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.

Hugo seemed to be the only man in the wings who was not drowning in the pool of drool surrounding Britney Amore. The TV soap star had declined Hugo’s Chateau Grout Remover with a lecture on deadly pesticides. She then tried to prevent him sampling the hospitality meatballs.

‘Stop!’ she exclaimed. ‘Yer stomach may be sayin’ yes! But yer colon’s sayin’, “Are you insane?” ’

Looking her directly in the eye, my husband devoured three koftas in one bite. ‘Hitler was vegetarian. Enough said?’

Turning her back on him in apparent disgust, Britney proceeded to hold forth to the rest of us about her upcoming stage appearance at the National Theatre. ‘Actin’,’ her Texan accent had a velvety rasp, like the tongue of a big cat, ‘is ninety per cent talent and forty per cent brains.’

My husband snorted derisively. ‘Is that what you think? If you’ll pardon the exaggeration,’ he added, with disdainful suavity, handing me the beaker of tepid vino the actress had rejected.

Britney Amore shot him a wary look from beneath heavily beaded lashes – so thick it looked as though the tarantulas that were obviously nesting in her eyebrows were doing stretch aerobics with their many mohair legs.

‘Am I missin’ somethin’, hon?’ she turned to me, placing her manicured hands on her sticky-out hips and cocking one little foot up on to its towering heel.

‘I’m terrible at maths too,’ I explained, kindly, ‘But, um, I think you’ll find that ninety and forty is a hundred and thirty per cent.’

‘Ah-huh.’ She widened her eyes at me as though I were retarded. There was an alluring contemptuousness about her which took my breath away. ‘And that’s exactly what I give, honey-pie.’

Yeah, along with chlamydia, honey-pie, I thought, my good-will evaporating.

‘Acting these days,’ said Hugo a bit pompously, ‘is a hundred per cent about looks. Now that the National Theatre is in a state of collapse, the only way they can get bums on seats is by casting actresses from TV soap operas – preferably with a scene where they take off their clothes. I guess it was hard to find a Shakespearean role that required full-frontal nudity. Ophelia’s last swim, perhaps …?’

I giggled. ‘Can I Ophelia up?’

Britney met Hugo’s gaze with defiance. ‘I ain’t never had a red-blooded man complain about my bodkins forsooth.’

Her scrum of male admirers, having ignored my bad pun, laughed over-heartily at her worse one. Except Hugo.

‘Achievement doesn’t depend on physical perfection,’ he elaborated. ‘Beethoven was deaf. Milton was blind. Stephen Hawking is in a wheelchair. Physical perfection means, well, nothing much, actually.’

I gave him an imploring glance – one of those oh-there’s-nothing-wrong-with-my-partner-that-a-good-funeral-wouldn’t-cure looks, an expression perfected by wives over the centuries … He completely ignored it – a response perfected by husbands over the centuries.

‘We’re totally aware of racism and sexism these days. But “lookism” is one of the most pervasive, albeit most denied, prejudices.’ Hugo ran his hands through his tawny mane of hair, which reared back off his broad forehead. ‘Society confuses beauty with goodness. Police, judges, juries – they’re all more lenient towards pretty women.’

Britney snapped her gum belligerently. ‘Yeah, well, sex discriminates against the un-att-rac-tive.’ The elasticated twang to her Texan vowels jarred discordantly with Hugo’s rounded, ringing tones. ‘I reckon a lady’s gotta make the most of what she’s got, ya know?’

‘Well, here in Europe,’ he responded, pointedly, ‘we have a much more sophisticated approach to life. A woman who ages well is a thing of beauty.’ I can’t say I appreciated the way he draped his arm limply across the back of my shoulders, with all the passion of a beach towel. ‘And those who fight it, ugly.’

There was a baited quality to the air. The actress bristled. But before she could run him through with her stiletto, the last chorus of The Vagina Monologues faded. After the curtain calls, everyone was ushered upstairs for the post-show party.

