As if sensing himself thought about, Dr Nadir walked into Claire’s room and approached her bedside, shooing the nurse away with the density of his arrival. He was dressed, as always, in an Armani suit, unbuttoned to allow for his paunch, and he carried a leatherbound folder holding Claire’s papers. He glanced at these briefly through the bottom half of his bifocals, and nodded to Claire.
“Now, you understand what’s going to be done to you today?” Despite his rich brown skin, he had that English-academic-type voice that all successful doctors in private practice seemed to have, as if he’d been left, a black infant foundling, on the doorstep of a prestigious medical university. “Yes,” she said at last.
“And what’s that?” rejoined Dr Nadir. His tone was still lazily authoritative, but with a subtle highlight of playful condescension. Was he enjoying this? Or simply checking he had the right patient in front of him?
“Um... You’re going to give me a... a new vagina...” she stammered.
She knew as soon as she’d said it she’d branded herself contemptibly ignorant in his eyes. The word that had come to her first was cunt. The word she should have used was vulva, but she’d had a mental block on it and instead used the one she’d been taught at school, in the quaint pre-New Woman days.
“Hardly,” sighed the doctor, with a little grimace of offended pedanticism. “Your vagina has nothing to do with this procedure. I am going to surgically reshape your vulva, involving some reduction and compaction, and possibly some implants. This is the procedure you have requested and for which you have signed these consent forms. Yes?”
“Yes,” said Claire again. It seemed the only vaguely intelligent thing she had to say to him.
“Good,” he murmured, consulting his watch. “I’ll see you in theatre, then, in about twenty minutes.”
He said it as if they were rendezvousing at a restaurant of mutual choosing; so much so that, for a moment, Claire was anxious about how she’d get to this theatre – how would she find it, never having been there before? But of course, the clinic staff would fetch her when the time came. “Thank you,” she said, and he was gone.
She settled back against the pillow and turned her head to the great bay window, because all of a sudden her room was weirdly dim despite the electric lights. Outside, a soundproofed blizzard of snow was whirling past the glass, vagueing out the world. Next summer seemed a long way away, and Claire had a sudden flush of anxiety that by then, a different cunt might be in fashion. Wouldn’t it be terrible if there were some sort of fashion revolution, and suddenly Ws were considered gross? But no, it must be the pre-med fuddling her judgement: Ws were an eternal standard. There’d been a retrospective in US & THEM magazine, showing all the drop-dead-gorgeous women in history, from babe-of-the-moment Arlette Binchois right back through Livvy Warren, Steffie Kerr, Kiki Farouf, even really ancient ones like Pamela Anderson – all Ws. Plus of course, all very young girls were naturally Ws, and that just proved that being anything else was giving in to the creeping deterioration of age.
Belatedly, she became aware that she was sweating so much that she had soaked the underarms of her theatre gown. Was her cunt really so bad that she had to... do something... drastic? Sluggishly she threw off the bedcovers and pulled the gown up onto her abdomen, trying to examine herself, but of course she couldn’t see anything. Cunts were for other people to see.
At home, using mirrors, she’d examined hers endlessly though, hadn’t she? It was definitely not right. It wasn’t a W, wasn’t even a vee. It was heading in the direction of something horrible and flaccid and old, like limp cabbage or lettuce. She should have got it fixed in her early twenties, not waited until she was about to turn thirty.
It wasn’t as if Claire was a surgery junkie like some women. She hadn’t even had her breasts done, which all her friends certainly had. It just so happened that her breasts were OK, she thought. In fact, they were so good that everyone assumed she’d had them done anyway. She almost felt like a fraud. Whenever she unhooked her bra, she always feared that a man’s gaze would droop slightly in disappointment, but this had never happened. Not that she’d had a man for ages now. She didn’t want anything to do with them for a while: she’d been hurt too much.
This operation, in fact, was her way of reclaiming lost self-esteem. Relationships with men flagellated her emotions, until she was mutilated, out of shape, bits of her hanging out everywhere. Surgery allowed you to become streamlined again; it planed back the damage.
