Call it what you like, we think it’s love, but it’s chemical.
“You’re not a smoker, are you?”
“No.”
“Only because if you were, at your age, I’d never be prescribing this brand.”
And you feel that little swoop again, hear the at your age like stepping on a sharp piece of gravel, a wince at ludicrous defensiveness.
“If he were thirty-nine and you were thirteen years younger nobody would turn a hair. I say go for it.”
Once upon a time you would have said, confidently: show me someone who says they’ve never had a fantasy of being the Older Woman, and I’ll show you a liar.
Here’s a dead giveaway: in the supermarket, that third week, your hand will reach out and take a box of hair colour and it’s the easiest thing in the world to appear the next day with red highlights.
You start thinking you actually have those rich chestnut highlights in your hair naturally. Well. You know the rest. You know how it all goes. Then, a week into the contraceptives, you’re ravenous.
Thirteen years ago you were living in London, fervently avoiding any chance of children. Now you’re one of those nuisance women obstetricians must hate, waking up to the alarm on your biological clock just before it runs itself down…. [E]very pill sticks in your throat like a sugar-coated lie.
He goes and buys fish and chips and you eat them at a picnic table, everything dazzling and warm. But once that poison has started, once you’re committed to giving yourself a measured dose of it every day, nothing’s going to be enough. You have traded in your unselfconsciousness for this double-visioned state of standing outside yourself, watchful and tensed for exposure.
Funny how the dye seems to have missed the odd grey hair, which seems stronger and wirier than the others…. and the sight of your own cellulite (all those chips!) so disgusts you and saps your energy that you doubt whether you can actually get dressed and drag yourself out of the [department store changing room], away from that ridiculous lingerie or the jeans you’ve chosen.
“Brazilians are all the go now,” she says. “You want pain, boy…”
“Don’t tell me.”
She tilts your leg, ices on some more wax, rips it away.
“Yep, everything. Completely hairless. Like a Barbie doll.”
“And Jesus, will you just relax and stop worrying about your weight? How much reassurance do you need?”
“I don’t need reassurance.”
“Yes, you do. It’s so bloody tiring. It’s like you’ve already decided to end it and you’re just waiting for me to slip up so you can blame me.”
You’d opened and closed your mouth like a stunned fish. A wave of nausea. You’d clenched your jaw, saying nothing. Don’t cry, you’d ordered yourself., don’t you dare. Mascara running haggard. Lines. Ugly. Old.
“I’ll be forty in a fortnight,” you say.
Impossible to gauge his real, unadorned reaction to that news. You’ll have to turn the light on for that.
