Nip n tuck, p.1
Nip 'n' Tuck, page 1
NIP ‘N’ TUCK
ALSO BY KATHY LETTE
Till Death Do Us Part
HRT: Husband Replacement Therapy
Best Laid Plans
Courting Trouble
Love is Blind (But Marriage is a Real Eye-Opener)
The Boy Who Fell to Earth
Men: A User’s Guide
To Love, Honour and Betray
How to Kill Your Husband (And Other Handy Household Hints)
Nip ‘n’ Tuck
Dead Sexy
Altar Ego
Mad Cows
Foetal Attraction
The Llama Parlour
NIP ‘N’ TUCK
KATHY LETTE
www.headofzeus.com
First published in the UK in 2001 by Picador,
an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd
This edition published in 2024 by Head of Zeus,
part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Kathy Lette, 2001
The moral right of Kathy Lette to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 9781035901869
Cover design: Jesssie Price / Head of Zeus
Head of Zeus Ltd
First Floor East
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM
About the Book
Journalist Lizzie McPhee has always thought of beauty as a case of mind over matter – if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
But all that changes when she begins the countdown towards the big 4-0. Suddenly, she’s comparing her butt buoyancy to that of women on billboards and worrying about wrinkles.
But the pitter-pitter-pat of tiny crow’s feet is soon the least of Lizzie’s worries. In the space of twenty-four hours, she is replaced as news anchor by a young himbo who keeps fit by doing step aerobics off his own ego. And then she catches her surgeon husband Hugo cheating with catty soap actress Britney Amore – a woman whose bra cup size is bigger than her IQ.
Suddenly, Lizzie is in free fall. Can she turn back the clock, and win back her life? Or will she discover there’s a better way to grow older gracefully?
Contents
Also by Kathy Lette
Title Page
Copyright
About the Book
Dedication
Epigraph
1. Introduction: The Pitter Pitter Pat of Tiny Crows’ Feet
2. Are you Sure You Need Only One Cake For All Those Candles?
3. Medics! We Have Incoming!
4. Too Old to Lambada, Too Young To Die
5. If I Can’t Have It All, Can I At Least Have Some of Hers?
6. You Turn Me On Like a Cuisinart, Baby
7. When You Wish Upon A Michelin Star
8. Many a True Word Is Spoken Ingest
9. It Is as Bad as It Gets and They Are Out to Get You
10. Husband Uncertainty Syndrome
11. Never Darken My Dior Again
12. Having Your Cake and Not Eating It Too
13. What Am I? A Hamster?
14. Is That A Wallet in Your Pocket or Are You Just Pleased to See Me?
15. Long Day’s Journey into Shite
16. With a Husband Like Mine, Who Needs Enemas?
17. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Marriage! It Smells, Tastes, Looks and Spreads Like Marriage, But It Just Isn’t
18. The Night Is Young, but You Are Not
19. A Stitch in Time – Now That Really Would Have Confused Einstein
20. All Stressed Out With No One To Kill
21. Say Goodbye To Childhood, Hello To Adultery
22. Sigmund Freud Floor – Neurosis, Psychosis, Paranoid Schizophrenia, Delusions of Normality And Ladies’ Lingerie, All Exit, Please
23. Shopping and Tucking
24. Ladies and Gentlemen, Due to Illness, Tonight the Part of Lizzie McPhee Will Be Played by Pamela Anderson … Now Sit Back and Enjoy the Show
25. ‘I’m a Natural Blonde, So Please Speak Slowly’
26. The Boobed Job
27. I’m So Miserable Without You, It’s Almost Like You’re Here
28. Relying on the Kindness of Passing Serial Killers
29. Premature Cremation
30. That Was Then, This Is Noir
31. Ugliness Is In The Eye of the Beholder: Get It Out With Optrex
Acknowledgements
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
This book is dedicated to my children, Georgina and Julius, without whom I would look years younger.
‘God has given you one face and you make yourselves another.’
