Altar ego, p.2
Altar Ego, page 2
I’d made it through breakfast okay, even with my dysfunctional parents, but by the time I was in the shower, I was suppurating with anxiety. All my life I’d found it hard to avoid temptation. Soon it would be impossible to find any.
Negotiating my knee topography with a disposable razor, I thought how ‘cruising’ used to mean a late-night trawl through the Café de Paris for a Stud Puppy … Soon it would mean hunting for a parking spot outside Peter Jones. All my married friends, that’s where I saw them now, cruising round Sloane Square in their orthopaedic People-Movers, an urgent look in their eyes – a lust for linen and light fittings. Ugh. No, I did not want to become one of them. Never. Ever.
The blood loss, as I hacked mechanically at my leg hair, was now rivalling the shower scene from Psycho. Would I never again get the urge to lambada naked in front of my pets? Never again perform a strip karaoke? Never again seduce the tumble-dryer man with the washboard tum and torn jeans bum? Never again be a painter of towns? Never steal a friend’s fiancé? … Never again give him back again?
No. Now my life would be consumed by much more Important Issues. Locating lost dry-cleaning tickets. Taking dogs I loathed for dental descaling. Perusing Sainsbury’s Homebase stores on Sunday mornings in search of paint-stripper and Polyfilla, before brunching with people I hated merely because our children had a mutual fixation on Bananas in Pyjamas memorabilia.
By the time the eyelash-curler was clamped in place, I could clearly see my future (thought admittedly not much else): obsessing about whether my washing machine has a double-duty agitator, as I run my fingers through what would be left of Julian’s hair and wonder how I ended up living with a man who could wear a tartan flannel dressing-gown, without irony.
Sweet Jesus. By now I was towelling sweat. After my lip de-fuzzing, hair-gassing with Maximum Hold and Sepia Remembrance eyeshadow application, I perched on the closed lid of the toilet in my tatty silk robe and tried not to have a cardiac arrest. I took deep, even breaths. In … Out … In … Out …
Yes. I felt much calmer now … I then flossed my face and powdered my teeth and ran a bath through my hair.
On the tenth attempt I threaded my legs into white silk stockings. But as the blue satin garter snapped on to my thigh, a horrible realization besieged me. I’d never told my single years how much I loved them.
Tutoring my breasts into uplift with merciless underwire, it hit me that I really was too young to get married. I had a pimple. I still got crushes on pop stars. Hell. I still wanted to be a catwalk model … The fact that I was five foot three, thirty-two-years old and would rather drink battery acid than be seen in a bikini had done nothing to dampen the dream.
But Jesus Christ – I slammed my palm against a sodden forehead. Was I really young? When my parents were my age, they were old. My parents. Ugh. Now there was a happy marriage: husband and wife, grinding together like teeth; my father wearing that slightly baffled, I want-my-money-back expression he’d worn all his married life. Perhaps like him, I’d develop marital Alzheimer’s and just forget how miserable I was? Holy Hell. It was then I’d clambered on to the bile-green tiles of my parents’ bathroom ledge, left leg flapping out the window as though trying to pick up a short-wave radio signal.
But the frequency being transmitted was all too familiar.
‘Rebecca?’ it was my mother. ‘Reb-ECC-A?’ her knuckles rapped resolutely on the bathroom door – an irritated maternal Morse code you didn’t need an Enigma machine to decipher.
My armpits spurted into each embroidered socket – proof that I’d completely bypassed the apprehension stage and gone directly to panic. The streak of hair-sprayed misery I dimly recognized in the mirror as myself (Mum had insisted on putting up my chilli-pepper red hair, so I looked as if I had a brioche baked on to my head) pitched backwards off the sill, caromed off the towel rack and whimpered pathetically. ‘Ye-es?’
She jiggled the handle. ‘What in God’s name are ya doin’ in there?’ The key plopped on to the mat and I knew her eye was at the hole. ‘Re-grouting?’
Since my mother had storm-trooped her way back into my life, dragooning me into all the baroque grotesqueries of a white wedding, I’d reverted to little girl-dom. On progeny autopilot, I immediately reinstated the key and unlocked the door.
Parents can be a disappointment to their children. It’s such a shame when they don’t fulfil the promise of their early years. My mother was wearing a micro-mini two sizes too small and dressed for cleavage. She’d always done this, upstaged me. She liked nothing better than to spend the evening as the centre ornament of an arrangement of my boyfriends, most of whom were a head shorter than her and happy to be so. My father, on the other hand, drew underwear on the natives in the National Geographic magazines. He has no neck, as though constantly cold and has never kissed me in his life.
