Callie Reynolds sat in the cosmetic surgeon’s chair and winced.
This was going to hurt, no doubt about it.
‘I think you need a little more filler ...’ Frederica, the cosmetic surgeon pointed, ‘... just there. A little lift.’
Callie held the small mirror up to her face and knew why she never had enlarging mirrors in her bathroom. Up this close in the heavily magnified dermatologist’s mirror, she looked about seventy and her skin was as pitted as Pompeii on Day Two of the disaster. And as for the increasing growth of fine facial hairs ...
If it kept up this way, she’d look like a baby chicken by the time she was sixty.
Once, sixty had seemed old, but not now. She would be fifty in a month.
Fifty. She’d never thought she’d care and yet, now that it was around the corner, she found that she did. Worse, she kept thinking of her family and all the bridges she’d burned.
Was that why people hated the big birthdays? Not the age but the retrospection?
‘I don’t want to lookdone,’ she said again to Frederica, who was the best in Dublin.
‘Nobody who comes to me looksdone,’ said Frederica indignantly and then they both grinned. They’d often had this conversation. Just across the hall was a dermatologist who specialised in turning out people who looked expensively retouched from a distance of fifty yards when viewed even by people who were legally blind. They came out of her office with big lips, puffy cheeks and glassily smooth foreheads that couldn’t move a muscle even at the onset of an earthquake.
‘Sorry,’ apologised Callie. ‘I’m just anxious, Frederica. I feel old, irritable and anxious.’
‘Hormones,’ said Frederica firmly. ‘Have you seen anyone for HRT yet?’
‘No. It’s like admitting I need it. Being on the verge of menopause makes me feel so ...’ She searched for the word. ‘Ancient. Dried up. Unfeminine.’ There, she’d said it.
‘We all fight ageing the best we can, Callie. You could be mourning the lack of fertility. And for the moods with perimenopause, you need help. If you needed insulin, you’d take it. I’ve given you the name of the best gynaecologist I know, please see her.’
‘I know,’ muttered Callie. ‘I didn’t know it was going to be like this. I thought I’d sink into elegant fiftyhood and, instead, I just feel like a dried-out prune on the inside, with no sex drive. I’ve no energy and zero interest in the party my poor husband is planning.’
‘That’s sweet of him.’ Frederica went to the fridge where she kept her magical ampoules and filled up a syringe.
‘Yes, he’s very good,’ agreed Callie, even though she knew that Jason was driven to have the party for them, the fabulous Reynolds family, rather than as a love letter to her.
Jason, bless him, loved to show off.
She got ready for the pain as the doctor flicked on her special light, put on her glasses and looked closely at her.
‘So, where are you having this fabulous fiftieth birthday party?’
‘At home.’
It would all look amazing, though, she thought, almost tearfully. Jason would stop at nothing to make sure it would be sensational. He loved her. He wanted to show off both her and their fabulous house.
So why didn’t she feel more excited about it all? What the heck was wrong with her?
Afterwards, Callie snuck out the back entrance to the surgeon’s rooms wearing her sunglasses. She walked coolly and elegantly to her car, like the former model she was. Not that she’d been a Chanel favourite or anything like it. No, she’d modelled in Ireland in the eighties when she’d been the muse for an Irish designer who’d never made it on the international stage but had been an utter genius. Simon had been kind, clever, gay and the AIDs plague had taken him from the world too soon.
Simon had made her name and he’d understood her, intuitively recognised her anxieties and that just because she looked like Grace Kelly didn’t mean she came from the same social strata.
‘Beauty, darling, is your ticket out of here,’ he used to say when he was draping fabric on her in his small fourth-floor studio from which the spires of Dublin could be seen. ‘Ignore the bitches with the money who might mock your accent – I was hardly born with a silver spoon in my mouth.’
Callie had jerked in astonishment and got a pin stuck into her by mistake for her trouble.
‘Sorry, just don’t move. Elocution lessons. Changes the grubby tin spoon into a silver one.’
Simon had been the one to get her to change her name, from Claire to Callie.
‘Sounds better, different,’ he’d said. ‘You’ve got to stand out. Callie’s the shortened version of Calliope, tell people that.’
