14

Is That a Wallet in Your Pocket or Are You Just Pleased to See Me?

THERE IS A very fine line between ‘beauty regimes’ and mental illness. Unlike a snake, I don’t enjoy the sensation of my skin crawling. But by the end of two days at Victoria’s beauty spa, witnessing acid peels, fat grafts and liposuction, I was positively reptilian.

The Tranquility Spa was a minimum-security prison, with palms. The manor’s crumbling façade cruelly mimicked the epidermal exteriors of the females filing through its portentous portals. It was situated in the manicured environs of the Chilterns. Inside, synthetic tinkle-tinkle harp music seeped serenely from the velvet-upholstered walls. Bovine, pampered Kuwaiti princesses bobbed comically in the heated pool, the fleshy bubble-wrap of their bloated thighs afforded round-the-clock protection by whippet-thin security guards.

The walls of its antiseptic treatment rooms were lined with posters featuring women just like us – except that they had ENORMOUS boobs with no hips, cellulite or body hair. Believe me, only chemo patients have less body hair than models. It was in these torture chambers that I spent my first day. I had my buttocks pummelled by a Swede called Igor and my lymphatics drained by what – judging by her white garb, austere smile and remote eyes – could only have been a high priestess, who asked me, as she snapped on rubber gloves, if I’d ever really been able to relate to my lip-liner?

On day two, when I was sure I didn’t have one remaining pore it would be possible to put your hands in and rummage around, Victoria bustled me off to a ‘Tranquility Suite’ where I marvelled at row upon row of embalming fluids glistening in glass sarcophagi. Surely there couldn’t be enough skin in the world to absorb all these moisturized globules? This place had everything to reverse time, bar a Tardis.

Another high priestess diligently began her application of a phantasmagoria of facial potions that were going to cost more than my wedding reception. They also hurt like hell.

‘Jesus Christ!’ I gasped, slapping her hand away. ‘Is that a moisturizer or a flame-retardant furniture treatment?’

She responded with a mechanical spiel bloated with quasi-scientific guff I didn’t know – ‘peptides’ and ‘peroxidation’, ‘excisor enzymes’ and ‘benign solar keratones’ – before concluding haughtily that it was also a barrier ‘to keep out irritants’.

‘What? Like bullshitting beauty clinicians?’ I muttered.

Victoria, who had just breezed into my suite, sent me a slit-eyed look. The pharmaceutically sombre clinician who followed her whipped off my sheet. As I lay there exposed to the room in nothing but a pair of paper panties, she made a perfunctory prod of my pale flesh. She then ran long white ghostly nails over the shelves of coloured vials as though consulting a ouija board. Finally she decreed that what was necessary in my rather tragic case was an Intensive Thigh Unit with skin caviar (real beluga). The price? Two hundred and fifty quid.

Victoria confirmed the sagacity of this advice with an earnest nod.

My mouth dropped open. Obviously the Tranquility Spa was not so much about getting in touch with your Inner You as getting in touch with your Outer Bank Manager.

‘Why bother buying the products and having the treatments?’ I groaned to my disapproving sister. ‘I mean, we might as well just record the sound of a cash register opening and closing.’

‘It’s not so expensive,’ Victoria reprimanded crisply, smiling apologetically at the priestess. With both hands she shoved me back on to the treatment table in to the giving-birth position.

‘Yeah, you’re right. No more expensive than, say, maintaining a space programme.’

‘And could you please Do Something about her bikini line.’ She pointed at my bristly toothbrush pubes. The haphazard regrowth resembled the pelt of a balding bandicoot. ‘I’m amazed Hugo doesn’t get rug burn.’

‘Not wax!’ I squeaked, recoiling. I still had third-degree burns from that nasty home treatment incident. ‘Hot wax is only meant for cars.’

‘Wax? How very “last century”, madam,’ patronized the beautician, busily strapping her head into yellow welder’s goggles. Before I had time to protest, I was attacked by some kind of Tactical Pube Napalmer. I discovered, in that agonizing moment, that laser hair removal is nature’s way of promoting the Natural Look.

Trouble is, it’s so hard to make a run for it with only a flimsy pair of paper panties between you and police arrest for indecent exposure.

‘Victoria! Victoria! Help!’ I tried unsuccessfully to swivel from my supine position. ‘Where is my sister?’

The beautician waved her harpoon in the general direction of an adjoining cubicle. ‘She’s having dermabrasion – a very simple and effective beautification procedure. Now, stop behaving like a baby. It’s only a laser.’

‘Tell that to Luke Skywalker.’ My protests were drowned out by the buzz of her machine as she resumed her excruciating incineration of the hairs around my groin, with a light beam powerful enough to vaporize a bulldozer.

When she finally lifted the welder’s goggles above her forehead (having doubtlessly introduced a vast array of long-term inoperable cancers into my system) and my squeals had stopped reverberating un-harmoniously through the entire Tranquility Spa, I unplaited my toes to hear my sister making a high-pitched, squawky whine akin to a walrus giving birth.

‘What the hell are you doing to her in there?’ I gasped, ready to spring to the rescue.

‘Skin resurfacing.’

‘What is she? A road?’ It transpired that my sister was involved in a facial resurfacing project more extensive than the Birmingham bypass.

‘You’re next,’ said the over-rouged beautician in her bogus lab coat. ‘Now, would you prefer a chemical peel to get rid of your horrid T-zone? Or are we looking at a laser vaporization of the outer layers of that exhausted complexion?’

