The Yummy Mummy (23 page)
He ushers me into the examining room and tells me to hop onto the chair and make myself comfortable, which I can’t. “Hmmm. I can see we’ve got a bit of work to do here,” he says, inspecting my face. “Don’t look so worried. It’ll be such a subtle effect. No wind-tunnel face, promise.” Then he gets out what looks like a black marker pen. “Frown,” he says. “Grimace. Smile . . . there’s a good girl.” There have been only two other people who have called me a “good girl” in adulthood. My abortionist and my cesarian surgeon. Not a good precedent.
Sopak draws on my face, following the contours of my lines like a relief map. He pens my nose-to-mouth lines. I smell instant coffee on the tips of his fingers. To ground myself I concentrate on studying Evie, who rather than falling asleep as hoped, is sitting bolt upright in her pram, straining at the straps.
“See, it’s just a ’ittle needle,” Sopak says, unwrapping not such a little needle from its cellophane. “And I just put a teeny weeny bit of this Botox in here. . . .”
I’m not sure if the baby talk is for my benefit or Evie’s. He’s giving me the creeps. Sopak sucks up the botulism and flicks the needle from his wrist. I sit up.
“No, no, lie still, honey, totally still. It’s just a little prick, won’t hurt a bit.”
The needle stings into my skin. There is a crunching sound, a stepped-on-cockroach sound.
“What’s that weird noise?”
“Just the muscle. Lie back, there’s a good girl.”
I feel something warm drip down my face. The needle comes at me again, and again, like a furious wasp. Please stop, please stop. Breathe.
Breathe
. It’s Botox, for God’s sake, people have parties with the stuff. But it’s no good: I can’t see parties, I can see only
Daily Mail
–style Botox—“my face-droop horror”—front-page stories. Biting my lip like a brave child, I focus on my new Nicole Kidman complexion, Josh’s admiration, the bad nights wiped away. More stings. More crunches.
Suddenly there is the most terrible howl from Evie. I jolt.
“Do not move!” commands Sopak, needle raised like a sword. This inflames Evie further. I feel utterly helpless, unable to pick her up. More warm trickles. More screams.
“I’ll get a tissue,” he says quickly.
I sit up and catch my reflection in the mirror and gasp. Blood is streaming from my forehead down my face, rivulets feeding into my mouth, trickling under my jaw, Catholic red. Then I turn and look at Evie. Mistake. She stares at me in silent horror for a few moments. Then her face turns burgundy and she sucks in a huge backdraft of air, fills her lungs, swells her chest . . .
“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
Evie is beside herself.
“Tissue, tissue,” chatters Sopak nervously, smoothness lost. “There, all gone.”
I jump off the bed and take Evie out of her pram and cuddle her to my chest. She writhes and kicks in my arms like something possessed, purple in the face now, gasping for breath.
Heels
click-clack
urgently on the tiled floor. “Is everything okay?” Amber swings open the door. A frown has even managed to worm its way between her frozen lakes of Botox. “Poor baby, what happened?”
“Just got a bit of a shock seeing Mummy with a bloody face, I think,” says Sopak, looking desperate. “Let’s get Miss Crane’s transaction done as soon as possible.”
“WAAAAAAAAAAA!”
What have I done to my child? Have I scarred her for life? I rummage in my bag trying to find a bribe biscuit. She throws it across the floor. Pacifier. Across the floor. I bend down and bundle Evie into her pram.
“Miss Crane!” shouts Sopak above the racket. “Please avoid bending down. Try to stay upright for the rest of the day. No alcohol. Keep frowning for the next few hours. . . .”
I frown into car window mirrors all the way home, just to check. Only a few red dots on my forehead. It’ll take a while to set. Evie, calm now she’s lost her audience, munches breadsticks and gurgles happily. As we trip through Marylebone, euphoria tickles beneath my skin. I did it! The mother of all makeovers! Done.
JOE SITS ON THE SOFA, FEET SCUFFING AT THE SCUFFED
patch on the floorboards, molding the house to fit his shape like a shoe. Beer in one hand, he turns the stiff pages of a photo album, licking his finger, flicking. These albums are usually hidden away at the back of the airing cupboard; he’s never shown the slightest interest in them before. Another mood change, then.
“So how does the present measure up to the past?” I grin, still a little pleased with myself.