This wasn’t her first cosmetic surgery, though. She’d dabbled. As an assertion of adult independence, she’d had some microsuction done on her cheeks two days after her eighteenth birthday. She hadn’t even needed a general anaesthetic. The doctor had inserted the long needle behind her ear and hoovered it into her jowls, slurping away some of what her mother had always fondly (but repulsively) referred to as puppy fat. Cheekbones had materialized before her very eyes. A few years later, following endless grief with her parents, she’d noticed a premature frown line forming above the bridge of her nose, and had that fixed with a wee implant.
But nothing major until now. She hadn’t had the money, for one thing. Plus there was the problem of sleeping in a strange place, and the dream.
Her best friend Chloe had had almost every cosmetic operation imaginable, but then she’d always been wealthy, or at least attracted the wealth of others. And, of course, she was pushing forty.
Chloe was a great friend to Claire, though. She’d visited her last night, right here in the hospital, even though it was a Friday night and The Aquarium wasn’t reserving tables for anyone anymore.
Chloe had arrived looking like a sixties icon, sprung from the pages of YOU ME US. She had, after all, been born sometime in that decade, the high point of the previous century, and liked to claim she remembered it well, despite looking a whole generation too young. To emphasise the point, she also liked to wear original sixties clothes, not modern copies; she bought them at Sotheby’s or paid hard-up students commission to find them for her at street markets.
In Chloe’s opinion, wearing mass-produced clothes was no different from eating at McDonalds or drinking coffee from a vending machine, but she was tolerant enough to forgive her friends for apparently disagreeing. Now here she was on Claire’s bed, sporting an ankle-length, wing-collared dress worn by Nico in La Cicatrice Intérieure, the slit neckline swaying over her bra-less breastbone. Claire’s nightgown, by contrast, was a Harvey Nichols number. The two women’s eyes met; understood; and let it go.
“Chloe, you shouldn’t have,” Claire had protested, so relieved to have Chloe’s miraculous body perched at the end of her bed.
“Oh, there are other places to eat than The Aquarium,” pooh-poohed Chloe with a flick of her hand. “Not many, though,” she added with a knowing cocktail shake of the eyeballs.
Pleasantries over, Chloe got down to what really mattered. “Are you scared?” she asked concernedly, leaning close.
“Maybe a bit,” said Claire. It was a guess. She was too scared about the dreams to know how scared she was about the surgery.
Chloe gave her the low-down on the operation, at once frank and reassuring. She’d had vulvoplasty herself, though not in Britain, but on one of her trips to Paris with Brett. It was an impulse thing: she’d just saved herself thousands of pounds in VAT and whatnot, by buying clothes at source, and then she’d actually met a darling of a surgeon at a do, and next day she was in a clinic having her cunt done. It was only really sore for a week or so afterwards; after that the big problem was boredom. You had to lie on your back all day waiting for your perfect W to heal enough for you to be able to sit down on it.
“It also depends,” elaborated Chloe, “whether you have your clitoris worked on or not.”
“N-no,” breathed Claire, oddly squeamish. “I... He’ll leave that alone, I think. I mean, we didn’t discuss anything about that. I certainly haven’t paid for anything to be done.”
“Oh, good,” affirmed C
hloe. “Some women get the hood trimmed and the clitoris enlarged a bit, but I think that’s a bit tacky, quite frankly. I suppose it would suit sex maniacs who want to be turned on all the time.”
“No, I’ve opted for the... ah... classic look,” said Claire.
She had, too: smooth, rounded pubis and outer labia, firm rosebud inner labia, the untidy flaps tidied up, splayed out symmetrically and fixed in shape with plastic underwiring. She had been offered a variety of styles like different collars of a jacket; Claire knew that Geraldine Walsh had had hers fashioned into an exact replica of Marilyn Monroe’s mouth (sideways, presumably) but that was so crass and unnatural and so American. Claire had chosen a classic cunt, a cunt which would keep its value, a cunt she could wear forever. In the end, there was no arguing with the soundness of the decision, and Chloe ran out of reassurances. Instead, she became abruptly playful.
