Читать книгу: «PS Olive You»

-Chapter One-

On the Christmas before the credit crunch exploded in our faces, my mother-in-law bought me a spectacular vanity case. A leather studded Versace with enough capacity for ten litres of age-defying products.

The following Easter she bought me a course of Botox. Clearly the ten litres had not been enough.

Bridgette was the sort of person who gaveth with the one hand and tooketh away with the other. Still desperately clinging to the notion I might conceive after four failed IVF attempts, she somehow conflated looking-younger with fertile eggs.

Behind my back she worked on Andrew to leave me for a younger woman and have a second go at gene proliferation. Who could blame her? I was only thirty-two but my ovaries were at least two hundred. Andrew was ten years older than me and needed to get a move on, or else he’d be mistaken for a grandfather on sports days.

How ironic that he’d selected a younger model to settle down with after screwing just about everyone his age in Greater London and the Counties, only to discover the younger model was a dud. It irked Bridgette beyond belief. I knew this because whenever I came into the kitchen and interrupted them over the Aga they’d both go silent.

Andrew leaving me was something I secretly feared myself although I never dared raise it. We didn’t share our insecurities.

Politics.

Economics.

The couple next door.

They were all up for grabs, but never our anxieties, our hopes and fears for the future. Especially not my ovaries. That would have been ‘dreadfully middle class’. Instead I tried to compensate by being the most pleasing wife in Chelsea. As long as other men desired me, Andrew would want me too. Vast quantities of money were dedicated to this end. I cooked haute cuisine, kept an immaculate house and dressed in a style that said effortlessly-classy-yet-sexy.

Glossy well-cut hair.

Plumped breasts.

Flawless skin.

On the night we left for Greece I packed enough sun cream to smear around the stratosphere three times and block out solar radiation for a year. I had no intention of returning from our little Hellenic adventure looking like a sultana.

Of all the places to buy a second property, a deserted goat-infested island in the Cyclades was not one I would have earmarked. What was wrong with Brittany where the weather was as shit as England and you had less chance of dying from skin cancer?

But after nine years of marriage, the penny was finally starting to drop that choice didn’t come in to it with Andrew. You simply got swept along on the tsunami of his enthusiasm, and woke up a few months later feeling resentful and irrelevant. His was the footprint in life we followed. He carried me on his back so that I needn’t get my feet dirty and leave any footprints at all.

The Greek adventure was partly prompted by the social circle we moved in. Andrew’s ex-Marlborough crowd were a well-heeled mob, the descendants of lords and ladies and cotton barons. Andrew was the son of an accountant. My dad owned a hardware store. That was before a multinational chain muscled its way into town and bankrupted him. That was before he developed depression, then cancer, then died and left me and my mum to fend for ourselves.

Our Chelsea crowd lived the high life. Yachts, summers in Saint Tropez, winters in Cloisters. The mandatory second home in Majorca, Ibiza, the Dordogne, with six bedrooms furnished by Jasper Conran. Andrew had been lamenting the second-home-shaped-hole in our lives for some time, but the playgrounds of the jet set were simply beyond our reach.

That’s when he came upon the epiphany of an island house in the Cyclades. The Marlborough set might do sumptuous, extravagant, opulent – but we could do interesting, quirky, surprising. Greece was going bankrupt and Andrew said a fire sale was imminent. In the spring of 2011 you could already buy a four-bedroom house with a sea view for half a million euros in Naxos.

Unfortunately we didn’t have half a million euros so we had to look further afield. Two stomach-churning ferry journeys later he came upon Iraklia, a tiny island with a permanent population of a hundred and fifty that swelled to a few thousand during the summer. He’d been there on a business trip and came back waxing lyrical about the balmy evenings, the delicious honey and the fragrant herb-covered hills. After he found it described in the Lonely Planet Guide as ‘a sleeping Aegean gem’, our fate was sealed.

Three months later I was stuck in Iraklia in temperatures of thirty degrees with my face falling off. The only fragrance I could smell was goat.

It’s the metalloproteinases that ruin the collagen in your skin. Under normal conditions they’re there to assist and repair, but excessive sun can make them spiral out of control. The UV also creates free radicals, which break the collagen down and leave it unable to regenerate itself. None of our Chelsea set went into the sun anymore after Nicole Kidman made it fashionable to go around looking like Nosferatu. The irony of this wasn’t lost on me. We responded to our fear of aging (thus death) by going around looking like cadavers. I added luminosity to my corpselike appearance by applying a thick layer of Piz Buin factor fifty each morning on Iraklia and swaddling myself in scarves and shawls. Locals frequently mistook me for the mummified body of Agios Ioannis and ran off screaming as I approached. Not flattering I know, but rather a mummy than a prune.

Iraklia was an unusual little place. A couple of dusty mountains poking out the Aegean with only two villages and three small beaches.

One cash machine.

One doctor.

One extortionate supermarket.

That was soon to change though because what most people didn’t know was that Iraklia was on its way to becoming a major tourist destination. This privileged information came from the hallowed corridors of Brussels itself. As EU Commissioner for European Development, Andrew was responsible for doling out the pot of money set aside for promoting economic growth in underperforming areas of the union. Iraklia was a pet project of his and he knew exactly how much had been allocated for infrastructure schemes. As we drove around the island he proudly pointed out the manifestations of this benevolence – a school, a desalination turbine, a new road - as if he personally was the munificent St Nicholas that had given over his own savings to bestow such generosity upon the island.

