Nip 'N' Tuck Read Free Page B

your birthday treat.’
    My sister was a member of the Vulva Chorus in a big charity performance of
The Vagina Monologues
. Although embarked on the inexorable slide towards the C list, Victoria was digging her acrylic nails in all the way. And appearing at a media-intensive event raising money for a women’s refuge was part of her publicity rehabilitation plan.
    Her miniscule pink Nokia began to ring and her face lit up as she mouthed, ‘Sven,’ to me before purring huskily into the phone, ‘Darrrrrling, six weeks’ absence was
way
too long. My muff’s in a huff. So, did you find me any work in America?’
    I winced. While I’d retreated into books, Victoria ran away from our bleak, Nicholas Nickelbyed boarding-school at sixteen. She found work as a topless waitress in a Spanish tapas bar, followed by a stint as a ‘dancer’ in Sophisticats where she was spotted by a model scout. Sven’s first words to her were ‘
You
are 9.9999. If you were with
me
you’d be a perfect ten.’ This was her version of events anyway. Personally I think she could only have met her odious boyfriend in a police line-up. Hell, the man had handcuff tan marks.
    Twenty years later, she’d now rekindled contact with this ‘love of her life’ and although he’d re-signed her to his agency, she was desperately hoping he’d marry her as well – a proposal she was busily promoting with sexual favours.
    Sven (as in ‘Svengali’) had changed his name at twenty-two (from Terry Taylor) and had never looked back at his knick-knacked, pebble-dashed council-house past. He’d successfully transmuted a juvenile zeal for nicking women’s knickers from clothes-lines into a career as a model agent where women took them off for him. Proving that you can’t keep a bad man down, he became the European Head of Divine, one of the world’s largest model agencies with (as he endlessly boasts) a 100-million-dollar annual turnover. But his Christian Liaigre décor didn’t fool me. This was a flamenco spa five-seater Jacuzzi man if ever I saw one. Despite the copy of the
Financial Times
tucked permanently under one arm, I’m convinced his real reading material is limited to back issues of
Big Butt, Hog Tied
and
Latex Maiden
. He may have a voice as mild and cool as a kindergarten teacher, but I suspect that if Sven went swimming in shark-infested waters, the sharks would wear chain-mail suits.
    I checked my watch and realized that I had exactly thirty seconds to remove squashed bananas from the bottom of gym bags, snap the Velcro fasteners on trainers, comb Julia’s hair for nits and leave for work. I could have asked my sister to drop off the kids, but she’d only accidentally leave them behind at the hair-dresser’s. To Victoria, children are like Ikea appliances – you have no idea how much assembly is required until it’s way too late. Despite having the maternal instincts of a guppy fish, my sister is the bewildered mother of the beautiful Marrakech. For the past fifteen years she’d been looking for a loop-hole in her daughter’s birth certificate.
    I left my sister practically fellating her lover over the phone, herded the kids out of our Hampstead terrace house and was just about to hook myself up intravenously to a bottle of Valium for the school run, when my neighbour from the ramshackle, rent-controlled garden flat next door trampolined towards me on springy Nikes.
    ‘Happy birthday.’ Calim Keane grinned. ‘I have no idea how old you are but you certainly don’t look it.’ He plucked the car keys from my hand and replaced them with a plate of cupcakes bristling with candles. ‘How ’bout I do the school run?’
    Calim was always coming to my rescue. He looked after my kids even when they were contagious and had earned their undying gratitude for teaching them how to make hilarious intestinal noises with their armpits. He’d assisted in the delivery of our guinea-pig’s babies. He even came with me to try on swimming