A slightly shell-shocked minister from the Department of Culture and Sport and the usual collection of Labour-supporting and toupée-sporting beer barons and tax exiles were approaching the benefit gala like draftees crossing a minefield. Feigning feminist sympathies, yet terrified that they were about to be savaged by a feral Fallopian tube, their smiles were snap-frozen on to bewildered faces. To unnerve them further, on the table in the centre of the room rose a six-foot cake in the shape of a pudenda. Between the two pink marzipan labia majoras pouted the particularly moreish, sugar-coated labia minora. The whole ambrosial, raspberry red cunt-fection was crowned by a delicated candied clitoris, which nestled temptingly beneath the piped icing pubes. Guests hovered hungrily, in lip-licking salivation … until they realized that they’d just been subjected to an account of infibulation from a Somali victim. It had been a harrowing monologue from her heart and what was left of her vagina, which had made complaints about western sexism seem trivial. Shuddering at the memory, nobody dared wield the knife to cut the cake. Eventually, ravenous guests unhygienically took to gouging out chunks with surreptitious fingertips.

‘I know he’s here somewhere.’ My sister anxiously scanned the throng, looking for Sven. ‘I couldn’t believe it when he said he was coming tonight. I mean, this is not his scene at all. I think he’s finally on the brink of proposing! The night before he left for the States he said we’d look cute on a wedding cake together! I so want to be happily married like you, Lizzie.’

I was about to point out that Sven was really not my cup of slime when a whiff of aftershave strong enough to dissolve igneous rock forewarned me that the patron saint of Fake Tan Man was in the near vicinity. I swivelled and, sure enough, Sven appeared, a gold chain glinting amongst the hairs of his toasted torso. Though thinning on top, he wore the prerequisite ponytail, which straggled down the back of a shirt darker than his tie. Inhabitants of the lower slopes of showbiz genuflected before him.

‘Well, here I am! What were your other two wishes?’ he oozed, in a silken voice.

‘Sven, darrrrrling.’ My sister kissed him proprietorially.

‘Vicky,’ he daubed his mouth with a satin hand-kerchief, ‘let me wipe off a place for you to sit.’ Sven’s easy charm was negated by his cold, slow, unblinking eyes – which he rested, in turn, on each woman in the room. The scrutiny was so intense, so calculated, it made me feel as if he was assessing which of us to eat first, were we ever adrift in a lifeboat.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I asked him icily. ‘Your views on women date back to the Jurassic period.’

‘I couldn’t miss out on seeing my fiancée in action.’

Victoria beamed at me. But when we turned back towards Sven it was to see him tentacling an arm around the miniscule waist of Britney Amore.

The atomic bomb on Hiroshima had less impact than this conversational detonation. My sister made a third-stage-of-labour face.

‘Your – your fiancée?’ she stammered, trying hard to digest the unsavoury information. (Probably all she’d eaten that day.) She was as crushed as the marzipan clitoris Sven had just circumcised from the cake with his penknife and was now devouring whole.

‘Christ, you’ve only been in the States for six weeks!’ I said, amazed. ‘I mean, where did you get her? A fiancée-vending machine?’

Victoria’s daughter, Marrakech, chose that moment to bound up to us. ‘Mum! You were amazing.’ She hugged Victoria with an enthusiasm usually reserved for foliage in the path of a bulldozer. ‘I’m so proud of you. You’re, like, finally using your fame to help the less fortunate …’ She kissed me too. It was like being greeted by a Labrador pup – all limbs, wet mouth and yelps of joy.

My niece, devoid of her Doc Marten boots, combat trousers and beanie, had at last allowed her thick golden hair to fall free. Marrakech, who is desperate to be Taken Seriously, is a bottle brunette. Much to her mother’s horror, she regularly dyes her blonde locks a mucky dull brown.

‘This is your daughter?’ Sven asked, amazed.

‘So they tell me,’ Victoria said, almost inaudibly. To preserve her unlined visage, my sister kept her emotional thermostat at a constant sixty-two degrees. And yet from the play of muscles beneath the surface of her face, I could see just how much Sven’s marital announcement had mortified her.

‘But she’s grown so much!’ Sven let his eyes slide down to focus on the teenager’s stupendous bosom. And it was more than a professional appraisal.

