Jane Shilling - The Stranger in the Mirror

The week before my appointment with Dr Foster, I had lunch with a friend. We had met at work when we were in our late twenties and for a couple of decades, until I turned to freelance writing, our careers had run along parallel tracks. After that we grew a little apart, although we still kept in touch. Now, although I hadn’t seen her for a while, I knew that she had been made redundant from one job and soon afterwards found another, better paid and more prestigious. It was a great success story.

She looked very beautiful when we met. Her clothes were exquisite – a pale silk suit, a putty-coloured bag of the sort that has a name. I had on a dress from H&M – a successful dress, I had thought when I bought it. But beside the silk suit it looked ill-fitting and unsuitably young. I felt awkward, graceless, at once less poised and much older than my friend, whose unmade-up face had the creamy firmness of a young woman’s skin.

We talked about our lives. Her new job, she said, was exciting and very demanding. She hesitated for a moment, then, lowering her voice, she said, ‘You mustn’t tell anybody, but I’ve knocked ten years off my age.’ ‘You’re telling them that you’re 40? And they believe you? And you remember to be 40 all the time? With all the right music and everything?’ said I, idiotically amazed. ‘But why?’

She shrugged. ‘The deputy’s 33,’ she said. ‘The subs are in their twenties. The editor is the same age as me…’ Another shrug. We carried on piecing together the jigsaws of our lives, finished our lunch, parted affectionately. She returned to her office and I to my desk at home, thinking rather ruefully about her beauty, her poise, how composed and successful she looked, with her pale suit and her opulent bag and her lovely creamy skin.

At the same time I felt a sort of vertigo, as though the solid ground had just tilted beneath my feet. Ten years of her life had vanished at a keystroke of the personnel department’s computer. We’d known each other for twenty years. That was half our friendship obliterated: a decade of experience disavowed and now, it seemed, she had, by wishing it, made herself ten years younger than me. I felt both stupidly cheated, like the only person not in on a secret, and obscurely troubled. If I kept on getting older while my contemporaries grew younger and younger, whatever would become of me?

With all this racing in flustered, fragmentary fashion through my mind, I sat in squashy sofa-bound proximity to Dr Foster while he explained that the flesh of the face is like a grape, or a balloon, or some other plump, resilient object. At any rate, when young it is fresh and firmly attached to its bony armature, and when old it goes a bit saggy, which seemed unarguable, as far as it went.

And so his radical idea, the thing that had made him the Derm’s Derm and the star of chick lit, was to rehang the flesh upon the structure of the face by augmenting the cheekbones with silicone, softening the nose-to-mouth lines just here, lifting the brow a little, plumping up the lip line… OK? Are you ready for this, Jane?

No! I want to say. No, indeed I am not. I’m with your grandma. I have no wrinkles – at least not until I put in my contact lenses in the morning. And, thanks to the kindly blurring effects of my cataract, if I shut one eye I can still imagine I look pretty much as I did twenty years ago. Or at least ten years ago.

At any rate, my face is my own and although I should very much like it to go back to what I quite recently remember it as looking like, I still believe this might be achieved with a good face cream and less domestic stress. I have no desire to see a synthetic simulacrum of that younger face in the mirror (not yet, at any rate. Though naturally I reserve the right to change my mind, particularly if those purple under-eye hollows begin to turn into actual pouches. In which case I will be on my way to the plastic surgeon’s consulting room before you can say blepharoplasty.)

In fact I don’t say any of this. A small internal civil war takes place, between my horror of plastic surgery and my sense of professional obligation. I agreed to do this story. It isn’t my editor’s fault that it involves syringes and Botox rather than, as we imagined, seaweed and Siberian throat music.

If I followed my instincts and launched myself out of this sofa at top speed, past the entourage of eerily kempt PR people, up the stairs with the tinkling waterfall, past the reception desk thronged with dismissive sprites, out into the anonymous red-brick expanse of Wigmore Street and the soothing hot-rubber smell of the Tube, I could be home in half an hour. Home where the grey Thames flows and the geese fly honking in V-formation across the pale evening sky, the cormorants roost on the ruined hulks of the old wharves and the sun shines on the shabby little streets of Victorian brick terraces, at the end of one of which is my own front door, surrounded by blown Gloire de Dijon roses.

Indoors the cat will be curled up on the chair by the door, smelling comfortingly of hot fur and purring when I press my faded face into his cushiony side. Soon my son will be home from school, full of news. He doesn’t mind what I look like. (It is true that once, glancing at a photograph on the kitchen pinboard of me looking fond and fragile, balancing his huge, bald, soggy-nappied six-month-old self on my bony knee, he remarked, ‘Gosh, Mother, you were quite pretty once’. But that is not to say that he’d prefer it if I suddenly appeared with the face of that fifteen-year-old photograph.)

If I went home now, in half an hour’s time I could be emailing my editor, explaining that the non-surgical facelift wasn’t what we thought. That it meant semi-permanent changes to my face, that I couldn’t go through with it. She would understand. I’d work again. Only… her story would be wrecked, the photographers’ fee wasted, the expensive derm’s time booked for nothing. There would be an element of the dud racehorse refusing to leave the starting stall, which would hurt my amour propre . Then there was the curiosity of looking over the hedge that is the reason people become journalists in the first place. This, if I declined it, would be the first hedge I had ever refused to look over.

‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’m ready.’

Having cajoled me into the starting-stall and slammed the gate upon me, Dr Foster stopped flirting and became brisk. His assistant, a pigeon-plump person in a white smock with a slightly alarming style of reassurance and the smooth, almost featureless face of a nicely speckled brown egg with a pair of glossy pink lips attached to it, installed me in a chair and the Doctor, snapping on a pair of rubber gloves, advanced with a large needle.

‘Have you ever been to the dentist?’ he asked. ‘Every six months!’ said I, furiously, taking the question as a slight on my (well tended, but distinctly British) teeth. ‘Then you’ll be quite familiar with this ,’ he said, sticking the needle into the crease by my nose and wiggling it about. ‘Soon you’ll feel quite frozen, just like at the dentist’s.’

Quite frozen, yes. Just like at the dentist’s, no. Even for big stuff – the shoring up of horrible old fillings, the fitting of a crown to a crumbled premolar – I was accustomed to rise from nice Mr O’Malley’s dentist’s chair still able to converse politely, drooling only a little, about the cricket (he was Australian) with only the area around the particular bit of jaw where he had been excavating immobilised.

This was something altogether more powerful; in a few minutes my whole face become nerveless and numb, as though someone had moulded a close-fitting rubber mask over my features. When I touched my cheek it felt dead, like the flesh of a chicken I was about to rub with butter before putting it into the oven. I shut my eyes. Over my head, Dr Foster and the photographer chatted matily as they went about their respective jobs.