‘Well, kiss the b …’ she nearly said ‘beautiful’, but giving me the once-over modified it simply to ‘bride’. She unceremoniously shoved my father over the pastel threshold. He tried to kiss me but got the muscle groups confused and merely collided, teeth bared, with my ear lobe.
By way of a little joke, my mother had dressed him in a long-sleeved T-shirt stencilled with a dinner jacket. That was her technique – endless little digs until both were buried alive in a marital grave. He’d retreated into plane spotting, eyes constantly skyward – ‘Oh, it’s the BA 52. Right on time,’ and reporting neighbours to the ‘Beat a Cheat hotline.’ When my father first met Julian, he treated him to a home movie of the damp-proofing of the tool shed. Grounds for divorce before we even got married, really.
‘Now get a move on, girl.’ She tapped a snakeskin stiletto, which her pet Chihuahua named Brutus, licked morishly. ‘All ya relations are waitin’ to take a look at ya.’
Oh great. There was an incentive. Uncle Fester meets the Clampetts.
As my mother finger-licked my hair back into place, reshaped my torn nail and verbally catalogued who’d spent what on which presents, yet more nightmares engulfed me. My parents were hideous enough. But what about his? The Blake-Bovington-Smythes? What the hell did I know about them? Really know – besides the fact that the upper class have the same number of chins as surnames. What if Julian was a carrier for genetic diseases like Huntington’s? My God. That was something I’d never asked him. And who were all those mysterious business contacts he was always going to meet? … Maybe he had debts? Maybe he had ex-wives? Ex-names, even? Hell, maybe he had an ex-husband? Which might mean Aids. Maybe he was an Aids-carrying bankrupt of bad character? With one hour till the wedding ceremony, was it too late for surveillance? Was there still time for him to be followed, photographed and ultimately befriended by a private investigator? How on earth could I have contemplated marriage without a pre-wed? By now I was hyperventilating. My foundation had started to slide off my face. I readjusted my breasts in their cups, as though wearing red-hot underwear.
‘All right, love?’ (I didn’t take it affectionately. That’s what my mother calls everyone.) ‘That underwire’s far too tight … There.’ She re-hooked my Wonderbra on to a less asthma-inducing notch, re-zipped my frock and tucked her little canine accessory under her arm. ‘Feel better?’
Yes. Like an astronaut on a space walk who can’t get back into the shuttle.
‘Yeh. Great. Fine. Fab.’ A fake grin rictused to my face.
‘Now get ya skates on, Rebecca. I’m gunna go do an infantry of the guests.’ My mother was always getting words wrong. The premature baby was in the ‘incinerator’. My cousin had a low sperm count meaning his wife had to have an ‘FBI’ baby. And her own sex life was ruined because my father was ‘imminent’.
As she went sighing into the kitchen, on some further stage of mother-of-the-bride martyrdom and I unsutured my smile, a fresh attack of the ‘Will It Work?’, ‘Is He The One?’, ‘Will He Now Expect Me To Iron His Shirts?’ ambushed me. But come on, I castigated my reflection as I wiped the brush back and forth across the blusher compact. We’d lived together, bought a microwave and shared a genital infection. Marriage was surely the next logical step?
But Jesus. I rouged more ferociously. Should love be logical? My mother said that marriage was a natural progression – yes – but forty to fifty years’ progression? From honeymoon to tomb? Forty to fifty years of looking at the cheezels and chips stuck in his fillings every time he laughed … Shit. By now I either had too much rouge or not enough cheek. With palsied palms I rubbed off the blusher I’d just applied.
Why tinker with a relationship that’s working? Why didn’t we just stay in unwedded bliss? … Stop this marriage! I want to get off! … and I was back on another Window Ledge Odyssey.
Riding the weathered sill side-saddle, asphyxiated by the cappuccino froth of my frock’s lace and tulle, I cased the Crescent for witnesses to my escape. The part of North London where I grew up is architecturally book-ended by the Hospital for Infectious Tropical Diseases and Pentonville Prison. Tall, elegant Georgian houses fraternize (well, slum it really) with the sort of squat, grey-brick bungalows in which my mum and dad live. Meek and defeated, their council flat at 2, Coventry Crescent is the home I’d fled at sixteen, and to which I’d returned in this ludicrous act of wedding-day rapprochement with my parents. It was Julian who kept telling me that blood was thicker than water. But hey, so was egg-nog.