“So,” she smirked. “What does your surgeon look like?”
“Look like?” echoed Claire.
“You know,” prompted Chloe. “Is he dishy?”
“No way!” Claire exclaimed, then immediately wavered. “Well... maybe in a rugged way. He’s kind of... fat.” She shrugged non-commitally, not wanting to be caught out. There’d been a real fashion for ugly men recently, sparked off initially by a fad for French stars of the 1950s and 60s – Jean-Paul Belmondo, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Brel – and Claire wasn’t sure if it was all over. She preferred Adonises herself. Or actually, she wasn’t certain anymore: men were increasingly alien creatures and nobody seemed to agree on what they were really supposed to look like.
Chloe wound up her visit by presenting Claire with a gift: a little something, she said, to celebrate the new cunt with. From an elaborately wrapped cocoon of crepe paper, Claire extracted a pair of Pierre Artisse leggings, the last word in chic for Ws. They were black with a spidery grey brocade woven down the sides, loops at the waist for a belt (leggings with belts were the absolute latest thing) and of course cut very tight in the crotch and thighs, to separate the legs and show off the cunt contours. Tears sprang to Claire’s eyes, at the thought of having a friend who would buy her something like this. She embraced Chloe impulsively, their first-ever physical intimacy, and Chloe made her embarrassed excuses and left.
Alone again, Claire slumped back and looked at the window. She couldn’t tell what the weather was like outside, as it was pitch dark now and the glass reflected, with fluorescent-strip clarity, Claire’s own body in the hospital bed. She wept some more, clutching the Pierre Artisse leggings, then got worried she’d damage them with her nails.
She consulted the digital clock on the DVD player under the dormant television (yes, this place had everything!) and was surprised how sleepy she was at such an early hour. Though it hadn’t been so very long since dinner, the dream – the nightmare – was already peering through the spyhole of her consciousness. She shut her eyes tightly, which of course only made it worse.
It was always the same dream. She had no others anymore. As a child, she’d been all kinds of things in her sleep; her dream self might be a princess, a warrior maiden, a sports champion, a detective, a witch. She’d even dreamed of not being human anymore: a bright young fish exploring the limitless ocean, a seagull cruising over misty clifftops. Once, when she’d been very young, she’d seen a TV show about the weather, and that night had dreamed about being a snowflake, spiralling gently down through the sky. Each snowflake was different, the show had said. Another time she’d dreamed of being a bat – furry, tiny, ugly and infinitely self-satisfied, flying around at the speed of a flashlight, then folding up to sleep with thousands of other bats in a warm cave somewhere.
Nowadays in her dreams – in the dream, singular, because it was the only one left – she was exactly the same person as when she was awake. The dream would find her lying in bed, starving hungry as usual after another long day of staying size 10. A man had promised to come in the morning and take her away from her loneliness: all she had to do was be good and stay beautiful until he came. But always she would get up out of bed, helplessly, and she would walk through the tasteful emptiness of her house until she came to the kitchen. There she would kneel at the refrigerator, in the pale light of its opened door, and examine its contents. Everything she ever yearned to eat was there; no one treat in particular, just food in all its different forms. With a squeal of rage and desire she would lurch forward, plunging her hands inside the luminous metal torso in search of its soft and perishable heart. Everything she pulled out she ate, like an animal, clawing meat off polystyrene trays, guzzling milk and custard, scooping fatty gunge out of plastic tubs with her fingers, ladling up gravy in the palms of her hands, swallowing hard on leaking mouthfuls of the raw and the cooked. This would go on for hours and hours, until finally at dawn she would glance aside, and suddenly see a pair of grey-trousered male legs standing right next to her, and, below them, polished black shoes half-submerged in a glutinous moat of spilled food. Then she would scream, and the scream would wake her, and then she would rush to the kitchen in a panic to check that she’d really been dreaming, and that the fridge was neat and clean and contained only what was supposed to be there, untouched, with plenty of chilly space around it.
