Nip 'N' Tuck Read Free Page A

cancerous smoke. ‘You’ll only alienate all your other women friends.’
    ‘Look, on the Big Day I expect I’ll drink too much.’ I slapped the Tupperware lids on to the lunch boxes and burped them shut. ‘I’ll possibly cry and dance naked on a table or two. But I mean it. I like getting older.’
    My sister rolled her heavily mascaraed eyes. With their tonnage of eye-shadow, it was a feat of optical weight-lifting worthy of Olympic status.
    ‘No, I
do
. I don’t feel scared of life, the way I used to. I don’t care if people like me or not. I like myself. And I know my limitations. I no longer expect to win the Nobel Prize for Astrophysics. I will never be an astronaut either. Or do a nude film scene. I will never have sex with Ben Affleck. I will never be beautiful. But one thing I’m
not
terrified of is wrinkles. Or death, come to think of it …’
    ‘Darling, wrinkles
are
death.’
    ‘Hugo loves me just the way I am.’
    Victoria arched her topiarized brows. ‘Show me a woman who’s happy about her age and I’ll show you the electro-convulsive therapy scorch marks.’
    I shook my head at her. As half-sisters Victoria and I love each other, but we’re insufferable friends. The only thing we have in common is our shared contempt for our materfamilias. Our mum, a B minus English actress on Broadway, survived a stormy six-minute marriage to an unpublished New York poet, thereby producing Victoria. The closest I came to finding out the identity of
my
father was during an attempt at a sex-education talk. ‘Where do I come from, Mum?’
    ‘Brooklyn,’ was all she’d said.
    Victoria and I presume she only got pregnant as a useful distraction from daytime television. Whenever she was summoned to our headmistress’s office, she chose to go to the Caribbean instead. Finally she left us boarding in some scholastic hellhole in Surrey and took off – for ten years. Her favourite little quip was that she was so desperate not to have more kids that she’d put a
condom
on her
vibrator
. (Despite our mother’s endless warnings that ‘Men don’t make passes at female smartasses’, we’d both inherited her unattractive talent for tongue-lashing.) She is now ensconced in a Maximum Security Old Persons’ Home and has put out an injunction to stop us visiting her.
    But apart from mutual disappointment in our mother, you couldn’t get two more opposite siblings. Victoria, with her slanted, luminous grey eyes and six feet of slender, photogenic flesh, doesn’t look anything like a sister of mine. While I’m a brunette, Victoria is a blonde – and prepared to go blonder. I’d always wanted to be tall and disdainful like her, but instead ended up just short and eager. And it’s not only in looks that we differ. Though
I
baked and broiled my way around the beaches of South East Asia during my gap year, I have never once seen my sister in direct sunlight. I tell people she hangs upside down to go to sleep at night. While I tend to think that my body is just there to carry my head around, my sister thinks that her head is just there to enable her to worry more about her body. After studying Liberal Arts at Brown University, I moved to Europe with the CNN job to discover my superficial sibling adorning the British fashion pages.
    I caught sight of our reflection in the conservatory windows. I looked as flushed and dishevelled as my sister was coiffured and calm. In order to be ready to go out at nine a.m., she starts preparing at
four
. She’s not happy unless squeezed into a size double zero dress. In her
grave
, Victoria will still be wearing a collagen mask and an overnight rejuvenation cream.
    I wrestled my electric mane of hair into a rubber band at the nape of my neck. Why was
I
the sister to fall out of the Plain Jane tree and get hit by every bloody branch on the way down, goddamn it?
    ‘Darling, don’t forget tonight.’ She flicked a blonde frond over her right eye, Veronica-Lake-like. ‘It can be