21

Say Goodbye To Childhood, Hello To Adultery

THE SABRE-TOOTHED HUSBAND Hunter flung her arms around Hugo, throwing her weight forward on to a set of perfectly pedicured toes, one waxed leg folded up flamingo-like behind her pertly rounded posterior.

‘You knew she’d be here?’ I fumed at Hugo, once my heart had started beating again.

‘No. I knew Sven was coming to drum up some business …’ he mumbled.

‘Sven’s here?’ As this was her first time in direct sunlight in her entire life, my sister was stumbling around like a newborn field mouse. ‘Oh, God! Hide me! Oh, God!’

‘Ain’t this gonna be fun?’ Britney crooned, pinching my husband’s bottom – her way of firing a warning shot across my marital bows; this conference was important for the clinic’s credibility and I wasn’t to make waves.

‘Ah-huh!’ I replied. About as much fun as having a personalized lap-dance from Ian Paisley. My marital waters were calm, all right – calm as Lake Placid.

‘W-where is Sven?’ Victoria asked, turtling her neck further into her collar and peering nervously over the tops of her shades.

‘Attending the birth of his next wife, probably,’ I replied, under my breath.

‘Get changed, y’all, and come down to our beach over yonder.’ Britney indicated the direction with a flick of an orange talon. Her smile was sewn on like a sequin. And it was practically all she was wearing, apart from a pint or two of cooking oil.

While we waited for our room to be made ready, Britney lay supine on a banana chair in her leopardskin bikini. She stretched out her honeyed legs, which ended in gold sandals about a mile away from her hips. As she giggled with Hugo, Victoria and I made totally unnecessary trips to the loo to gawp at her chest on the way.

‘She’s had them Done again, hasn’t she?’ I whispered, in awe.

‘Wait, let me have one more look …’ Victoria replied, making a quick saunter loo-wards. ‘Jesus. She could use her bikini top as a slingshot and fire Exocet missiles at Iraq!’ she reported back.

‘Iraq?’ I murmured. ‘Those tits could deflect meteors from outer space!’

Britney uncoiled to standing position, diamond ankle chain glistening in the sun. ‘So, come on, happy campers. Let’s go swimming!’

‘No thanks. We’re tired, aren’t we?’ I glared at my husband pointedly.

Britney Amore’s eyes slid down to my abdomen. ‘Course ya are, hon. I mean, in your condition …’

I sucked in my stomach so violently my neck got thicker.

Hugo cleared his throat. ‘No, um, actually we’re not having any more children.’

‘Well, then, waddle on over to the beach, gal, and get fit,’ she chided.

Clearly Britney Amore had been separated from Eva Braun at birth. ‘I’m not overweight, you know,’ I spluttered defensively. ‘I mean, for my height …’ Why did this woman have the ability to make me sound like a Mormon elder? ‘Am I, Hugo?’

‘Well, maybe you could do with a little suction round the saddlebags …’

‘I was on a diet, but I’m in remission,’ I said, tartly – a pretty Mae West-esque reply, seeing as I was halfway through a heart-attack. Of course, what I wanted to do was book my husband on an all-expenses-paid trip on a Russian submarine – but, determined to win him back, I merely smiled. Not much of a smile, really, more like open-face surgery.

As Hugo rummaged through his suitcase for his swimmers, I begged my sun-hating sister to put on her asbestos sun suit. ‘I cannot go to the beach with Her, alone.’ I shuddered.

Victoria pooched her lips defiantly. ‘I can’t let him see me like this! Have you seen my waist? If I’d known Sven was bloody well going to be here I’d have only drunk water for four days. Or maybe just had a bottom rib removed.’

I looked at my svelte sister and shook my head in disbelief. It was clear she was following the ‘Fabulous Karen Carpenter Dietary Secrets To A Thinner You’.

One of us had been adopted, definitely.

