My mother has always said Zizi has healing hands. It’s one of an endless number of paradoxes about my diminutive friend and beauty therapist. She is under 5ft tall, with sturdy olive skin, tousled hair, and a fondness for pedal-pusher playsuits, so it’s hard to guess her age. In truth, she’s almost 50, but still frequents raves. She cares for her brother, and her mum, who has been in the UK for a lifetime but still only speaks Portuguese. Zizi is fit from lugging her treatment bed around, from the miracles she works on whoever is lucky enough to be on it, from Hiit circuits she does in the park. And she’s addicted to smoking cigarettes.
Zizi has been waxing, pedicuring and massaging the female members of my family for almost two decades. She knows all our backs, labia, feet and underarms intricately. If the things I share are anything to go by, she’s also the custodian of a tapestry of secrets: things we’ve each told her, but never each other. Zizi’s secret, how her touch cures muscle tension, her varnish clings to nails for days longer than it rightfully should, and why the hairs on which she has wrought wondrous violence struggle so long to grow back, none of us know. She has some kind of beauty therapist superpower.
