Chapter Three
Make mine a ham and cheese, please
It’s a few days later and my neighbour Josie is in my kitchen. We’re sitting where we usually do, but today we’re drinking coffee, not wine, and there is a third person at my yellow table, Josie’s ten-year-old daughter Héloïse. I feel I should like Héloïse more than I do, but I find her intimidating. There’s something of the Wednesday Addams about her: a quiet judgement – and plaits. She also frequently points out what things smell like, which isn’t always complimentary. For example, when she arrived today with Josie to help with my Halloween costume, she told me I smelled ‘like balloons’. I didn’t know how to react so said ‘thanks’. Héloïse stared at me for quite a while after that.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for the assistance – the party is next week and I might have non-stubby eyelashes, but the criminally expensive ‘wet fungus mask’ I got from Etsy covers them up, so requires some strategic trimming. Also, on its own, the mask makes me look like I have an omelette stuck to my face. So the plan is to do some clever body paint and maybe stick some fungal-looking things on my shoulders using eyelash glue. These will be on show as Héloïse has given the dress I’m wearing some apocalyptic ‘distressing’ with a pair of Ikea kitchen scissors.
The table is quiet as we sip coffee, munch on dark chocolate and sea salt cookies (Héloïse made them, not me, obvs) and mould fungus shapes out of modelling clay, dabbing on green eyeshadow from a Forest Fantasy Luxe Palette (#gifted) to make them look more realistic.
‘This smells like zoos,’ says Héloïse, sniffing the clay.
I ignore her this time and turn to Josie. ‘I saw Gabe the other day.’
‘Oooh really?’ Josie says. I look at her face. She’s got absolutely no make-up on and I find it quite weird. I can’t imagine just being out and about during the day having done nothing more than a thorough tooth brushing and an application of SPF. I want to put some contour on her and see what it looks like. She’s forty-five, slightly younger than me, but not so much younger that she wouldn’t benefit from a bit of help to look more chiselled, let’s put it that way. But she does have nice skin, and in a way, I admire her for not feeling like she has to ‘put her face on’ before she leaves the house.
We’ve known each other since she moved in opposite a few years ago. We started smiling at each other across the street, then chatting… then became friends. Josie is a brilliant cook, whipping up big Ottolenghi feasts with very little notice, and she often invites me round for company as her French wife, Laure, travels a fair bit for work – something worthwhile to do with ‘Médecins’. Sometimes we go to The Perch – a pub nearby, where I met Gabe for the first time. He’s a music teacher who uses Josie (a bookkeeper) for his accounts. I watch her sculpting cordyceps out of clay for me, and wonder if I would do the same for her, or anyone. Must give her one of those body scrubs.
‘Yes… not sure I was really looking my best though,’ I say.
‘Well, Gabe isn’t the sort of person who would worry about that.’
He’s a man, so I seriously doubt that, but I don’t say anything, and go back to the green eyeshadow instead.
In the week leading up to the party, I spend fifty per cent of my time getting excited about Merlyn’s email, and fifty per cent thinking about Gabe’s freckly hands – or more specifically, Gabe putting his freckly hands on me, although I can’t imagine why he would want to do such a thing. With that in mind, I’ve started doing a YouTube workout called The Change Challenge With Bethany which has No Jumping (important, as although I can jump, I’m not very good at landing) and focuses on weights, which is ‘vital’ because at forty-seven I apparently have ‘wasting muscle mass’ and ‘reduced bone density’. Go me! I like Bethany though because she keeps telling me to ‘listen to my body’ and ‘only do what feels good’, which on most days is carte blanche to sack the whole thing off after about ten minutes and scroll through Cassia’s Instagram stories instead.
Although the bone density thing is depressing, it’s less worrying than the flapping bits under my arms, which now appear to have two matching flapping bits on my inner thighs. At least I’m symmetrical. Unfortunately, however, I don’t have any weights, and they are too expensive for someone who has spent all their money on a fungus mask. So I’m improvising with two large, weighted fabric doorstops that my Auntie Viv gave me last Christmas. One says,Remove your shoes or scrub the floorand the other saysA house is not a home without a cat. The first seems just plain rude, and the second is confusing, as I don’t have a cat, and I’m pretty sure Auntie Viv knows that.
It’s the day of the party and on my way to London, I message Nandy.
In the bogs at Paddington reattaching fake mycelium to my shoulders. You?
Same girl, same.
No seriously, where are you? And what are you dressed as?
Having a tightener in the pub round the corner from the Luscious offices. I’m dressed as a Bollywood star you won’t have heard of. Thought I’d culturally appropriate myself. Hurry up will you, mofo?
There are mercifully enough weirdos on the Bakerloo line to allow me to blend in. That’s the beauty of London. However self-conscious you feel, there will always be someone within six feet of you either looking weirder or doing something weirder. It’s like that urban myth about never being more than six feet away from a rat. But today that’s no myth. There’s both a rat on the platform (which looks at my face like I must look at Port Salut) and a man in the carriage with a wooden chopping board on his knee, julienning carrots. Thanks to him, not a single passenger gives me a second glance. I miss London sometimes. Nobody would stare through my living room window here; everyone would be too busy being weird to care what I’m up to.
I’m not prepared for how hot – and indeed cool – the party is. It’s been a while since I’ve been to theLusciousoffices and while other beauty mags have stayed the same, or not survived,Luscioushas always managed to keep up with the times. For the party, they’ve opened up both of their office floors and turned them into a Halloween-themed labyrinth, decorated with real (and rattan, obvs) pumpkins and gourds, and crow-themed ceiling lights that give the impression of being constantly dive-bombed by birds, like in that Alfred Hitchcock film. Which is really relaxing.
As Nandy and I walk in, I get the same horrible sinking feeling I do when my brother phones me. The room is a sea of designers, models, journalists, art directors, stylists, influencers… all looking amazing. And not a single one of them has an omelette on their face like I do. I wonder why three Aperol spritzes in The Ox round the corner with Nandy seem to have had the reverse effect than usual on my confidence.
The idea – which seemed like a good one last week – was to hide my bad bits (jowls, sagging, hollowness, forehead lines, crepey lids… the list goes on) and show off my okay ones (shoulders) – but seeing Cassia Carver on the other side of the room looking effortlessly bloody amazing as Margot Tenenbaum, I wonder if there would have been a better way to do that. And I also wonder what Margot Tenenbaum has to do with Halloween, but I suppose one could argue the same about fungal zombies. And also, what was the point in having a lash lift when a) nobody recognises me and b) the first thing my costume makes you think is ‘make mine a ham and cheese please’.
‘Well, this is shit, obviously,’ says Nandy, who looks incredible in a tight orange sari, a beehive hairdo and massive earrings.
‘I feel like I might need to drink substantially more to be able to enjoy myself,’ I shout at her over the inexplicably loud EDM.
Then I spot Merlyn in the corner. She’s dressed as Frida from ABBA, in the curly mullet era, which is also not very Halloweeny. It is however very stylish, unsurprisingly for Merlyn. She waves at us across the room and Nandy and I head over.
‘Watch out at three o’clock – Carver incoming,’ says Nandy as we push through the crowd.
Cassia intercepts us at an angle, like a cheetah stalking antelope in the Serengeti. I watched a documentary about this once. David Attenborough is amazing. Cassia is just annoying though – she doesn’t look remotely sweaty in that fur coat. I’d be at the ‘drips on my top lip’ stage of the proceedings by now. How does she do it?
‘Nandy sweetie! How are you? How’s that hot husband of yours?’ she says.
‘Ash. Ash is fine, thanks Cassia.’ Nandy fixes a smile.