‘Yes. Who would have thought that beneath the chick-pea halitosis and hand-knitted bulky jumpers lurked a beautiful fifteen-year-old,’ Hugo teased.

‘Thirteen,’ my niece amended strictly, nodding towards her mum.

My sister’s anti-gravity precautions include not only bribing the Passport Office to allow her an airbrushed photo but also making her daughter pretend to be thirteen for the last two years.

‘Anyway, beauty is superficial crap, it just makes you into a decorative object. A vase with tits.’

‘Your breasts remind me of Mount Rushmore … My face should be among them. I’m a president too, you see. Of your mother’s modelling agency.’ Sven winked at her. ‘You don’t mind a bit of tasteless humour, do you? I do so love to whip these liberals into a froth of indignation.’

‘I hate my boobs. They only attract one-track-minded creeps. Phallocrats. And penetration is oppressive.’

‘Marrakech,’ chided her mother. Victoria was holding herself very still, as if she were an overfull glass of wine that might spill at any moment. I winced for her. Despite our differences, there’s a fine silver umbilical wire uniting us. Something to do with all those childhood years of crawling to the bottom of the bed, shrieking with laughter about something ridiculous our mother had said, snorting, howling, muffling our hilarity with our nighties. Something to do with all those years whispering sad secrets beneath those covers, holding each other because nobody else would.

But Sven looked far from displeased at Marrakech’s feisty outburst. He’d made a career out of bedding women – two thousand at the last count (his). Running the European division of Divine put him in prime position to play the Cuntmeister. And working with teenagers allowed him never to grow up. At fifty-six, the man was a senile delinquent. Peter Pan with the Lost Girls.

‘Phallocrats, eh?’ Sven repeated, lasciviously. He eyed my niece hungrily. Think fluffy pink bunny, I thought, think python.

‘I agree wholeheartedly,’ said Hugo. ‘I’m so glad I married you, Lizzie. Men who marry beautiful women are heading for an early grave. Men married to plain women live an average of twelve years longer. Looks can kill!’

Victoria clucked her tongue in utter horror on my behalf. But I merely laughed.

I punched my husband’s bicep good-naturedly. ‘Thanks very much, you sweet-talking bastard. And on my birthday, too.’

‘So it’s ya birthday? How old are ya, hon?’ Britney came out of her sulk to miaow at me.

Victoria spluttered, unable to believe one female had asked another female that question in public. My sister maintained that the best way to tell a woman’s age was not to.

‘Thirty-nine,’ I stated, with matter-of-fact pride.

Britney who was approaching thirty, but I’m not sure from which direction, recoiled. ‘Hon, your cake must be collapsing from the weight of candles. Hell, you’ll need two cakes!’

Britney Amore obviously had some good points – if you like rottweilers. But before I could share this insight with her, the guest speaker from the women’s refuge, who were benefiting from the show, took to the podium. Terrified that any talk about women might make mention of cramps or secretions, the various well-fed corporate cowboys, so desperate to appear PC, could not disguise their drinking-straight-whisky expressions.

Next to me, Sven absentmindedly rearranged his testicles in their too-tight pants and murmured to Marrakech. It might have looked to others as though he was scratching his dick but, considering where he kept his brains, it was clear to me that the man was just thinking. Edging closer, I overheard him offer her a modelling contract. ‘Modelling agencies are ruthless and cut-throat … especially the good ones,’ he bragged, marinating in his own testosterone. ‘You are a 9.9999. If you were with me you’d be a perfect ten.’

Where had I heard that before? As he was a friend of her mother’s, Marrakech’s crescents of black lashes blinked back at him trustingly.

The heavy summer air seemed suddenly freighted with unbearable tension. As the speeches monotoned on (it was the turn of the Big Businessmen now: a particularly pinstriped one took the microphone to feign feminist sympathies in the talk version of karaoke – talkaoke) I grew a surface of awareness that made my skin crawl. Half an hour later I could feel the beginnings of a headache gnawing at my temple. Was there a doctor in the house? I looked around for my husband. When I couldn’t see him, I decided to brave the backstage labyrinth of corridors, locate Victoria’s dressing room, fetch my bag and flee. I planned to call Hugo’s mobile once I was in the car. He had probably zipped off to an emergency op. As I pushed past the throng, the party seemed like a movie set. My mind was zooming in and out, the shutter of my eye’s lens clicking and whirring.

