by Anna Maxted
‘Right,’ she said, flexing her fingers. ‘Coffee. Then we’ll go to my study and you can get undressed.’
‘What?’
Gabrielle gave me a reproving glance. ‘If I’m to be your new stylist, stroke, dietician, I need to have a good look at you.’
‘I’m not going on a diet. I never said anything about dieting. I can’t eat less than I need, Gabrielle. If I even think I might be tricked out of food I start bulk-eating. Put me on a diet, it’ll have the opposite effect. I’ll be twice the size before you know it.’ I wasn’t exaggerating. I take hunger very seriously. Sometimes, I’ll be eating a piece of chocolate and swallow it, accidentally, before I mean to. I feel it going down my throat in a lump, and the fact that a taste experience has been squandered is a cause for severe regret. I’ll think about that chocolate going down whole several times again that day and feel intensely annoyed about it each time. If you’re like me you cannot diet. Your nerves can’t take it.
Gabrielle held up a hand. ‘Calm down, dear. I’m not talking about deprivation, I’m talking about health.’
One and the same. I took my coffee and slowly followed her upstairs. Of course I would be wearing old fraying knickers and a greying bra. Gabrielle is a woman who kits herself out in matching white lace underwear every day of her life. She even calls it lingerie, that’s how chic she is. I reminded myself that I was going to do anything it took to make myself worthy of Jason. I was going to be a born-again girlie.
Gabrielle took my coffee cup out of my hands and placed it on the side. ‘OK. First thing you’ll need to do, Hannah, is take off the hat. It’s not a good look. Oh my God, neither’s that.’
I was wearing a baseball cap. She’d wrenched it off before I could stop her.
‘Hairdressers are so expensive,’ I said. ‘Anyone can cut a fringe.’
‘Plainly not.’
‘It kept looking wonky, I had to keep cutting.’
‘You idiot. When did you do this?’
‘Last night. I was bored. There was nothing on TV.’
My sister-in-law made a face.
I added, ‘Gabrielle, if you must know I felt bad about … something I did to Jason, OK? I felt remorseful. I did it out of remorse.’
It was true enough. I had kept eyeing my banana plant – procured under false pretences – and wincing.
She hauled me to the mirror, her grip just about squeezing the marrow out of my bones. I was surprised not to see it squirl from between her fingers like Play-Doh. ‘Remorseful. Uh-huh. You look like Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber. Bet you feel remorseful now. You twit!’
I shifted from foot to foot. It was fair to say that I had made myself look a bit simple. None the less, I was impressed that Gabrielle had seen Dumb and Dumber. ‘I do a bit,’ I said in a small voice.
‘Second thing, I’m going to have to send you to my hairstylist.’
‘Don’t you mean, first thing?’
‘No. First thing, we need to get you some new clothes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you can’t just go to Michel’ – Meeeshell, she pronounced it – ‘in a tracksuit. Well, I suppose you could but it would have to be Dior.’
‘What! You mean you dress up to go to your hairdresser?’ I could barely believe it! What was the world coming to? But she was nodding!
‘You bet. And full make-up. And that’s another thing. Do you even pluck your eyebrows?’
‘No.’
‘Take off all your clothes.’
‘Wh—’
‘Take them OFF!’
Miserably, I obeyed.
There was a sharp intake of breath. Maybe I’d grown a tail and not noticed. This time I knew better than to say, ‘What?’
Gabrielle lunged for the phone and pressed five on her speed dial.
‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Gabrielle Goldstein here. I have an appointment with Michel, tomorrow, at noon. This is a courtesy call to say that my sister-in-law, Hannah, will be coming in my place. She sleepwalks, I’m afraid, and last night she cut her own hair while she slept … Yes, poor thing, only Michel could save her … Thank you. Now, please transfer me to the spa desk … Sybil? Darling. It’s Gabrielle … Yes. An emergency … No, my sister-in-law. Full-leg and a Brazilian. Eyebrows. Moustache—’
This was too much. I did not have a moustache. But I did have work. ‘I have work t—’
Gabrielle pressed ‘Hold’. ‘Take the day off!’ She paused. ‘You can get dressed now.’
Good, because I was starting to feel undignified, standing there stark naked having my physical and mental imperfections openly mocked.
