That was just the frames, though: the one position it worked in. It took us 20 minutes, half an hour, an hour to find that one position the outfits looked good in. The rest of the time, it was dealing with the camel-toe here, the upper-arm fat there, the muffin-top bulge the other. The clothes were stretched, pegged, tied on with string – the lighting changed, the hair arranged; hats brought in, in an emergency, to balance cruelly proportioned shoulders. I felt like a pig. A clumpy, awkward pig out of her league. I was supposed to be selling these clothes by finding the ‘best’ angle for them, fronting them, working them – but my tits were wrong, and my arse too big, and my arms helpless, heavy and exposed. I left that studio, eight hours later, sweaty and in tears. It was the ugliest I’d ever felt. Without even the aid of being able to smile – ‘Look mysterious, and sexy. Kind of … vague’ – I was reduced entirely down to the clothes on my back, and how my body looked in them. And in these styles, rather than the ones I’ve carefully collected as being ‘helpful’ to me, I was a total failure.
I’m not stupid – I’d always known the difference between models and normal women is that normal women buy clothes to make them look good; whereas the fashion industry buys models to make the clothes look good. Most clothes are helpless without models. They were certainly helpless on me. I could do nothing for this shit. I couldn’t even stay upright in the heels.
‘I’m so sorry – I bet all the models can do this for hours,’ I said, gloomily, scrambling to my feet again, having keeled over sideways, ungainly, like a horse on its hind legs.
‘Oh no,’ the stylist said, cheerfully. ‘They fall over in them all the time, too. They’re impossible to walk in. No one can walk in them. Hahaha!’
I thought again about my years of despair at not being able to walk in heels, despite ‘everyone’ wearing them. Quite a lot of the ‘everyone’, I now reflected, were in fashion shoots, or on a red carpet. i.e. they weren’t really wearing them as ‘shoes’, to walk around in all day. They were just wearing them for the photographs. They know it’s just for photographs. We – the customers – are the only ones who are buying this stuff, and then trying to walk around in it all day; move in it; live in it.
So much of this stuff is just for tableaux – not real life, I finally realised. Although we use it as our major study aid, fashion does not, ultimately, help us get dressed in the morning. Not if we want to wear something we can walk around in without constantly having the hem ride up, or picking the seam out of our crotches. Fashion is for standing still and being photographed. Clothes, on the other hand, are for our actual lives. And life is really the only place you can learn the most important lessons about how to get dressed and feel happy.
Here, then, is what I have learned about clothes – ignoring magazines and advertising campaigns, and picking up the knowledge where it matters: a) crying in a changing room in Topshop, whilst stuck in a pair of PVC leggings, b) running down the street after someone who looks amazing, and saying ‘Where did you get that?’1 or c) my sister Weena coming into the bedroom, seeing what I’m wearing, going ‘No’ and walking out of the room again—
1) Leopardskin is a neutral.
2) You can get away with nearly anything if you wear the thing with black opaque tights and boots.
3) Contrary to popular opinion, a belt is often not a good friend to a lady. Indeed in many circumstances, it acts merely as a visual aid to help the onlooker settle the question: ‘Which half is fatter – the bottom or the top?’
4) Bright red is a neutral.
5) Sellotape is NOT strong enough to mend a hole in the crotch of a pair of tights.
6) You should NOT buy an outfit if you have to strike a sexy pose in the changing-room mirror to make it look good. On the other hand, if you immediately start dancing the minute you put it on, buy it, however much it costs; unless it’s lots, in which case, you can’t, so don’t. Fashion magazines will never say, ‘Actually, don’t buy it if you can’t afford it.’ Neither will your friends. I am probably the only person who will EVER say it to you. You’re welcome.
7) You should never describe your look as being ‘a mixture of high street and vintage’. Remember how angry it makes you when Fearne Cotton says it. Don’t let the abused become the abuser.
8) You are very, very unlikely to look bad in an above-the-knee, fitted, 1950s-style dress with sleeves and a cardigan. Have you seen what Christina Hendricks – the stacked, hot Joan Holloway in Mad Men, the woman Vanity Fair recently christened ‘The Body’ – looks like in modern combat trousers and a top? Awful. There’s a lesson for us all there.
