Between Sisters
Authors: Cathy Kelly
For Dylan, Murray and John, as always.
Between Sisters
Cathy Kelly
Contents
LONDON
Dr Elsa de Marco sat in the television studio make-up room and closed her eyes to allow the make-up artist to begin the slow task of airbrushing her with foundation. It was a fabulous gizmo, Elsa often said to people who marvelled at her youthful screen self – despite the HD screens – and her not-so-youthful self in the flesh.
One moment she was pale with the wrinkles and uneven pigment of a sixty-year-old woman, and the next, she was sandblasted with television-quality beige, fluffed up with peachy, illuminating blusher to create cheekbones, and the majority of her wrinkles were expertly hidden with special magic pens.
Even her eyes, hooded now from age, shone out of her face the way they used to all those years ago: bright, a little too knowing, eyes that had seen it all, now lined with expert gel liner to give her gravitas along with a hint of sex appeal.
The thinking man’s TV psychoanalyst crumpet
, a newspaper supplement had once called her.
Tanya, the presenter of
The Casebook
, had not been pleased. Tanya liked all attention on herself.
‘I hate the press interviews,’ Elsa had pointed out with the calm, even tones she found worked with highly strung, highly jealous people like Tanya.
‘That’s right, you don’t,’ said Tanya, looking curious.
Why would anyone not want to be in the newspapers?
‘You’re better at that sort of thing,’ Elsa added before Tanya got thinking as to
why
any reasonable person would pass up lifelong exposure to media scrutiny, which was Tanya’s dream.
If Tanya had ever asked her this, Elsa would say that psychoanalysts liked to stay in the background and let the stars shine, which would be handily manipulative – and not entirely honest.
In truth, Elsa didn’t want anyone delving too deeply into her life. Being in the background was her speciality.
Elsa’s close friends still teased her about the ‘thinking man’s TV psychoanalyst crumpet’ comment. But her psychoanalyst friends, who thought their profession should stick to small rooms, couches and comfy chairs instead of television shows, didn’t mention it, apart from the odd comment about how nice it must be not having to worry about money.
Either way, Elsa didn’t mind. She’d learned that she could not change how other people thought of her. And having money, after many years of playing catch-up,
was
nice.
Still, she didn’t look too bad for a woman her age, Elsa had to admit, staring at herself in the mirror.
‘Where could I get one of those foundation spray-on machines?’ her tactless, young, new upstairs neighbour had asked only the previous weekend, catching Elsa about to leave the house and exclaiming again that television make-up was: ‘science-fiction brilliant because, honestly, look at your skin now compared to when you’re on the telly!’
The Elsa of thirty years ago might have snapped that, yes, she was an aged harridan compared to the twenty-something in front of her, and she had a polymer mask that they glued on in the TV studio. But the Elsa who’d spent most of the past twenty-four years praying for peace and acceptance at great personal cost smiled benignly at her neighbour and said, ‘They’re available on the internet, I think.’
‘Oh, gosh, thank you. My skin …’ The young woman touched her face, and Elsa, who hadn’t been wearing her glasses, finally noticed the acne marks. ‘It’s so hard to find the right foundation for coverage,’ she said awkwardly.
‘This is great, but you’re too young and beautiful to need it,’ Elsa said kindly.
The young woman grinned.
‘I’ve seen you on TV – you’re always the nicest one to people. My mum’s dead impressed I’m living above you. If she comes up to London, could she get your autograph?’
‘Of course,’ said Elsa, but the knot was in her chest again. Incredible how few words could do it.
She’d learned how to deal with the knot. Repeating her words to live by helped:
the wisdom you’ve learned was worth the journey.
That’s what she told herself every single morning.
But it didn’t always help.
All of these thoughts were rippling around in Elsa’s mind as she was being beautified that morning in the busy make-up room in OTV, where a rising boy band with degrees in hotness were being cooed over in one corner and a Miss World-lookalike newsreader with a degree in English Lit was being stared at by the boy band. Just your average morning in make-up.
Amid the buzz, Gigi chatted to Elsa. ‘What’s the topic this morning?’ she asked.
Elsa liked it when Gigi was the artist working on her face. She was young, calming and concentrated on her work. Their conversations about the show centred Elsa, took her into the space of thinking about the guests and what she was going to say.
‘Grandparents’ rights in the first show, and then plastic surgery and the danger of unrealistic expectations about it,’ said Elsa.
‘Interesting,’ said Gigi, standing back to check if Elsa’s eyes were evenly shadowed. ‘So not to expect a nose job will change your life – it’ll only change your nose.’
‘Exactly,’ said Elsa, thinking of precisely how painful a nose job actually was, because she’d had one. It had hurt like hell and she’d looked like she’d been in a fist fight for two weeks. ‘You could be doing my job.’
Gigi laughed. ‘You’ve got the qualifications, Doc,’ she said. ‘I’d just be talking common sense but you really know what you’re talking about.’
Elsa smiled good-naturedly. A degree was a wonderful thing to hide behind. A doctorate was even better.
Dr Elsa de Marco was an expert and nobody asked experts how they knew what they did. It had all been learned in dry, dusty lecture halls and over endless hours of listening to people spill out their pain as they lay on the analyst’s couch. People never expected academics to have learned most of their wisdom the hard way.
