Under the Duvet Read online

  I was in Beverly Hills and the woman emerging from the offices of Dr Milton Applebaum had been in a terrible accident, right? Her entire head was swaddled in bandages. Perhaps she was a burns victim. She was being led by a swishy-haired princess who was murmuring tenderly, ‘OK, Mom, there’s a step coming. Five more steps, then we’re there. OK, here’s the car. I’m, like, opening the door.’ In Mom got, holding her head very gingerly on her neck.

  I couldn’t help staring. It was such a horrible sight. But the woman wasn’t a burns victim, according to my friend Varina.

  ‘Plastic surgery,’ she muttered. ‘She’s had her whole head lifted. You see this a lot in Beverly Hills.’

  When I opined that it looked painful and disgusting, Varina advised me to get over myself. The woman would spend a couple of days in bed, then have a launch party for her new face.

  As we watched mother and daughter drive away, Varina nodded at the daughter. ‘And see her nose? That won’t survive in its current configuration for much longer. At Beverly Hills High they get given nose jobs for their sixteenth birthdays.’

  Well, I was in Los Angeles, what did I expect? Reconstructive surgery is considered a wonderful thing and a chance to get one over on Mother Nature. Although some people are doomed to disappointment – an earnest young actress confided to me that she’d got her nose done, ‘so my kid will be born with a great nose’. Oh dear.

  Plastic surgery is on the increase in Ireland, but it still seems to be approached furtively. In Los Angeles they’re much more relaxed about it. During my five weeks there, I came across the occasional person going about their business as normal – the only unusual thing was that they had a huge scaffold-type bandage on their nose. At first it made me look – That person’s just had a nose job! – but by the end of my trip, it was no more remarkable than someone putting a stripe of zinc sun-lotion on their nose.

  ‘And watch out for people wearing sunglasses indoors,’ Varina said. ‘They’ve just had their eyes done.’ And sure enough, I saw a fair few of them too.

  The latest thing seems to be that you have your plastic surgery with your girlfriend. A bonding session that’s an alternative to a night out with a few apple martinis, perhaps? In response to this, some surgeons have started offering job-lot price reductions. In fact, the phenomenon has become so popular that there’s been a rash of articles in various LA publications about how to deal with jealousy if your friend heals quicker, gets off with the surgeon or just looks better than you when the bandages come off. Everywhere there are ads for tummy tucks, eyelid surgery, lip augmentation, Botox injections, liposuction, collagen replacement therapy, micro-dermabrasion, chin surgery, forehead lifts and – oh, but of course – breast augmentation.

  Forty-six per cent of all breast augmentation in the entire world is done in Los Angeles. Of course, everyone knows that LA is the place to spot lots of enlarged breasts, maybe this sounds like old news. But when you actually see them with your own two eyes…

  A few drinks at The Standard – starlet central – was like being at a freak show. The women were parodies of themselves. It wasn’t so much their hand-span waists and childlike hips, it was the enormous, humungous, gravity-defying breasts. They were so obvious and so very, very BIG. And I realized why. If every girl in town has implants, how are you going to distinguish yourself? By going bigger. And statistics support my theory. The size of implants has increased; originally people went up one or two cup sizes, now it’s more like three.

  Himself is very politically correct and would never comment on a woman’s appearance (not unless he wants an elbow in the chops from me), but even he was moved to mutter, ‘How come she’s upright? How come she’s not flat on her face from the weight of those things?’

  And as well as being Barbie-proportioned and ever youthful, the other thing Angelenos seem to want is to be entirely bald. Apart from the hairs on their heads, everything must go!

  Laser treatment is the thing, claiming to be both permanent and painless. Varina has had it done, and she insists that it’s neither. And of course, bikini waxes ranging from ‘very little’ to ‘entirely bare’ are hot news. The Brazilian wax – currently big in Ireland – seems to have been overtaken in LA by the Playboy wax, which is even more extreme.

  And speaking of extreme… Bleaching is very now. But I’m not talking about hair. I’m not even talking about teeth. I’m talking about a certain part of one’s anatomy that very few people get to see. Delicacy doesn’t permit me actually to mention it, but I will say that if you were an exotic dancer who did a lot of bending over, you might get great mileage out of this treatment.

