by Fiona Neill
‘Is there anything that can go wrong?’ I question the girl behind the counter at the chemist.
‘Not if you follow the instructions,’ she says lazily, closing her magazine to look up at me. My mother slept with my boyfriend, I discovered my brother was my father, My dad ran off with my sister, read the headlines on the cover. Straightforward extramarital affairs are so last century.
‘Do you enjoy reading about that kind of thing?’ I ask her with curiosity.
‘I just skim it,’ she says, fiddling with a belly-button ring. Her stomach is not an obvious asset, and I wonder why she has chosen to highlight its burgeoning power in this way. ‘Unless it’s really unusual.’
I stop myself from asking her to define ‘really unusual.’
‘Have you ever read anything about people coming to harm from botched home eyebrow dyeing kits?’ I ask.
‘Never,’ she says emphatically.
So when Fred falls asleep in the pushchair on the way home from nursery after lunch and I have an hour to spare before I set out to pick up the other two boys from school, I decide to forge ahead with the eyebrow experiment. I race upstairs to get a mirror from the bathroom. It is the one Tom uses for shaving that magnifies everything. I stare at my face, like someone who has just had cataracts removed and is seeing herself clearly for the first time in years.
Every flaw is highlighted. The crow’s feet around my eyes have deepened to become channels that I imagine will one day be capable of directing tears down the side of my face. New trenches have opened, some in curious criss-cross fashion with vertical drops. I experiment with a few grimaces to work out exactly what facial expression might have caused these. I finally happen upon an unlikely combination that involves my mouth being wide open and my eyes being scrunched up until they are no more than small slits. Surely I cannot be unconsciously making this expression on a regular basis, unless I am doing it in my sleep.
My nose looks sharper and more pointed. Forever growing, I think, trying to envisage what it might look like in twenty years’ time. The skin on my neck looks slightly ruched. Still some way until I turn into a lizard. Or my mother. On my chin I have a small spot. By what curse do women suddenly develop adolescent spots in their thirties, I wonder? What potion of hormones is responsible for this betrayal? Still, a fine pair of eyebrows will compensate for all this and distract attention away from my flaws like a beautiful fireplace in a room with peeling paint. Then I discover that I have lost the instructions.
Not to be thwarted, I decide to press on. It all seems very straightforward. Women around the world do this kind of thing every day. I mix the dye and hydrogen peroxide with the satisfaction of someone doing a GCSE chemistry experiment. This simple motion makes me feel as though I am already regaining control of my life. I brush the dye on my eyebrows and wait for cosmetic alchemy to take place. When nothing happens after five minutes, I decide to repaint both eyebrows.
Then I start to search the house for tweezers, ready for the second part of the process. I lie flat on the floor in our bedroom to look under the bed, kicking away rejected pairs of trousers from this morning and sure enough the tweezers are there. So is the dice from Snakes and Ladders. And a credit card. These are the kinds of indicators that point towards a positive change in my fortunes, I think. Then I catch sight of Tom’s rabbit clock. It is already past three o’clock and if there is any hope of arriving at school on time, I will have to run most of the way.
I set off at a jog, pushing Fred, wondering how New Year’s resolutions can so quickly conspire against each other to pervert the course of natural justice. We are almost at school when Fred wakes up. He takes one look at me, shrinks back into his pushchair with a look of fear and starts howling loudly. I stop running for a moment to get a packet of sunflower seeds from the pocket of my coat, healthy snacks for children being part of my Great Leap Forward. My hands are slippery with sweat and it is difficult to open the packet. Finally I tear it open with my teeth and the seeds spill over the pavement. I make what I hope are soothing noises to prevent one of those cantankerous moods that can settle on an almost-three-year-old following an afternoon nap, when the only incentive to smile is a half-full packet of sunflower seeds.
He throws them angrily on the ground. Parents who have already collected their children walk by and stare at us as I kneel in front of Fred, trying to comfort him. The expressions range from empathetic smiles to poorly disguised disdain, according to the amount of exposure they have had to their own children, the mothers with most staff falling into the latter category.
