by Sue Margolis
Alex smiled at Anna. He looked as if he had just opened a mail order parcel and realized to his joy and utter surprise that the company had sent him precisely what he'd ordered.
Anna smiled back.
“So what branch of medicine are you in?” she asked.
“Good Lord, I'm surprised Reenie didn't tell you. She usually can't wait. She seems to be under the impression that what I do is terribly glamorous. Of course, it's not really. I'm a plastic surgeon.” His hand went to his watch strap once more.
Had there been any beer left in Anna's mouth, she would have choked on it. Instead, in one immediate reflex action her hands shot up from the table to her breasts, and down again.
Although she disapproved of cosmetic surgery for all the usual women-aren't-meant-to-have-bodies-like-Barbie-dolls, and aging-isn't-a-crime reasons, she wasn't sufficiently confident of her feminist stance to take off her clothes, fling a breast insouciantly over either shoulder and jump into bed with a cosmetic surgeon.
Her body could never be good enough for this man. He would always be trying to change her. Instead of flowers he would bring her implants. Instead of foreplay he would produce a protractor, calipers and scientific calculator to assess her droop and sag quotient. Anna saw them in their tender postcoital moments, thumbing through nose catalogues.
She decided there was no point spending the evening getting to know Alex. Sleeping with people meant getting naked, and she was about as likely to get naked in front of Alex as her mother was to give up her three-bottles-of-Jif-a-day habit.
She was on the point of making her excuses and leaving, when she came to and realized Alex was speaking to her, apparently oblivious to her horrified state.
“. . . So you see it was one of the main reasons,” he was saying, “I wanted to meet you.”
Anna apologized for appearing distracted and said something feeble about being a bit tired as she'd had a particularly busy day and could he say that last bit again.
Alex seemed quite happy to oblige.
“I was just making the point that when Reenie Theydon-Bois told me you were a journalist and worked for the tabloids, it struck me that we had rather a lot in common. I'm always having to justify why, after the government paid for me to spend seven years learning how to heal the sick, I am now devoting myself to satisfying the vanity of the well heeled. I thought that working for the tabloids you must receive your fair share of flack from the broadsheet brigade.”
“You could say that,” Anna said with heavy irony. It was as if the flag had gone up at the starting gate. She was off, rabbiting on about how she loathed having to justify what she did for a living. Barely pausing for breath or a sip of beer, she told him how she only worked for the tabloids for the money, but had, nevertheless, worked out this brilliant philosophical justification for the existence of tabloid newspapers, based on the fact that for years they had been the only part of the media which had dared tell the truth about the royal family, had been rubbished by the Establishment for doing so and proved ultimately right down to the finest detail; they had simply outreported, outresearched and outfaced the broadsheets, the BBC and the rest of the pompous media, and should be proud of their muckraking, not apologetic over it.
When she had finished, Alex said that he still got terribly hurt when people laid into him about what he did for a living. He said there had been two reasons for him becoming a plastic surgeon. The first was that despite what most of the world said, he genuinely believed he was helping people and improving the quality of their lives. He said it wasn't all face-lifts and breast implants. He regularly saw people with striking imperfections which the National Health Service refused to treat.
“Sometimes pinning back a teenage boy's bat ears can cure him overnight of the kind of hang-ups and insecurities it would take a therapist years to cure.”
For the sake of politeness Anna decided not to pursue her argument that it was mainly women who had cosmetic surgery and that in her opinion cosmetic surgeons were power-crazed men who wanted to control women by mutilating them.
Instead she played safe.
“So what was the other reason?”
“Same as yours. Money.”
To Anna's complete surprise, it turned out that Alex had been brought up by his widowed mother in a thirties row house in Hounslow. His father had died when he was three and his mother, who was a clerical officer at the public housing department, used to eat jam sandwiches for supper and make a tea bag do for three cups, in order to give him steak and piano lessons. When he passed the exams for public school she did extra typing in the evenings in order to pay the fees.