“Ah, getting all sentimental on you,” Joe sighs, smiling gently, absorbed. “Just got a real urge to see these. Wasn’t she the cutest?” He points to a picture of a just-born Evie, tiny in the bowl of his huge hands. A nurse took that picture. I was in too much pain to move, the cesarian scar felt like a shark bite.
“And you . . . sweet.”
So not. It must have been a couple of weeks after the birth. I am collapsed on the sofa, eyes glittering with exhaustion, shell-shocked and pasty.
Joe pats the sofa next to him. I yank off my jacket and sidle up, inhaling his yeasty smell of beer, relieved to be momentarily freed from my schoolgirl pangs and the jubilant vanity that led me to Harley Street. Closed in on one side by the wall of his solid, warm body, I can contain myself, the thorny garden of desires and doubts. His hands work the pages over quickly.
“Nice hair.” I point to a picture of Joe taken a few years ago, hair battling his collar like Michael Bolton’s.
“It’s rocking out. I may grow it again,” he teases.
“You will not. In London, it’s lost in translation.”
He nuzzles into my hair and sniffs. “I have to confess, I do rather like yours now,” he says unexpectedly, stroking it gently. “If I can forget about how much money you spent and the fact it’s bleached, it’s almost like it was in India, lightened by the sun. . . .” He lifts bits of my hair and lets them drop again. “Smell that sandalwood.”
“Remember the lice?” We got the most terrible lice in India, ferocious tropical things. The underbelly of our sunset romance.
“You really do know how to kill a moment, don’t you?” Joe goes back to the album, fingers trailing the pages from one photo to another. “That was a boiling summer, do you remember? I got embarrassingly sunburned.” He points to a photograph of me, Joe, and Kate in Kate’s garden, late August.
Joe is standing between me and Kate, arms cradling both of us. I was about five months pregnant, had just come out of my sick phase, and looked overweight rather than pregnant. Kate’s been caught at an unfortunate angle. While Joe and I smile into Pete’s lens, Kate’s gaze hits just below the camera lens, so she’s there but not involved somehow. She was having a rough time with Pete. She did her best to mask it, but my pregnancy hit her hard. She’d been trying for a baby for months at that point.
“Don’t forget we’re going to Kate’s this weekend,” I say, suddenly remembering myself. Without the regime of work or a diary (little point in one without the other), days slip into weeks, months. The park’s change in season is the nearest I get to a clock.
“If we must,” he says grumpily.
“We promised. You know Kate will have cleared Waitrose and redecorated the entire house in a new shade of Farrow and Ball for the event. We can’t not.” Part of me is dying to know if she notices anything different. Will the wrinkles have gone by then?
“Okay, just the Friday.” He tucks a wedge of hair behind my ear and kisses me on the nose.
“What’s that for?” A guilty conscience?
“I don’t kiss you enough.” Joe stares at me. He looks puzzled, peers closely into my face, eyes fixed on my hairline. “Amy. What are those?” His finger taps the sore spots on my forehead. “You have little bruises all over your face.”
“What?” I stand up and look in the sitting room mirror. Christ. All the little white needle dots have ripened into pink circular bruises. They track along my forehead, between my eyes, like a red ant’s footsteps.
“Not sure.” Despite my attempts not to, I can’t stop myself shifting guiltily. I’m the world’s worst liar.
Joe knows this. He frowns. “Amy? Please tell me what these are. I can tell you’re hiding something. These are not normal bruises. What have you done?”
“I have had . . .” I take a deep breath. Why should I be ashamed? I am merely making the best of myself. Besides, few women in West London can frown anymore. “Botox.”
“BOTOX!”
Joe thunders, face puce. I don’t have to wonder where Evie gets it from. “Botox! You are fucking joking! You’re completely insane. That poison . . .”
“Calm down, Joe, please.” But I have no effect. Joe’s chest bellows with fury.
“What the fuck is going on, Amy? Who are you becoming?”
“I thought it would just be one little prick.”
“One little prick! I’m going to phone Alice.” Joe’s nostrils flare into two black tunnels.
“Calm down, it isn’t Alice’s fault.”
“Yeah right. I bet she made you go. She did, didn’t she?” He strides toward the phone. Shit, he really is going to phone her.
“Stop! Joe . . . it’s got nothing to do with Alice.” My pleading works. He stops. “What’s wrong with making the best of yourself? Tell me. I’m looking so fucking rough, haven’t slept properly for months.”
“You are not the only mother in the world who has a baby who doesn’t sleep through. I don’t see them nipping from the baby clinic to the Botox doctor. I’m not even going to ask how much it cost. It’ll make me too angry.”
