Authors: Kathy Lette
‘Hi. I just dropped by for a career,’ were my first words when I walked through the BBC news room a week later. Weirdly, nobody commented on my complete transformation. They just told me that it was good to see me looking so ‘well’. It made me suspect that plastic surgery is an annual event for female news-readers of my age; a televisual rite of passage, a hardy annual, like photocopying your bum at the office Christmas party.
So now I had everything I’d wanted so badly: doting husband, fabulous job. I should have been ecstatically happy. Euphoric. On top of the world, which was, of course, my oyster. Then … why the hell wasn’t I? My self-esteem should have deepened like a tan as I basked in the heat of my husband’s lust. But, as it turns out, ‘the top of the world’ is nothing more than a dismal little place at the North Pole. Instead of glowing, I felt shrivelled and cold inside.
I raged at myself to get a grip. This was what I’d always wanted – to be beautiful, blonde and busty like my sister. But here I was, having fulfilled my quest for beauty beyond genetic inheritance,
hating every God-awful moment of it
.
As were Julia and Jamie. My kids wanted their old mother back – the one who had time for them, the one who wasn’t spending every waking hour on body maintenance. As I was now, not even hatching chicks would have taken me seriously as mother material. Trying to stay young, I discovered, is a full-time occupation. It’s a goddamn career. I had a Ph.D. in face creams – and the intellectual vibrancy of a hand model. Once you’ve morphed into a glamour-puss all that’s left is grooming. A woman could spend quite a lot of serious time, possibly sell-your-house-and-move-the-family-to-a-trailer-park amount of time, at exorbitantly priced beauty salons. How was I going to keep it up? I was at my wits’ end –
and it hadn’t taken me long to get there, either
.
Now that I was a perkly breasted blonde, a strange change came over me. I took to twirling my hair and walking differently – a half sashay, half-mince. I found myself asking incredibly stupid questions all the time. My voice even started going up at the end of sentences. All of a sudden, I was no longer capable of joined-up writing. I’d become so dull, even my
house-plants
had filed for divorce. Which was a shame, because now that Cal no longer popped over for cups of tea they were all I had for company.
It wasn’t until Easter that I actually bumped into him on my way to work one morning. He looked as wan and forlorn as I felt.
‘How’s life?’ he asked.
‘“Life” as in
real life
, or the panty-freshener from Boots?’
Calim looked me up and down. ‘You’re so thin, shug. Remind me never to fly with you near the Andes. I mean, if we crashed there’d be nothin’ to eat.’
‘I can’t believe I’m getting criticism on my appearance from a man wearing Ugg boots,’ I irritatedly tapped a spiked stiletto on the pavement. ‘Now, if you’d excuse me? Some of us have work to do,’ I said primly, slipping behind the wheel of the Mercedes convertible Hugo had bought me for our wedding anniversary.
‘Yeah, I’ve been watchin’ you on the box.’ He distractedly tucked a torn white T-shirt into faded black fly-button jeans. ‘You’ve become the sort of woman you hated, do you know that?’
‘And who is that exactly?’
‘The sort who wants world peace, an end to sectarian violence, oh, and to drop a dress size.’
‘Do you know what I think about that? Well, let me put it this way,’ I said, then banged the car door in his face.
Calim pulled open the door and grabbed hold of my wrist. ‘Don’t you have any feelin’s for me at all any more?’ he asked, desolately.
‘Not the ones you want.’
‘Actually I was wrong. I’m not in love with you. Not the woman you are now. The old Lizzie. She’s the one I loved. The funny, feisty one. Not this carbon copy of your mother. “
Don’t disturb Mummy, kids, she’s busy counting calories
.” ’
I gunned the motor to try to drown him out.
‘THE REASON YOU WERE SO BLOODY GOOD AT YOUR JOB, LIZZIE,’ he yelled, ‘IS BECAUSE YOU REPORTED THE NEWS WITH AUTHORITY AND INTELLECT.
NOT
BECAUSE YOU BUY A LOT OF UNNECESSARY HERBAL SHAMPOOS!’
All afternoon his words ate away at me. I
was
presenting Newsak. The reports I introduced seemed to have been dumbed down to go with my looks – hard-hitting exposés on lesbian tendencies among lap-dancers and shower safety for women prisoners. It was also true that I’d turned into one of those mothers whose biggest parenting decision was which nanny to take to Nevis. My own mother had children in the way we had the eaves painted on the house – to keep up appearances. It struck me that Calim had been right about that too. I had spent so much time and money distancing myself from my mother’s
physical
DNA only to discover that I’d turned into her mentally and emotionally. And why? To please my husband. A dark thought had begun to nag away at me, like a dull persistent headache.
