‘Ouch!’

      Angie, forty-five, pretty in a hard sort of way, is taking care of business. She is, she unashamedly admits, the neatest bikini waxer in the world. I’ve been visiting Angie for years at my local gym. The GoForIt Fitness Club is an extortionately priced black-and-shiny-chrome ego centre for professionals, heavy on self-absorption, light on self-awareness. The purposely heavy-glassed building tries to be desperately welcoming with the Jane Packer flower arrangements at fifty quid a twig in reception, and the blinding white waffle towels in the changing rooms which everyone, whether they can afford to buy their own or not, nicks. The overly air-conditioned studios have lights that make members look far more blotchy and fat than they are—or as they are—I can’t work out which. And the nursery is equipped with everything money can buy except carers who like children. Sit and listen in this place for ten minutes and you need not buy the Sunday papers. There are the wives and mistresses who twitter to acquaintances they need to know rather than want to know, believing friends are to be kept close, enemies kept closer. Their spindly manicured fingers swooping like swifts over tasteless, indigestible salads, furtively nibbling at the organic cucumber when no one is looking. There are the husbands who hide behind broadsheet papers or mumble into hands-free phones and window-shop at the aerobicized twenty-and thirty-somethings in their sweaty White Stuff gear. Then you have the tanned and toned tennis coaches in their whites, calf and thigh muscles deliciously defined, who strut like peacocks, their every word treated like a grain of worldly wisdom by emaciated Traceys who live in Barnes and Wimbledon Village who want to improve their stroke, on the court. The supersized eighty-degree heated swimming pools are full of noisy children watched neatly on the side by pained mothers who’ve just had their nails, toes, noses, eyes done and look ridiculous in the plastic blue bags they have to wear around their latest Manolos or Jimmy Choos. No working class here of course, but then that’s not what GoForIt is all about. It’s about professionals and professional accessories looking good and being watched. And it remains, despite the happy clappy attempts of the earnest club manager to squeeze soul into the place, as anaemic and false as the smiles on the ladies who Pilates through the pain. I go there for one reason only. I go there because of Angie.

      Angie is sharp of chin and nose and wit. She has luxuriant long auburn hair and is permanently tanned, but genuinely so (no St. Tropez muck for her, she tells me) and is model thin. Long of leg, body and arm, she looks like a sexy spider, if there is such a thing. She’s had two husbands, numerous lovers and several abortions. I think she has Mafia connections because she’s always hinting at me should I ever want anyone ‘seen’to, I should give her a call. I don’t think she means waxing. She talks in a posh cockney accent so she sounds Australian most of the time. She’s become my counsellor as well as my waxer. Over the years, she’s seen me at my most vulnerable, emotionally as well as physically. And well, to be honest, as every time I see her I’m naked from the waist down, my legs splayed dangling in midair, like some gigantic dead fly, I feel it’s a tad churlish not to open up lyrically as well as literally about baggage and stuff whilst she waxes away. She’s waxed through my marriage (painful), the birth of my child (painful but worth it), and my divorce (very painful and thanks to focused solicitors Hughes Fowler and Symth very worth it), but her waxing always causes me glazed eye distress. It’s okay pain. It’s positive pain. It distracts from other pain, alternating between the exquisite pain induced by my career, the men, the lack of men, the sex and the frustrations—the latter two are invariably interrelated. She’s given me pain. I’ve given her a few laughs. Luckily, she doesn’t charge for the listening, nor the advice, just the waxing.

      Today, she’s giving me a ‘target’. An arrow pointing abruptly upward toward my belly button. I’m here with best friend and soul mate Fran, who’s in the next cubicle getting her finger and toenails French polished and eyelashes permed for, I’ve worked out, £1 a lash.

      ‘Hazel, now put your hand on there. That’s it. And stretch that bit. Yep. That bit. Yep. All in the stretch. And pull that bit over there. That bit, and hold on tight…’

      Rip. The green-pea-coloured tea tree wax, which is allegedly less aggressive than the powder-pink sludge variety, tears fire into crotch. The green sludge is supposed to soothe away all possible pain. It still fucking hurts.

      ‘Aghh, that hurts even more.’ I whimper, surveying red blotches blossoming all over my nether regions. ‘Are you sure the men won’t think I’ve got herpes?’

      ‘No, no, Hazel, this is quite normal. Quite normal. The blotches will disappear. Try not to sleep with any one tonight darling, or if you do, do it in the dark. But they might feel the bumps anyway and suspect something’s up. Plus, don’t have a bath, so they may not want to sleep with you anyway. Whatever, when the blotches are gone, you’ll love it. You just wait. They’ll love it. They’ll get all excited when they see it.’

      I’m trying really hard to visualise any of my recent boyfriends getting excited by my arrow. Their faces grinning inanely like five-year-old schoolboys who’ve discovered the delight of the latest PlayStation game for the first time. I can’t. All I see are blotches. I imagine their faces contorted in astonishment and possible disgust as I seductively pull down the latest lacy almost-there pink number from Victoria’s Secret to reveal one of my own.

      Really? I thought most men like something there.

      Well, there is something there. An arrow. And it looks sexy. If I were a man, I’d sleep with you, Hazel.