If I really had been in a movie, though, water would have started shaking in a glass to warn me that something Very Big and Scary was about to happen. Completely oblivious to the fact that my life was about to change for ever I pushed open Victoria’s dressing-room door. When the door swung wide to reveal a naked Britney tongue-kissing my husband I saw stars. And I don’t mean the Melanie Griffith, Glenn Close, Gillian Anderson performers either. Oh, no. In that split second I discovered more celestial firmaments than an astronomer with a Hubble telescope.

‘Lizzie! Oh, Christ. It’s not what you think …’

I tried to retreat from the room, but it was as if my entire central nervous system was being remote-controlled by a puppeteer. My hands, legs, arms, mouth all jerked awkwardly trying to ape real human movements. My heart was beating so loudly and quickly, I felt sure they could see it pulsating in and out of my chest cavity like a character in a Merrie Melodies cartoon. The very air seemed to shiver, as though in recoil from the scene.

‘Remember me?’ I finally squawked. ‘I’m whatshername – the mother of your two children.’

Hugo had leapt back as though electrocuted. His fly! Oh, God, was his fly open? ‘Have you just had sex with That Woman?’

‘It was only a kiss.’

He was beside me in a trice, tossing a lick of hair from his handsome face with a flick of his head and whispering, ‘Look, if George Clooney suddenly asked you for a kiss, you couldn’t turn it down, could you? I mean, look at her.’

I followed my husband’s gaze towards the chaise, where Britney lay, supine, laughing insouciantly at my suspicion. Her legs were as long as the limousines she used in lieu of them for transportation. Her tangerine-coloured tresses set off her lightly sautéd tan. The icing on her cupcake of loveliness were her breasts: 32D, I reckoned, at an envious glance, and as buoyant as the bubbles in the champagne flute from which she nonchalantly sipped. The woman was so perfect that she kept fit, no doubt, by doing step aerobics off her own ego.

That was when I caught sight of my own reflection in one of those dressing-room mirrors studded with merciless bulbs. My uncollagened mouth was as open as my unrehydrated pores. Britney draped a silken arm across her ample chest. Even her elbows were moisturized, for God’s sake. My skin was like stucco. You could make a bloody patio out of me.

‘Yer see, hon,’ she gloated, in a belated but cruel response to my earlier Ophelia crack, ‘beauty may only be skin deep – but ugly goes right down to the bone.’

It was then that the wave of ageing Angst engulfed me in one gigantic roar. Why was I born so plain? Why was I born at all? Happy bloody thirty-ninth birthday to me.

‘I came looking for you … She was changing. And …’ Hugo panted ‘… we just naturally seemed to have a make-it-all-up kiss. I mean, she is a star,’ he shrugged, ‘and I’m a man—’

‘Don’t kid yourself.’

‘A normal red-blooded man who—’

‘Well, your DNA suggests you’re a male,’ I shrilled, ‘but your behaviour is more that of a rutting elk.’

‘Really. I don’t know what came over me—’

‘Britney Amore, apparently.’

Embarrassed to be having a marital meltdown in front of Her, I backed into the hall. Hugo followed, making defensive noises about it being just a brief exchange of saliva. (‘I’m innocent, officer. I just tripped and fell and my tongue ended up embedded down this woman’s throat.’) On the drive back to north London he delicately turned the knife of accusation I had held against him. Hadn’t I noticed that we’d fallen below the national average sex wise? My diaphragm must be home to at least three strains of mould spore from under-use. But once home he promised fulsomely never ever to go near her again, and I good-naturedly promised not to tell anyone about his misdemeanour – especially Sven. It was just a kiss. It meant nothing, I did understand that, didn’t I?

My brain understood, but if my vagina could monologue it would have only one thing to say: you lying, cheating, hypocritical bastard.