Chapter 15

Chapter Fifteen

The chap of your dreams will appreciate a neat whisper of a waist that can be clinched beneath his hand span. The largest part of the bust should be equal to the largest part of the hips and the waist should be at least ten inches smaller than either!

Matilda Beam’s Guide to Love and Romance, 1955

The next day, Grandma doesn’t mention anything about last night and the fact that she may have seen my vagina, though she studiously avoids meeting my eye, which is absolutely fine by me. Tonight is the night of the retro funfair in Regent’s Park where I’ll be meeting Leo Frost in a 1950s disguise and attempting to charm him into asking me out on an actual date. I haven’t looked less forward to something since I had to defrost the freezer last February.

Grandma has marked the entire day out for the purposes of making me over. Now ordinarily I love a good makeover – especially if it’s in an eighties teen movie and involves some sort of perm, but I am filled with trepidation about this one. I don’t want to change my appearance; it’s already kind of all right, I reckon. But needs must, and I have agreed to take it like a woman.

We’re starting my transformation with, as Grandma has kindly termed it, ‘the ghastly situation atop my head’, i.e. my hair. She and Peach have set me up in Grandma’s huge bathroom in front of her big Hollywood mirror, which is framed by light bulbs and casts a sultry boudoir glow over us. I gaze at my long platinum hair extensions and feel a sinking in my heart. I love my fierce so-white-blonde-it’s-almost-blue hair: people can easily spot me in a large crowd, and the sun reflects off my head, giving me a certain glow. I will miss that. I will not have a tantrum, however. No one ever won America’s Next Top Model by having a tantrum on makeover day. Tyra never forgets, you see.

Peach fishes inside one of the shopping bags from her supplies trip and pulls out a home dye kit. After much debate yesterday, we decided to turn me into a fiery strawberry blond. Grandma was advocating for brunette because that was her hair colour as a young woman, and she felt it presented a classier look (whatever that is), but I refused. I have not been a brunette since I was seventeen, and there is no way I’m going back to that life. No way. So strawberry blonde was the compromise and still enough of a change from platinum to disguise me from Leo Frost.

All three of us start to take out my hair extensions, loosening the glue bonds with an acetone solution that Peach picked up from town. I feel sad as I watch my former hair being chucked into the bathroom bin. I spent a month’s wages on that stranger’s lovely hair. Peach and Grandma pull disgusted faces as they take it all out, the glued ends on occasion getting stuck to their fingers. It is pretty gross, admittedly, but no one was ever supposed to see this part of the process. Hair extensions are a very private thing.

The pair of them fuss about, pulling on heavy-duty marigolds and mixing up the dye. They carefully squirt it all over my head and rub it in. I watch the three of us in the mirror and wonder quite how I got myself into this odd situation with these odd people rubbing my head so enthusiastically. How many wrong turns must I have taken to get here?

‘I trust you revised the chapter on making a new male acquaintance?’ Grandma asks lightly, avoiding my eye in the mirror.

If revising means having a vague flick through last night to show Jamie before casting it aside so he could go down on me, then yes. Yes, I did.

I nod my head.

‘Good. That’s good, at least.’ Grandma smiles a little and a sharp spike of guilt darts my chest. Must remember to look over the chapter properly before tonight. Ordinarily I’d write it on my hand as a reminder, but I don’t have a pen. I take my iPhone out of my bathrobe pocket, open up the Notes app and create a new document entitled ‘FROST’.

I tap out: REMINDER FOR JESS: Read chapter on making male acquaintance.

When the dye is rinsed off, the atmosphere in the bathroom becomes heavy with anticipation. Peach blasts my hair dry with an old sage-green hairdryer and then I face the mirror. I’m totally ginger. It’s a pale, orangey-gold ginger. It makes my hazel-coloured eyes ‘pop’ and really sets off my Fake Bake. I like it.

Grandma turns to Peach. ‘The tan will most certainly have to go.’

What?

‘Noooo!’ I yell in a Scottish accent. ‘You can take my freedom, you can take my hair, but you will never take my tan!’

