Authors: The Hungry Years
`MY next victim,' grinned Mr Prakash.
Five months later, I knocked on the door of Anne's large Victorian house in the Sussex countryside. The door opened. The woman on the other side of the door, while recognizably the woman I met before the operation, looked changed. She looked ... tighter. There was something different around the eyes. She smiled. Her smile was not exactly the same smile. She led me into her kitchen, where we both sat at the table.
I said, 'Well!' She poured me a glass of wine. One of her eyelids looked slightly tighter than the other. She no longer had a double chin. She had a single chin, like a younger woman. She had a more defined bone structure. Her face conveyed her thoughts in a flatter, less complicated way, in a way that resembled the expressions of a younger woman, although her skin, as she pointed out, was not the skin of a younger woman. Her skin was 53. She looked younger, but not, I imagine, precisely like her younger self.
She was, she said, 'very happy' with the operation. She had, she'd been told, 'lost a good eight years'. In a way, it was true. Having been a young-looking 53, she could now pass for 45. `When I'm 63,' she says, 'I'll probably look mid-fifties, or perhaps 57.' Friends she had not told about the operation had been remarking on how well she looked.
`My confidence,' she said, 'is boosted 100 per cent.' Her husband was 'over the moon'. There were pictures of him on the kitchen door before liposculpture and, younger looking, after. Anne's children, who had thought she was 'mad' to have the operation, were pleased. Now she was no longer negatively conscious of her neck. 'I hated looking down,' she said. 'To look down was awful.'
After the operation, Anne felt 'tight', as if she was 'perma—
nently blowing up a balloon'. Later, there was discomfort, swelling and bruising. The bruising takes weeks to go down. i told my children I'd look horrible,' she said, 'but you can't prepare people.'
Looking at Anne, I could see that her facelift both had and hadn't worked. She had dispensed with her double chin, which she hated, and various wrinkles. But it was not perfect. She had the air of a woman who had had her wrinkles removed, rather than one who was too young to have wrinkles. Looking at Anne, with her new smile and firmer chin-line, made me understand a bit better my misgivings about cosmetic surgery. It is one more example, in the modern world, of the superficial being offered as a substitute for the profound, of image being traded for meaning. The terrible, secret worry I had been carrying around about cosmetic surgery, I began to realize, is that it might actually work.
`The thing that went wrong with my eyelid,' Anne said, `was that it bled so much. It's very rare for this to happen. But that's why it's healed like this.' She put her finger up to the eyelid. She said, 'But that won't be any problem. Mr Prakash can put that right. No trouble.' She moved her finger across her eyelid, as if it were a surgical tool.
We sipped at our wine. Anne was getting the feeling back in her cheeks. The nerves were joining up again. You could see that the cheeks, tighter now, were almost back to a natural look. The scars around the ears were minimal. She nearly felt right again. Some people don't for a year. Some never do.
Extrinsics
No, I'm thinking as I drink the last of my coffee, facelifts are not the answer. At best, facelifts disguise you as a more attractive person, in the same way that credit cards disguise you as a rich person, mobile phones as a connected person, cocaine as a happy person, painkillers as a person without a hangover, diets as an untroubled person who never got fat, never stuffed their face. But, with all these things, the economics are not good. You end up with a net loss. Overwhelmingly, people who diet end up still feeling fat, and eventually getting fat. People who have facelifts still feel wrinkly; many book themselves in for repeat surgery. Credit-card debt is increasing exponentially; more debtors commit suicide every year. Cocaine makes you depressed. Painkillers give you headaches.
Treat the symptoms, not the cause. That's what we're always being told. What can you do if you're feeling sad? Take Prozac. Get a new kitchen. Have a wardrobe makeover, an operation, a new set of teeth. Have a botox injection in your lunch-break. Have a cushion inserted into the sole of your foot, so you can wear higher heels. Get a tattoo or a piercing. Play the lottery. Fly to a secluded beach. Become famous.
