Turn Back Time

Chapter One

Rabbits are surprisingly muscular

How did you show kindness to yourself yesterday?

TYPE YOUR ANSWER HERE: Cheese

Frankly, I could save everyone the bother and just tell them what’s wrong with my self-belief.

How about the fact that I’m pushing fifty and have to scrutinise my face every day so I can write about anti-ageing creams?

Hold on… you aren’t meant to call them that anymore.

Somebody finally worked out that ‘anti-ageing’ is nonsensical – because everyone ages, and a cream isn’t going to stop that.

If you aren’t ageing, you’re most likely dead, or an alien or supernatural being.

So nowadays it’s all about ‘pro-ageing’, which is much more positive and inspiring. Allegedly.

The truth is, writing about beauty products all the time was fine when I was in my twenties and had those ‘pretend’ signs of ageing, like teeny tiny lines under my eyes.

The kind that look adorable and characterful, like having freckles or owning a Dachshund.

But when my whole face started sliding down my neck like a Salvador Dali clock in the desert, I realised I could slather on as many peptides as I liked, but I was never going to look twenty-seven again.

Even getting ‘tweakments’ (as they call them these days) doesn’t really make anyone look young – I should know, I’ve tried most of them.

It’s all about looking ‘Fresh’ or ‘You – but rested!’.

And if you go too far, you end up looking like you’re in The Lion King, all wide eyes and a face so fillered up it’s like you’ve got a muzzle. No thanks.

It’s Tuesday morning. Through the living room window, I can see the postman approaching with his red trolley, and no doubt the usual stack of parcels for me.

He’s taking ages so I turn back to my phone and google ‘Erica Pells’ to see if my article about some supermodel’s botched hi-tech beauty treatment has gone live.

‘I’m done hibernating,’ says Celeste, after being disfigured by CryoSculpting.

She doesn’t look disfigured to me, but then supermodel disfigurement is probably on a par with how regular people feel when they walk to the garage without make-up on.

It has an M&S Food section (the garage, that is) as of this March, so it’s worth the twenty-minute round trip, even if you haven’t had time to put on a Bobbi Brown Five-Minute Face, which I usually swear by for leaving the house.

You never know when you’re going to run into Paul Rudd, after all.

I go back to googling my name and spot a new search result, but my excitement that it’s the ‘by-line’ of an article I wrote is short-lived because, as per usual, it’s about a memorial service in a US retirement home.

Why is my name so popular with elderly Americans?

I stand up and adjust my kimono so Lewis or Laurie or whatever the postman is called (definitely begins with an L) doesn’t think I’m trying to flirt with him.

There’s nothing more unsavoury than a middle-aged woman wearing poolside casual in Wiltshire during the autumn, other than maybe the same but with three inches of cleavage.

‘Been online shopping again, Ms Pells?’ he says when I open the door.

I take an armful of packages. ‘Nope. They’re for my job.’

‘What is it you do again?’

‘I write beauty articles for magazines and websites. About skincare, treatments, things like that.’ I feel I have told him this before, many, many times.

‘Right… And they pay you for that?’

‘They do indeed.’ I smile. ‘Well, usually. Sometimes I do it for exposure.’ I yank my kimono up again. ‘Anyway… is there a parcel from Slay PR?’

He looks on his phone-meets-scanner device. ‘Have you got the tracking info?’

I hold up my phone for him to scan the barcode. Just as I do, a notification appears at the top of my screen.

BEAT PERIMENOPAUSE BELLY FAT has followed you back!

The postman glances at me.

‘I get lots of spam because of my job,’ I say.

He is young and won’t even know what the perimenopause is. And who cares, I can never remember his name anyway. Maybe it’s Liam. Maybe not.

When he’s gone, I sit on the living room floor to unpack the parcels, pushing aside a saucer containing the remains of some Taleggio from my latest Say Cheese subscription box.

I often sit on the floor, and consider myself well designed for it, with short legs and a big bum.

It’s like an inbuilt seating system – who needs a chair?

I’m making three piles of packages: Need Now For Imminent Features, Quite Fancy Trying For Myself and Give Away As Presents.

On the first pile are four body scrubs I’ve been waiting for, all to be tested out for a feature in Grace magazine.