‘Sybil? Yes. Manicure. Pedicure. Probably a Thalgo marine algae wrap. And a St Tropez for the day after … No. I’ll deal with the face … Yes. Thank you. Bye.’
She ended the call and grinned at me. I grinned back. Brazil, St Tropez, these were nice places. Beauty treatments with such lovely names couldn’t be that bad. Gab ordered me to be back at her house the following morning at nine sharp, and I didn’t protest. I was actually looking forward to this. Doing penance was going to be fun.
Chapter 16
‘Lovely, now can you pull your cheeks apart for me?’
I can’t speak for the rest of society but it’s not often I find myself pantless on all fours on a table, spreading my buttocks so that a glamorous blonde can rip out the hairs obscuring my anus. Maybe other, harder women get used to this. But me personally, call me a wuss, I couldn’t get over the unusual fact that my anus was in her face. She was staring right at it – O, there it was, my bottom hole inches from her ski-jump nose. I couldn’t believe people voluntarily did this. And I’m not talking about sexual sadists. Normal women. I mean, it isn’t right.
I blushed right the way through to the back of my head. At the least, I blushed on all four cheeks. When she was tearing the hair off my legs, I’d managed to bluster through my embarrassment. But this? Nothing! No words could cover this!
I shut up. The Brazilian silenced me as effectively as a bullet. I couldn’t have spoken even if I’d wanted to. This was a social situation that gunned down etiquette and left it bleeding. There was no form of words on earth, no correct behaviour available to the human race that would normalise this and make it comfortable. Monstrous mortification dwarfed the pain which, experienced in isolation – an Iraqi prison, say – would have been excruciating.
I supposed if there was a God and He was looking down on me (I hope not) He’d have said I was being punished for my sins. Even so, I would kill Gabrielle, I would kill her, for what she’d put me through. The day had been a horror, right from the second I’d set eyes on her that morning.
To my surprise, Oliver had opened the door, with Jude in his arms. Jude – who was wearing a white fashion item, a cotton leotard – screamed when he saw me, from fright or delight, I wasn’t sure.
‘Why aren’t you at work?’ I said (to Oliver, not Jude).
‘Why aren’t you?’ he replied.
‘I got the day off.’
‘And I’m freelance, remember?’
Oliver gently placed Jude on the ground. That child had the fattest feet I’d ever seen. There were creases in his thighs, they were so pudgy. This, for some reason, was enormously pleasing.
‘Go and see what your mother is doing, darling,’ said Ollie, and Jude tottered off on his fat baby legs.
When I first heard Ollie speak to Jude it choked me. He used a voice I’d never heard before – insufferably tender. But when he said that, go and see what your mother is doing, darling, I felt a sick jerk in my throat, like someone had hooked a noose round my neck and was tugging. I wanted to throw myself on the floor and wail. I had no idea why.
I gulped, and stared at him, as if his face might give me the answer, but he grinned and waggled his ears at me – a trick he’d mastered aged seven and, some might argue, the peak of his talents. I smiled stiffly, and seconds later, Gabrielle appeared, Jude at her hip.
Within minutes, she’d whi
sked me upstairs and was preaching about the proper use of face creams. It emerges you don’t mix them with black paint and poisonous berries and chant spells over them, you put them on your face. As she talked me through the moisture-replenishing, wrinkle-reducing, cancer-zapping, eternal-life-giving powers of a tiny pot of gunk entitled Dolphin Aromatic Soothing Cream (or something) I felt a swell of suspicion. Then she told me it cost forty-five quid.
‘The smaller the pot, the more expensive, normally,’ she added, as if this explained it.
‘Gabrielle,’ I said, ‘this is … I mean … it’s oil and water and pink dye. It’s … it’s … tarted up Vaseline. Those pseudo-scientists in their fake laboratories, they must sit there in their white coats pissing themselves.’
Gabrielle set her mouth in a cold, straight line, which led me to understand she had a vested interest in the Dolphin scientists being geniuses and the Soothing Cream being everything it said on the instructions. Instructions! (‘Stick finger in pot …’).
I knew it was foolish to continue, but I couldn’t stop myself.