‘Hairy monsters,’ he cries, and I assume that he has had a nightmare about the David Bowie song that made Joe so afraid at Christmas.
‘There aren’t any scary monsters,’ I say to him repeatedly, but he keeps pointing at my face. I feel a tap on my shoulder, and I know before I turn round that it will be Robert Bass, because even though Fred is in the midst of a tantrum, I feel a shiver wander down my body to settle somewhere in my groin.
I try to remember what Mark told me about voles. The prairie vole is monogamous and mates for life. Meadow voles on the other hand are promiscuous. Partners mate and move on. But the only real difference between them is hormonal.
‘You are a prairie vole, Lucy,’ Mark said. ‘I am a meadow vole.’
‘But I can empathise with the meadow vole’s position,’ I said.
‘That doesn’t mean that you need to act on those feelings,’ he said. ‘You might think you’re having nothing more than a casual conversation with this Sexy Domesticated Dad, but actually there is a complex chemical process taking place in your body, and if you feel there is a connection, then most likely there is. Science has proven that we are drawn to people with a particular set of genes, mainly through our sense of smell. Mates with dissimilar genes produce healthier offspring. This is what sexual chemistry is. Are you on the pill?’
‘Er, no,’ I said, unsure where all this was heading. ‘That’s good, because women on the pill have the opposite instincts and choose mates who are not genetically suitable,’ he said. ‘But that’s an aside. What I am really trying to say is that if you find each other attractive, it’s probably because an attraction exists. During intimate conversation, you release hormones, which create a bonding feeling with someone. In fact, there is empirical evidence to prove that the more you look into someone’s eyes, the more you find them attractive. So first and foremost, you should stop chatting to this man, to prevent the biochemistry of love taking over. And if you can’t do that, you need to remind your rational self that you have the willpower to stop yourself from crossing the line.’
‘What is the line?’ I asked him.
‘You’ll know when the time comes to decide whether to cross it. But my advice would be to step right back now, before you even come across it.’
‘Happy New Year, Lucy, good Christmas?’ asks Robert Bass in jolly fashion. I feel myself jump.
‘I am a prairie vole, I am a prairie vole,’ I whisper to myself in between Fred’s wails. It is a tricky dilemma. If I release him from the pushchair he is likely to prostrate himself on the pavement and turn himself into a dead weight, a secret weapon used by toddlers when they sense they might lose an argument. I decide to use my own secret weapon and pull out a packet of chocolate bears from my pocket. The cries immediately subside.
‘Did you just say that you are a prairie vole, Lucy?’ asks Robert Bass, eyeing the chocolate bears with disapproval. He is definitely more of a sunflower-seed man. Which probably makes him a meadow vole, sunflowers not being native to prairies.
‘Fred finds it comforting,’ I tell him.
Then I turn round to speak to him, still trying to avoid eye contact. I am not breaking resolution number 4, because Fred is with me, but I feel immediate guilt that my youngest child is unwittingly acting as chaperone.
‘Yes, sorting out schools for Sam, getting on top of everything. The usual,’ I say with conviction. This is not so difficult.
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sp; ‘Oh my God,’ he says, ignoring what I have said. ‘Where did they escape from?’ His face comes so close to me that I can feel his breath, warm against my cheek, a not unpleasant mix of coffee and mints. I fleetingly wonder, despite the presence of scores of parents from school and Fred, whether this is The Moment. Far from engaging my rational mind, I seem to have accessed ever more murky regions of my subconscious. This is what happens if you spend too much time talking to psychologists.
From the dim recesses of my memory, an incident of unreasonable passion, filed away years ago, elbows its way to the forefront in stunning detail. But it is not the detail of what occurred, rather the feeling of guilt that it engendered that grips my stomach first. Then I feel even more contrite, because this last moment of unreasonable passion was truly wicked, involving, as it did, a married man, and I thought I had condemned it to a part of my brain never to be accessed again.