In an essay entitled 'The Dark Side of the American Dream', sociologists Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan wrote about people who pursue what they call 'extrinsic goals' money, fame, and beauty believing these things make then, happy. But they don't, of course. They experience lower quality of life' than people who are less materialistic. But they are not just miserable they spread misery, too; they have `shorter, more conflictual, and more competitive relationships with others'. People with extrinsic goals, writes the Australian economist Clive Hamilton, 'tend to be more depressed than others, and they tend to suffer from higher levels of psychological disturbance.' Romantically, they are more jealous. As teenagers, they commit more vandalism. And when they achieve their goals, Hamilton says, they are `no happier'.
And when one person gets a facelift, others will want one, too. This exponentially increasing pursuit of the superficial, Hamilton believes, is the West's most significant problem. Every Western government, he says, is obsessed with economic growth. But how does the economy achieve growth in a time of abundance, when everybody has what they need?
By making them want what they don't have, of course. By making them dissatisfied with what they've already got. By making them feel abject, hungry, isolated. And by making them overspend and overeat, by lending them money at high rates of interest, and pumping their bodies full of insulin, and then telling them the problem, the real problem, is fat, sugar and salt.
That's what I'm thinking, sitting here on the bench with the last of my coffee. Extrinsic goals are not the solution.
But what, then, is the solution? Therapy?
Really, I Was Fine
I was late for my first session. Twenty minutes late.
`Sorry about this,' I said. 'You see, when you gave me your address, you gave the number as 130. Which is right, of course. But, see, I took it down as 30.'
`Don't worry.'
`I took it down wrong.'
`That's fine.'
`So I get to number 30, and nobody's around. No answer. And then this woman arrives, walks up the garden path, and says, can I help you? And I say, well, I hope so. And she says what do you mean, and I say, well, I think you're my therapist. And she looked really scared at this point. It was getting dark. So I said, actually, I might have the wrong
number.'
`I see.'
`And that's when I worked it out. I thought, you know, this is a long street. And the only other number it could have been
was 130.'
`Right.'
`So here I am.'
I've read that, during therapy, you're not supposed to notice your surroundings, but I took everything in. I was sitting down on a small, neat armchair, not a couch, and my therapist, Naomi, was sitting on an identical chair. Sort of like the chairs you would get in a hotel lobby, chairs to be quite comfortable in, but not totally relaxed. The room was minimally furnished. White walls. Neat carpet. Journals on a shelf.
I was not sure what would happen next. I wanted to find out what my problems were. That was all. I was not unduly alarmed. I reminded Naomi about my 'issues', which we'd briefly discussed on the phone. The eating. The drinking.
`So eating and drinking. Anything else?'
I thought for a moment. I felt a sense of vertigo, as if standing on the edge of a crevasse.
`Well, obviously, procrastination.'
`Procrastination?'
`Yes. I'm always ... putting things off.'
`That's interesting. Tell me about that.'
`I always seem to leave things to the last moment. I'm always late. I don't like being late. In fact, I hate being late. But I can't bring myself to be on time. Something, a sort of malign force, always takes me over.'
She asked me if I could think of any instances, and I told her stories of nearly missing trains, nearly missing planes, actually missing trains and planes. I told her that, if I was ever early for something, I felt uneasy, gripped by anxiety.
`And has this caused you problems?'
`Oh, yes. Everybody hates it.'
`Can you tell me about a specific time?'
`I was once on holiday, in Italy, with a girlfriend and her family. One day we went somewhere on this train. And we all got on the train. It was a tiny station. We were sitting there. The train was leaving in about five minutes. And I looked across the platform, and there was this lovely sort of coffee place, a tiny little coffee bar. And all I could think of was that I really wanted a coffee. I mean .
`Go on.'
`I mean, I really wanted a coffee. And I said, does anybody want a coffee? And my girlfriend just hissed at me. She said, You can't be serious. I said, look, we have, like, six minutes. How long do you think it will take me? And she gave me this look, just this mean look, as if to say, if you do this I will hate You, And I sat there for a while, and just when she thought I was definitely not going to do it, I got out of the train, walked
across the tracks, got my coffee, and made it back, about a full minute before the whistle.'
