Chapter Four
Every pore exuding Aperol
I’m googlingdoes the perimenopause make your breath smellwhen Simon calls. I answer before I realise I haven’t yet done my ‘Morning Shed’, so as I’m still wearing both my tooth whitening trays and mouth tape, my voice comes out like I’m inside a bottle.
A ‘Morning Shed’, incidentally, has nothing to do with those wooden huts at the bottom of the garden frequented by middle-aged men, and instead means shed as in ‘cast off’. It’s a viral trend from a year or so ago that I have gotveryinto after I tested it forGlowgetter, due to its anti-… sorry…pro-ageing benefits. It consists of trussing (there really is no other word for it) yourself up at night with a variety of masks, tape to pull back saggy skin and to keep your mouth shut so you breathe through your nose, heatless curlers, a giant bonnet to protect your hair, and last but not least, a massive silk sleep mask. The overall effect is nothing short of ghoulish, I admit, but in the morning you ‘shed’ it all and I believe there is a chance that I look zero-point-zero-point-one per cent better and/or younger as a result. Which is enough for me.
‘It sounds like you’re trapped in a well, Erica. Are you still in bed?’
‘I am Simon, yes,’ I say, yanking out my teeth-whitening trays and immediately wishing I hadn’t answered my phone. ‘I had a very important work event last night and thankfully unlike you I don’t have to get up for any children. And also, it’s none of your business.’
‘It’s eleven-thirty a.m., Erica.’
‘I realise that. I didn’t sleep well.’ I peel off my gold silicone under-eye patches, and then remove the tape on my nasolabial folds (smile lines to the layman) hoping Simon can’t hear the weird noise it makes.
‘Mum said you phoned her last night and it sounded like you were drunk.’
I take a second to try to remember if it was an accident or if I was calling my mother to drunkenly shout, I’M SORRY I’M SUCH A DISAPPOINTMENT TO YOU or similar. I decide it was definitely a pocket dial.
‘That’s ludicrous, Simon. I’m forty-seven years old. Why does everyone in this family treat me like a badly behaved child?’
‘Because you’ve got previous, Erica, and you know it.’
‘Ever heard of redemption, Simon? Anyway, why are you phoning? Surely not just to have a go at me?’
I say ‘surely not’ but that is exactly the sort of thing Simon would do.
‘No, actually, Erica. I wanted to talk to you about Mum.’
Saved by the bell – the front doorbell rings, right on cue. Must be my Deliveroo from the garage. Twenty minutes round trip is too much for me today, with every pore exuding Aperol and the remains of some wet fungus on my shoulders.
‘I have to go,’ I say, hoping he heard the doorbell too. ‘Someone important is at the door.’
It’s true, M&S food can’t wait. ‘And they’re here for a meeting,’ I add, to give it some sort of credibility. ‘A neighbourhood watch meeting.’
I think I took that too far.
I can’t really remember a time when Simon and I were close. Four and a half years’ age gap doesn’t sound like that much but when Simon started school, I was still in nappies. ‘We tried to get you out of them earlier,’ according to Mother Pells, ‘but it seemed like you didn’t mind sitting on…mess.’ After school and at weekends, Simon and his friend Martin would take over the back garden of the house in Saltford where we grew up. My earliest memories were of the boys making my Sindy kiss their Action Men, Martin pulling my hair, and Simon telling me he’d hoped he would be an only child before I came along – and worse, that Mother and Father Pells did too.
School was fine – the local primary in Saltford, then the academy in Bristol. Not a period I look back on with much pain, or indeed much pleasure. Simon was five years above me because of when our birthdays fell, so our lives rarely overlapped. When they did, I found him serious, condescending, never my equal. We were ‘latch key kids’ – our parents both working long hours for an aerospace company in Filton – although at least money wasn’t ever much of a problem. But it meant that the minute we got home from school, Simon and I disappeared to opposite ends of the house untilRentaghostcame on, our paths only crossing briefly in the kitchen where we would grill Findus Crispy Pancakes in silence (he favoured minced beef, I preferred Cheddar cheese) and plunder the biscuit tin for Wagon Wheels and Trios. It suited us both just fine.