Cresting the hill behind Hugo and Britney Amore, I tried to put a positive spin on things. There are, after all, some good things about nudist beaches. First off, you never have to buy anyone a drink – ‘I’m sorry. But my money’s in my jeans’ pocket.’ Nor is it likely anyone will ever steal your vinyl sun-lounger. What’s more, it does away with the usual am-I-too-old-to-wear-a-bikini? trauma.

Britney Amore immediately peeled off her G-string to reveal a red patch of pubic hair topiaried into a heart shape, an all-over tan, and those pneumatic breasts. When she got out a mosquito coil, so many male conventioneers lunged towards her with their lighters ablaze that she was practically flambéd.

‘Come on, ol’ son.’ Sven playfully yanked my husband’s shorts down to his knees. ‘Don’t be shy.’

‘Oh, is that how the prison guards did it?’ I asked, clutching my clothes tightly to my sweating torso.

Gritting my teeth, I tried to shed my Speedos and dive-bomb face down on to the towel in one deft movement – which merely resulted in a grazed nose, a cracked rib and a bit of seaweed up my fanny. The next hour was agonizing. I lay on the sand, fantasizing about putting my clothes back on. Then, just to be really kinky, I fantasized about other people putting their clothes back on as well. After another hour I hissed at my naked husband. ‘Um, it’s a hundred and ninety degrees. What exactly is the point of this? Must we give third degree burns to everything?’

‘You’re just angry because Britney’s here,’ he whispered. ‘I didn’t know she was coming, darling. Honestly.’

‘Who cares about her?’ I feigned nonchalance. ‘Being in the presence of perfection wears off after a while, you know?’

Britney, on cue, rolled towards us on her beach towel. ‘So, what shall we do now, y’all?’ Judging by her muscled physique, Britney was one of those ‘Excuse me while I do the six hundred-metre butterfly, climb two Alps and abseil back down for some dressage and parachute formation before lunch’ types.

My only rules about sport are – nothing involving water, balls, my feet leaving the earth, or sweat. My preferred activity is reading, in which there is not much potential for death. And I would have kept it that way too, except for Britney’s next utterance.

‘You really do have the kind of figure that looks better in clothes, don’t you, sweetie?’

Now, all I’d planned to do on this holiday was loll about reading inferior fiction and making love to my husband. But if Hugo was going anywhere with Her then, by God, I was going too, come hell or high water … Oh, hang on, I’d forgotten, high water is hell.

‘Skin-diving? Yeah. Sure. I can skin-dive,’ I lied, as Britney doled out flippers and goggles. A clammy sense of dread filled my being. Did I mention that I’m one of those people who won’t even go into the bath without a life-jacket and a distress flare? In my view, if God had meant us to swim in the ocean, he would have given us shark-proof metal cages. I mean, there must be a reason fish never look truly relaxed – because something much, much bigger is always trying to devour them.

‘Um … what about sharks?’ I queried, as I attempted to jack-knife a foot into a flipper.

Britney was already wading backwards into the sea. ‘Sharks?’ she scoffed, her goggles perched expertly atop her glossy locks. ‘Y’all got more chance of being hit by a car.’

‘I have been hit by a car!’ I wailed miserably. ‘Um … really, Hugo, let’s rethink this …’

Too late. His naked buttocks were already cresting the foam like two scoops of vanilla ice cream in a zabaglione froth. In the list of ‘Ways To Win Back Your Hubby’, letting him go nude snorkelling with his mistress is curiously absent. He was treading water now, by her side.

Britney executed a back flip, offering a view to which only a midwife should be privy. ‘We’ll swim over to the reef. If y’all get into any trouble, this is the International Sign for Rescue.’ She demonstrated, one hand raised in the balmy air. ‘Okay?’ And she was off.

‘The reef?’ I gave an apprehensive glance towards the white lace on the water – way over near Cuba.

‘Do I have to keep my feet off the bottom the whole way?’ But when I turned to Hugo for an answer, he was already swimming in hot pursuit. Sven, busily working on his tan, dozed on the beach, oblivious.