  When I was first told about it, I was certain that it was a ‘make fun of the credulous Irish girl’ joke. But then I saw an actress on a chatshow who’d not only had it done but was willing to speak freely about it, and I had to admit it was for real. I still don’t get it though. I’m not entirely averse to the idea of some treatments – a Botox injection doesn’t sound so disgusting – but that one, it’s just too much!

  As well as surgery and treatments, the Angelenos’ love– hate relationship with food continues apace. (For a group of people who don’t eat much, they invest an awful lot of thought in it.) The diet currently big with (so I’m told) Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston and other golden Hollywood lovelies is the Zone diet. There have been liquid diets, protein diets, combination diets, fruit diets, and this has to be the most bizarre yet. It features the revolutionary combination of 40 per cent carbohydrates, 30 per cent protein and 30 per cent fat – what I learned in Home Economics was a balanced diet. But where’s the faddiness? Where’s the silliness? How very disappointing that the whole thing has gone full circle.

  And if starvation and surgery haven’t given you the body you desire, well, then there’s always exercise. I joined a gym while I was there and the timetable showed spinning classes at five-thirty. ‘Is that five-thirty p.m.?’ I asked, fearing the worst. ‘No, five-thirty a.m.,’ came the reply. ‘And if you’re coming in the morning, try to get here before seven.’ When I enquired why (not that there was a chance it would happen), I was told, ‘Because the car-park is full after seven.’

  Spinning is still very big there, but the spinning classes here are as nothing compared to the spinning classes there. They are possibly the most savage, inhumane thing that could ever happen to a person. They’re high-speed, intense, sustained work. But what was interesting was how regulars coped. A lot of them seemed to go into a type of trance; they pedalled with their eyes closed, seemingly impervious to the tortures being inflicted on their bodies. It put me in mind of the religious ecstasies that people go into when they’re being nailed to a cross in a re-creation of the crucifixion, where they really do feel no pain. But as well as burning off two thousand calories before breakfast, what is very popular is ‘realignment’. Pilates, yoga, and a new combination of the two called yogilates are used to change your posture so that you look taller, thinner and ‘more centred’. Varina has a personal ‘realigner’ who uses a gyrotonic machine and anti-gravity boots (basically, you hang upside-down like a bat) to stretch and straighten her. And what is absolutely huge in LA – and I predict will take off in Ireland soon – is power yoga. It’s yoga Jim, but not as we know it. For a start, you don’t want to begin screaming with boredom five minutes into it. (Or is it only me who has this problem?) It’s done in sauna-hot conditions, so that you detox as you work, and it’s extremely hard. You don’t lose weight with it but it lengthens your muscles, so you look leaner and tauter. They swear by it.

  A couple of quickies before I finish – eyebrow shaping. They’re all at it, because if it’s done right it’s ‘as good as a face-lift’. (But, obviously, without the Return of the Mummy bandages.) If you don’t have regular appointments with Anastasia of Beverly Hills, eyebrow shaper to the stars, you might as well get on the bus and go back to Wisconsin.

  And finally, nails. I found some of the ways they interfered with their bodies a bit too much, but I
really approve of their attitude to nails. Everywhere there are nail salons where you can walk in without an appointment and – here’s the good bit – have your hands and feet done simultaneously. You read a magazine while one person beautifies your feet and another does your hands. Half an hour later you leave, twenty dollars lighter, with twenty perfect nails. Now the sooner that comes to Ireland, the better.

  First published in Image magazine, October 2000.

  Hope Springs Eternal

  Occasionally real life leaks into my novels. Anyone who has read Last Chance Saloon might recognize what happens here…

  As the warm three days that constitute the Irish summer will be upon us any minute now, naturally my thoughts turn to shifting the lard from my thighs, bum and the rest of the usual suspects. As always, I’ve left it far too late for the dieting and exercise lark, so I’m on the lookout for a magic solution. Although I’ve learnt the hard way that there are no quick fixes. The old Chinese proverb springs to mind – No pain, no gain.