– Hamlet
1
Introduction: The Pitter Pitter Pat of Tiny Crows’ Feet
LET ME INTRODUCE myselves.
First there’s the me who is often found flirting with lettuce fronds on my front tooth. The me who doesn’t use hair conditioner because it takes too long. The me who, only this morning, got my antihistamine and spermicide sprays confused. Now I have a vagina that can breathe more freely and nostrils I can safely have sex in for at least six hours.
This is the me whose idea of ‘working out’ is a good, energetic lie down. (There is growing medical evidence, you know, that jogging can make you hot and sweaty.) The me who understands that if shop mannequins were real women, they’d be too thin to menstruate. (I mean, hello? There are three billion women in the world who don’t look like super-models. And only six who do.) Hey, if you’re feeling fat, just make sure you always stand next to a heavily pregnant woman – take one with you everywhere. That’s my advice. And wear tights that control your excesses the way the Taliban controls Afghanistan.
It’s the me who only shaves my legs to the hemline in summer. In winter I’m too lazy to shave at all. I wear thick tights and hope nobody notices the spikes porcupining through my Lycra. As for holes? I simply paint my leg in black felt pen. Even when I do shear, I always miss a bit and end up sporting a hirsute median strip down the back of one leg. And you could use a curling wand on those pubes. I like my bikini line, goddamn it. It’s like having a little pet in my pants. Which is why I favour, at the beach, the Channel-crossing-neck-to-knee circa 1922 look. Nothing better than a sturdy, orthopaedic bathing suit.
My other sartorial preference is trackie daks. My motto is – if it fits, don’t wear it. I like to wear clothes baggy enough to cover an aircraft carrier; teamed with voluminous knickers – yes, my panty-line is always visible. I have a positive allergy to G-strings. Hey, if I needed a curette, I’d bloody well go to a hospital and get one.
The same me who’s always thought of beauty as a case of mind over matter – if you don’t mind, it don’t matter. The me who allows all that ageing Angst to fly right under my anxiety radar. The me who doesn’t think age is relevant, unless you’re like, you know, a Stilton. You never see Cheddar cheeses undergoing Dermagen soft-tissue augmentation, now, do you?
This me mouths off tipsily at dinner parties that make-up generates more money than armaments. ‘And when you think about it, that’s exactly what all those beautification products are, really – ammunition in the sex war.’ (My girlfriends are usually making ‘Who lit the fuse on your tampon?’ taunts by now.) ‘Most cosmetic manufacturers are French. What does that tell you? That they’re full of bullshit and LOUD about it. That’s what.’ (You’re starting to be amazed that I have any friends, right?)
But honestly. ‘The Science of Beauty’ … puh-lease. If these so-called beauty scientists are so bloody brilliant, why aren’t they off fixing the hole in the goddamn ozone layer? Given the choice between an episiotomy and listening to a beauty therapist, I’d say, ‘Get the scalpel.’ It’s nothing but protein-enriched witchcraft. The only reason a moisturiser is called a ‘miracle cream’ is because it’s such a bloody miracle that anyone would fork out fifty frigging quid for it.
That’s the me who thinks ‘free radical’ refers to Nelson Mandela. The me who hears myself described as a ‘lady’ – and reels around looking for the Duchess of Kent. Despite the fact that I’m a presenter for the BBC’s The World News Today, I’m obviously just impersonating an Adult. Actually, I’m immaturing with age. At work, after I’ve boiled down the day’s events into digestible yet nourishing news bites, I waste entire afternoons thinking up profoundly puerile nicknames for my superiors. After I’ve reported on the latest volcanic eruption or political corruption, I am often to be found alone in my office, miming along to Destiny’s Child singles using my deodorant as a microphone, or hanging out with the make-up girls, making prank phone calls to the Prime Minister’s office and Xeroxing our labial regions.
That’s the me I like – the one who’s been known to drink huge amounts of vodka and wake up stark naked in an unfamiliar nation with nipple jewellery. The me who only leaves a cocktail party when abducted. Or at knifepoint. The low-maintenance, high-value, worldly me who can say in sixteen languages, ‘
But then there’s that Other Me.
