each step.
Jogging’s not great for the skin. The repetitive up and down motion tears at the collagen and makes it sag like a rubber band that’s been stretched once too often. Each time my trainers struck the tarmac I pictured the hundreds of small rents opening up in my subcutaneous layer. But whereas in the past I had avoided activities that diminished my looks, for once it actually felt liberating embracing the destruction that the act of living entails.
Fuck the shackles of perpetual youth, I ranted as I pounded my way home
Fuck the fear of aging, I fumed as I opened my stride.
Fuck Chelsea perfection.
Fuck wrinkles.
Fuck Andrew.
I was way too vain for self-harming so this was as close as it was going to get! A wave of relief washed over me as let it all out. A lifetime of frustration and neurosis. Of never looking good enough and never being perfect enough to be loved.
By the time I got home I was a foaming, wobbling, salivating wreck but my anger had drained away. I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror for some time.
Eyebrows plucked, arched high.
Skin dermabrased, acid peeled.
Top lip waxed.
Eyes vacant.
Behind me my clothes sat in a tidy pile waiting to adorn me.
Gossard Plunge Bra for extra lift.
DKNY control briefs for smooth thighs.
Silk blouse with slimming vertical stripes.
Cigarette capris for elongated legs.
My gaze transferred back to my face. It seemed suddenly greyer and pallid in comparison with Turban Girl’s glowing tan. As if all the life had drained from it and I was looking at my own dead corpse.
That day I left the house without sun cream. Pasty face held high (foundation-free!), I marched defiantly toward Livadi in my bikini top (no sun hat even!), my marbled shoulders as naked as the day I was born.
I would no longer kowtow to the fear tactics of the cosmetic industry!
I would no longer simper and snivel at the altar of beauty!
I would no longer numb myself with restraint.
From that day forward I, Faith Cotton, would worship at the bacchanalian feet of ‘The Gods of Excess’! When I got to Livadi I pulled off my bikini top and tanned half naked on a rock, hoping Turban Girl would appear to marvel at my breathless insouciance. Heck, I could be as defiant as the next turbaned beach bum. If I had been camping and needed the loo, I would have peed right there on the beach.
Behind a bush.
Well, maybe, behind some rocks.
Luckily I did not need the loo all that day.
By five pm the Bacchanalian Sun God of Excess had burned me to a crisp. Theodora nearly screamed when she came knocking.
‘What you done?’ she said. ‘You look haggard.’
That night I dreamed my face was falling off, sliding down the sheets like melting wax, but over the next two days the colour settled and I started to go an attractive shade of brown.
A day later my nose peeled white again. I dug my sun cream out of the bin (where I’d chucked it that morning in defiance) and decided a ‘once-daily’ application would still count as a form of rebellion. After all, being a feminist was one thing. Dying of cancer was another. Whilst rummaging round in the bin I retrieved my foundation, mascara and lippy (gosh I really had gone overboard that morning!). Perhaps I’d been a bit over zealous in my outright rejection of the cosmetics industry. Even feminists had the right to look pretty.
On Friday Andrew flew back from Brussels. I picked him up from the midday ferry looking hot and irritable in his crumpled suit.
‘What the hell happened to your face?’ was the first thing he said as he threw his bag into the back of the buggy.
All charm was Andrew. He lived by the maxim ‘I say what I think’, and said what he thought far too often. Somewhere along his life’s journey he had actually come to believe that the recipients of his unfettered opinion-giving should be grateful for these unsolicited pearls of wisdom on account of the fact they were his honestly held views and therefore tantamount to universally held truth.
‘I got a bit of sun.’
‘A bit of sun. You look like you’ve been freeze-dried.’
I decided not to dignify his comment with a reply but made a mental note to re-moisturise when I got home. Knowing full well Andrew liked to drive, I made a point of firing up the engine and revving it with feminist indignation. He frowned but got in the passenger seat and plugged in his seatbelt before leaning over to plug in mine. While I may have embraced the Gods of Excess, Andrew was still worshipping the Gods of Health & Safety.
‘Really Fay,’ he persisted above the din. ‘God knows what damage you’ve inflicted to your skin and how that could age you in years to come. All it takes is a bit of sun cream’.
My mum always said Andrew took an unhealthy interest in my appearance. The first weekend I stayed at his place, I was applying my make-up in the bedroom mirror when he walked past and snapped the lights off. ‘Natural light for make-up please,’ he said without irony.
I still married him. My dad had died the year before and it seemed too much effort to say no.
I studied him now out of the corner of my eye as we chugged up the hill towards the villa. He was not a particularly good-looking man although he was aging well. His forehead was a little too high, his eyes a bit too pale, his jaw too pronounced.
For someone that craved perfection, the realisation when he hit puberty that he would never be more than a mediocre-looking adult must have come as a blow. He’d overcompensated in the gym ever since.
Right now his pronounced jaw was working overtime, grinding and flaring at the point where the mandible meets the zygomatic bone. This was his stress indicant. Clearly his meetings in Brussels hadn’t gone well. I listened absently to his remonstrations about the airline, the ferry, the queues – a preamble to the herculean disburdenment of his real grievances which he’d hold back to ruin dinner with.
Ironically it was his loquaciousness that attracted me to him in the first place. The first time I saw him he was holding court in the Foreign Office canteen surrounded by a gaggle of wide-eyed disciples lapping up every word of his diatribe on UK interference in the Middle-East. Of course, he didn’t refer to it as interference – as far as Andrew was concerned the British Empire was the greatest thing God visited upon the face of the earth and any country fortunate enough to attract UK interest in their affairs, their minerals, their cash crops, should be thanking their lucky stars. Once his oration was over he detached himself from his fan club and zoned in on me. What Andrew lacked in looks he made up for in gumption and self-confidence. As he slid into the chair opposite mine, I clocked the jealous glares of the other women and blushed with pride. I was after