Still, Elsa had found college a joy: learning why people were made the way they were was like finding the key to the puzzle of everyone she had ever known.
Gigi went back to her work, instructing Elsa to close her eyelids again. Under the black nylon make-up cape, Elsa’s hand strayed to her left armpit, as it had so often these past few days.
Stop it,
she told herself.
She’d palpated the lump so many times it would be impossible now to know if she’d created this swelling with its dull ache or if it really was something sinister. Probably nothing. That’s what she said at night when her fingers touched it lightly, an innocent little nodule that could be so many things.
Sign of an infection, for a start. Plus she was run-down. Filming twenty shows in a ten-day schedule was insane.
‘Budgets,’ was the answer of the production company and the show’s constantly beleaguered producer, Stanley. Cheaper to get the team in for a full day and work them to the bone filming two shows in a row. Get the guests up for one night in a London hotel – not as good as the old hotels used to be, now cheaper chains with no mini-bar so vast drinks bills could not be rung up with after-show relief. Have make-up do everyone in one high-speed swoop. So what if the afternoon guests’ minimal make-up was sliding off their faces after lunch in the canteen? Nobody wanted to see the guests looking too glamorous: real life in all its normal, reddened or aged skin was what was called for. The talent – the show’s host, Tanya, plus Elsa and Malik, the child psychologist – all had the services of a make-up artist on set so that by the second show, they were still unshiny and with no thread veins peeking through.
Suddenly Tanya breezed in, a cloud of heavy perfume behind her along with a nervous PA wielding a cup of coffee and an iPad. Everyone with eyes closed for eyeliner opened them to see the vision.
Today, Tanya was encased in some sort of bandage dress that Elsa knew her fashion-conscious friend, Mari, would be able to identify. In it, Tanya’s forty-five-year-old body looked like a rather sexy mummy straight out of the sarcophagus, having torn her bandages to mid-thigh and rather low on the bosom.
‘Tanya knows about the pain of cosmetic surgery,’ Gigi murmured quietly to Elsa.
Elsa smothered a laugh. Tanya’s bosoms had miraculously increased in size one summer and she’d had the gall to say she planned to be the face/bosom of an entirely natural breast-increasing cream.
‘They’re going to pay me a fortune!’ she’d said gleefully.
Stanley, a man with great sad eyes like a Bassett hound and an entirely bald head from tearing his hair out over budgets, had taken her aside and muttered that she might be accused of false advertising.
‘Any, er … cosmetic help would count against you if you implied the, er … increase was due to creams alone,’ he’d said, desperately trying not to look at Tanya’s breasts, which perched high on her chest as if they were a TV drama heroine’s and had been stuffed into a corset by Wardrobe.
When Tanya had subsequently taken two days off ‘sick’ as proof of her rage, Stanley had been heard to say he should have kept shtum and let her be sued.
‘You’re ready to go, Elsa,’ said Gigi cheerfully five minutes later, admiring her handiwork and sliding the cape off Elsa’s shoulders.
‘Thank you,’ said Elsa with the genuine warmth that had made her a star.
‘If you can fake warmth, you can do anything,’ Tanya liked to say, a bastardisation of the old W. C. Fields joke about being able to fake sincerity. Tanya’s warmth was skin-deep and most of the time she shimmered with malice. Tanya hated that Elsa was beloved of the viewers.
For a moment, Elsa thought about what would happen if the lump under her armpit turned out to be more than her being a bit run-down. Tanya would tonelessly say, ‘Oh dear,’ and then turn to Stanley and the director to discuss Elsa’s replacement in a heartbeat. Tanya’s reputation for being as hard as nails was entirely deserved.
The lump was bound to be nothing, Elsa assured herself. Nine out of ten breast lumps were not cancerous.
Use your training. Calm yourself
.
Do not catastrophise
.
Give it a few weeks and see if it calms down.
She remembered a doctor once telling her that if you heard hoofbeats, you shouldn’t always assume zebras were coming. Breast cancer was a herd of zebras, or whatever the collective noun was. This was probably nothing.
She climbed down from the make-up chair and went back into her dressing room where she made, purely for want of something to do, another cup of lemon and ginger tea.
She sat in the stiff armchair she’d made comfortable over the years with some cushions, trying to run over the details of the first show. But her mind was betraying her, slipping and sliding all over the place, refusing to deal with the case of grandparents trying to persuade an angry former daughter-in-law that her children would benefit from seeing them.
The Casebook
was supposed to be a cut above the ordinary ‘let’s open the DNA-test envelope and see who the father is’ morning show. Elsa was proud of the work she’d done on it over its ten-year run. It was the achievement she was second most proud of in her life. The list of things she regretted was far longer, but time and help had taught her to forgive herself for her failings.
Yet she couldn’t forgive herself for them all. Sometimes it was impossible to close the door on the past.
Again her hand slipped under her silk blouse to the painful lump. If it was cancer, what would she do? Did she have the courage to confront things the way she made people on the show or in her practice confront things? She’d confronted so much herself, but now she was out of energy.
Physician heal thyself.
No, she was fed up with dealing with things. She’d let this wait. She’d know if it was serious, wouldn’t she?