“Sometimes in the winter we would run out of coal. I remember her holding my hand as we walked the streets just to keep warm. From the age of about seven I knew I didn't just want to be well off. I wanted to be very rich indeed.”
Anna asked him if he had achieved his aim. He gave a self-mocking chuckle and admitted he was getting there.
She couldn't help wondering why, with all his money, he had brought her on such a cheap date.
Just then the waiter came to take their order. He was extremely matey and called Alex by his first name. They clearly knew each other very well. When the waiter had gone Alex explained that he ate at the Bhaji on the Bush at least four times a week. This was partly because ever since working at a hospital in Bradford years ago, he had become a curry-holic, and partly because he couldn't face going home.
Over chicken spinach, lamb passanda and pilau rice with fluorescent pink bits, Alex told Anna about his miserable marriage and why he had joined Liaisons Dangereux.
His wife, he explained, was American. Her name was Kimberley. She'd kept her maiden name, which was Tadlock. As they hadn't had sex for over a year, Alex had nicknamed her Padlock. He laughed as he said this, but Anna could almost taste the sadness behind the laughter.
Kimberley, he went on, came from the American Deep South. He had met her in 1981 while he was doing a year's internship at a hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. She was a theology student at UAB—the University of Alabama, Birmingham. Kimberley was also a part-time waitress at Vinny's Diner, a famous roadside eatery a few miles out of town.
“We met there one Saturday lunchtime in August. The day was so hot and humid it could have steamed peas.” He put down his fork and stared past Anna into the distance.
A group of them, all male doctors at the hospital, had driven out to Vinny's in an open-top fifties Chevy. They had been driving along the same empty stretch of country road for ages, going through one identical village after another. These had names like Nectar and Locust Fork. The small houses on either side of the road were wooden, single-story affairs with white picket fences and porches. Alex and his four mates were beginning to think they must have accidentally driven past Vinny's when one of them noticed the huge 7UP sign ahead. It came towards them, shimmering in the heat haze.
Vinny's turned out to be a huge painted shack with dozens of wood-effect Formica tables and red plastic bench seats. The place was sweltering. The rows of ceiling fans did little more than rearrange the heat.
Alex said that walking into Vinny's felt like walking into a Steinbeck novel. Being a weekend it was full of families, mainly white farming people. Everybody was wearing denim dungarees.
Alex and his friends stood waiting to be seated and watched huge plates of fried catfish or Southern-style chicken with candied yams being set down at the tables. Most of the waitresses were middle-aged, motherly women with thick ankles and rear ends as wide as Mobile Bay. The skirts of their pink nylon waitress uniforms hugged their hips like taut shrink-wrap.
There were two or three young, pretty waitresses. They wore their skirts short and their eyeshadow thick. After a couple of minutes one of them came smiling towards them.
She was about twenty, with freckles, excellent teeth and long red hair tied into a ponytail. She cocked her head to one side and said, “Hi y'all, Ahm Kimberley. I'll be your waitress fur today.” Then s
he turned to Alex and in a voice that was pure Blanche Dubois she whispered, “How're ya doin', sugar?”
There was a wiggle in her walk as she led the group to their table. Alex could see she was undoing a couple of the buttons down the front of her blouse. They sat down, and as she bent over Alex's end of the table to hand them the menu and go through the specials, he could see her huge breasts spilling out of a skimpy flesh-colored bra. In those couple of minutes, he fell in love.
According to Alex, over the weeks that he kept driving out to Vinny's on his own every Saturday and Sunday, Kimberley fell for his accent, navy blazer and brogues.
So it was that Alex and Kimberley started dating. After four lust-filled months they married in a tiny Baptist church in Locust Fork and came back to England.