  I’m forever placing my faith in a snake-oil salesman of a beautician and I’m forever being disappointed. Let me tell you about the time I went for a body-wrap. A few days before I got married, I decided to ‘perspire away those unwanted inches’. I had no choice, because I had made the great mistake of arranging my wedding day for 29th December. Which meant, of course, that the previous six months’ hard-won weight-loss was annihilated in a matter of minutes on Christmas Eve, when I interfaced with a wheelie-bin-sized tin of Roses. I should have simply cut out the middle-man and sellotaped those chocolates directly on to my hips, because that’s where they went anyway. Unfortunately, my wedding dress wasn’t a huge meringue that hid any last-minute expansion in my girth. It was as unforgiving as it was slender and desperate measures were called for. I couldn’t locate a back-street liposuctionist at such short notice, so when someone suggested that I had a mud-wrap, I almost wept with gratitude.

  I knew about mud-wraps, and I liked what I’d heard. The idea of a full-body immersion in warm, creamy chocolate-type stuff, so that I was like a human Mars Bar, sounded like heaven. And as for the idea of just lying there, losing weight, letting the mud do all the work!

  It got better – the beauty salon said they guaranteed a minimum loss of eight inches. Eight inches!

  Walking on air, thinking of losing four inches from my arse and two from each of my thighs, I went along to the salon two days before the nuptials. Where I met a beautician called Tanya who was clearly displeased at having to come to work two days after Christmas. My mood dipped instantly, as I felt cruel and guilty.

  It dipped even further when she ushered me into a freezing little room – clearly they hadn’t had the heat on in days – and ordered me to strip off. ‘But we’ve only just met!’ I tried to cover my embarrassment with humour, but Tanya ignored me and pulled hard on both ends of her measuring tape, as if she was getting ready to thrash me.

  She measured me about fifty different times – each arm alone was done in four different locations: wrist, forearm, lower upper arm, upper upper arm. Quickly I did my sums, and I didn’t have to be Carol Vorderman to figure out that if I lost a fifth of an inch from each measuring place, the promised eight inches wouldn’t be too hard to come by, but would make no difference at all to my silhouette. The prospect of me walking down the aisle in my lovely white dress seemed less and less likely.

  Next, Tanya was using her hand to scoop water out of a bucket and splash me with it. I recoiled in shock – the water was stone cold! ‘Oh, didn’t I say? The hot water’s broken,’ Tanya said brusquely, eyeing my goose pimples. When I was finally drenched, she produced a spatula and used it to smear me randomly with a warm, foul-smelling mix.

  ‘That’s the mud?’ I asked uncertainly.

  ‘’Course! What did you think it was?’

  So much for the full-body immersion and being a human Mars Bar.

  Then she wrapped my legs, arms and midriff in ragged, old, salmon-pink bandages – the sort my mother used to practise her First Aid routines with – and secured each bandage with the kind of pins that normally live on kilts. I felt like such a gobshite.

  ‘Now,’ she declared, ‘we’ll put you into the special rubber suit, which heats up the mud, stimulating your metabolism and increasing weight loss.’ Suddenly I was happy again – this sounded reassuringly scientific. A lot more so than kilt pins and spatulas. But the special rubber suit wasn’t a special rubber suit at all. All it was was a cheap, nasty shell-suit that a twelve-year-old boy might wear to Funderland. Then she announced that it took about an hour to ‘stimulate the toxins’. Basically, what she meant was that her ‘full leg and bikini’ had arrived, so off she went, abandoning me in the freezing room. To pass the time, I listened to the wince-making rips of the other customer having her legs waxed and wondered which of us felt worse.

  Me, probably. Because after a while the bandages cooled and felt damp and clammy under the nylon pants. I was transported back through time to when I was five years old and had wet my knickers.

  Some time later, Tanya returned, unpeeled the bandages and measured me again, this time pulling the tape measure so tight she was in danger of arresting my circulation. She seemed in much better form – maybe she’d worked off some of her anger on the leg wax – and offered exclamations of delight at how much I’d shrunk. ‘Would you look at that! You’re disappearing on us. You’re barely there!’