Pulling myself up by the sash cords, I was just jockeying into position to test Newton’s Law, when a kerthump of car chassis on kerb heralded Anouska’s arrival. Her Mercedes sports car had lurched into the Crescent at breakneck velocity. Anouska believed that the speed limit should be quadrupled in visually challenged places. Kosovo, Slovakia, Croydon and everywhere north of Bond Street were tackled at the speed of light.
‘I nearly died, doll. I thought I’d missed it,’ she trilled, alighting in a swirl of silken Voyage – the upmarket Bag Lady look currently championed by London’s Celebritocracy. The only skill Anouska had learnt at her Swiss Finishing School was sports-car-alighting with minimum knicker-flashing whilst balancing a copy of Who’s Who on her highlighted head.
‘No. But I might.’
I’d met Anouska through her half-sister Vivian, one of Julian’s law firm partners, and had liked her immediately. She was considerate (the woman faked orgasms ’cause she didn’t want to be impolite), deliciously quixotic and endearingly erratic … but not about to be headhunted by a Space Research Centre. Which is possibly why she hadn’t noticed that I was half out of a window, my wedding dress tucked up around my waist, stockings laddered, tears Niagara-ing.
‘I CAN’T GO THROUGH WITH IT.’
She blinked her false eyelashes. Anouska’s Mac lashes are so long that when driving, she gets mascara streaks on her windscreen. ‘WHAT?’ She re-knotted her Hermés scarf with such agitation that she nearly garrotted herself. ‘But, doll, marriage is so fashionable now. Think of Uma Thurman, Sharon Stone, Brad Pitt and Jennifer what’s-her-name.’ She retrieved her brocaded bridesmaid’s dress from the passenger seat. ‘Don’t move, doll. I’ll be right up.’
But the voice at the door moments later was Antipodean, rough, tough, good in a crisis. Kate looked up at me with horror as she barged into the bathroom. ‘Why are you wearing those ridiculous shoes …?’ She nudged the door shut with her bum and plonked a magnum of Moët on the fluffy pastel bath mat. ‘You’ll get nosebleeds up there. You’ll need to chew sugar to keep your energy levels up.’
Yes! Maybe that was it? Maybe I wasn’t suffering from existential angst at all, but altitude sickness! From vertiginous heels. That was why I felt so light-headed?
‘High heels,’ I retorted, ‘were invented by a woman who got sick and tired of being kissed on the forehead.’
Striding towards the window, Kate planted a wet one mid-brow, then frisbeed a paperback of How to Do Your Own Divorce at me with such force that I nearly made my appointment with the pavement. ‘Why not save time and money and just marry a divorce lawyer?’
‘It’s just as well I don’t have sensible shoes. If I did, it would be time to take my shoelaces away.’
Kate’s eyes flickered on to high beam. ‘Really? Why?’
‘What else can a woman do, who’s running out on her own wedding?’
‘You little beauty! … I did wonder why you’re half out the window. Atta girl.’ She dropped her crumpled bridesmaid’s gown on to the toilet-pedestal splash mat as though it were toxic. ‘Peach is not my colour.’
‘But God, Kate. Julian.’ I buried my face in my damp palms. ‘I love him so much, but isn’t there some other way I can prove it? If only he’d get sick, so I could give him a kidney … I mean, what a betrayal.’
‘Not being true to yourself. That’s the ultimate betrayal; the ultimate infidelity. If you’re apprehensive about getting married then …’
‘I’m not apprehensive about getting married. I just don’t want to be married.’
‘You have a great job, a great boss,’ she winked, ‘… a fully charged vibrator, a car that rear-demists and a washing machine that only floods the kitchen two or three times a month. What the hell do you need a bloody husband for?’
‘Right now I need a drink,’ I said. ‘Just one.’ One magnum, that is. Clambering off the ledge in my clonky white shoes, I broke a varnished nail popping the gigantic cork and swigged as though rescued from the Sahara. ‘What the hell are you wearing anyway?’
Kate’s only interest in clothes was that they were flame retardant. Today, her Cumberland sausage thighs were squeezed into ill-fitting trousers made from natural fibres. But before she had time to lecture me on the misogynistic superficiality of the fashion industry, the door wheezed on its hinges once more.