That Other Me recently rear-ended a police car because I was scrutinizing my face in the rear-view mirror for signs of photo-ageing. This Other Me’s body is coated in creams thick enough to trap small domestic creatures – cats, squirrels, passing pet mice, they’re all to be found stranded and struggling on my nether regions. Honestly, of late I’ve been dousing myself in a potion quotient to rival the petrochemical output of Iraq. My husband, Hugo Frazer MD, could develop Gulf War Syndrome from just one kiss. Actually, I’m terrified I’ll start some toxic chain reaction by accidentally using a Revlon décolletage softener with a Clarins abdominal cellulite gel and just EXPLODE! There’ll be bits of me all over the bloody room. Well, at least those beauty products will live up to their claims to ‘stop ageing in its tracks.’
This Other Me feels trapped in a body that is no longer mine … which is why I’m wheezing and panting my way to an early death on the hamster wheel of self-improvement … And why I’ve given up the New York Review of Books in favour of magazine articles entitled ‘Ten Tips For Toning Thunder Thighs’.
This Other Me is backstroking up and down the pool of Narcissus, at torpedo speed … This Other Me feels so ugly that I worry if people so much as glance at me they’ll need a cornea transplant, pronto.
What the hell is wrong with this woman? I hear you ask. If her brain were a toy the box would read ‘Batteries Not Included’; produced by a company called Morons R Us. I mean, why the schizophrenia?
Why? Because I’m thirty-nine.
That’s why.
At thirty-nine, you go to bed one night as usual, your normal, scuzzy old self, in your husband’s faded Arsenal shirt, with a smudge of toothpaste on your chin and a bit of dental floss still wedged between your fangs, encased in your favourite pair of moth-eaten cottontails, the ones with the hole, the stain and the erratic elastic (just in case you get your period) – only to wake up a Spandex-wearing gym junkie with pores in need of constant rehydration, a personal trainer, a Jungian analyst, a car shaped like a sex aid, a nail technician, a toy-boy fixation and having whole conversations about seaweed facials and tantric clitoral lavage.
Beautification techniques to which you’ve never given a moment’s thought suddenly take up more of your brain space than third-world debt. If I had to choose between starting a new diet and eradicating world hunger, I’d have to ask, ‘Um … Slimfast or Jenny Craig?’
El Niño and the ensuing environmental destruction are less worrying than the discovery of a new wrinkle. Wrinkle? Who am I kidding? I’ve got enough crows’ feet to start a bird sanctuary. Actually, they’re not crows’ feet: they’re bloody great ostrich prints … Who let the pterodactyls loose? Apparently they’ve been stomping all over my face and I didn’t damn well notice.
It’s as if UFO rays from some outer galaxy have been beamed into your brain making you agonize over, of all things, inner thigh elasticity. Just as quickly all the money in your purse evaporates, teleporting itself into the bank vaults of cosmetic companies. And for what? Some ‘wonder cream’ that they can’t tell you exactly how they make – but, put it this way, two hundred ferrets went into the laboratory, and only two hobbled out, and those had grown a couple of extra heads and undergone some mysterious sex change.
But who cares? You bloody well buy it anyway. You seem to have developed a chronic inability to say ‘No’ to Harrods beauty assistants. Puréed pig erections? Yes, please. Ground sheep embryos in a handy, handbag-size dispenser? Hell, yes. Good God, if beauty experts told me to eat my own sanitary towel for an invigorated complexion, I’d damn well do it.
All of a sudden, sunlight, late nights, alcohol, coffee and everything else that makes life worth living are not DC – Dermatologically Correct. With no prior warning, I find myself unexpectedly wanting to put a cosmetic surgeon’s kids through private school. Out of the blue, I’m comparing my butt buoyancy to women on ten-foot billboards and making lists of all the females I know who are younger and more slender of thigh than I.