  It was bad enough being swizzed. But to be patronized into the bargain…

  The upshot of it was that she told me I’d lost ten inches. On account of not living in a parallel universe, I couldn’t see any improvement.

  And there was one final twist of the knife: I had expected to have a shower before I got dressed and went home. I had visualized sluicing away my toxins and nasty, evil fat cells in the cleansing, purifying water. But Tanya insisted that I wasn’t to wash the muck off yet, because it would continue to detoxify me for a day or so. Any fool could tell that she was only saying that because the hot water was broken, but after paying thirty-five quid for the experience, I thought I might as well get what I could out of it. So I put my clothes on over the mud, gave her a hefty tip and left, bitterly disappointed.

  That evening, my family-in-law-to-be came to my parents’ house to get jarred and bond with each other before the wedding. And I yielded dried mud with every movement. A trail of brown dust followed me, as if I was rotting. Whenever anyone brushed against me, dried mud billowed forth, as though I’d just been exhumed. Each time I passed my future father-in-law a drink, a cloud of dust rose from me, obscuring my view of him. If someone sat beside me, their nose wrinkled in surprise at the stench surrounding me, and they quickly got up and moved elsewhere.

  Anyway, the good news is that through no fault of my own I still managed to fit into my wedding dress. The bad news is I saw a feature about mud-wraps on telly recently. And although I know the truth, I was still sucked in. Seduced by the thought of a quick fix. Hope springs eternal…

  Previously unpublished.

  What Colour is Your Aura?

  Like every other magazine at the time, Irish Tatler had a special so-what-did-you-think-of-the-nineties? edition. This was my contribution.

  Earlier this year, I was at a friend’s house and sitting beside me was a woman I’d never met before. She was great fun and had nice shoes and I thought she was lovely. Next thing she started rummaging around in her handbag, located a red bindi (small round yoke that women in India wear on the forehead to signify what caste they belong to, I think) and stuck it between her eyes. ‘That’s better,’ she sighed. ‘Now it’s closed.’ She turned to me and explained, ‘My third eye has been giving me terrible gyp. I’ve been getting all sorts of unwanted insights and psychic flashes.’

  This is the kind of behaviour that once could have got you arrested. Or at the very least, ferried off in the bouncy ambulance to a high-security laughing house. But it’s a testament to how codology-friendly the nineties are that I jus
t nodded and smiled (and moved my chair away a little, but still).

  There was a time in Ireland when, if you were looking for some kind of a spiritual fix, you’d have your tarot cards read. Or else you’d make a ouija board or get your mammy to do a novena, and that really was all that was available to you. You had superstitions, of course – like you wouldn’t stir your tea with a knife, or if you spilt salt, you’d throw some more over your left shoulder, but superstitions are more preventative than proactive, if you follow me.

  But look at how things have changed. Once upon a time, if you said you heard voices in your head, everyone thought you were schizophrenic. But now you’re as likely to be talking about your ‘spirit guides’ as needing very strong medication.

  Codology abounds on the island of Saints and Scholars! Irish interiors magazines cover the Feng Shui issue with nary a hint of irony. The radio programme Live-line, which usually deals with practical issues like bin collection, recently gave airspace to a woman who claims she is followed constantly by a veritable posse of guardian angels visible only to (you’ll never guess!) herself. The annual Mind, Body and Spirit fair in Dublin offers, among other things, rebirthing, colour therapy, dream interpretation and some bollocks with pyramids (and lovely frozen yoghurt, but I digress). Not too many years ago, the likes of this fair would probably have been picketed by a crowd of foam-flecked ‘Christians’, who for a long time claimed a monopoly on all things spiritual in Ireland. But now that spirituality has been deregulated, the joint was jumping with people enthusiastically embracing a plethora of psychic balm. Indeed, I’m not ashamed to admit (well, only a little) that I had my aura photographed. (A lot of purple and white – apparently that means I’m artistic, which just shows how wrong they can be.)