More irksome were the stock phrases he reserved for dignitaries like Ajax Galitsis, his local fixer.

‘Education is self-perpetuating’ was for when we passed a half-built school on the way to Panagia.

‘Water’s the source of all life’ was reserved for sun-downer cruises past the desalination turbine.

His favourite place to stop for an oration was in front of the oversized EU sign at the top of the new beach road that had been blasted through the mountains to Merihas bay.

‘Tourists want beaches,’ he’d proselytise, staring proudly up at the circle of yellow stars that had come to represent a force for good in his eyes.

‘And tourists bring money.’

At that, Ajax and his wife, Theodora, would both nod their large heads enthusiastically at the prospect of so much money.

It wasn’t so much that he was unethically bankrolling an economic boom on Iraklia – there were thousands of projects like this all over the EU – but more that he was not above feathering his own nest by vicariously benefiting from the growth. Iraklia was on its way up in the world and Andrew intended being part of its gold gilt future.

That meant ingratiating ourselves with the right kind of social scene on the island. Theodora and Ajax were all very well, but unfortunately one couldn’t spend every Saturday drinking raki on Ajax’s fishing boat.

In his characteristically relentless pursuit of new friends, Andrew soon managed to unearth a wealthy Athenian family called the Gerardos, whose vast holiday home sprawled arrogantly across about a quarter of the island. After our first dinner with them Andrew cheerfully listed their excellent qualities as he undressed that evening and even announced Dimitri was a ‘regular bloke’. Regular was a term he used often to describe people he liked. It meant steady and predictable. No worrying eccentricities or outspoken ideas. A fish that swam with the rest of the shoal. This was just as well, since the Aegean had virtually been fished dry and Dimitri’s frozen foods company was probably responsible for it.

Within days Andrew knew everything there was to know about the Gerardos, although they knew very little about us. Despite being loquacious, Andrew seldom gave out personal information. He was a conversational cuckoo who nested in the minutiae of other people’s private lives while offering nothing of his own. This he prided himself in. The fact that he could extract the most delicate of confessions from people at dinner parties and leave a full six hours later untarnished by the shabby business of reciprocal self-disclosure.

Dimitri’s wife, Christina, was beautiful and vacuous. She shopped and entertained for a living. A disturbing Greek version of myself. Andrew expected me to sit with these people night after night talking about nothing. All the while the boredom and fear of desiccating into shrivelled Mediterranean olive ate away at my subconscious, smudging out what was left of me, particle by particle, causing my brain to collapse into itself like a space-time wormhole through which I slid and emerged in a parallel universe. A universe where it was no longer necessary to think or even exist, just to drift along in Andrew’s slipstream. A ribbon of fragrance that trailed in the air behind him.

Andrew would vehemently have denied such an accusation if I’d ever found the courage to raise it with him, because Andrew prided himself on being a card-carrying feminist. He’d read all the literature and felt it was important to think progressively whilst behaving like a medieval laird at home.

At the end of July, he abandoned me in Iraklia to house-hunt. He had an important series of meetings in Brussels to attend and since it was ‘all agreed’ we were definitely buying, it was left to me to find a suitable abode. His instructions were clear:

West-facing.

Sea view.

Close enough to the Chora to be able to walk in for dinner.

Not so close as to be disturbed by late-night revellers.

Three to four bedrooms.

Two bathrooms.

So, not much to ask for.

After he’d gone, the Meltemi blew in from the north-east and battered the island remorselessly for seven days. My skin withered and shrivelled under its relentless onslaught. I started applying a layer of petroleum jelly as a barrier to lock in whatever moisture remained in my shrunken face. Now I looked like a shiny, white, cadaverous mummy.

Every night I’d scan the mirror for signs of damage. The line between my eyebrows that I’d botoxed before I left (another small triumph for Bridgette) was starting to re-emerge.

Ghastly stuff Botox. My friend Rene assured me it was just a gentle plumping of the skin with a product found in nature, but I Googled it and found out it was a concoction of vile toxins harvested from the Clostridium Botulinum bacteria, in other words Botulism - an illness so dangerous that each case is considered a public health emergency. By that stage my face was becoming a public health emergency, so I decided to go ahead with it anyway. Even though I was totally revolted and morally opposed, by then the line on my forehead was starting to resemble the Bristol Channel, so I had no choice. As I lay on the dentist’s chair – yes, unbelievably Dr Katz my dentist administered the shots – I could picture the poisons seeping towards my neuromuscular junctions and immobilising the acetylcholine chemical messengers. (As usual I had done way too much research). But hey-ho, if botulism was strong enough to paralyse a man, then it was good enough to paralyse my face.

The effects were remarkable, but sadly only lasted a few months. Rene suggested collagen implants, but I went right off that idea after I found out on Google that the Chinese were exporting human collagen extracted from dead convicts. Definitely a step too far.

That was then. After three weeks of Iraklia’s harsh sun I was ready to personally kill the convicts and extract their collagen with my own bare hands.