened and lifted her belly and tightened her buttocks. In the end they left her kidneys where they were, too near the surface of her body for safety, but the gestalt of her system was under threat: her heart beat would slow, then race, even in the inter-operative periods. Her menstrual cycle required hormonal topping up to keep it functioning. It seemed to Mr Ghengis and Dr Black the less internal surgery her body was obliged to endure the better. The possible danger to her future health by virtue of a blow to less than adequately protected kidneys was outweighed by this factor. If, at the end of it all, she still had an appetite for surgery, she could have her kidneys moved in her spare time.

Mr Ghengis tightened Miss Hunter’s vagina and drew back the clitoris to heighten his patient’s sexual response. This made Dr Black uneasy.

‘It seems an interference with the essential self,’ he complained.

‘There is no such thing as the essential self,’ said Mr Ghengis.

‘It is all inessential, and all liable to change and flux, and usually the better for it.’

Miss Hunter needed increasing doses of heroin to dull the pain. Her body had become addicted to the substance, but her mind remained elated and producing the hormones most conducive to her general health. They would cure the addiction when they had to, not before. In the meantime, her will to recover was phenomenal.

Only once did it flag; she received a letter from home, an unusual event. She wept. She lay in bed and her eyes were dull and her hands limp — or such of these as could be seen through the bandages: Mr Ghengis, recently, had made a series of hairline incisions between the fingers and drawn up the skin over the backs of the hands.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘Someone I know has cancer,’ she replied. ‘She’s dying, in hospital.’

‘Someone you know well?’

‘I met her at a party: we drove home in a car together. And once I went to dinner at her place. That’s all.’

‘She must have made a great impression, to upset you so now.’

‘Oh, she did.’

He said that if Miss Hunter wished she could return home to see her friend before she died. It would be as well to give her body as long a rest as possible before they started on her legs. If, indeed, wisdom and prudence had not prevailed and Miss Hunter had not changed her mind, and would put up with her legs as they were, and be content to be a statuesque beauty?

But Miss Hunter said she could not waste her time or her life in hospital-visiting, and that the leg processes should begin at once, since there was less time than she had thought; and not only were her legs to be tucked, but her arms too. She did not want to look like a gorilla.

In fact, shortening the arm was simplicity itself compared to shortening the leg. The arms did not have to bear the body’s weight. It had just never been done.

‘Tell her about the cost!’ suggested Dr Black. ‘Tell her it is simply not worth it.’

But Miss Hunter did not care about money. She used it as a tool to achieve her ends: she despised it. She had invested it well, if speculatively. She had a broker in New York regularly at the end of the telephone: she made killings on the money market. One of the girls on the clinic switchboard, listening in, had invested her small savings, her few miserable hundreds of dollars, as Miss Hunter did; now she had a substantial portfolio, and hundreds of thousands to her name.

Miss Hunter believed, as many do who have achieved wealth but who have been born to poverty, that the more you spend the more you get. Mr Ghengis and Dr Black gathered their medical team together from the far corners of the earth, and Miss Hunter paid, without flinching. And the more she paid, the happier she seemed.

She was increasingly popular with the nurses and the clinic staff. They admired her courage, and they admired her looks. She was charming. She could not help it. Her face, as it emerged out of bruising and swelling, was set in an expression of sweetness. Her eyes sparkled; her long lashes (grafted from elsewhere) veiled any sharpness of expression; her voice was husky and expressive. They flew, men and women alike, but especially men, to do her bidding.

Dr Black, deviously, invited Miss Hunter to a party at his home on the eve of the arm operations. It was a fund-raising occasion given by his wife. Dr Black and Mr Ghengis hoped that the response to her at the party would be such that she would be content with her new self, and leave well alone.

‘But I’m not a party kind of person,’ she objected at first ‘I never know what to say.’

‘Good heavens,’ said Dr Black, ‘someone like you doesn’t have to
say
anything. All you have to do is to
be.
’

Still she demurred. Mrs Black telephoned.

‘You simply must come,’ she said. ‘A party’s just the thing for morale. And it’s in a good cause. Polar bears. People think that because animals are large they don’t need protection, but the opposite is true. Well, you of all people must know that! My husband’s told me so much about you.’

There was a small silence. Presently Miss Hunter replied, ‘I should simply love to come, Mrs Black.’