9) The most flattering trousers you’ll ever have are some black running trousers with a fiercely high Lycra content. They make your thighs and arse look tiny. You spend over two years trying to pluck up the courage to wear them out with a pair of knee-high boots and a jacket, but always bottle it at the last minute. It is a source of lasting regret.
10) Silver lamé is a neutral.
11) Ditto gold sequin.
12) Instead of buying something that says ‘Dry clean only’, just put £50 in the garment’s pocket, and walk out of the shop, leaving both on the hanger. In the long run it will save you money, time, and the unedifying spectacle of you squirting Sure Extra onto the armpits, in an emergency, on a train on the way to a meeting.
13) Everything from Per Una at Marks & Spencer makes you look a little bit mental. I don’t know why this should be so, but it is true.
And this is what I have learned about fashion.
1Sadly, the answer is almost always, ‘An amazing vintage shop in Rotterdam, four years ago, that has now sadly burned down in a fire, and which you wouldn’t have been allowed in anyway,’ but I still haven’t lost hope they might just point to M&S and say, ‘There. Ten minutes ago.’
CHAPTER 12
Why You Should Have Children
A Bad Birth
It was no surprise at all to me to discover I was terrible at giving birth. No surprise at all. All that I know about birth is what I’ve seen from my mother – returning after delivering every sibling as white as death; hobbling into the house seven times with a bad story: a breech, an emergency Caesarean, a trapped nerve, a tangled cord. For her fifth – Corinne – the placenta didn’t come away, and an inexperienced midwife simply took hold of the umbilical cord and pulled it, like a dog lead attached to a recalcitrant beagle. My mother haemorrhaged so badly they had to give her four pints of blood, and when they sent her home, it was like having someone return, shell-shocked, from a war.
I was 11 – I carried the baby around like a cross between a doll and a baby monkey. We were all in fear of Mum suddenly collapsing again. She fainted in the supermarket; halfway up the stairs. It seemed like the baby was something that was essential to her, and should have stayed inside. She seemed broken without it.
The next baby – Cheryl, two years later – was worse. Mum came back with a trapped nerve in her shoulder, and couldn’t move – she lay in the front room with the curtains drawn, through a long hot summer, crying, as the house descended into a hot soup of mould, ants and scared children. Thirteen now – I fed the family on tins of cheap hot dogs, and crackers and jam; the new baby monkey in a cardboard box at my feet, along with the old one. It was awful until late September, when the hot weather breaks, and Mum finally started to walk around again, slowly; killing the ants with hot water and bleach.
So when I become pregnant at 24, I both know how to look after a baby – you put them in a cardboard box, and eat tinned hot dogs – and dread one coming out. Frankly, I don’t think I can do it. I don’t know how you do it. I’m insanely, wilfully ignorant. At my six-month check-up, I comment on an odd, modern sculpture above the bed. In white plastic, it seems to show ten pupil-less eyes getting gradually wider, as if in alarm.
‘What’s that?’ I ask, cheerfully. ‘Is it a rip-off Jeff Koons?’
‘It’s the stages of cervical dilation,’ the midwife says, puzzled. ‘From nought to ten centimetres.’
/> ‘The … cervix?’ I say. ‘Why does the cervix dilate?’
‘That’s how the baby comes out,’ the midwife says, now looking like she’s talking to a madwoman. ‘That’s what labour is – the cervix gradually dilating, to let the baby out.’
‘The cervix?’ I repeat, wholly alarmed. ‘A baby can’t come out of that! It’s not a hole! I’ve felt it! That’s a solid thing!’
‘Well, that’s why it’s all a … bit of an effort,’ the midwife replies, as diplomatically as she can.
At that point, I know I can’t have a baby. The me-maths just aren’t adding up. I can’t open my cervix. I wouldn’t even know where to start.
So all the way through pregnancy – through the jolly doctors and can-do midwives – I feel pityingly sorry for them every time they refer to my forthcoming labour. It’s not going to happen, I say to myself. I feel as if they’ve all – nurses, obstetricians, my husband – been told that, in nine months’ time, I am going to put on a magic show, and will miraculously fly around the room like Peter Pan, or – almost literally – make monkeys fly out of my butt. The chairs are all set up and the audience is patiently waiting.