As it’s due to be filed by five p.m. today, I’m contemplating the best way to give them all a genuine evaluation: probably one shower, and a limb for each scrub.

No time for any lasting effects but honestly, who has?

Every product must be tested, written up, posted online and – the horror – shared on Instagram reels, all within forty-eight hours…

if you want to keep the editors (and PRs) happy, that is.

I’m interrupted by a call from ‘Sally Pells’.

I know, it’s weird that my own mother is saved in my contacts under her full name.

But as ‘Mum’ with no surname looks a bit lost on its own, what else could I have it as?

Not ‘Mum Pells’… Actually, how about Mother Pells?

It makes her sound like the old wise woman in a mediaeval village, one successful herbal poultice away from being burnt as a witch. I quite like it.

I let it ring three times, almost fou…

I can hear that she either has a cold, or is crying, and immediately wish I’d let it go to voicemail, because then she would try my brother, Simon, who would be better at dealing with whatever is causing the sniffing and an unscheduled ten-thirty a.m. call.

Mother Pells normally sticks to after six p.m., believing, perhaps, that it is still cheaper, as it was in the days of landlines.

‘You okay, Mum?’

‘It’s Carol, Erica. She passed away last night.’

I squeeze some Tuscan Tomato and Sea Salt Energising Body Polish (which smells like pizza, incidentally) onto my leg and think how to respond.

I’m not particularly good at this sort of thing.

Carol is my mother’s closest friend, who’s been ill for a while.

Simon would probably know what to say, annoyingly.

Rather than condolences for the grief-stricken, my forte is more a punny title to a beauty product round-up.

I’m already mulling over Take The Rough With The Smooth as the headline for the body scrub feature I have to write today, although this isn’t really my finest work.

How about Yes Scrubs? Like ‘No Scrubs’, but the opposite?

But then, I suppose if you have to explain it, it probably doesn’t work…

‘Ohhhhh,’ I say, aiming for sympathy-mixed-with-a-bit-of-surprise, plus a touch of inevitability, as Carol has been in a hospice for a few weeks and was definitely on the wrong side of eighty.

But it comes out more like the sound someone might make when they discover a three for two on Zinfandel, which wasn’t quite what I was aiming for.

‘Is that the best you can do, Erica? I knew I should have called your brother…’

Why am I so bad at this sort of thing? I get up and move towards the mantelpiece to get a sniff of a criminally expensive reed diffuser I was recently gifted by a PR.

It’s meant to ‘shift energy’ and has, according to the gold packaging, been ‘energetically imbued by an in-house alchemist’.

As I attempt to appease my mother by saying nostalgic but thoughtful things about Carol, I wonder if it works down the phone.

But I’m stuck for what to say as I can’t remember much about her other than that, when I was a teenager, I was tasked with feeding her rabbit while she was on holiday.

Or probably, thinking back, her children’s rabbit – that would make more sense.

I wasn’t meant to get it out of the hutch, but I did, and it ran under Carol’s decking.

They never found it. Maybe it made a new life for itself under there, and was happy.

But Carol and her family certainly weren’t when they came back from Los Cristianos.

Thinking about this, I feel a wave of guilt.

(Holy crap, is this the energy shift the reed diffuser promised?

Remarkable.) I shake it off quickly though – best not to pick at the scab of feeling guilty about things that happened years ago.

Anyway, rabbits are surprisingly muscular, not like gerbils or other smaller rodents one might keep as a pet, so maybe it wasn’t even my fault that it wriggled free.

‘So, you’ll come with me then?’

I snap out of my reminiscence and realise I’ve agreed to accompany my mother to Carol’s funeral, ‘when it happens, which probably won’t be for a while’.

Why, I wonder… is there some kind of hideous dead body backlog I don’t know about?

I decide not to ask, having probably done enough damage for one conversation.

‘Of course, Mum. And I’m sorry about Carol. She was a real…’

I go to say ‘treasure’ but feel this is a bit strong, so change it to ‘doll’ halfway through, because I was watching Mad Men last night. It comes out as something akin to ‘troll’ though. Thankfully, Mother Pells is now focusing on the funeral logistics and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t hear.

‘You know how I’ve been getting so confused about directions lately. The Inevitable, I’m sure…’