They bought a Victorian house in Hammersmith which they did up. Kimberley went a bit overboard by buying four rocking chairs and trying to cover all the available wall space with cross-stitch samplers, but Alex didn't mind because he knew they reminded her of home. She bore him two ginger-haired, freckled children called Brandy and Jim Bob, filled the freezer with Mississippi mud cakes and pumpkin pies, and became a devoted fan of the Queen Mother and cream teas.
When Alex announced that he intended to specialize in cosmetic surgery, Kimberley wasn't sure if she approved.
“Seems downraht un-Christian,” she said, “to go meddlin' with what the good Lord dun give us.”
Nevertheless, she stood by her man. While Kimberley re-created down-home domestic bliss in Hammersmith, Alex pursued nips, tucks and large checks in Harley Street.
They had been happy until two years ago, when Kimberley started to put on a huge amount of weight. Alex would stand outside the kitchen and watch her stuffing her face with chips, pizza and Coke.
At first he thought his wife was trying to make a political or moral statement about how he earned his living. As the months went by and she became truly obese, he realized there was more to it than feminist ideology.
She now wore her long hair in a cheap corkscrew perm. She had also taken to wearing voluminous pink shorts which she asked her mother to buy for her at the local Wal-Mart back home. Kimberley's sister would buy them in packs of six and they would arrive in huge padded envelopes. Kimberley would team the shorts with glitzy T-shirts which had shoulder pads, white cotton socks with pom-poms and a mint-green eyeshade.
Kimberley, he realized, was turning herself into a caricature of a middle-aged working-class Southern woman. The reason for this was that she had become unspeakably homesick. Getting fat and wearing clothes from Wal-Mart put her back in touch with her roots.
Very soon she decided she wanted to rediscover Southern-style Christianity. She located a few expats in west London and together they set up their own Baptist chapter which they called the Evangelical Women of Salem in Hammersmith and Barnes.
Alex packed her off to Alabama one summer with the children, but it made no difference.
In fact it made things worse. When she got back she would only cook Southern-style food and began trying to locate possum suppliers in west London. Breakfasts became unbearable. Brandy and Jim Bob made it clear they preferred Coco Pops to grits, but she wouldn't listen. Nothing changed. Every morning they got up to find grits bubbling on the stove and Kimberley standing by the kitchen table holding a Bible, waiting to conduct morning prayers.
Every day she filled the children's lunchboxes with mountains of cold fried chicken, umpteen slices of pumpkin pie and great chunks of cornbread. What Brandy and Jim Bob couldn't eat they distributed like Red Cross parcels to their classmates. The other children, most of whom were on low-fat, low-salt, low-sugar diets, wolfed it down.
One mother phoned Kimberley and said that her little Anastasia was putting on weight eating all this Southern fried food. Her child, she explained, was used to live yogurt and pieces of sushi in her lunchbox. Kimberley got quite angry, saying they had sushi in Alabama too, but there it was called bait.
Her latest attempts to turn their bit of Hammersmith into rural Dixie included trying to get planning permission to build a stoop on the front of their house and insisting that because she took the children on so many camping trips they should invest in a thirty-foot Winnebago.
“When I asked her where we were going to park it, she said the Lord would provide. . . . I try to get home as late as I can each evening. If I get home too early she's either having a prayer meeting at the house or she and her good-old-girl friends are sitting on rocking chairs whittling and making patchwork quilts. I think the reason she refuses to have sex is because she feels trapped here with the children and blames me.”
Alex offered Anna some more lamb passanda. She smiled, said the food was lovely, but she was full and couldn't manage another bite. She watched him take some for himself.
She wasn't sure what to make of his tragicomic saga. He was either the most incorrigible joker, or his tale of Southern discomfort was genuine. Working for the tabloids, she was no stranger to the bizarre-but-true. She knew Brenda would call her a gullible tart, but she decided to give Alex and his story the benefit of the doubt.
“So,” Alex said, putting the stainless-steel lamb passanda dish back on the hotplate, “that's my story. What's yours? What made you phone Reenie Theydon-Bois?”