I started gingerly, flapping my arms in a windmill motion, while groping in vain with my foot for the ocean floor. Then I felt something brush my legs. Horror coiled its fingers around my abdomen. As my eyes frantically searched the water around me, a black fin sliced the surface with knife-through-butter ease. Panicking on dry land is uncomfortable enough, but in water what ensues is a surprisingly rapid decrease in buoyancy. I bobbed up and down like some deranged species of pelican. What was the International Sign of Rescue, I wondered, for ‘My Aorta Has Ruptured ’Cause I’m Being Eaten by A Tiger Shark’? I started taking in a lot of water. As I went down for the fifth time, I was just picturing myself as a legless intensive-care patient in a semi-vegetative state, blinking out coded requests to have my chin wiped or the channel changed when, flailing one arm desperately behind me, I hit something solid.

It was a shark all right. Not a tiger shark, though, a leopard shark. Shedding her leopardskin bikini hadn’t made Britney any less carnivorous. The athletic actress flipped me on to my back, hooked an arm around my neck and launched into a strong breaststroke towards the sandbar. The great green surly mouth of the sea spat me back on to the shore in disgust.

‘A shark – I felt a …’ I tried to explain to Hugo, who shone admiring eyes on Britney Amore.

‘You were amazing!’ he praised her.

‘Hugo!’ I spluttered. ‘Don’t you care that I was nearly eaten by a prehistoric predator?’

‘Probably a harmless reef shark,’ dismissed Britney.

‘Hey,’ I protested. ‘No creature gets to be that size by eating seaweed.’

About this romantic holiday with my husband? I was beginning to think I could have experienced the same level of enjoyment on a blind date with a bloke named Lecter, first name – Hannibal.

‘Are ya sure you won’t be a scaredy-cat?’ Britney Amore teased, strapping herself into the harness with practised efficiency.

Day Two found me parasailing. Don’t ask. That’s how desperate I had become for Hugo’s approval.

‘Scaredy-cat? What’s there to be scared of?’

Catapulting to the upper stratosphere into the flight path of a jumbo jet in total defiance of the laws of gravity, physics and logic … ‘Of course I’m not scared,’ I said, praying that someone had the number of the Emergency Airlift Rescue Service. ‘But, Hugo,’ I desperately consulted the conference schedule, ‘aren’t you supposed to be chairing a session on Hylaform Filler in the Promenade Room?’

‘Hyla-what?’ Britney demanded.

‘It’s a protein that makes lips look fuller,’ Hugo explained. ‘Obtained from a rooster’s comb.’

Britney gave a bored sigh. The woman’s attention span was obviously limited. Or perhaps she just felt she’d had enough cock in her mouth for one lifetime. ‘Your wife’s too chicken, won’t you come with me instead, Hughie?’

‘You do look a little nervous, Liz.’

‘Nervous? Nah. Me? One hair is maybe raised somewhere on my neck,’ I lied insouciantly, as the instructor strapped me on behind Britney, ‘Hughie.’

We arced up into the sky, the air whooshing by us at a terrifying speed. As Mother Earth sped away below, at about warp-factor 1,000,000, Britney whooped with delight. I, however, was overcome by the surprise fact that nuclear fusion can actually take place in one’s bowel.

Back on deck, once I had stopped screaming long enough for the captain to establish that I could breathe unassisted, I notified my humiliated husband that I never ever wanted to fly over the Caribbean sea again unless accompanied by a lot of aviation fuel.

On Day Three when Britney asked, ‘How ’bout some jet-skiing?’ I replied, ‘What, as an alternative to suicide?’

It is my opinion that people only jet-ski because it is illegal to masturbate in public. We were attending a lunch for Gore-Tex Facial Implant salesmen on the mezzanine floor. Britney had playfully swapped nametags with Hugo. What a kidder that gal is!

My nametag had fallen off and I couldn’t remember who the hell I was any more.

An hour later Britney had gone twice around the bay, executing wheelie spins, front-wheel stands and double back flips while my husband applauded. Then it was my turn. I wish I could have made him proud. But, five minutes into my ride, terror of capsizing in that shark-infested lagoon had frozen me into a seated position, gripping the handlebars. Hugo could only remove me from the motorcycle seat by prising my fingers free one at a time. Shaking his head with disappointment, he then carried me horizontally under one arm and parked me on a bar stool, where I could stay, inconspicuously, hands gripping the bar rail, until I thawed out. About ten hours later.