Shortly before I married Tom, some time in the winter of 1995, just before the end of the Balkans War, the same colleague who had unwittingly provided solace during Tom’s infidelity found himself waiting for a cab home at the same time as me, in the early hours of the morning after a long session at Newsnight. We had never mentioned our fling the previous year and although we continued to circle each other with flirtatious enthusiasm, it was less meant than before, because we knew it should not be repeated lest it turn into a habit. Besides, now that he was recently married and I was due to be married in a few months, our colleagues viewed such lapses less indulgently.
I had returned from two weeks’ filming in Sarajevo. I knew that he missed me, because whenever I called, it was him who wanted to discuss details of what time I had set up my satellite feed, whom I had interviewed, whether I had remembered to wear my BBC issue flak jacket and helmet, which I hadn’t because there was a flap designed to protect the male anatomy which made me walk uncomfortably like a penguin.
That night, we all got drunker than usual after the programme finished. There had been a glitch in a feed from the US and the presenter was left improvising for about thirty seconds until we managed to make the connection. Iain Duncan Smith was in the studio answering questions about Srebrenica, and he always liked to stay late after the show, drinking in the Green Room into the early hours. And I was relieved to be back in London because I was getting married in four months and needed to find something to wear.
‘Can I share your cab?’ asked the colleague. I must have hesitated, because he added, ‘I’ll sit in the front in case you can’t resist.’ I smiled. Somehow this tacit acknowledgement of what had come to pass reassured me. He made the prospect sound absurd. Then he got in the back of the car.
We set off through the back streets of Shepherd’s Bush, heading towards my flat. Before we reached Uxbridge Road, his hand had crept towards my own until he was gently stroking it with his middle finger. I knew that I should move away from him, but every nerve ending on the back of my hand craved further attention and my willpower ebbed away until I felt that time pivoted around this small movement.
‘Come back to my flat, Lucy,’ he leant over to whisper in my ear.
‘What about your wife?’ I heard myself say.
‘She’s away,’ he said. Then we started kissing, fumbling around in the back of the taxi like teenagers, his knee pressed between my legs, his hand ever deeper inside my trousers. I tried to push him away when I saw the taxi-driver – they were all Bosnian or Serb at this company back then – vicariously enjoying the situation in his mirror. But it was impossible to resist and I allowed myself to enjoy the moment.
‘Change of direction?’ asked the taxi-driver, in a thick accent.
‘Yes,’ I said, reciting his address off by heart. And we spent the night together. Soon after that, he wrote his first script for a film and left Newsnight. I was relieved. He promised to keep in touch, but I knew that he wouldn’t and I didn’t see him again for years. The trouble with the memory of good sex is that, like a favourite restaurant, there is always the temptation to go back and try the same dish again, to see whether there is room for improvement. If Mark knew about this, he might feel more dubious about my status as a prairie vole.
So when Robert Bass reaches out and touches my eyebrow, I wonder what might happen next. Fortunately, eyebrows are a less erogenous zone and besides, he is staring at my face a little too intently. This is where Mark’s theory about eye contact breaks down, I think, relieved.
‘Forget Lucy Sweeney, it’s Denis Healey,’ he says in wonder. I bend down to look in the wing mirror of a nearby car. My eyebrows are no longer a whiter shade of pale. They have reinvented themselves as bushy black caterpillars. There are salty streaks of dye mingled with sweat running down my face. How will this react with hydrogen peroxide? Will I be left with streaks? I imagine the woman in the chemist avidly reading a piece about me under the headline Home dye experiment left me looking like tiger. I rub my eyebrows frantically and they look even more wild and unruly. The black dye comes off on my hand.
‘Definitely more southern hemisphere, I’m thinking jungles of Borneo,’ says Robert Bass wondrously.
Yummy Mummy No. 1 crosses the road to greet us, but as she closes in, she stands stock-still, her hands frozen in the air.
‘I’ll have to bleach them,’ I say desperately.
‘I wouldn’t do that,’ says Robert Bass. ‘Then you’ll look like a leopard. Or an albino lion. Or . . .’
‘I get the picture,’ I say.
‘No more homespun solutions, Lucy,’ says Yummy Mummy No. 1, taking control of the situation. ‘Think 1930s. Think pencil skirts. Think Roland Mouret. Scarlett Johansson. Think elegance is the new bohemian.’ Robert Bass listens agog. ‘Think Marlene Dietrich and narrow arched eyebrows by my discreet home plucker. She does Fiona Bruce. Come to my house next week.’