It was Anna's turn to put down her fork and stare into the distance. She had been dreading him asking that. She still had no intention of compounding her betrayal of Dan by discussing the problems in their marriage. Nor was she about to confess to Alex that one of the reasons she had contacted Liaisons Dangereux was because she needed another subject for her unorthodox journalistic experiment.
She was about to deliver a pre-prepared anodyne speech about twelve-year itches when all of a sudden her mobile phone started to ring. She picked up her bag from the floor and reached inside. She put the phone to her ear, but before she could say anything, the voice came at her, low, breathless and full of panic.
“Hello, Anna, is that you? It's me. Please don't be cross, but I need you to come over now, right away. Something dreadful has happened. I'm hiding in the airing cupboard. Anna, be quick, I'm terrified for my life.” Then the phone went dead.
The voice belonged to her mother.
C H A P T E R T H I R T E E N
“BRENDA!” ANNA YELLED. “FOR Chrissake take it easy. Did you ever have proper driving lessons or did you just take the correspondence course?”
Anna and Brenda were steaming towards Gloria's house in Stanmore. Anna couldn't believe Brenda was managing to get nearly eighty out of her ancient Zephyr.
Still in battle dress, she was flashing and hooting at anything which got in her way and then saluting her thanks as she careered past. Anna kept making the point that nobody could see her saluting in the dark, but she carried on doing it anyway.
Ignoring Anna's plea to take it easy, Brenda pulled out to overtake a lorry. In the process she cut off a Porsche which was careering down the outside lane. Anna winced, clutched her seat belt with one hand and shielded her face with the other.
“Brenda, for crying out loud . . . will you slow down and bloody listen?” she bawled. “There is absolutely no reason to get us killed. My mother has pulled stunts like this before. Whenever my father goes away her obsessions get worse. She's probably having a panic attack because she's run out of Flash liquid.”
For the umpteenth time, she leaned forward, picked the phone up off the dashboard and stabbed the redial button.
“Still engaged,” she spat, slamming the phone back on the dashboard. “My mother is a woman clearly so terrified for her life that she can't resist sharing her terror with all one hundred and twenty-six members of the synagogue ladies' guild.”
Brenda said nothing. Anna folded her arms, looked out of the window and sulked.
She was irritated not only with her mother, but with Brenda too. Anna had given her a brief outline of the Kimberley and Alex story. As she had predicted, Brenda had called her a gullible tart.
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“What you have to understand,” Brenda had said in a patronizing tone which got right up Anna's nose, “is that blokes like him tend to marry Sloane Rangers called Annabel—women who have amazing grace rather than sing it. Then, what usually 'appens is that during the week while she is safely stowed away in the country with the kids and the dogs, he's safe to bonk around in London. In 'is case I would guess it's mainly grateful face-lift patients. I'll bet you a tenner 'e's got the use of a flat over his Harley Street practice.”
“And what you have to understand,” Anna had replied coldly, refusing to allow Brenda to undermine her judgment, “is that I have spent my entire working life pursuing stories which sound like hoaxes and then turn out to be true. What about that tip-off I got last year about the woman in Shanklin who heard voices coming from inside her washing machine and called in a priest to get it exorcized, only to find a four-foot midget who'd hidden inside the drum when he was disturbed burgling the house?”
Brenda had grunted to indicate her partial submission.
“Just because you have a nose for a good story doesn't mean this bloke's genuine. I still think 'e sounds like a smarmy upper-class git.”
Suddenly the Zephyr lurched forward along its chassis as Brenda screeched to a tire-scorching, Disney-style halt outside the five-bedroom mock-Georgian house.
Getting out of the car, Anna could see all the curtains were drawn. She could hear nothing but the hum of traffic in the distance.
“It all looks perfectly normal,” she whispered. “She's probably got over her panic and gone to bed. I tell you, we are going to scare her witless if we just march in.”