* * *

Day Four already! Doesn’t time fly when Ms Amore keeps coming up with more fun activities, like wind-surfing? I considered suggesting that we save time and just call the paramedics in advance. But a viperish riddle from Britney – ‘Why are flat-chested gals like rocks? ’Cause they’re so much better to skip’ – had me strapped into my wet suit faster than you can say ‘mouth-to-mouth resuscitation’.

Hugo trained his video camera on Britney, who was soon tacking her surfboard expertly for his benefit.

‘Have you windsurfed before?’ the instructor asked, preparing to launch me out across the sea directly into gale-force winds.

‘Well, technically no, but I’ve read the instruction manual.’

Where the manual let me down was its failure to explain how to change your surfboard’s direction while you’re balled up like a petrified armadillo. Half an hour later I was rescued two miles out to sea by the water police.

‘Glad to be back?’ Britney, ensconced in her nice dry hammock, purred between sips of piña colada.

‘No. I always tongue-kiss the beach like this,’ I replied. My husband merely shook his head wearily. That’s when I noticed she was holding the cam-recorder in her lap. Not content to be an eye-witness to my profound humiliation, she had determined to capture it for posterity.

Now that’s what I call a costume drama.

* * *

Day Five. Victoria was beautifying in the spa – she’d moved in there, basically – and Sven was giving his keynote speech, ‘From Detox to Botox: Ageing in the Modelling Industry’, which left just Britney, Hugo and me, as per usual.

‘Game for a spot of water-skiing?’ Hugo grinned over breakfast. The warm wind was blowing his hair into a rakish halo. His sun-kissed skin had turned caramel, making him more delicious than ever.

‘Water-skiing?’ I resisted the temptation to point out that water-skiing is merely the art of drowning with planks of wood on your feet. ‘Ah-huh!’ I enthused.

Britney and Hugo, of course, were both ‘naturals’. They took turns to videotape each other’s spectacular stunts in hours and hours of fabulous footage.

‘Sure! I’d love to have a turn!’ I thrilled from the dock when the speedboat skidded to a foamy halt. But unfortunately, once aboard, I so dreaded going over the side that Hugo warned me he’d have to use an oxyacetylene torch if I didn’t unfetter my fingers from his leg.

By Day Six Hugo no longer invited me to join him and Britney for water sports. At the conference dinner-dance that evening, he brushed my hand off his shoulder as though it were lint. My husband had lost all respect for me. Which is not the greatest foreplay in the world. In bed later that night, after I’d sucked and licked him for an hour or two, he reciprocated with some perfunctory cunnilingus. He was like a cow chewing methodically upon a bale of hay.

Afterwards I fell into a deep, despairing sleep. Woken later in the dead of night by a mosquito with a head cold, I stretched out a hand only to find the other side of the bed was empty. Apprehension swamped me. I floundered to my feet in an instant. Outside our hut, standing in the anaemic moonlight I decided, on a hunch, to walk towards the pool. The grass felt chilly and slick beneath my bare feet. Then I heard it: soft murmuring from one of the hammocks strung between the poolside palm trees. Dreading what I might discover, I tiptoed closer.

The best way to catch a cheating husband is with his pants down. Far more effective than a private eye or a Xerox of his bank statement. But as I got closer to the tilting hammock, I felt I was about to risk the same brush with danger as when the shark swept too close to my legs in the lagoon. I re-experienced that terror and, suddenly disoriented, stumbled. My vision blurred and swam – the only part of me that could, I remembered, as I stubbed my toe on a sun-lounger, hopped on one foot, cursing loudly, crashed into a sun umbrella, which had failed to take evasive action, and fell, head first, into the pool.