Anouska scurried into the bathroom, kicked the door shut behind her, searched in vain for an ashtray before upending the soap from the dish, closed the toilet seat, sat down on it, rummaged in her cavernous bag for a fag, swilled down some champers, crossed one perfectly waxed leg over the other and lasered me with her coloured contacts. ‘Bottom line, you can always get divorced.’
‘Don’t be silly.’ Kate removed her red-flamed specs. ‘Have you got any Band-Aids? … You make it all sound so quick, so easy. A drive-through McMarriage,’ she admonished, rifling through the haemorrhoid and foot-fungal creams in the cabinet. ‘Husbands are disgusting. They shed more nose hair than a moulting Labrador. Drain-clogging amounts of nose hair.’ She retrieved a packet of plasters. ‘They dribble piss on the porcelain … Post Urinal Drip Syndrome. Matchsticks covered in earwax; clipping toenails during foreplay …’
‘Oh, right. Like you’d know,’ I interjected. ‘You think Mutual Orgasm is an insurance company. Give me a fag, Annie.’
‘But you don’t smoke, doll.’
‘I do now.’
Kate perched on the edge of the bath and waved away Anouska’s cigarette smoke with a windscreen-wiper motion. ‘I’ve just had a dry spell … That’s all …’
‘Um …’ I corrected her, ‘it’s called a decade.’
‘Success puts men off,’ Kate said, truculently. She confiscated Anouska’s cigarette, stubbed it out on the bath enamel and flicked it window-ward.
‘Ugly women who can’t get laid always say that,’ snapped Anouska.
‘Some men find me very attractive, I’ll have you know.’ Kate peeled open a Band-Aid and wrapped it around the bridge of her glasses before pushing them back on to her nose. ‘Not that it bloody well matters of course …’ she said defensively, commandeering the champagne.
‘Yesterday’s spinster is today’s feminist.’ Anouska ostentatiously lit up another Cartier. ‘I do not want to have to hastily organize another Girls’ Night Out on Valentine’s Day so that I won’t be tempted to kill myself, okay?’
From across the Crescent came the warble of an organ gasping into life. ‘Oh God,’ my voice see-sawed with emotion. ‘What the hell am I going to do?’
‘Flee!’ Kate demanded. ‘Do a runner.’ She started peeling me out of my wedding dress.
‘Stop that!’ Anouska clawed at Kate’s dirty, dishwater-blonde hair. Kate swatted her away. Anouska sprang back. A Feminist and an It Girl wrenching either arm, I accordioned between them. It was like Strindberg meets Mr Bean. Which is how my mother found us. She took in my chipped varnish, the clumps of my red hair caught on a nail by the window, the skew-whiff lipstick, the low tide in the champagne bottle, one false eyelash dangling like a suicidal caterpillar from a smudged and tear-swollen eye.
‘What the flippin’ hell’s goin’ on?’ Her eyes glinted like metal. Her painted talons strained around a tumbler of lager and lime. Brutus snarled menacingly.
‘… Mum.’ I gulped in air, a palpitating fish on the deck of a boat. ‘I’m … I’m having second thoughts …’ I blurted. ‘Not second, really. 142nd.’
‘What?’ She growled, sounding suspiciously like her pampered little canine. ‘Of course ya goin’ frew wiv it, Rebecca.’ Her voice set me on edge, like a knife scraped on a plate. ‘You’ve lived with Julian for five bleedin’ years. Ya love him, don’cha? Love should end in marriage.’
‘Oh believe me,’ muttered Kate, ‘it does.’
‘Marriage, well, it’s a natural progression, ain’t it? And then kids …’
‘God! Just because I’m in my thirties everyone keeps asking me when I’m going to have my first baby. Why? Just because you’re sixty, do I keep asking when you’re going to get your first incontinence pad?’
I bit my lip. Another Doris Day Mother and Daughter moment. It brings tears to the eyes, it really does.
‘I am not sixty!’ my mother huffed, vacuuming in her cheeks all the better to pout her collagened lips. ‘This …’ she sniffled into her lace handkerchief, an escapee from a Jane Austen novel, ‘is ya chance for Once In A Lifetime Joy.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Mum. I’m thirty-two. I’ve found Once In a Lifetime Joy zillions of times … But before, I could always leave him if the sex went off.’
‘Ya silly cow! Sex is not the most important fing in a marriage!’
