Diabolic Digest
Khaled Diab
Losing Face
Skin
therapy
In the morning, Sven woke to find a crumpled
pillow beside him. Tanja had been reduced to a single rusty redish-brown hair
and the faint scent of the perfume he was so hooked on when it reacted with her
skin.
But her aura was still so strong that it was
almost as though she was still in the room, despite the absence of a body.
Hanging gently over the bed was the musky smell of their recombined essences
and, on the bed sheet, sat the dried stain of their unison. Would this milky
blotch be the last symbol of their togetherness, Sven wondered? He prayed not.
After marking some lines with a felt-tip pen, the
surgeon sliced with his scalpel through the skin of Sven’s face. Before the
operation, Sven had not realised that plastic surgery involved so much blood
and sweat – he’d assumed it was, well, just cosmetic! He heard the surgeon’s
hacksaw cut through the bone of his nose to straighten it and make it smaller.
The doctor also used permanent makeup and some silicon to pucker up Sven’s thin
– and slightly harsh – lips.
While his face was still bandaged and sore from
the surgery, Sven recalled, the programme’s producers handed him over to a
personal fitness trainer called David. Although he possessed the proportions of
his renaissance namesake, this David was known as the Michelangelo of the
fitness world – he turned spindly wimps into sinewy imps – who loathed the Goliath-like stature of
the Schwarzeneggers of this world. His task was to chisel a hunk of man out of
the unhewn block of Sven’s scrawny physique.
Sven’s build was not the V shape preferred by
body sculptors but it was a sort of I shape. He had not only been short changed
in the shoulders department, his creator had also deemed to burden him with an
oversized head, slightly bowed knees and larger-than-life feet.
David was a bit of a slave driver in the gym.
He ignored Sven’s breathless complaints that he could hardly breathe through
his recently re-engineered nose. “You want to look good for your woman, don’t
you?” he would ask as he punched in another half an hour on the treadmill’s
timer.
For the first couple of weeks, Sven spent five
to six hours a day in the gym at the secluded Renaissance spa in the original
town of Spa. His gruelling workout included weights for each muscle group –
most of which he had only a passing acquaintance with – especially his arms,
shoulders and back. Around him, fat cats ran or cycled on the spot, journeying
down the long road to Slimburg.
Sven was always bemused by the way the physical
had been so squeezed out of our jobs and leisure that – like some strange
chemical or elixir – it had become isolated in its own right by an alchemist
who had decided to extract the labour from work. People no longer moved to make
a living, get somewhere or play a sport. Instead, they sat immobile while they
drove to the gym, and ran flat out on the treadmill to get nowhere in particular.
After his workouts, Sven went to bed with a
numb face and aching nose, sore muscles and stiff joints. But he was usually so
exhausted that he slipped into a semi-comatose snoring stupor.
After a fortnight, the deadly David decided
that he wasn’t getting results fast enough out of his charge. One morning, he
informed Sven: “I’m going to put you on special supplements to help your
progress along.”
“Supplements?” Sven echoed. “Do you mean
doping?”
“Let’s not start using loaded words. I’m just
going to give you some amino acids, vitamins, proteins – just wholesome
ingredients taken from nature, but refined a little to give them some extra
kick. Besides, it’ll only be for a short while,” Dave exhaled in disbelief.
Sven spent the next six weeks swallowing pills
with colours that struck him as anything but natural. Like a monstrous
reincarnation of Sven’s physical education teacher at school, David pushed him
to his physical and psychological limits every day.
“If you want to be kissed by the gods, you have
to spend more time in the temple,” Michelangelo began before breaking the news
that Sven would have to spend a minimum of eight hours per day in the gym. At
the end of the ordeal, Sven had built up a fair bit of muscle bulk but his
bow-knees refused to straighten completely.
The producers, trying to show themselves in a
responsible light, provided Sven with professional emotional and psychological
support. This came in the form of allowing him to attend one session of a
plastic surgery support group named ‘Under your skin’. The group was mediated
by Dr Seiko Suzuki, a Japanese psychiatrist who had built up a cultish
following among plastic surgery patients.
Her mobile clinic was currently anchored in
Brussels. Sven was joined at the group meeting by a hodgepodge collection of
rich nobility, high-flying Eurocrats and entrepreneurs. A synthetically
handsome man in his late thirties looked like a clever Taiwanese clone of a
Hollywood star whose identity eluded Sven.