I probably owe my life to my sister, who fished me out of the drink, coughing and spluttering. ‘Were you following me?’ I spluttered. ‘I mean, what are you doing up at this hour?’ I asked, momentarily forgetting that the modelling species is primarily nocturnal.

‘Oh, just working on my tan,’ she replied, coolly.

Red-eyed, mucus streaming from my nose, I regarded my saviour. She didn’t look at her best either. Her lips were all smushed from kissing, mascara smudged, clothes rumpled. ‘It was you and the Slimeball in the hammock, wasn’t it?’

‘Do you think you could ever have a good word to say about Sven?’

‘I dunno. Is there a nice way to say “nauseate”? I’m just relieved it wasn’t Hugo and the Penis-hogging Prom Queen.’

When I staggered back into bed, exhausted, Hugo was cosily coiled around a pillow. He’d been out for ice, he explained innocently. Seems to me that he could just have taken some from around his own heart. ‘Just relax, Lizzie. Look outside the window, darling,’ he said softly, slipping his arm around my shoulders. ‘This is paradise.’

‘Yes, paradise.’ Or, possibly, Rwanda.

On the last evening of our ‘romantic’ vacation, Britney Amore insisted on screening the week’s video footage. And so, after the conference farewell dinner, five of us sprawled across my cabaña – Britney, Sven, Victoria (as close to Sven as she could get while avoiding direct lamplight), Hugo and me. Hugo was in Host Mode, handing round vodkas and crisps. We were in the midst of the apparently hugely entertaining spectacle of my sporting failings compared to Britney’s athletic triumphs, when the TV flickered and blurred. Everyone groaned, there was a grainy hiatus and then two thrusting buttocks came into full view. At first I think we all just presumed Hugo had taped over some routine programme on Channel 5. Then I looked closer at the screen. There was something familiar about the sofa. It was my sofa in Hampstead. Then I made out something else familiar: my naked husband, on my sofa. Then something else. My naked sister, came into focus, on my naked husband, on my sofa. And my living room sofa was not Scotchguarded! Until this moment, the thought had never crossed my mind that my sister had got a new face just so my husband would sit on it. In the next split second I got so hot it was as though the Gestapo were trying to sweat a confession out of me. Then I became as cold, dark and hard as a stone. I squinched my eyes shut tight. Hugo, who’d been fetching more vodka from the bar, stopped dead still in the doorway, a fixed moronic grin on his face.

‘What’s that on your penis, Hugo?’ I asked. ‘Oh, look! It’s my sister’s mouth. Let me guess,’ I wailed at my half-sibling. ‘You were just launching your new face. A face-warming party.’

‘Liz,’ blurted Victoria, ashen-hued, ‘I’m … oh, God … It’s …’

On the screen their bodies shifted once more in a blurry jump-cut so that we could clearly see my husband’s hand between Victoria’s legs. Snatching the remote, I freeze-framed the image. The realization of their betrayal was like a sudden photographic flash – the negative image imprinted on the backs of my eyelids and seared into my brain.

‘Um … would you believe I was taking her temperature?’

‘With your finger? Um … no.’

Something cracked open inside me then – open heart surgery, a gaping wound. I’d thought we were just going to watch a holiday video. But this was a disaster movie.

‘We need to talk,’ Hugo mumbled, diving for the remote control, and fizzing the television screen into silence.

‘Sure,’ I replied, in a high-pitched voice I didn’t recognize, ‘if you can manage to extricate your tongue from my sister’s twat.’ I turned to Sven and Britney. ‘Would you mind leaving now, because I seem to be in a Greek play all of a sudden?’ Inside I was wailing, screaming, sobbing, to the accompaniment of wrists being cut, but outside I was all crass sarcasm.

Britney tittered maliciously as I shoved them outside. The door to our room clicked shut behind their snickering forms. And then we turned, we three, to stare, in horror, at each other.

‘If you weren’t father to my two children and a brilliant surgeon, you’d be nothing but a philandering bastard, do you know that?’