‘So when Jude gets his baby eczema, you reach for the Dolphin Aromatic Soothing Cream, do you? I mean, he has the best of everything, Gab. He’ll be a bit peeved when he learns to watch TV and he finds out you’ve been treating his skin with crappy old Sudocrem, from a grey tub, what are you going to tell him? It’s because he wasn’t worth—’
‘It’s Darphin. Now do you want me to help you impress Jason or not?’ shouted Gabrielle.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Go on.’
‘This is Givenchy Balancing Mist. It’s a moisturising toner. You spritz it on after you’ve cleansed your face.’
Since when, I wanted to ask, did a perfectly fine word like ‘cleaned’ become ‘cleansed’? Cleansed had a biblical ring to it, and I wanted to know just how dirty those beauty scientists thought women were. I kept my mouth shut, which was lucky because Gabrielle held up the bottle and squirted it right at me. It was cold and nasty like someone spat in your face.
Then she’d taken me to Brent Cross Shopping Centre. Most of my friends growing up spent more time in Brent Cross Shopping Centre than they did in their own homes. This is because traditionally, North-West London mothers have used Brent Cross Shopping Centre as an alternative to open prison for their kids. That place is pure evil. Husbands and wives walk through its doors holding hands. Minutes later they’re at each other’s throats. It’s the Bermuda Triangle for happiness.
I hadn’t been there for years and was sad to see that Top Shop hadn’t shut down. As I remembered, you had to be master of the dirty look to survive in that store. Gabrielle dragged me in there – it was full of fourteen-year-olds; I felt like a pumpkin in a carrot field – and bullied me into some asymmetrical clothes.
And then, just when I thought the torture couldn’t get any more sadistic, she’d driven me into town and introduced me to Sybil. Thank heaven that I couldn’t have an algae wrap on the same day I’d had a leg and bikini wax. ‘That’s fine,’ I joked, scrambling into my knickers. ‘I prefer cheese and lettuce.’
Sybil gave me an odd look. I imagined it was, ‘You revolt me.’
When I checked out what she’d done to me, later that day, I went hot with shame. I looked like a porn star. There was no way I was going back. Sybil could stick her algae wrap, and her St Tropez. She’d explained what they were. I could fly to India, get amoebic dysentery and it would have identical effects and save me money.
Gabrielle rang. ‘So, how are you feeling?’ she enquired in a voice that suggested she expected thanks.
‘I feel –’ I paused – ‘bald.’
Gabrielle chuckled. ‘And Michel’s a star, isn’t he?’
My lips pursed of their own accord. I’d been shunted from the clutches of Sybil, to the razor-wielding Michel, a rude Frenchman. He seemed to take the state of my fringe as a personal insult. Then, in a five-second frenzy of rage, he’d given me a cut that transformed me into a cross between Myra Hindley and his mother. I now had what I feared were sideburns. I’d spent forty minutes with the blowdryer trying to merge them with the rest of my hair.
‘Now, listen,’ said Gabrielle. ‘I’ve got to go in five minutes. I’ve got a client coming round. But I wanted to tell you. If you want to learn to cook your way into Jason’s stomach, or whatever the phrase is, I’m not your woman. I only do baby food. However. I do know the perfect person.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘And she wouldn’t mind helping me? I don’t only need to know how to cook a dinner, I need to know how to present it.’
‘You’re serious about this?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am. I want to give Jason what he … wants.’
And I wanted to exorcise my guilt. Despite the Brazilian and the sideburns, it hadn’t abated. It was there, coiled like a snake, inside me.
‘And your father.’
‘What?’
‘You partly want to get back with Jason to please your father, don’t you?’
‘You can’t object to a parent approving of his daughter’s choice of partner,’ I said.
‘Can I ask,’ added Gabrielle, ‘does this new you last until death do you part? Or does it last until the end of next week, when you tire of making choux pastry and neglecting your own needs?’
Shoe pastry? What was she on about? ‘I assure you,’ I replied, ‘I am not a person who neglects her own needs. My need right now is Jason. And if he’s happy, I’m happy.’
‘You know,’ said Gabrielle in a flat voice, ‘people say that. But personally I don’t find it to be true.’
Ah, me neither. Every dufus knows that that phrase is just talk. You think it makes you sound fab but it makes you sound like a loser. Even if you love someone, their happiness can never be a substitute for yours. If it was, I’d be out of a job.
