"Differing Opinions" by James ´Jimbo Fett ´ Inwood

I read the token that I held in my fist, “Future Facials” I read to myself before handing it to the fat little woman that worked the till.

It costs me a fiver to have my eyes refitted, but it should cost me much less if I have to look at fatties like the till woman. Jesus wept! She was almost like the little goblin women you find on the sinkhole estates: all fat and hairy with awful yellow teeth!

I nodded curtly at her as she told me to sit down on one of the pink bubble chairs - god, it must kill her to have a job like that; putting up with well-bred beauties like me coming into the surgery to modify my already flawless face. Yes my face. I started to touch my face: soft, tanned skin; dead-centre nose; swan neck with shoulder-length, luxurious, hair - silky, downy hair - and perfectly plump, red lips.

Yes, my face - my fifty thousand face - is still there - the goblin over there hasn’t dirtied it.

I pick up a magazine, I wonder what it is for a few seconds and then I laugh to myself; it’s a beauty magazine. I should have known to be honest. The first page and the cover have some truly beautiful women, if only I was like them, if only…

A voice calls me from my daydream.

I tick her name off the list, even though I and my colleagues already know her name. She’s one of the regulars: wealthy, and a regular head case as well. She’s the textbook example of someone with obsessive perfection disorder - her hair falls out if she thinks one of her cheeks has a spot on it, or her nose has too many blackheads. I dearly wish that she’d just give all this up and get some help - unlikely though that it is. I just want to help real people with real problems, not plastic problems like this fake with a mind that’s torn at the seams.

I don’t really have much of a choice here, with the recent oil wars and increased radiation poisoning coming from the east, being carried over by the wind and rain into the west. We didn’t expect our leaders would go to such lengths to gather plunder for us, but we were too busy having fun to care or think. When the epidemics broke out over in Turkey, the Mediterranean and up into the Balkans, extra funding was diverted in the NHS to prepare for the onslaught; but it was too much for us to handle. So with the stress of having to deal with thousands of people suffering from radiation poisoning, the NHS had to collapse, and medical care become privatised for the government to remain afloat, and not bankrupt like other European countries. But it was still not enough, cuts had to be made and I was one of the few professionals who managed to be moved to private health care. So here I am, stuck in the facial unit of a cosmetic surgery dealing with people like Dahlia.

I see her into the surgery.

The same old doctor that works on a Monday shows me in - Tisher or Fisher, I can’t remember her name or her surname. I think she’s the only female in the practice and she’s a little bit butch looking; all hair cut short and rather boyish. I like the surgery, it’s all white and clean, nice and pure. Pure is something that I hope to be someday. I hope to be something perfect in peoples’ eyes. The doctor gives me the old jibber jabber about how I should consider sticking to one pair of eyes which I’m planning on anyway, I just need to try some more before I stay with a pair - who knows this pair might even be the pair that I like.

Eyes are in today, or so I remembered hearing about before I left home for the surgery, last month it was hair which I didn’t quite bother with to be honest, but I did get a new set of ears since the old lot were a bit on the pointy side. I have a look at the book, there are some beautiful eyes here, one’s called the “crowd pleaser” , which made me giggle to myself, I had this image of me standing in front of a huge crowd like at the football stadium all cheering me instead of the football. There’s violet eyes which look entrancing, but I remember having them before, they gave me a hell of a headache looking at anything remotely blueish. I instinctively stayed away from the red eyes as, well, quite frankly they make people look a bit silly, and a bit evil - I think those gothic teenagers use them to look scary. Maybe I could try the sparkly eyes? They’re the ones with different bits of colour placed inside them by heaven’s know how. I thought about it for a while and then decided against it. I choose the light orange ones as they suited my skin tone more.

She looks a bit more relaxed now as I sit her down on the chair and explain the process even though she’s heard it god knows how many times - too many times. It’s still not clear on just how much damage a person can suffer from chopping and changing their body parts - both male and female. I do explain to her that she should consider selecting a set of eyes that she’s going to stick to, but no, she just snaps at me to do my job. Aww well, can’t say I didn’t warn her.

She spends a while looking at the eyeball brochure deciding which kind of coloured iris she wants this time. For crying out loud! The human body isn’t something that you can customise like an automobile, it’s a living, breathing machine that is fragile and likely to break if you keep fiddling with it! Dahlia points at this - that’s her name by the way - she wants a pair of eyes with bright orange irises, she said that they’d go well with her skin colour for Christ’s sake!

I strap her down the chair while applying my surgical gloves. I ready her head for the clamp, a safety device just in case the silly bint decides she wants out. I lower the binovisual operator onto her eyes and the shot of sedative does the trick, she’s limp, and at the mercy of medical procedure. Yes, she is at the mercy of a machine and another human being, both are prone to making mistakes and they have happened, but she doesn’t seem to care about that. She doesn’t seem to care that a very small percentage of people have lost their sight permanently, and others have ended up with the machine short-circuiting and with their eyeballs bulging out slightly looking as if they’ve been throttled. Yet she still doesn’t care, only the latest trends seem to concern her rather than her health and dignity. The procedure carries on, the eyes are given more sedative, which again, is another risk: if the sedative runs out, the victim is in for a world of pain, I had a friend once who worked in the same job as me and he saw this happen: he had nightmares for years! I select the vials of colour, I toy with the idea of putting in the wrong colour in, but no - more than my job’s worth. I insert them into the slot, the vial is drained, and hey presto!

Today I am reading Crime and Punishment, I’ve almost finished it, and it certainly relives the tedium that really does make this job an awful bore. Another sheep comes in to the slaughterhouse, she’s barely 18, so I ask her for any form of ID - no miss - bye, bye miss; remember to get daddy’s permission before you come barging in here demanding a facial!

This job doesn’t pay much, but I need this money since my hubbie got laid off from the plant, and there aren’t enough jobs going around for someone like me who wanted be a librarian all her life - what with printed books being out of date and a drain on the world’s resources, which have been almost depleted since the war. Yeah the job is indeed crap, though I do get the odd freebie from the company, but so far I’ve resisted the temptation to readjust my nose. I’ve seen it one too often, plain, attractive girls come into here and come out at the end of next month like the bride of Frankenstein. It just isn’t worth it - one thing leads onto another.

Now out comes Dahlia, another classic case. God she looks a state….