Me, Lizzie McPhee, a woman who could put a builder in a headlock as soon as his lips so much as pursed towards a wolf whistle. Me, Lizzie McPhee, a mouthy brunette who has been known to kick-start her own vibrator.
At least I’m not the only one making such a moron of herself. It seems to me all women over thirty-nine – from the double agent who smashed terrorist cabals to the aviatrix who crash-landed on a Himalayan peak – find themselves, contrary to all expectations, transmogrified into demented Barbie wannabes, desperate for an elixir to combat the terrible, incurable disease afflicting females – age. It’s not racial but facial prejudice – a discrimination only suffered by women. (I mean, Woody Allen still gets laid, right?) For females, word-play is foreplay. But for blokes? Well, if manners maketh man, make-up maketh woman. And we don’t need a phalanx of behavioural scientists to explain why men judge women by their looks. Because they see better than they think.
Is it any wonder that once you hit thirty-nine a woman’s IQ halves when she’s within the vicinity of a new beauty product? Why we huddle around the latest anti-ageing cosmetic like an underground movement in touch with the free world?
For females, turning forty is more dangerous than a beach thong in a big surf.
I blame Mother Nature (two-faced bitch!) and Father Time (bloody bastard!). Yep, those misogynistic killjoys have cut off my pocket money and left me grounded. With those two authoritarian heavyweights ganging up, what chance does a woman have, I ask you? … Which is how I ended up here, halfway through my thirty-ninth year, in a pastel-wallpapered, Muzak-saturated hospital recovery room, pulverized, puking and punch-drunk on painkillers. Mummified in bandages, I’m like a Christmas present waiting to be oohed and aahed over at my own unwrapping.
But will I ‘ooh’ and will I ‘aah?’ Or will this be the day I’m going to wake up, look at the algae wrapped around my abdomen and the raspberry enema pipe stuck up my bum and say to myself, ‘You fucking idiot’?
Bristling with needles and woozy from the anaesthetic, I try to swim back up into consciousness, but am weighted down by the enormity of what I’ve done. So much has happened over the past year to propel me here – adultery, incest, death, divorce … an accident with a do-it-yourself Brazilian Bikini Home Waxing Kit …The facts keep toppling down on me. I dimly recall that it all began last June, on my birthday. That’s when I first felt that my age was forcing me to hitch-hike on the hard shoulder. And Life was the lorry that had just zoomed by …
2
Are You Sure You Need Only One Cake For All Those Candles?
THE THIRTY-NINTH BIRTHDAY began much as any other day – a cup of cold coffee and a guinea-pig-poo pellet. As I tell my BBC news producer, the reason I’m often ignorant of the latest political development is that my kids always use the morning paper, before I’ve read it, to line the hamster cage. I have the best-informed rodents in the western world.
My husband Hugo handed me a hurriedly wrapped weed-whacker, for the newly landscaped garden – which had no weeds. ‘And they say romance is dead.’ I laughed. He was dashing to the hospital to save some poor bastard who’d blown out his carotid artery by driving into a lamp-post and self-ejecting face first through his sunroof.
But in truth, it was this very quality of altruistic dedication that had first attracted me to him. God, what was it now? Ten – no, eleven years ago. I’d smashed my jaw to smithereens when I’d fallen off the Berlin Wall. The only casualty of the Velvet Revolution. (What can I tell you? It’s a gift.) My then employers CNN flew me back to the London Hospital where I spent the next two weeks watching Hugo Frazer stride purposefully from ward to ward, as though on invisible skis. You see, my husband is a cranio-maxillo-facial surgeon. He jigsaws together landmine victims, excises cancerous tumours or corrects horrendous Elephant Man birth disfigurements, mostly in gruelling twelve-hour operations. His confidence is as broad as his shoulders, broad enough to advertise on. With his big build, blue eyes and engagingly craggy face (as though in training for the vacancy that will be left when Robert Redford’s arteries harden), it took me exactly two examinations to fall in love.