Horrid? Exhausted? A beauty consultation performs instant dermabrasion upon your self-esteem. Suddenly the door that separated our suites yielded and my sister staggered in. I gagged. The ‘simple beautification procedure’ had obviously involved being scoured by steel wool soaked in acid. Her face was red, swollen and lumpen with gunk, which I cringingly deduced was singed flesh. What beauticians call ‘dermabrasion’ most of us know by its original term: medieval torture.

‘Oh, Victoria, what have they done to you?’ I cried out, mortified.

‘Face facts.’ My sister’s voice was brutally shrill. ‘We live in sick, airbrushed times. No woman can afford to be left on the shelf looking exactly how God made her!’

‘But why destroy the years of good-lookingness we have left by worrying about staying good-looking?’ I glanced from my sister, whose face resembled a burnt pizza, to my own sorry pudenda – which could have been likened to a hairless lab rat. ‘Have you ever considered what you could do with the hours you waste exterminating body hairs?’ I grabbed my jumper, jeans and shoes. ‘Female defoliation is a futile struggle against the forces of nature.’

The beautician cringed. ‘Body hair is bestial.’

‘Well, then, please excuse me everyone while I skulk back to my lair.’

God! How had I allowed Victoria to talk me into trying to preserve myself in amber? What was I? An insect? I was just throwing myself into my car when she burst out of the manor behind me. At least, I think it was Victoria. Eyes hidden behind sunglasses despite the icy drizzle, face eclipsed by a sombrero-style hat and surgical facemask, it might have been Michael Jackson.

I fired the ignition. The Whacko-Jacko lookalike wrenched at the car door so violently I thought it would snap off.

‘You can’t go to the Model of the Year party looking like that. Do you want to lose your husband?’ I glimpsed the thick oozing skeins of blistered flesh beneath my sister’s mask. ‘Do you want to feed him on a plate to the Texan Trouser Hound?’

‘Hugo said he’s not seeing Britney Amore. I don’t need to spy on him.’ I wrestled the door closed and put the car into gear.

‘Is that right?’ Victoria screeched, pressing what was left of her face up against the glass. ‘Well, just make sure you check for MSB tonight.’

I looked at her blankly, crunching to a halt on the gravel driveway.

‘Maximum Sperm Build-up,’ she decoded, flinging open the car door once more. ‘You’ve been away for three days. If he’s been faithful, well, there should be gallons of sperm, darling. Geysers of the bloody stuff …’

Her voice trailed after me as I skittered down the wet drive, door flapping. I’d had enough of paranoia. It was time to get a grip. Wasn’t Hugo a good husband and father? Hadn’t he volunteered to take Julia and Jamie to Thorpe Park for a few rides on the ‘Twirl Through The Air Then Projectile Vomit’ so I could have some quality time with my big sis at the spa?

As the scribble of roadside trees gave way to the derelict factories of outer London, I abandoned my plan to attend, all eagle-eyed, Sven’s party, in order to check my affair radar for beeps. In fact, as soon as I got home, I insouciantly insisted on performing oral sex.

‘That was sensational.’ My husband sighed, falling back on to the pillow after a final convulsion.

I nodded, mutely, confidently trying to gauge the quantity of sperm in my mouth. I wasn’t remotely worried. Hell, no. I was cocksure. Literally.

‘Really passionate and romantic,’ he added, stroking my hair.

‘Ah-huh,’ I muttered, as I ever so romantically tried to fathom how I could subtly manoeuvre myself bathroom-ward to spit his ejaculate into the sink to more accurately calculate his spermatozoa output. ‘Eally oantic. I eed oo ee.’ I dashed to the bathroom.

‘You what?’ he called out after me as I spat into the sink. ‘I need to pee,’ I repeated, staring gob-smacked at the white porcelain. Because it wasn’t the geyser I’d expected. But a tiny, teeny trickle.

And it was déjà vu, all over again.

‘You know, Hugo, I think I will come to Sven’s party tomorrow after all.’

‘My love, do you really think that’s wise?’

A vision of my husband between the legs of Britney Amore hit me square in the chest. ‘Oh, yes.’

‘But there’ll be a lot of celebs there. Madonna, Jeffrey Archer, Al Pacino … He has a hair-loss condition you know. Alopecia.’ He leant against the bathroom door as I tore my toothbrush bristles to and fro across my gnashed teeth. ‘We’re trying to raise money for the clinic so I really need to impress these people and well, you’re bound to say something irreverent and raise a few eyebrows.’

‘Right. And now you’re a Cosmetic Surgeon, that’s your job.’

‘Come on, Liz. You were born with a silver foot in your mouth, admit it.’

Talking of things in mouths: ‘Listen, Hugo. I need to know something …’ I insisted, seriously. It was time to confess that he was married to a spermicidal maniac.

‘Yes, Lizzie?’ He turned to me, smiling contentedly – and then, as usual, right on cue, his pager went off. It was call-us interruptus, an emergency summons from the hospital.

But was it the hospital? Or was it Her? Hugo’s job gave him such a perfect excuse to slip away. As I listened to his car engine sparking in the dark, the pendulum of doubt swung back and forth. I burned with jealousy. What fresh hell was this? What stale hell? Because this was the same old hell over and over again. That’s what made it hellish. Oh, how I suddenly craved that £250 pot of La Prairie Skin Caviar …

Medical update – the Patient has been depressed ever since the doctor she loves started bloody well sleeping around in the first bloody place. The Surgeon General, I decided at dawn after yet another sleepless night, should issue a warning that marrying doctors can be seriously hazardous to your health.