‘Look,’ my husband busked, in his most authoritative, diagnostic voice, running his hands through his thick mane, ‘I … um … I was just helping your sister with some intimacy issues and things got a little out of hand …’

But I wasn’t interested in any of his feeble explanations. Instead, I rounded on my sister, who had taken up the foetal position in the corner of the couch.

‘It’s your fault!’ my sister sobbed. ‘You threw us together. That night you got Hugo to drive me home after the dinner party from hell. You ordered us to kiss and make up! We got talking and—’

I gasped. ‘All this time I’ve been accusing you of sneaking around with Britney, you were sneaking around with my own sister?’

‘I’m sorry, Lizzie,’ he grovelled. ‘I was thinking about you the whole time. It’s just … she’s so like you. You without the worry lines and leg stubble … A more glamorous version of you.’

I glared at him. ‘Glamorous? Victoria? You’ve turned her into a bloody patchwork quilt. There are bits of her body that you’ve operated on that don’t go with the bits which haven’t been. Her arms are over four decades old and her lips, two weeks. She’s sitting on one brand new butt cheek while the other half of her arse is forty-two.’

‘It’s just so unfair,’ Victoria bawled, in an attempt to get me to feel sorry for her. ‘At twenty I looked younger than I was. And at forty I look older.’

‘Oh, yes, it’s on a par with ethnic cleansing on the scale of unfairness,’ I shouted back.

‘I don’t want to be too old to die young!’

‘That’s good because I am going to kill you!’ I lunged at her.

‘You don’t know what it’s like!’ She swatted at me. ‘I’m slowly becoming invisible. I’m slowly being airbrushed out of life – like an ex-chum of Stalin’s.’

My voice wavered. ‘You’ve never had to try, Victoria. Life has just fallen into your lap. Since we were kids there’s been a two-year waiting list to get into your address book. While I’ve had to juggle and struggle and learn Latin roots and trigonometry and new languages to get noticed, all you’ve ever had to do is enter a bloody room.’ I got hold of my voice again. ‘You’ve had everything just handed to you on a plate. But that wasn’t enough. You had to have my husband too!’ My voice gave way again.

‘Oh, go comb your eyebrow, Elisabeth. You’re the one who’s had Life fall into her lap. You were Mother’s favourite. The intellectual of the family. You’d swot all night for a cervical-smear test! And yes! I was jealous of you and your happy marriage. I always have been!’ She coughed this confession up like a fur ball. ‘Plus, I got fifteen thousand pounds’ worth of surgery for nothing.’

I stared at her, uncomprehendingly. ‘You have no heart, Victoria. Do you know that? If Hugo X-rayed your chest cavity he’d find nothing. Just a hunk of lung. All this bloody time you’ve spent changing your exterior but your interior’s still the same. Inside you’re the ugly, spoiled, cruel little girl you always were.’

‘Well, you spent all that time changing your interior – reading books, getting degrees – while neglecting your exterior. You can’t blame me that you lost your husband!’ Victoria retorted, stomping her foot.

I buckled at the knees. A gushing, roaring pain flash-flooded through my body. Hugo took my arm and lowered me on to the couch.

I looked up at my husband in dismay. Some men play hard to get. Well, Hugo played hard to want. But damn it all! He was the man I loved. I know what you’re thinking. Why, in God’s name, did I continue to adore him? Why was I so determined to be a member of the UK Married Women’s Drowning Team? I dunno. Maybe my solar panels were directed at the moon.

‘Do you want me to leave?’ asked my husband, sombrely.

‘We have a loving, contented, supportive family, Hugo Frazer, and you, you cheating, moronic ratbag, are not going to fuck it up!’

‘Look, we can sort this out,’ my half-sister placated.

‘Chaos, tragedy, heartbreak.’ I opened the door for her. ‘I’d say your work here is done.’

‘Lizzie—’

‘Shut up. I never, ever want to see you again.’ I slammed the door in her face, and collapsed on the floral settee in the middle of paradise. As I sobbed I realized I had learnt a very important lesson: it’s a good idea to love your enemies. Just in case your friends and family turn out to be two-faced, low-down, rotten, lying mongrels.