I was simply trying to convey my sincerity using readymade words. As for skivvying after Jason for the rest of my days, well, maybe I’d get hit by a bus before I turned forty. Meanwhile, I doubted if I’d be able to maintain the cleanse, moisturise, tone regime for more than a month without a bank loan, but I was really, really going to try. I wanted to see the look on Jason’s face when, day after day, I served up roast chicken in high heels. (Me in high heels, not the chicken.)
Jason and I had the capacity to have a great relationship. I was aware that for the last five years I’d operated within it on half-power, while he zipped around on full throttle. If only I could find it in me not to be quite so lazy with him, we could be content. Roast chicken, I felt, was an important part of that.
‘Gab, are you OK?’ I said. ‘Your mood seems to have dropped. Are you still not eating carbohydrates?’
(Not that long ago, Gab had come over and I’d bought a bread at the Italian deli called ciabatta. All the rage, apparently. I knew instinctively that Gabrielle was a ciabatta kind of girl. So I served it up with butter and cheese, and from the look on her face, you’d have thought it was a cowpat.
‘I’m sorry, Hannah,’ she’d said. ‘But ciabatta is like poison to me. It’s white bread, it’s nutritionally void. Its glycaemic index is, like, about a hundred.’ She ate the cheese. I ate the ciabatta, expecting to fall down dead every time I swallowed.
‘It’s not that. I’m fine. Just tired. Anyway. Come round tomorrow at eight, after Jude’s in bed, for a lesson in How to be Jason’s Ideal Wife.’ Pause. ‘Knock, don’t ring, there’ll be a baby asleep in the house,’ she added, and cut off.
I shook my head. She was both ends of the seesaw, that one.
My hair didn’t cause uproar at work, but only because someone else was the focus of ridicule for a change. One of our freelancers, Ron, had been on surveillance in a van, across the road from a subject’s house, and decided – after seven hours of monotony, broken only by some kid bouncing a tennis ball off the side of his vehicle for forty minutes – to smoke a cigarette. A neighbour had seen smoke, assumed the van was on fire, and called 999. Ron’s nicotine high was cut short by six bur
ly blokes in helmets wrenching open the back doors of the van and spraying him at close range in ten tonnes of foam.
Ron’s excuse to the firefighters had been, ‘My missus doesn’t let me smoke in the house.’
Naturally, they’d believed him because men secretly think that all wives are like that. I couldn’t blame them — I secretly thought that all wives were like that.
It got me thinking as I rang Gab and Oliver’s doorbell. What was I trying to be? A traditional wife? A good wife? An unhappy wife? Or a pastiche of a wife?
As Martine once said, ‘God, I’m becoming a pistachio of myself.’
I didn’t want to be a pistachio of a wife. All I was doing, I reassured myself, was extending my choices. If it looked a little subservient and anti-feminist to some people, I would refer them, myself included, to the lack of respect I’d shown Jason … previously. I had to make it up somehow.
‘I told you to KNOCK,’ said Gabrielle in a voice loud enough to wake every baby in the neighbourhood. ‘And –’ dragging me into the house by my wrist – ‘why are you still white? What happened to your St Tropez?’
‘I’ll rebook it,’ I lied.
‘No, I’ll rebook it. I don’t trust you.’
We glared at each other.
Then I noticed a navy-blue shoulder bag on the floor. It had an anchor insignia and yellow rope trim. My shoulders tensed.
‘Whose is that?’ I said.
‘Hannah, I—’ began Gabrielle.
‘Hello,’ cried my mother, peeping from behind the kitchen door with her best impression of a confident smile. ‘It’s me!’
Chapter 17
‘Oh,’ I said.
There was a tone I reserved for my mother. Its use had become habit over the years. Slightly bored, a frosty edge, but not downright rude. Nothing, were she ever to challenge me, that I couldn’t attribute to being busy or tired. But she never had challenged me. Our relationship had slowly disintegrated like bread in water and she had allowed it to happen. Occasionally, I’d marvelled at her stupidity. If one course of action isn’t working, it is basic logic to try another. Even rats know that. And yet, my mother still clung to the same position – meek, obedient.
