Nip 'N' Tuck Read Free

turn to heroin, okay?’
    ‘Do you think that will be strong enough?’ I asked, picking a soggy Nut O Wow! from his lapel.
    But he wasn’t angry. Hugo adored his children. When we went out to the opera, he’d call home on his cellphone before we’d even made it to the bottom of the street to check they were okay. He knew without looking which child had stuffed the Malteser up the other’s nose. He
never
lost his temper with them, not even on the terrifying occasion when they accidentally pulled the inflate tag on the bouncy castle in the back seat of our moving car on the motorway. Not even when he’d been paged urgently in the middle of surgery because the kids had just washed the cats and wanted to know what setting to use on the tumble-dryer.
    As he cupped their tiny chins to kiss them farewell, I watched the love spill and ripple across his face and felt a tingling shiver of happiness.
    Hugo hastened off to the hospital and the kids trooped reluctantly upstairs to get changed for school, while I attempted a quick clean-up. My kitchen, like me, was comfortable with its lot in life. Chipped skirting-boards from indoor scooting, coffee rings on every surface, a chaos of kitsch magnets attaching homework schedules to an emphysemic fridge. I was just removing the brown blobs in the sugar bowl made from wet cereal spoons, when my older (although she’d never admit that to the outside world) half-sister Victoria breezed in for a quick hit of caffeine on her way to the beauty parlour.
    ‘Oh, shit,’ Victoria over-enunciated so that her red lipstick wouldn’t come into contact with her perfect teeth, ‘it’s your birthday. Darling, I forgot. Thirty-nine! Well, for God’s sake,’ she lowered her voice conspiratorially, as she shrugged off a light suede coat made from many cute, adorable woodland species – no doubt endangered, ‘don’t tell anyone. Take it from me, the twenty years between thirty-five and forty are the most fascinating of a woman’s life!’
    I laughed with a mixture of affection and despair. ‘You’re really sad, do you know that? Really sad and pathetic. You may not have noticed but “growing older” is a Major Lifestyle Trend.’
    Victoria is a model and, believe me, this is the woman who put the ‘cat’ into ‘catwalk’. Her
décolletage
is the deepest thing about her. She was humungously famous in the 1980s, but once she hit thirty, her star-wattage dimmed. It had been a good ten years since her face graced the label of a shampoo bottle. Her modelling assignments have now dwindled to shows scheduled in, say, Helsinki, around, oh,
four-thirty a.m
. And her shoots seem increasingly dangerous – you know, the ones that nobody else would touch, Somalia, Belfast, or into the wildest depths of Birmingham. The cold hard truth? My sis was ageing faster than a pair of Prada platforms.
    ‘Actually,’ I prised my arm free of her crimson talons, ‘I think I’ll like the anonymity of cronedom. At forty you can stop worrying about it all and just quietly go to seed.’
    My sister eyed me haughtily. ‘Don’t be rid
ic
ulous darling,’ she replied, peering into a diamanté compact to retouch make-up manufactured by Trowel and Co. ‘Turning forty is the major cause of old age.’ She flopped on to a kitchen stool and shuddered. ‘Age to women is like Kryptonite to Superman.’
    ‘God, Victoria, you make me feel like I’m about to open as the next Norma Desmond in
Sunset
bloody
Boulevard
!’ I said, exasperated, hurling celery and carrot sticks into the kid’s lunch-boxes.
    ‘Don’t pretend you’re not worried, Elisabeth. Turning-forty
Angst
is required by international law. All women go through it. And
you
are no exception.’ She ate a crumb off the breadboard – which took care of breakfast – and lit up a fag. ‘With every other forty-year-old woman feeling used and abused and on the social scrap heap, why should
you
feel any different?’ She launched a halo of passively