Why would I want a man who only wanted me for my looks?
To assuage my doubts, I made love with Hugo constantly. But I felt curiously detached from it all. It was as though a party was being thrown on my body to which I hadn’t been invited. One night, bored and waiting for the ordeal to be over, I went limp, oohed and ahed and writhed for a bit, then made a low moan and lay still.
‘You’re going to have another seven of those!’ Hugo boasted and, impressed by his own sexual virtuosity, set to work again immediately.
Between thrusts and pokes, I reminded myself that this was what I’d worked so hard for – my husband was totally in lust with me …
Then why the hell wasn’t I feeling anything?
I told myself to at least
try
for an orgasm – but gave up the idea eventually as a waste of vaginal muscle.
Just as tentatively as I’d removed my bandages after plastic surgery, I started to peel slowly, carefully, away at my marriage – and finally unravelled this fundamental truth. I no longer loved my husband. I’d surgically altered the wrong thing. It wasn’t my appearance that had gone all flabby, it was my marriage. Our relationship had lost its vigour and vitality. It had become baggy, saggy, withered, weathered, juiceless. What was needed was radical matrimonial surgery – a nuptual Nip ’n’ Tuck.
Guilt-tripped by Calim’s lecture, I began to leave work earlier to take the kids to the heath. Watching them eating their ice creams, huge vanilla whirligigs of slime, I found myself entertaining the thought of leaving their father.
What I’d realized was that winning back my husband for the wrong reasons – well, it was like getting a solar-powered vibrator while on secondment to Antarctica.
I frog-marched these thoughts out of my head. It was just post-surgery stress, I told myself. Maybe the bleach had leaked through to my brain? I’d issue a statement to Hugo: ‘We apologize for this temporary loss of service. Normal devoted-wife activity will resume at the end of this unimportant midlife crisis.’
But when Hugo started to complain about Sven’s ineptitude in not getting enough malpractice insurance, laughter tickled my nose as if I were about to sneeze. When his moan segued on to the lack of expertise of the clinic’s cowboy cosmetic surgeons, ‘Lizzie, most of those doctors couldn’t put a dressing on a salad!’ – it dawned on me that if I had to listen to his voice for much longer my earlobes would fall off.
As the weeks went by, complaints intensified. One woman sued because her trilucent implant, given to her as a ‘wedding treat’ by her fiancé, reacted with her own tissue and swelled, agonizingly, by more than 25 per cent. ‘Quite frankly, these implants have ruined my life,’ she said on
Channel 4 News
to millions of viewers. ‘And there’s also an increased chance that I might get cancer. Dr Frazer told me there was no real risk!’
‘You lied to her about the risks?’ I asked my husband, incredulously, switching off the television. ‘Anything else in your box, Pandora?’
‘It wasn’t a lie.’ Hugo took another slug at his whisky. ‘At worst it was a terminological in-exactitude.’ When he touched my arm I flinched. Whiny self-absorption is just
so
attractive in a man.
Another woman went to
The Times
when one side of her face-lift collapsed. In photos she looked like a constipated rodent.
‘God!’ Hugo threw down the paper and for the first time imagined the true cost of his Mephistophelean pact. ‘Any more bad publicity like this,’ he melodrama-ed, obviously running late for his Self-pity Group, ‘and I’m going to kill myself.’
‘Well, that’s easily done. Just run into the roach-motel under the fridge. Commit insecticide,’ I suggested abruptly, and left the room.
Then a class-action suit: a group of women sued because Hugo had given them breast implants filled with soya bean oil. Their gynaecologists had now advised instant removal because of medical concerns about the effects on embryos.
‘Yours aren’t soya – I checked with your surgeon – they’re saline. You’re okay,’ Hugo assured me meekly.
‘Oh, I feel
much
better now,’ I replied sarcastically.
‘The soya was approved! By the government! Besides, extraction isn’t such a major operation.’
‘Really? What if you’d had a penile implant, Hugo, and then it was
recalled
? How would
you
feel then, Doctor, hmm?’
