Late Night Shopping: by Carmen Reid Page B

Annie felt sorry for now. The poor woman wouldn't have stood a chance. Not when Svetlana aimed her two missiles in Harry's direction and gave it to him with both barrels.
     
'Why are you here?' Annie finally had the chance to ask. 'It's always lovely to see you, babes, but you're not on my list.'
     
'I know, I bring friend, she's out on the shop floor looking.' Svetlana sat down on the bright pink sofa, flashing sheerest stockings and a leg so exactly the right consistency between toned and soft that even Annie caught herself looking. That's how sexy Svetlana was.
     
But here was the thing: Svetlana was in fact a very good wife. Once she was hitched, she was loyal to a fault, supportive and devoted, and had seemed to genuinely love each of her husbands. But every one of them had ditched her for someone younger. Or died.
     
Annie hoped that Harry was going to be for good – just as soon as his very expensive divorce came through. Annie was also hoping that one day soon Svetlana might be a very good person to turn to when she needed a business investor.
     
'My friend Kelly-Anne is booked in with you. She needs makeunder,' Svetlana's voice dropped, maybe because she expected the friend to walk in at any moment. 'She turned forty and pfuuuuh!' this came with vigorous hand flicks in the air towards her face: 'injecting everything that move, filling up cheeks from her ass, all that thing! Botox: horrible! You can never get angry, you have to walk around like a robot.' Svetlana pulled a totally straight face and said in monotone: 'I am extremely angry with you, extremely upset, you mad, potato-faced Pol Pot.
     
'Mid-section facelift, much better,' she added. 'Anyway, her children, they nice boys at school with my boys, and all the kids there call her the high-class hooker. That is what she look like! I keep telling her, husband not going to leave because you now forty and have little tiny frown line and don't wear miniskirt all the time . . . but how do I know? This what happen to me.' She gave an enormous existentialist shrug.
     
Annie suspected that Svetlana had turned forty herself. She'd been thirty-nine for just a little bit too long now. And she definitely did things to her face . . . but it was all a question of degree and clearly this friend needed a little retuning.
     
'It's not nice,' Svetlana added, 'not for the school gates, ha?'
     
Before Annie could make any reply, the friend in question tottered into the suite, prompting Annie to give her warmest smile and welcome as she took a long, hard look at the woman.
     
She was carefully balanced on three-inch-high stilettos and squeezed into a black, short-sleeved wrap dress so tight it was almost a bandage.
     
Yes, the face on top of the cleavage looked younger than both the slightly creased breasts and the neck, but Annie could barely make the face out underneath the monstrous hair.
     
An enormous purplish-black beehive with a severe fringe and great long tendrils falling down round the shoulders perched on top of this poor woman's head. It was so styled and so lacquered, even the tendrils looked crunchy.
     
Annie checked herself: glam Addams family, yes, but it was a look . Maybe the woman didn't want to change. Maybe her husband adored her like this. Maybe it was just other women, like Svetlana, who were thinking: 'Hello!! Morticia!'
     
Annie was never too keen on women being dragged here by their friends. She lived by the psychologist's mantra that you couldn't change anyone unless they wanted to change. But anyway, she was here to suggest some new clothes. The hair was nothing to do with her.
     
'So! Kelly-Anne, isn't it?' Annie ushered her in and made her sit down on the sofa next to Svetlana. 'Tell me what I can do for you today. What kind of things are you looking for?'
     
'Well . . .' Kelly-Anne looked a little unsure of herself, 'I've never done this before. I have such a good idea of the kind of things I want, usually.'
     
'Pschuuuuut,' Svetlana