“Now that I no longer resemble a nerd, they
inform me that fashionably nerdy is ‘in’,” he mimes quotation marks. “It’s ever
so slightly peeving,” he complained in a voice that had lost little of its
nerdy roots. “Why can’t they stick to a standard protocol?”
A woman with bleached blond hair, smooth but
leathery tanned skin and a slight grimace sat tensely at the edge of the group.
Constantly checking her mobile phone for messages from her dealer, the poor
woman kept getting up every 7.5 minutes on the dot to go to the bathroom and
powder her nose. A trailing spouse by trade, the stress of her profession led
her to suffer from a tragic string of physical and psychiatric conditions
induced by an overly rich diet of wealth and not enough mental exercise.
Although she may have once been quite
attractive, no one would ever be able to tell. Her many illnesses had turned
her into something of a monstrosity. She was something of an addiction junky –
she collected addictions and obsessive compulsions compulsively. In addition to
the regular addictions to tobacco, alcohol and cocaine, she’d notched up more
exotic varieties, such as Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) which meant she was
hooked on plastic surgery.
Despite almost liposuctioning her husband’s
fortune away, she just couldn’t resist picking up a spring or summer nose, her
bosom rose and fell with her mood, and she just had to get the hippest hips in
town. “Look, guys, I want you to help me brainstorm. I need some new ideas for
my chin.”
Dr Suzuki threw her a withering glance: “I
thought we agreed. No more messing around for a year.”
“Sorry, Doctor,” she quivered.
Sven’s eye moved across the room until they
reached a young woman with a silent, brooding beauty that struck Sven as being
too individual, too natural to have been redrawn by a surgeon’s scalpel. Her
face had the lines and blemishes of the real – she had genuine leather,
or perhaps real hide, stamped all over her. He wondered what she was
doing there: “She surely can’t want plastic surgery,” he thought to himself.
She sat silently throughout the whole meeting
and by the end of the gathering curiosity was holding a sharp blade to his
throat. He managed to overcome his natural reserve and asked one of the other
patients about her situation.
“Ahh, Adèle. Poor girl,” the nervous woman with
the two facelifts remarked. “I understand she was raped and she can’t stand to
look at herself anymore. She’s afraid of walking out of the house and she wants
to make herself repulsive so that no one will want to touch her again. The
doctor is trying to talk her out of it.” All the talk had held her routine up
and, feeling uneasy, she now dashed off to the bathroom.
The session didn’t do much to prepare Sven for
the outside world but seeing Adèle and hearing about her story had shaken
something inside him, made him realise that beauty was a double-edged sword.
At the end of his ‘makeover’, Sven hoped that
he’d achieved a sufficiently passable symmetry to impress Tanja enough to keep
her. What he’d failed to register was that Tanja never shared his obsession
with his mortal form and its profound lack of divinity.
In fact, given all the attention her beauty
drew, his normality pleased her. Besides, she’d first been attracted by his
intellectual prowess.
For about the thousandth time since her
departure, he reflected morbidly on the paradox that it was his biggest bid to
hold on to her that had ultimately caused her to slip through his fingers. And
he kicked himself for his idiocy.
For some reason, Tanja always seemed to inspire
the reckless in a man who rarely risked public forays of the romantic
persuasion. Before they got together
three years earlier, Tanja Hendrickx had been Voeren’s most beautiful and
sought-after woman – the most eligible bachelors from near and far had all
tried to ensnare her. Ever savvy and devious, the local chapter of the Vlaams
Blok had even tried to recruit her as a canvasser. Despite all this attention –
and this is a point that Sven was never entirely able to grasp – Tanja’s
heartstrings latched on to him.
During the annual village kermis and
animal market, there had been a tombola to raise money for disabled children.
Sven had bought a dozen tickets in the hope of winning the first prize of
dinner with that year’s Miss Limburg, or Dr Limburg, as Sven liked to refer to
her. He had always been disappointed that she hadn’t decided to study human
medicine.
“What a waste for humanity,” he thought once as
she glided past him with her leather satchel.
