PS Olive You. Lizzie Allen

back to the concrete bunker restaurant where I’d do my stretches on the shuttered deck.

      Livadi was so peaceful at dawn. The bedraggled city of colourful hippy tents flapped contentedly in the breeze and goat bells chimed softly in the surrounding hills.

      One morning I saw Turban Girl crawling out from one of the tents. She was instantly recognisable from the trademark coil of tangerine fabric wrapped around her head despite the fact that she was wearing only a skimpy brown bikini.

      I studied her through the small window between my thighs as I counted my sit-ups. Her breasts were large and pendulous while by some strange miracle her arms remained thin and her stomach flat.

      Bitch.

      She probably did no exercise at all.

      As if reading my thoughts she stretched and yawned, arching out the vertebrae of her spine like an oversexed cat. In her hand she appeared to be holding something – a leather pouch. She sauntered over to a rock near the water’s edge, perched on top and began digging around in the pouch until she produced a roll of tobacco and a packet of Rizlas. Of course, I thought to myself sourly, Turban Girl was far too cool to smoke pedestrian cigarettes like the rest of us plebeians. It went without saying she’d roll her own.

      The luminous surf framed her bent head as she painstakingly rolled her smoke with the same care she’d taken over her leather bracelets. Then she lit up and smoked with ritualistic solemnity, savouring the morning light in meditative silence. She looked beautiful sitting there. Like a rebellious mermaid that had crawled from the lapping waves to escape Neptune and his lecherous demands.

      When she was done smoking, she ground the fag out on a rock and stood up, turning in my direction. I ducked involuntarily but she didn’t see me spying on her from the deck like a weirdo. Instead of going back to her tent, she picked her way through the thorny undergrowth to the dune behind, kicking at the sand as if she was looking for something. Intrigued, I sat up and squinted to get a better look. To my horror she yanked down her bikini bottoms and squatted down to pee in broad daylight.

      Unbelievable.

      Simultaneously disgusted and fascinated, I froze, mesmerised by the stream of yellow urine that shot out from between her legs into the sand. Suddenly she looked up, directly into my eyes, and lasered me with a penetrating glare as if she knew I’d been there all along. Flustered, I launched back into my sit-ups with the commitment of an Olympic athlete.

      You’d think she would have dived for cover or something but she just carried on squatting there, staring straight at me and peeing into the sand like a horse. When she was done she waggled her bum in the air for a few seconds before pulling up her pants and nonchalantly strolling back to her tent.

      By then I’d done so many crunches my stomach was killing me and I collapsed back onto the deck in agony. Something about the girl infuriated me. The way she met my gaze as if I was the one committing the transgression through my voyeuristic curiosity, not her by peeing in a public place. Annoyed by her louche confidence and my own spinelessness, I pounded up the hill at double the speed, my anger building with each step.

      Jogging’s not great for the skin. The repetitive up and down motion tears at the collagen and makes it sag like a rubber band that’s been stretched once too often. Each time my trainers struck the tarmac I pictured the hundreds of small rents opening up in my subcutaneous layer. But whereas in the past I had avoided activities that diminished my looks, for once it actually felt liberating embracing the destruction that the act of living entails.

      Fuck the shackles of perpetual youth, I ranted as I pounded my way home

      Fuck the fear of aging, I fumed as I opened my stride.

      Fuck Chelsea perfection.

       Fuck wrinkles.

       Fuck Andrew.

      I was way too vain for self-harming so this was as close as it was going to get! A wave of relief washed over me as let it all out. A lifetime of frustration and neurosis. Of never looking good enough and never being perfect enough to be loved.

      By the time I got home I was a foaming, wobbling, salivating wreck but my anger had drained away. I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror for some time.

      Eyebrows plucked, arched high.

      Skin dermabrased, acid peeled.

      Top lip waxed.

      Eyes vacant.

      Behind me my clothes sat in a tidy pile waiting to adorn me.

      Gossard Plunge Bra for extra lift.

      DKNY control briefs for smooth thighs.

      Silk blouse with slimming vertical stripes.

      Cigarette capris for elongated legs.

      My gaze transferred back to my face. It seemed suddenly greyer and pallid in comparison with Turban Girl’s glowing tan. As if all the life had drained from it and I was looking at my own dead corpse.

      That day I left the house without sun cream. Pasty face held high (foundation-free!), I marched defiantly toward Livadi in my bikini top (no sun hat even!), my marbled shoulders as naked as the day I was born.

      I would no longer kowtow to the fear tactics of the cosmetic industry!

      I would no longer simper and snivel at the altar of beauty!

      I would no longer numb myself with restraint.

      From that day forward I, Faith Cotton, would worship at the bacchanalian feet of ‘The Gods of Excess’! When I got to Livadi I pulled off my bikini top and tanned half naked on a rock, hoping Turban Girl would appear to marvel at my breathless insouciance. Heck, I could be as defiant as the next turbaned beach bum. If I had been camping and needed the loo, I would have peed right there on the beach.

      Behind a bush.

      Well, maybe, behind some rocks.

      Luckily I did not need the loo all that day.

      By five pm the Bacchanalian Sun God of Excess had burned me to a crisp. Theodora nearly screamed when she came knocking.

      ‘What you done?’ she said. ‘You look haggard.’

      That night I dreamed my face was falling off, sliding down the sheets like melting wax, but over the next two days the colour settled and I started to go an attractive shade of brown.

      A day later my nose peeled white again. I dug my sun cream out of the bin (where I’d chucked it that morning in defiance) and decided a ‘once-daily’ application would still count as a form of rebellion. After all, being a feminist was one thing. Dying of cancer was another. Whilst rummaging round in the bin I retrieved my foundation, mascara and lippy (gosh I really had gone overboard that morning!). Perhaps I’d been a bit over zealous in my outright rejection of the cosmetics industry. Even feminists had the right to look pretty.

      On Friday Andrew flew back from Brussels. I picked him up from the midday ferry looking hot and irritable in his crumpled suit.

      ‘What the hell happened to your face?’ was the first thing he said as he threw his bag into the back of the buggy.

      All charm was Andrew. He lived by the maxim ‘I say what I think’, and said what he thought far too often. Somewhere along his life’s journey he had actually come to believe that the recipients of his unfettered opinion-giving should be grateful for these unsolicited pearls of wisdom on account of the fact they were his honestly held views and therefore tantamount to universally held truth.

      ‘I got a bit of sun.’

      ‘A bit of sun. You look like you’ve been freeze-dried.’

      I decided not to dignify his comment with a reply but made a mental note to re-moisturise when I got home. Knowing full well Andrew liked to drive, I made a point of firing up the engine and revving it with feminist indignation. He frowned but got in the passenger seat and plugged in his seatbelt before