Robert Bass and Yummy Mummy No. 1 walk protectively on either side of me along the road to school, with their respective offspring a few steps behind, like the Praetorian Guard. They meet bemused looks with patronising smiles. I will have to revise my position on Yummy Mummy No. 1. Despite her natural inclination to herd with her own kind, she shows the right instincts in a crisis.
When we reach the queue of parents waiting to pick up year one children, there is a flutter of excitement in the air that is mercifully unrelated to my eyebrows. Parents would usually have left school long ago.
‘What’s going on?’ I whisper to Yummy Mummy No. 1. ‘Is everyone late?’
‘Haven’t you heard?’ she says conspiratorially. ‘A celebrity parent has joined our ranks. That’s why we’re thrilled by an excuse to come back to the playground.’
Just as January looked bleak and grey, Celebrity Dad has joined Joe’s class. Or rather his son has. I can’t reveal Celebrity Dad’s true identity for fear of encouraging paparazzi to lurk outside the school gates. But suffice to say that he is an American actor, a dark and brooding sex-in-the-lift kind of man, and, if you believe the tabloids, a notorious womaniser, despite the presence of wife number 3.
‘I anticipate children’s parties involving home cinemas, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a chance to mix with the rich and famous in a casual Issa-dress kind of way,’ says Yummy Mummy No. 1. I feel immediate sympathy for Celebrity Son, because he will always live in the shadow of his parents and even if he manages to overcome that setback, he will never feel that he has done it under his own steam.
Pheromones hover above the playground. I notice that Yummy Mummy No. 1 has pulled out all the stops and is carrying a white Chloe Paddington bag and wearing a fake-fur coat, rock-chick fashion.
I have to confess that I don’t recognise Celebrity Dad on first viewing, because he looks quite different from the photos I have seen in magazines. Also, I am only wearing one contact lens. A blurry scene unfolds something like this.
‘Mum, Mum, Fred is about to pee on that man’s foot,’ says Sam, as we wait outside the classroom for Joe to appear. Fred has discovered this is a unique way of grabbing par
ental attention away from his older siblings. Before I can intervene, his trousers are round his ankles and Fred pees on the man’s foot.
Celebrity Dad bends down to examine an expensive-looking trainer. I rush over and start mopping his foot with The Times, because I am not the sort of mum who carries wipes for all eventualities.
‘Fred, that is so naughty,’ I say, admonishing my youngest son. ‘Say sorry.’
‘Sorry,’ says Fred, smiling proudly.
‘No worries,’ says Celebrity Dad, wanting to appear laid-back but looking very worried. ‘Actually, I think the print will stain it.’ Too late, the print has stained the limited-edition trainer. I know it is limited, because Yummy Mummy No. 1, who is watching all this, tells me in hallowed tones later that, ‘It is the trainer equivalent of the Chloe Paddington. You can’t put a price on it.’
Robert Bass comes over and gives him wipes, because he is the sort of father who carries wipes at all times. He hovers but then walks away, because there is no excuse to hang around.
‘I’m really sorry,’ I say to Celebrity Dad.
‘It really doesn’t matter,’ he insists. ‘Actually, it’s quite nice to have someone talk to me. Everyone has ignored me apart from that woman over there. I guess that’s an English thing?’ He points to Alpha Mum. ‘She has asked me to join a committee to organise a party for parents.’
‘But we’re not having a party,’ I say.
‘But I agreed,’ he says with a puzzled expression.
‘Maybe it’s just you and her, then,’ I say quizzically.
‘What happened to your eyebrows?’ he asks.
‘Home-dyeing disaster,’ I tell him. Close up, even half-sighted, I can appreciate the overall gorgeous effect. Celebrity Dad collects his child and walks off. Mothers rush over to me.
‘What did you talk about?’ asks Yummy Mummy No. 1.
‘His marital problems, whether he should change agents, why he doesn’t have a nanny, the inside story,’ I tell them nonchalantly.