A hairdresser worked for some hours upon Miss Hunter’s hair. Now it waved and hung in fashionable gold profusion, looped and tendrilled to hide unsightly scars. In fact, the scars all over her body amounted to little more than a tracery of fine white lines. She had healed wonderfully well, doctors and nurses agreed, as if the parted flesh were all too eager to leap together again in its new configuration. In most cosmetic patients wounds seemed determined to mend in the old pattern, not the new, building up scar tissue in an attempt to make things as they had been, not as they now were. The red rims round her eyes had faded, and were now scarcely noticeable. She moved a little cautiously still; she spoke tentatively; there was something wonderfully new-born about her.

‘She’s like Venus,’ said Dr Black to his wife, ‘risen freshly from her conch-shell. Enchanting!’

Mrs Black marvelled at how impressionable men were, even doctors. Like show-biz producers, they would stop to gawp at the stars that they themselves had made. At the time, she was helping manoeuvre into her garden a large cage in which lay a massive, heavily tranquillised and friendly polar bear, mascot of the Save-the-Bear Society, on loan from the Northern Territories.

Miss Hunter was late arriving at the party. The young Californian chauffeur delegated to collect her in the clinic’s pale mauve limousine was taking her by the long scenic route to show her the beauties of nature. Mr Ghengis, made vaguely jealous, and not convinced that his patient’s intimate parts were yet fully healed, drank too much champagne, and embarrassed the other guests, who were mostly of the medical establishment. It was an area of the country much given over to private medical clinics. Land was cheap and the views superb.

‘I am her Pygmalion,’ he cried. ‘I made her, and she is cold, cold! Where is Aphrodite, to breathe her into life?’ He searched the party for someone yet more beautiful than his creation, and could not find anyone, only a large polar bear slumped in the kitchen. He reproached Mrs Black for letting the animal out of its cage, but Mrs Black was convinced there was no harm in the animal.

‘Only man is vile,’ said Mrs Black, with passion. ‘If we leave that beast alone it will leave us alone.’

Miss Hunter, along with the bear, were to be star turns at the party, and still Miss Hunter was not here. From his account of what was going on at the clinic she quite expected to see a female version of Frankenstein’s monster appear, with the plates of her scalp pinned together with iron bolts. Mrs Black frequently called her husband Frankenstein over the breakfast table, or last thing at night, when he was preparing himself for sleep. ‘Goodnight, Frankenstein.’ They had married each other in an idealistic flurry: she to save the wild life of the world, he to eradicate human disease. Now they lived in a house with lilac drapes and picture windows with a desert view, and he spent his life defying nature, not flowing with it, and their children ate pink food, like anyone else’s, and the human and the animal race went to hell.

Miss Hunter entered. Heads turned. Mrs Black stepped forward to greet her. Her guest was dressed in gold lame, in a manner that Mrs Black — who wore designer jeans and white voile shirts to parties — personally found distasteful; the dress hugged her figure to the hips, and flared thereafter, falling a surprisingly long way down to rather large feet A little fur bolero and a gold strap or two about the shoulders and arms served to cover scars, but only those in the know would have realised that, presumed Mrs Black. Miss Hunter reminded Mrs Black of an illustration in one of the old
Esquires
of her youth brought back to life: an impossible male fantasy made flesh.

Miss Hunter said she was chilly; she would keep her fur. Her voice was agreeably husky. The division between her breasts was wide, and at eye level, for those on the shorter side. Men stared, and clustered, and stared again, and the bolder sought to draw her aside and make assignations, which she declined, saying sweetly that she was temporarily out of circulation, and they mustn’t mind, or be jealous. But they did, and they were.

Mrs Black said to Dr Black, ‘She is an insult to womanhood. What’s more, she looks much like anyone else, only taller, and to all accounts even that won’t be for long. You and your friends aren’t doctors. You are reductionists.’

‘It’s what she wanted,’ said Dr Black.

‘I suppose what she thought was,’ observed Mrs Black, ‘if you can’t beat them, join them.’

‘I’d rather not talk about it,’ said Dr Black, stiffly. ‘What you are witnessing is the making of medical history, but of course that cuts no ice with you. I wish you would get the bear in its cage.’

‘If you leave the bear alone,’ said Mrs Black, ‘it will leave you alone.’

Mr Ghengis circled Miss Hunter as a sculptor might circle his finished creation. Everything worked. Her eyes shone and glittered; her lips were moist. She raised a glass of champagne, she sipped. He knew her jaw still ached with movement but that she was too proud, too stubborn, to show the pain. Just sometimes it was her habit to let out a little sound, half-groan, half-sigh, the same ingoing and outgoing of breath as a grieving woman might utter in love-making, of pain and relief combined, that seemed to be both summonsed out of a dreadful past and called back from an unholy future.