‘No, but you are going to come across people like Paco in your life and you cannot rise to their bait. If you do, you will be in prison before you know it. You need to work on your temper.’

‘Do I? I hadn’t thought of that! Wow, eureka moment or what – I need to WORK on my temper! Easy peasy, lemon fucking squeezy!’

But of course he was right. I was my own worst enemy. And little by little I tried to divert my mind away from the vitriol that would bubble and brew inside it whenever Paco was around. And the more I tried to suppress it, the more depressed I became. I had noticed it properly the day Paco drove me back from my liposuction. I was lying down on the back seat, padded up in gauze and compression bandages, doped up on Percocet, tuning him out, focusing on the engine hum. It was working. He wasn’t getting to me at all.

‘Hey, Rhiannon, did you see all the fat they took out of your stomach? There was a lot, huh? They suck a lot of fat out of you? Did they suck it out of your ass? That’s where you got a lot of fat, yeah?’

‘Just drive, you absolute fist-magnet.’ I chained a few more painkillers and lost myself in sleep.

I got lazy during that whole time. I think I only changed my leggings once in all the weeks I was laid up with my body wrapped in bandages – Aretha Franklin had her outfit changed four times when she was in her coffin.

I spent more and more time in my room, in bed, with the door locked during my recovery. I couldn’t even find the will to pull out the weeds in the garden – I didn’t want to do anything but sleep.

EAR PINNING

My ears were pinned back next, and that was a stinging little bitch of a procedure as well, though not nearly as problematic as the nip and tuck, even though initially I did want to vomit out all my internal organs with the pain. Adding insult to injury, I had to wear a compression bandage wrapped around my face for twenty-four hours which made me look like that botched art restoration, Monkey Christ. The results were pretty instant though when the bandages came off – I stared at myself in the doctor’s hand mirror at a follow-up consultation, turning my head from right to left and back again.

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘It’s working. I’m changing. Externally, at least.’

MOLE AND SCAR REMOVAL/HAIRLINE LOWERING