`And what happened?'
`She wouldn't speak to me.'
`And how did you feel?'
`Well, great. For a moment. And the coffee was not bad,
actually.'
`But this wasn't about the coffee.'
`Right.'
`So what was it about?'
I don't know. With me it's probably all about boarding
school.'
`What's the connection?'
`Well . . .'
And so began the procrastination phase of my therapy, the hours when I talked about certain things, in order to avoid talking about other things. Of course, this is not necessarily a bad approach. As Freud pointed out, therapy is not something that should be brought to a swift conclusion. On the contrary, therapy should be long, drawn-out, painful and, of course, expensive. 'Cruel though it may sound,' Freud wrote in Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy, 'we must see to it that the patient's suffering, to a degree that is in some way or other effective, does not come to an end
prematurely.'
`Were you happy at boarding school?'
`I was fine.'
`Fine?'
`I just felt very ... restricted.'
Boarding school, although I hadn't liked it, was somethingI felt relatively comfortable talking about; if my troubled psyche was a crevasse, the subject of boarding school seemed like a visible ledge. I lowered myself down on to the ledge. At boarding school, I explained, I felt 'trapped'. I hated the rules. I hated the fact that you had to wear a strict uniform. I hated the fact that, for a day every week, you had to dress up, not
I uniform, but in army uniform, that you had to polish just in uni
your boots and belt, actually polish your belt with boot polish, making it shine, as if it was itself a pair of boots. And why, in any case, do boots need to be polished? Boots that need to be polished, I said, made me sick. They made me think of old women scrubbing the pavement outside their terraced houses.
`So, you know, I think I'm always trying to escape, trying to kick against that stuff. Hence the procrastination.' `That's interesting.'
`Once, I remember, I was walking along a corridor, and this master just grabbed me, and slammed me against the wall and just ... sort of strangled me with my tie, because it wasn't done up properly. That's the kind of place it was, my school.,
`And where were your parents while this was happening?' `Oh. They were ... they moved around a lot.'
`Yes?'
`MY father was an academic. He worked at all sorts of different universities. He went to conferences all the time. Where were my parents? They were abroad.'
`We're going to have to stop in a couple of minutes. We can talk about this more next time. But how did you feel about Your parents being abroad?'
`Oh, fine.'
`OK then.'
`No, really. I was fine about it. Because . .
`I'm sorry about this, but we've run out of time.'
Only Nuts
When I walked out, thinking about my parents, about where my family had been when I was a kid, I went into a bar and drank a glass of red wine, trying to drink it slowly, but drinking it in two gulps, and quickly ordering another, and drinking that one in about four gulps, and I sat at the bar for a while, feeling woozy and reading a tabloid story about a survey claiming that six out of every ten women were unhappy with their bodies. One woman interviewed said she'd had liposuction, and was 'delighted with the results'. But she was still not completely satisfied with herself. 'The shape of my nose has started to bother me,' she said.
I walked out of the bar and tried to imagine doing something other than snorting some cocaine and getting hammered, absolutely hammered, and I wandered around for a while, went home, watched TV, tried to calm down. I was
fine, I told myself. There was nothing wrong. I went to the
deli across the road, and bought a packet of macadamia nuts. Standing there, in the street, I ripped the packet open, swallowed some nuts, went home, and put the rest of the nuts in the cupboard. I closed the cupboard door. I tried to breathe deeply. I was fine. It was only nuts. I opened the cupboard door. I looked at the nuts, thought about them.
Did I want the nuts? No, I did not.
I closed the cupboard door. It was only nuts. I was fine.
That's how I felt the rest of the week. Fine. Well, that's not quite true. I lay on my bed and read books, more or less Compulsively, about addiction and therapy. I sat at my laptop, scribbling notes on pieces of paper, on the dog-eared documents that formed a mound on my desk restaurant bills, bar bills, electricity and phone bills, reminders, final demands, summonses. The words I kept writing were 'compulsive' and `eating' and 'food' and 'alcohol' and 'childhood' and 'mother' and 'father' and 'procrastination' and 'hypochondriaI .