But I, of course, know I am not magic. I know I don’t have one single half-ounce of enchantment in my entire body. I’ve tried everything I can to encourage magic to happen – the birthing pool is set up in the front room, surrounded by candles waiting to be lit. I have herbs and music and things to burn. I am ready to cast the spell – but as I go first one and then two weeks over my due date, I feel like a failed shaman pointing my staff at the sky, shouting ‘BEHOLD! THE RAIN!’ as the crops continue to wither in the fields and the womenfolk wail.
When my contractions finally start, they are painful, yet useless. The baby is in the unfortunate posterior position – her skull grinds against my spine – and the midwives sadly explain that although the magic has started, I have accidentally, in my ignorance, called on bad magic, instead: posterior labours are long, arduous and unsatisfying. After 24 sleepless hours, they suggest hospital. I cry. They insist.
And in the brightness of the ward, confronted with the modern, sleek, beeping wonder of technology, the magic disappears completely. The shaman is revealed just to be an old man with a stick, and shuffles away, never to be seen again: the contractions stop entirely.
A sour-faced Swedish midwife assesses me as I sit on the bed, weeping.
‘This is what often happens with the mummies who say they want a home birth,’ she says, with some satisfaction, as she opens my legs, and inserts a hook – to monitor heart-rate – into my baby’s head. Poor baby! Poor baby! I’m so sorry! This is not what I dreamed your first touch to be! ‘They end up having to come in here, and get their tummies cut open.’
Finally, I have met someone who realises what I have known all along. This bitch sees me for what I am: incapable.
From Saturday night until Monday morning, the NHS slowly and dutifully goes through its list of actions to bail out failed women. My waters are unbroken – they break them with a crotchet hook. My contractions have stopped – they jump-start them with a pessary. My cervix is unyielding – painfully, they sweep it, just as a contraction starts. It is a sensation a little like being diced, internally, at the start of slow murder.
They are helping me because they have to, of course: these are all things the female body is supposed to do, automatically, and without fuss – like precipitation, or season change. My waters breaking, my contractions starting – these are all things my body should have done itself, with its innards hidden, like a music box.
But due to my incompetence, they now have had to prise the casing off, and a roomful of increasingly worried doctors are playing each note by hand – strumming flatly on the teeth of the mechanism. My labour has no rhythm at all. Every beat is being forced.
Of course, after two days of this bad dance, the baby started, very tentatively and apologetically, to die. On the monitor, her heartbeat sounds like a tiny toy drum. As each contraction squeezes her, you can hear the drum getting fainter – as if the Having A Baby parade was passing by in a distant street, or maybe moving away all together.
I know what comes next – intravenous oxytocin. The Drip. I have read about The Drip. Every book on childbirth teaches you to fear it. When you contract naturally, the body generally does it at a pace and intensity you can handle. The Drip, however, has no such compunction. It only has one speed: fast. It is a brutal machine – a metronome for the unrhythmic. An unstoppable atomic clock that makes you explode into contraction every minute, unfailingly. It is a pace-maker for the womb; like the red shoes in The Red Shoes. It makes you dance until you drop dead.
The pain was transformative – like going from agnosticism to evangelism in a single hour. The sky was suddenly full of God, and He had biblical pain for me. The breaks in between contractions were like licking a dripping tap in a burning house – a second of relief, but, when you turned back, it was so hot that the moisture burned from your lips; the walls had gone up, and there had never been a door or window in the first place. The only way to get out was to somehow turn inside out, like an octopus, and fly out through the magic doorway in your bones.
But I was meat and pain, pinned in place by monitor wires, and my mother had never taught me how to turn inside out.
And in the end – because I wasn’t magic and couldn’t fly monkeys out of my butt, and I’d been three days and nights in this place of failure – the doctors had to strap me down and cut me open. Instead of Lizzie coming out of me in a soft, spurting burst of magic and Milky Way, Dr Jonathan de Rosa pushed my kidneys to one side and hauled her out of me, upside-down by her feet, like a shit-covered rabbit on a butcher’s hook.