Peach muffles a small laugh while Grandma shakes her head at me in astonishment, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. ‘Deary me,’ she croaks. ‘Peculiar girl.’

They cannot take my tan away! My tan is what makes me me. If you asked someone to describe me in a word, they would say, ‘One word isn’t enough! I have to have three words and those words are Golden Fucking Brown.’

I pull a sad face as Peach dashes out of the room, returning with a bag of lemons and brandishing them in the air like a weapon. I know all about lemons. Lemons are the murderers of tans.

‘Disrobe, please, Jessica,’ Grandma commands, indicating the dressing-gown. I grumpily shrug off the robe, blatantly ignoring the sharp gasp of dismay that emanates from Grandma as she takes in my silver Wonderbra and non-matching turquoise knickers with the word ‘Juicy’ stitched over the backside in purple sequins.

I smile at her benignly. She looks away quickly and hurries out of the room, muttering to herself about appropriate undergarments.

Peach squeezes the lemon juice onto a sponge and starts scrubbing it all over my legs and arms. Ow. Bit by bit my beautiful tan fades away. Goodbye perfect tan. I am bereft.

‘I thought we were gonna be mates,’ I hiss at Peach as she makes me more and more translucent with her stoopid lemons.

‘You will look wonderful, just wait and see,’ she squeaks as she scrubs my ankles. ‘And, Jess … speaking of friends … ’ She pauses her rubbing and looks up at me shyly. ‘In many of the movies I’ve seen, girlfriends often hang out and watch DVDs together as a way of bonding. They have popcorn and wine and do face masks and that sorta thing. I was thinking that when you get back tonight we would maybe watch a DVD together … ’

‘Sure.’ I shrug. ‘Sounds cool. I love watching movies.’

Peach smiles and flushes pink, handing me a towel to wipe off the bits of lemon gunge all over my body. Grandma returns with three pieces of fabric and a dress bag.

I peer closer and notice that the fabric is some sort of underwear.

‘Underwear? Why on earth?’ I clutch my bum and my super-cool ‘Juicy’ knickers. ‘Isn’t the point of this that I’m supposed to be demure? Leo Frost is never going to see my knickers!’

‘Jessica,’ Grandma says with a calmness that seems to take a great deal of effort. ‘Undergarments are the fashion beneath the fashion. They will streamline your silhouette.’

‘My silhouette? What’s up with my silhouette?’

Grandma looks me up and down and purses her lips. ‘You are a little wiry. All that running, I suspect. I would like you to appear softer, more curvaceous. This − ’ she holds up a piece of elasticy cream-coloured material that looks like some kind of Spanx skirt − ‘is a Spirella 206 girdle. It will smooth out your shape, in particular lifting the derrière. And this − ’ she hands me what looks like a very wide belt − ‘is a boned waspie. It will create an illusion of curves, giving you a twenty-three-and-a-half-inch waist.’ Grandma says this casually as if she’s not just suggested something anatomically impossible. ‘I had a twenty-three-and-a–half-inch waist on my wedding day,’ she adds proudly.

‘Yeah, well, Kylie Minogue has a twenty-three-inch waist,’ I retort. So there.

‘Twenty-four, actually,’ Grandma replies promptly.

How does she know that?

I step into the girdle and watch forlornly as Peach and Grandma struggle to roll it up over my hips like a too-small condom. When it’s finally in place, Grandma takes the waspie and wraps it round my waist.

It’s a bit tight, actually. Really quite tight.

‘Fuck!’ I yell as they tug at the corset and I realize that my breath is being taken from me against my will. ‘I thought you said I need the illusion of more curves?’ I groan through the pain. ‘This is stealing all my curves!’

‘A Good Woman does not use such coarse language, Jessica,’ Grandma says impatiently, pulling at the waspie. ‘You will get used to it. It will be worth it. Beauty is often painful.’

Normally I’d agree – I’ve got eyelash glue in my eye on more than one occasion − but I feel like this is a wrong thing.

