Page 71 - Raffles09_March2022

“– staring at your own face in the mirror.”
His tone and pace of speech reeked of reasonableness. She felt almost a sense of awe at how ambushed she felt, how helpless – she couldn’t remember ever feeling like this.
After a slew of consultations, it had been impressed upon her that there was, after all, no secret magical surgery. Her facial keloids were extensive and unusual; each would require a localised response. Each response would hurt, would take time to assess, would very possibly make things worse, would interact with other responses in unpredictable ways. Different plastic surgeons with different specialisations would need to be committed, coordinated. She would need to be involved for her own care between procedures – that was critical. Did she have anyone to support her? The program would cost a ransom, and there was no guarantee of anything approaching success. Was she sure?
“Especially,” Andrew went on, “when your face is fine – it hasn’t changed at all since we arrived – or, really, since you emerged after two hours in our bathroom at home.”
One drawn-out mess of pain. She lost count of her times under the many-irised light, under local and general, offering her face to numbing creams and needles, being surgically markered, sliced open, irradiated by X-rays, burned by liquid nitrogen and lasers. She came home bleeding, suppurating, swollen, blistered, and then changed dressings on skin that felt like an open sore, applied topical antibiotics that stung and stank and crusted, went back for regular steroid injections. There were infections and inflammations; a couple of operations triggered keloid growth in adjoining tissue. Then revision surgery. Over and over again she endured it. Then reconstruction surgery. It was her whole life. She was all alone. Renewal, she reminded herself, was painful.
At last, after almost three years of non-stop trauma – of battle with her face – she called truce. There had been substantial progress: the skin had been resurfaced, the contours corrected. The remaining scar lines were etiolated. She was left some discolouration beneath her eyes, and mild chloracne, which flared like bad teenage acne, proliferating blackheads. Nothing, she was told, that skincare and make-up couldn’t manage. So she threw herself into the study of cosmetics as she had futures trading, and amassed oils and unguents and extracts and serums and distillations to cleanse and moisturise and mattify and tone and balance until she had learned to manage her face, and negotiate its weather, so as to admit the possibility, on some days, in some lights, of feeling something close to beautiful again.
“You really are a pig,” said Kristin. “Who do you think she’s doing it for?”
A rapt hush around the table. This was sacrilege, of course, the airing of secret women’s business; and blasphemy too, because women were supposed to do these things only for themselves. She felt a force of gratitude towards Kristin. She’d done all this prior to Andrew, it was true, but once she’d met him it had become all for him, and until now she hadn’t considered that wrong or weak. She hadn’t revealed to him the extent of her disfigurement, or her efforts to remediate it, because that was her old life, and she’d wanted – how she’d wanted – to be new for him.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. He considered saying something, and didn’t, and not saying it hardened him. “Anyway, I prefer the natural look.”
So now it was all sloughing away, all the solid landmass beneath her. Suddenly your feet were standing on nothing. He preferred the natural look. What she wouldn’t have given. She looked around her and it all seemed so ethereal, the room become a glittering aviary, and the women’s faces those of light-boned, subtle- coloured birds. She did love him. And she knew he loved her, even if he could never understand that his love was responsible for these girls’ floating faces, the skin effulgent, lipshine, nailshine, the hair moving in its own light – nor what horror was needed to make that light, what stuff these girls countenanced: sheep fat and sebum, snail slime, ambergris and algae, crushed fishscales for the hands, crushed beetles for the mouth. Beauty was nothing less than a massacre, a Baba Yaga spell, and love – his love – was entirely captive. Love was the castle built on morgue and midden, was the room you must never, under any circumstances, enter, the temple asquat its purging chambers, where they bring down your doubting flesh, where they mortify it, and all in the name of love.
***
She sat in the small lobby. He would come exactly on time. She looked out at the sunlit terrace, from the edge of which travellers used to step straight onto the backs of elephants. Frangipani and poinciana boughs, leaves of rubber plants polished to a metal sheen. Behind her the old European elevator, with its original timber cage and black latticework, gliding smoothly up and down. A cocktail being shaken: she turned to watch. The young bartender, lit only by glowing vitrines, held the copper shaker in front of his face and shook it, it seemed, with his whole body. A filigree of sweat below his hairline. The point was the containedness: you paid for the stylised violence as much as the spirit.
− EMOTION −
RAFFLES MAGAZINE 69