A complaint a day kept the doctor at bay. I was beginning to understand why doctors wear those little green masks – so if anything goes wrong they won’t be recognized. There was pectoral slippage (one patient woke to find his pec implant on his elbow). There was eyelid paralysis from botox injections. A pair of realigned nipples were leaking yellow toxic yoghurt. A handful of breasts were stealthily seeping fermenting carcinogenic fluid. There was permanent oozing and crusting from chemical face peels. Gore-Tex fibres used to build up an assortment of lips poked out like bedsprings from an old mattress.
There was speculation in the press about the massive sums the court might award in compensation. Then other people, smelling money, got in on the act. Like the man who had been slammed in the head by the enlarged breasts of an enthusiastic lap-dancer. He likened the experience to being hit with cement blocks and demanded fifteen thousand pounds compensation from the Spread Eagle Nightclub, which sued the Longevity Clinic for the hardening of the implants in the first place.
‘At least I now know why doctors call what they do a
practice
,’ I told my husband, icily. And what would happen, I asked, when customers who’d paid exorbitantly for models’ egg donations had babies that grew up ugly? ‘I hope you haven’t counted your eggs before they hatch. Have you included a baby-back guarantee? I mean, how did you become a bloody doctor?
By correspondence course?
’
The media continued to fix the clinic in its mesmeric eye. A man who looked a lot like undercover reporter Roger Cook applied for a job as our au pair. And there was a van constantly parked in our driveway, which I didn’t remember buying …
When Hugo muttered to me about the time Sven pushed him into recommending unnecessary laser work (Sven was a shareholder in ‘Knuckles’ Milano’s company, whose laser machines the clinic had purchased), I didn’t even look up from my nail-file.
‘You seem to have mixed me up with someone who gives a shit,’ I replied, intent on my thumb buff. ‘Anyway, I know you don’t perform unnecessary surgery … you only operate if you need the money.’
To top off the horrors, a week after her breast augmentation Heroin Chic’s weight had risen by a quarter. She died from toxic shock due to an infection contracted through surgery.
‘The operation was not a serious surgical procedure and the infection she developed was not a typical infection,’ Hugo told the inquest. As her family wept, Hugo fobbed them off with flourishes of medical sophistry. I found myself wondering how I could let him know discreetly that his services as partner for life were no longer required? Perhaps throwing my hair dryer into his bath would do the trick.
And then Sven became the subject of the exposé when he was secretly taped by an investigative journalist who was posing as a fashion photographer. The transcript of Sven admitting to arrange breast augmentations for underage models was widely reported. Ironically, it was the kind of story for which at one stage in my career I would have given my now perfect capped eyeteeth.
Sven told us that the press pack could kiss his ass. To which I replied, ‘That sounds more like a job for my husband.’
‘I need your guidance, Elisabeth. I’m disgraced publicly. And I don’t know how to handle it.’ Hugo was slumped before the 10 o’clock television news. His suit drooped funereally on his broad shoulders. ‘You’ve always given me such wise counsel in the past.’
‘Sorry.’ I shrugged. ‘I’m a blonde. I don’t do “counsel” or “wise guidance” any more. That was the old me. The one you discarded. The one you didn’t want. Remember?’
‘What’s up?’ he asked, in a peeved voice.
‘The warranty on our marriage,’ I replied sadly.
Fourteen hours later, slick with sprays and glistening with lip-gloss, I sat frozen at my half-moon-shaped newsreader’s desk, flanked by cameras. Cables, thick as eels, writhed across the scuffled floor. Makeup artists and hair-stylists puttered about my face like moths. I tried to ignore the pain in my breasts. The silicone implants were less Exocet shaped now. In the half-light, they could almost pass for real. But the pain had never really passed. It felt like having jogger’s nipple on top of mastitis. Then there was the constant terror that someone might hug me too hard and they’d burst like over-inflated space-hoppers.
One of the TV monitors was switched to a commercial channel. Ads sang the praises of ‘mature’ women – played by teenage models. You’d have to work out 365 hours a day, I reflected, to look like that. In fact, any model who looked roughly thirty-nine was warbling about the benefits of bowel regulators or orthopaedic footpads.
I started to feel slightly dizzy. Waves of panic began to rise in my chest. Despite the extra-strong styling mousse, the hair on my head was standing up. What was I doing sitting at this desk, in a body that wasn’t mine? This body belonged to K-Tel. This body was Barbie’s. I tried to disguise my identity – the identity imprinted on the strands of my DNA just as a celestial map is carved upon an ancient Abyssinian necklace. And without the map, I had lost my way, everyday navigation suddenly impossible.