Tanja had
entered the contest following a half-drunken bet with her dad. It was an
experience she never wanted to repeat and she had chosen to disappear from the
limelight following her victory, refusing to go on to the national competition.
“I felt like a prize bitch being paraded before
the judges at a dog show, daddy,” she complained to her pig-farmer father. “I
could feel some of them undressing me with their eyes, mentally measuring my
pedigree. There were a couple of real creeps there who promised some girls
their vote in return for a private showing and a chance to sample the goods. At
least, they were removed before the final vote.”
All the prizes in that year’s charity draw had,
in fact, been provided by the Hendrickx clan. Josef Henderickx, Tanja’s father,
had pledged an adorable pet piglet for second prize, while her uncle Hermann
provided the third prize of dinner for two at his restaurant.
Unusually, perhaps, for a Flemish farmer, Josef
was a dedicated socialist. The similarity of his name to that of Jimi Hendrix
and the summer of love he’d spent with Tanja’s late mother led Josef to a
lifelong passion for the master’s music – some of his friends even called him
Jimi.
Josef was an easy-going tolerant kind of man.
But his forbearance was severely tested when it came to pigs. Driven by his
penchant for social justice, he felt that we condescending humans looked down
too scornfully on those noble creatures. It was his pet mission in life to set
the record straight.
He critiqued everything from fairytales to
religion and satire to demonstrate to all who would listen that pigkind was
unfairly and constantly stigmatised. “Don’t call me pig-headed,” he’d once
boomed at Tanja, when she complained that he harped on too much about the
subject.
In the story of the three little pigs, owing to
apparent piggish stupidity, the wolf gets away with two-thirds of the pork.
Even Orwell’s Animal Farm portrayed them as devious sub-humans who, ousting the
farmer, became tyrants in his place. “It’s only a political allegory,” a
drinking buddy at the local union bar told him.
Orwell’s fable galled Josef for other reasons.
As a young man aspiring to forge a just and egalitarian world he’d become a
communist agitator and he didn’t believe that he would walk and talk like the
bourgeois elite he so passionately wanted to oust, even if he was a pig farmer.
As he got older, he realised equality was dream and social justice became his
quest.
“So, why didn’t Orwell get the cows to take
over?” he asked. “Is it because of their doughy-eyed good looks or the sacred
motherly status their milk gives them? Well, the Egyptians had that cow-headed
Hathor. Did they have a pig god, I ask you?”
Indeed, the nearest swines ever get to the
heavenly is when people refer dismissively to flying pigs. Whereas Hathor – a
select member of the House of Horus – was the original mother goddess, one of
the oldest in the Egyptian pantheon. She was the bringer of love and joy.
The lucky cow not only had male and female
priests serving her, but she also presided over the funkiest cult in all of
Ancient Egypt – singers and musicians turned their talents to her service and
joined her priesthood, creating all kinds of cool new rituals and some
infectious grooves to boot. If Prince were an Ancient Egyptian, he would have
probably found his religious awakening with her!
“The real problem is that pigs resemble us too
much. They’re too close for evolutionary comfort,” he was fond of saying.
The Jewish and Islamic religious prohibition of
pig meat also puzzled him. “Why are you Muslims so set against pork, Mo?” he
quizzed Mohamed, the Moroccan, St-Pieters’ only resident Muslim.
“In the days when the rule was set down, pigs
were disease-ridden animals in sweltering Arabia,” Mo explained. “Besides,
every culture has its forbidden fruit. Why don’t we eat dogs or cats, for
instance?”
“Now that they’re safe, will you eat pork?”
“Heavens no,” Mohamed said in alarm as a barely
concealed look of revulsion crossed his friendly face. Both men broke out in a fit
of laughter. Mo was a livestock shifter and he transported Belgian farmyard
animals, pigs included, across the length and breadth of northern Europe. He
would regularly make long-haul runs with a school of swine merrily and rudely –
to his Muslim ears – snorting and squealing in the back.
“So, tell me, Mo,” Josef said, not for the
first time, his blue eyes blazing, “how does it feel to be a pig chauffeur?”
“Well, I’ve got to bring home the bacon
somehow,” he laughed. “Since I was laid off from the coal mine 15 years ago,
this job has put clothes on my kids’ backs and food in their stomachs, and
given them a university education. I’m grateful to each and every pig I’ve
limousined around.”
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