New York, Upper East Side.
I wake up at two am and am swamped with panic that I will never get back to sleep again as long as I live and will, instead, become psychotic and have to be hospitalised and tanked full of lithium. In other words, I have perfectly normal jet lag. I’ve only been in bed for three hours, but eventually I drop off until it’s five thirty, and a reasonable time to put the light on, and flip open the laptop.
At seven o’clock the occupants of the house are upstairs exercising and I’m sitting in the kitchen with a bowl of figs and a cappuccino made for me by Antonio who is already at work.
I didn’t expect that there would be anybody downstairs and so I walk in wearing a scanty dressing gown like Botticelli’s Venus, a hand on either extremity. The sound of an early morning garbage truck chewing its way up the street is the only noise apart from Antonio tapping on the computer. It’s comfortingly familiar and I realise that it’s been a while since I saw the back of a man’s head at a keyboard.
Unless you count Martin in accounts.
At 11.00 am I’m having my nails done by Lula from Azbekistan who informs me I have an intelligent face – you can tell, apparently by my long nose and wide forehead. I start to feel even worse than I did before I left the house, doughy faced and wan from jet lag and free airplane alcohol. She tells me I’m lucky. I have a lucky face – I don’t ask why in case she makes a merit out of my age spots. She used to tell fortunes, she adds, so she knows, but ‘no more I tell them’ she says. ‘Since we come here my husband gets more religious and the Torah says no fortune telling,’
Sylvia is doing my toes. I feel like Cleopatra, albeit Scottish Cleopatra (you speak like Breetesh, says Lula) being ministered to, having my feet rubbed and my fingers massaged. I long to fall into the grasping fingers of the massage chair and go to sleep as my feet bob up and down like apples in the foot spa and little bits of me are pinched and preened and buffed and polished.
An hour later and I have fingernails like sea shells and red toenails that glisten in the sunlight.
‘You need to do your eyebrows’, says Lula sternly and I cannot but agree as I lie down and have hot wax poured over my forehead. “You want I should do your top lip?’ she asks.
What top lip? So I have long nose, wide brow and a bloody moustache.
I decline, but can’t help but squint into the mirror when she’s finished and my ‘wide brow’that now looks like a case study for skin disease, all red and swollen, checking for the invisible ‘tash.
And they call this beauty treatment?
The next stop is the hair salon where a nice stodgy French woman with a double chin colours me golden, degingering me with a sweep of her magic brush, and then highlights me blonde.
I’m feeling wonderfully confident until I go to the bathroom and discover that I can’t get the toilet seat lid to go up. There’s a reason for this. It’s electrical. There’s a control panel beside the pedestal with more buttons than the NASA space program and I don’t have my glasses so I don’t know what to do. I press them randomly and nothing happens, then suddenly rapid jets of water start hitting the underside of the, mercifully still closed, seat, otherwise I would have had a facial of the sort I hadn’t anticipated. Then the toilet flushes several times in succession. In desperation I press a yellow button, and for a horrible moment as it seems to have no effect I worry that I’ve pressed an alarm bell like they have in disabled loos and that suddenly someone will burst in and find me bent over the toilet, peering at the cistern.
Eventually I manage to hit the spot, and open sesame.
Who goes to the hairdresser and has jets of water fired up their various entrances and exits for god’s sake?
Next I am passed to Herge who chews gum and smiles with his mouth open so that it looks like his teeth have been glued shut with blue tac. He loves curly hair so much that by the end of the blow dry I look like I’m in Boogie Nights and only need some white lipstick to complete the bouffant look. Luckily he tongs me into ringlets and I leave ready to give a rendition of The Good Ship Lollypop, following Audrey into Hermes where the manager greets her with: 'Is this your daughter?'
Audrey is ten years older than me and about 200 years thinner.
I can only assume it was due to the youthful hairstyle which is lacking only a big red bow. Or that he thought I was retarded and out of the care facility for the weekend.
I still feel like a goddess.
Tonight we’re going for drinks and dinner. I only have a black dress but Audrey’s friend the style consultant who dresses many of New York’s rich and famous told me that the only people in a restaurant who should be wearing black are the ones handing you the menus.
Oops.
I guess I’m not going to be feeling like a goddess for very long then. What with me having the maitre d' moustache and all.
But who cares?, There’s a vodka martini with my name on it and a bowl of chips waiting to be eaten. I can only oblige.