Of course, I haven’t told you the half of it. I haven’t told you about Pete crying, or the shit, or vomiting three feet up a wall, or gasping ‘mouth!’ for the gas and air, as I’d forgotten all other words. Or the nerve that Lizzie damaged with her face and how, ten years later, my right leg is still numb and cold. Or the four failed epidurals, which left each vertebra smashed and bruised, and the fluid between them feeling like hot, rotting vinegar. And the most important thing – the shock, the shock that Lizzie’s birth would hurt me so much; would make me an animal with my leg caught in the trap of my own bones, and leave me begging for the doctors to take a knife and cut me free.
For the next year, every Monday at 7.48am, I would look at the clock and remember the birth, and tremble and give thanks it was all over, and marvel that we both survived.
Lizzie was born at 8.32am – but 7.48am was when they gave me the anaesthetic, and the pain, finally, stopped.
Now, it’s Monday morning. I am on my narrow hospital bed, with everything suddenly quiet and calm, and a saline drip in my hand, and a morphine shot in my leg, and my husband on a chair, and my daughter in a glass cot, and not even flowers on the cabinet, it’s still so early and new. My eyes are huge with morphine. When I look at the photographs later, I look gorgeous. Like Stevie Nicks, wasted, on Mulholland Drive, but incongruously next to a baby.
Pete looks like shit. I didn’t notice it at the time, because, without pain, everything – even old, brown blood stains and the punishing strip-lighting – looked beautiful; but the picture that Caz and Weena take of him when they arrive, ten minutes later, shows a man with cried-red eyes and pale green skin, from exhaustion and fear and drinking all my Lucozade.
His eyes are filled with tears, he can only look at me like I am going to die, and he is going to miss me more than he could ever explain.
‘Pete,’ I say, putting my hand out to him. It has a drip in the back of it. Pete looks scared to touch it.
‘Everything they did hurt you,’ he said, and started crying. Really awful crying, with his mouth all liquid; strings of spit between the lips. ‘I couldn’t do anything. Every time I thought it was going to get better, they just did something that made you worse. When they put that thing in your back [the first of three failed shunts for the e
pidural] they were saying the pain would stop – but it went in wrong and you screamed, and wet yourself. They ran with the trolley down the hall. You were making this terrible sound.’
I look into the glass cot, and tap my finger on the side, like people do on goldfish bowls. Lizzie opens her eyes for a second, and stares, with wrinkled monkey brow, at me. Her face looks red against the hospital sheet. She still looks like an internal organ. She has no white in her eyes – just black. Just huge pupils – two big holes in her monkey head, that lead straight to her monkey brain. She stares at me. I stare back at her.
Pete and I look up at each other. We both know we want to smile at each other; but we cannot.
We look back at the baby.
Pain is transformative. We are programmed for it to be the fastest lesson we’ll ever learn. I learned two things from the first baby I had:
1) That being very unfit, attending only two NCT birth classes, and genuinely believing that I would probably die was not a good way to prepare for labour, all things told.
2) That once you have experienced that level of pain, the rest of your life becomes relatively easy. However awful an experience, it’s really not wasted.
Because you know what you get along with 27 stitches in your belly, or seventh- to second-degree tears in your perineum? Perspective. A whole heap of perspective. I do not mean this in a – to use the technical term – ‘wanky way’. But in many cases, a furious, 24-hour dose of wildly intolerable pain sorts out many of the more fretful, dolorous aspects of modern life.
It is like a mental bushfire. You get rid of a lot of emotional deadwood. Do you currently get wound up about poor customer service, or ill-made sandwiches, or how your legs look? You won’t when you’ve been dragged backwards through the brightly burning gates of hell during a 48-hour labour!
In that respect, childbirth is far superior to Sertraline, or therapy. Fairly early on in the event, you will have the most dazzlingly simple revelation of your life: that the only thing that really matters, in this whole goddamn crazy mixed-up world, is whether or not there’s something the size of a cat stuck in your cervix, and that any day when you do not have a cat stuck in your cervix will be, by default, wholly perfect in every way.