Claire tried to tell herself that she couldn’t possibly have the dream in hospital – there was no kitchen, no fridge to go to. Yes, that’s what she had to keep reminding herself, as a way of immunizing herself against the dream. But then she realized that there must be a fridge somewhere nearby – for drugs and urine samples. Queasily, she glimpsed the possibility of having a cruel hospital variant of her nightmare, where she squatted in front of some clinical icebox, greedily consuming human waste.
However, when the time actually came, on that first night in the hospital, she hadn’t dreamed the dream after all. She’d slept like a lamb.
Now it was tomorrow already, and here she was full of pre-med, waiting for her turn under the blade. She was relaxed and dozy, enchanted by the snow swirling silently outside, compliant as the orderlies scooped her childishly light body off the bed and transferred it onto a trolley.
Even Dr Nadir, when he saw her minutes later, seemed pleasantly surprised by how close to unconsciousness she already was, on a drug so weak.
“Now,” he said, as the anaesthetist was injecting her with the real thing. “I want you to think of what year it is, and count backwards from it.”
“2009, 2008, 2007... 2006...” began Claire, thinking she would probably make it as far as the 1960s. But by 2003, she was already under.
HANNAH’S TALE – FLAT
Lucy Golden
Lucy Golden is an intensely private person: she is unwilling to publish her biographical details, considering the intimate revelations in her books to be more than adequate. She says, ‘My books and stories are extremely personal. They are drawn from the very deepest parts of my mind and if you don’t know me after reading them, you never will.’ Her fiction is based both on her own experiences and those of friends; these people are not impossibly rich, nor are they cardboard cutouts. They are real people, with real families, real lives, real careers, who all have a keen interest in sex which they have shared with the author. This populist element in her writing could explain why Lucy Golden has built up such a devoted following.
It wasn’t the day Mike left. That had been a day of betrayal and bitterness; of loathing him and loathing everything he stood for and everything he had ever owned or touched (including me). It was a few weeks later, the day Mike came back, with that smarmy little cow waiting outside for him while he went through the flat in a carnage of bin bags and cardboard boxes packing up all his stuff. But that was all it was: just stuff. And yet he was tearing our life apart: not our lives (plural), not separate lives, but that one indivisible wholeness which had made us one thing, drawing together the clouds and the trees and the earth and the whole universe into a single being which was us and meant eternity.
Tearing up the long slow Sundays when
we wouldn’t leave the flat for a single minute, because that was the one day we cooked a meal together, pulled out the table and laid the cutlery and glasses. Real food – cooked food – that we took turns to prepare and spent the rest of the day quietly enjoying and digesting as we flopped out in front of videos or read books. Tearing up those warm days walking out into Ken Wood or Hampstead Heath. Or further, to real countryside and forest, to places where there was only sky and birds or insects to watch us curl up together, sliding hands inside the clothes that had been so carefully selected to be unobstructive. On other days, the shorter days, it would just be the Common, where the limitations would be tantalising but the danger of discovery would be greater and the lovemaking more intense, a magic that rather than being spoiled had actually been enhanced by the two occasions when that danger became reality.
Ripping into those Friday evenings when – sometimes – we could both finish work on time and would meet in that disgusting smoky little pub where we drank too much. And that often led to a film, but certainly a takeaway pizza devoured in our bed with a bottle of wine, drunk straight from the bottle, or from each other’s mouths or stomachs or Mike would – well Mike had options I didn’t. Until the whole bed was a disgusting mess of spilt wine and smears of tomato sauce: slices of greasy mushroom on the sheets and on our skin; slivers of cheese laid in a trail down my front where I bribed his mouth to follow. By now the ice-cream would be half melted but still cold: goose-pimpling, nipple-hardeningly cold when he scooped fingerfuls into my mouth and across my body and I wrapped handfuls round his cock; instant deflation that I quickly repaired when I turned the sticky cold to slippery cool between steady stroking hands. And afterwards we slept like that, wallowing in the disgustingness of it all and waking in shamefaced delight at our squalor. The bath together was the best bit before the sheets were stuffed into the washing machine and we remade the bed, smirking, each taunting the other with how decadent we had become and drawing strength from the security of having shared such private and unspeakable delights.
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