‘Now we are going to hook it at the top,’ Grandma says, panting with the effort of yanking and pulling the corset. ‘Peach, I’m going to need your help. It needs to be just a little tighter.’

‘Hook it? Tighter? It’s not fastened yet? Oh, Jesus.’

‘If we had more time we would have had a few practice runs to get your ribs used to the pressure.’

‘Ugh. This kind of restrictive shit says a lot about why I’m glad I’m a woman today. I shouldn’t be wearing anything that my ribs have to get used to.’

I feel myself go pale as Peach and Grandma tighten the waspie and hook the final eye, squidging my body into a shape it was not designed to be in.

‘A bra too?’ I huff as Grandma hands me the final piece of fabric – an odd, pointy sort of bra. ‘Surely nothing on earth is as good as my Wonderbra?’ I indicate my brilliantly pushed-up cleavage, so pushed up that it looks like I have Harry Hill and Harry Hill’s twin brother comfortably tucked inside.

‘This is not just a bra,’ Grandma says, sounding vaguely like the woman who voices the M&S adverts. ‘This is an original Delightex firming, lifting bullet bra.’

‘Sounds dangerous,’ I grump, still twisting with rib pain.

‘It served me well for many a year,’ Grandma says, a look of happy nostalgia flitting across her wrinkled face.

This is Grandma’s bra? Ew. No. I cannot.

‘You don’t even know if it will fit!’ I protest, eyeing the weird cone-shaped bra with horror.

‘36C,’ Grandma declares with conviction. ‘All Beam women are.’

She’s right. I am a 36C. God, please no. This is so wrong.

I reluctantly unclip my beloved silver Wonderbra and they turn away to give me my modesty, which I never have and don’t currently require. I pull on the weird pointy bra and clip it at the back. As I turn back round, I seem to lose all spatial awareness regarding my breasts and knock Peach into the wall with my left boob.

‘Oh mah goodness.’

‘Shit, sorry, Peach. I’m all uneven! Let me look – I need to see this.’

Surely I must look like a member of the circus by now. Boobs like road cones and a waist circumference smaller than my thigh circumference.

‘Just a little longer, Jessica, dear. Your look has to be perfect. A Good Woman is a patient woman.’

Grandma takes a suspender belt from the big drawer and clips it round my waist. Man, there are so many things wrapped around me and I’m not even dressed yet. Grandma unzips the dress bag and pulls out a white cotton summer dress with a pale blue polka-dot pattern on it. The skirt is huge − all pleated and sticky-outy.

‘This piece is my favourite Victor Josselyn dress. I wore it to my first ever mid-summer picnic with Jack. It’s perfect for the funfair. It will show your figure while also being light, seasonal and demure.’

I take a closer look at the dress. It smells faintly of Chanel No. 5, the perfume my mum used to wear. I go slightly dizzy at the scent. Don’t think about that, Jess.

I take a deep breath and recover myself, putting my hands in the air while Peach and Grandma pull the dress over my head.

Once they’ve buttoned up the gazillion buttons up the back, Grandma glides around me in a circle like a shark, huge eyes narrowed in assessment.

‘Can I look now?’ I tut, folding my arms in front of me.

Grandma nods once and gestures towards the mirror. ‘Go ahead.’

I stiffly shuffle over to the large bathroom mirror, trying not to exert myself too much due to the pure danger of breathing too hard in this ridiculous get-up. I bet I look ridic—

Oh.

Wow.

There I am.

What I see before me is not a freak of nature, but sort of a more elegant version of Jessica Rabbit. My waist is tiny, but it doesn’t look that peculiar, it just makes my hips and boobs look bigger – a quintessential hourglass. The shoestring straps of the summer dress show off my now creamy-coloured shoulders and décolletage, and while the bare flesh of my breasts is covered up completely, they still look, and are quite literally, knock-out tits.

‘Fair enough,’ I say eventually. ‘Maybe you’re right about the look.’

‘Well, of course I’m right about the look, Jessica, dear.’ Grandma gives a nonchalant shrug, delicately pushing her red glasses up her aquiline nose. ‘I’m Matilda Beam.’