I got through it, I did okay, I made some friends, some of whom I stayed in touch with for a while on Facebook, but nobody’s really on that these days. My grades got me to Birmingham University to study social anthropology because, well, it looked quite interesting, and also most of the lectures started at eleven a.m. I probably should have done English, looking back. But unleashed from Somerset – and away fromMother and Father Pells, who seemed to prefer Simon (although Father Pells did sometimes dote on his ‘funny little Erry’) – it was as though I’d been waiting for freedom. Fuelled byCK Oneand Moscow Mules, ‘Show Me Love’ by Robin S became the soundtrack to my emancipation. Show me love – show me any strong emotion for that matter – after a life hitherto on the receiving end of indifference.
Simon did business and management at Exeter and made quite the name for himself at the surf club, but he’d graduated and moved back to Bristol before I even started at university. From then on, we only saw each other at family gatherings – until one Christmas, Simon came home with Alannah. Australian, always in a good mood, she brought something out in Simon that seemed to make my parents love him even more. Simon and Alannah married in Bath, settled down, and my nephews, Oli and Sam (now seventeen and fifteen), came along. Meanwhile, and by contrast (as usual), I was having that ‘difficult year’ after Kofi and I broke up. But, Alannah and the children seemed to soften everything around the edges, and I was briefly glad I had moved out of London to be an auntie and to be closer to my parents, who’d retired by then and moved from Bristol to the Wiltshire town where I now live. Things all seemed brighter, for a while at least.
Ten minutes later and I’m eating my M&S Farmhouse Cheddar Cheese Sandwich on the living room floor like that sea lion did with an unfortunate penguin on a documentary I saw last night. The phone call with Simon has put me in the kind of bad mood you only get when you have a stinking hangover. What is it with my family? Admittedly, there were some pretty crazy clubbingyears when I went a bit Lindsay Lohan – then the awful thing happened, which led to the questionable move back to Wiltshire. But I am not exactly a lost cause. I’m just in a rut. In need of a change – any change. Something more interesting than watchingThe Great British Bake Offand eating a Raspberry Royale, which is what I’m about to do now.
This whole WULT® thing could be exactly the change I need. Last night, I pulled the mask off in the bathrooms of theLusciousoffices at the end of the party, to avoid attracting any unwanted attention on the way home. Chance would be a fine thing – catching sight of myself in the mirror, I decided I looked more gruesomewithoutthe zombie costume. Seriously, what the hell happened to my neck? I hadn’t really noticed before, but it seems to have developed lines that run right around it, like segments of a worm.
Then, sitting on the 22:49 to Swindon, I thought, you know what? Just do it, Erica. What’s the alternative? Gradually retreating into higher and higher polo necks to hide my nematode neck? Constantly lifting my head up and smiling as much as possible to create some semblance of a jawline, like a meerkat who’s had some particularly good news? And locking the door to my overgrown dusty cellar once and for all? I’m as out of date as those rotating electric face cleansing brushes that everyone had in the Noughties.
And now that I’m safely at home, working my hangover like a pro – M&S lunch and some Say Cheese Chaumes in the fridge for later, with every chance I will rewatchThe Good Place– I am even more sure. I’m the perfect candidate for any sort of procedure like this: I’ve seen enough needles to be completely unfazed by them. When the nurse came round for Father Pells in his last few weeks, I’d watch when she got the stuff out to give him an injection, fascinated. Maybe I missed my calling, although I doubt it as I got a D in biology GCSE.
‘With all these injections, I’m holier than thou, Erry,’ Father Pells would say, sniggering.
He moved slowly in his recliner chair, with his hands bunched up and bent over like long paws, reminding me of a documentary I watched once about sloths. When I held them, the mottled skin seemed to slide about over the surface like a wet carrier bag. Life was ebbing away and all I wanted to do was transfer mine to him. Why hadn’t anyone worked out how to do that yet? Like charging your phone from your laptop. You’d think it would be pretty elementary. Here, have my vitality, you deserve it more than me. I was his baby girl… never his old girl. I am becoming someone he would never even recognise.
Nothing like an Aperol hangover to put you in a good mood… I half laugh and half sniff at my own misery, then think about WULT® and smile. Why the hell not? It might even be what finally makes my parents – orparentI should say – take notice of me. And it’s not just that. I’ve tried every other possible way to feel better about myself and I’m still practically a hermit. It’s not going to get any better is it? We’re all going to end up intravenously morphined out of our heads with sloth hands. Either that orThe Inevitable. Oh god, now I sound like my mother…