“Please, Joe, try and understand.”
He looks at me, bewildered. His mouth opens to speak but he seems to think better of it. “I’m going out,” he whispers and closes the door softly behind him, rather than slamming it, just to show his restraint.
My mistake: I should never ever have told Joe. And I shouldn’t have to apologize for a choice I make about
my
body. It’s fine for me to be sawn in two like a magician’s assistant by some scalpel-happy cesarian surgeon but not for me to choose to have a few small injections.
I cover my forehead in the thickest foundation I can find, reach for the solace of the biscuit tin, and slump on a kitchen chair, running my fingertips lightly over the lumpy tracks beneath my skin. Hmm. Sopak didn’t mention how long they might last. In fact, he didn’t mention them at all. A heat, he’d said, just a heat that would go away in a couple of hours. And, yes, a rather expensive heat.
Suppose Joe’s right there. Funny, without the hours put in behind the desk, money’s value is lost, and something of an heiress’s casual sense of entitlement sets in. The idea that the money may dry up completely becomes harder to grasp. I haven’t looked at a bank statement for more than four months. It’s about time.
In the office under the stairs is a scratched silver filing cabinet filled with old mortgage repayment reminders and two-year-old telephone bills. I scrabble through its dusty files and pull out the bank statements. Oh. Did I really spend that much at the hairdresser’s? On Westbourne Grove with Alice? The joint account is in a similarly bad state. Notably, our food bills have doubled since Evie moved onto solids, as the fridge is now entirely stocked with locally sourced organics, such is our fear of pumping our darling daughter full of sex hormones and antibiotics. However, Joe’s account—I can’t resist looking—isn’t doing too badly. He doesn’t spend all his income every month, as I always have done. His expenditure is neither excessive nor glamorous: Amazon, the London Underground, Sainsbury’s, Boots and Bloom’s Hatton Garden Jewellery. £2,575. What?
GOLDEN AFTERNOON SUN SHAFTS THROUGH THE VELUX
windows. Spacious, calm, and warm, it contrasts with the space I’ve just fled with its question marks hanging in the alcoves, doubts and suspicions huddled like moths in the corners. At first the studio seems empty. But then I see Josh, sitting quietly, legs crossed, alone, monklike on a mat. Beneath a tousled mop of curls, his sienna skin glows, plumped and tightened by a new tan. His back is infant-straight. From this angle I can see his eyes are shut, the lids shadowed by the sharp cliff-cut of his eyebrows. It feels rude to wake him from this quiet meditation. I consider leaving again to face the music, pretending I never came.
“Don’t go,” he says suddenly. “Sit down on the mat next to me.”
He doesn’t open his eyes. It strikes me that it takes real confidence to address someone with your eyes shut.
“Where is everyone?”
“Oh, er, flu I think. Lovers. Annabel’s gone into labor.”
“Gosh, really? Wow.”
“Sit down opposite me. On my mat.”
So I do. It feels okay, not too embarrassing, because his eyes are shut.
“I knew you’d come.” His blue eyes spring open, pupils spreading and shrinking to focus. “Have you ever played this game?” The corners of his mouth curl. “Group therapists love it.”
Game? I look at him, puzzled, remembering how unpredictable he can be.
“Look at me.” He edges forward on his mat so he’s about a foot away and just stares at me, unflinchingly, like Joe stares at
Sky News.
“You hold eye contact with the other person for as long as possible. It’s an incredibly intimate thing to do, always makes me go gooey.”
I laugh nervously.
“Hey, don’t look down! Not allowed.”
I lock my eyes with his and stare. It is hard, very hard. I just want to blink him away, glance at the floor, ceiling, anywhere to escape the drilling honesty of Josh’s eyes. It feels like we sit here for an eternity. Call time, call time. He doesn’t.
“You okay?” he says.
“It’s difficult.”
“Yes, it’s about opening yourself up. Makes you feel vulnerable, doesn’t it?”
How long has it been? Five, ten minutes? He is still staring. I’m blinking now and my right nostril itches. I imagine two pipes running from my eyes to his. Emotions begin to trickle along it, like chatter on a telephone wire. Back and forth. Mostly sadness pouring out slow and reluctant, thick as cream. I think about the hotel and the jewelry bill and Joe’s secretive, jumpy behavior of late. How could he?
“You’re crying,” Josh says, voice conveying neither sympathy nor judgment.