BELNICE HELENA-NZINGA

The East Wing

YOU are 50 years old but tell people you’re 60 so you can hear them talk about how young you look. You live in an extensive forty-five bedroom complex on Pennsylvania Avenue. You believe in self-care and maintenance, involving a raw vegan diet and holistic exercise: yoga, pilates and the Jane Fonda Prime Time Workout DVD are consistent parts of your daily routine. In the early mornings, you are often found, back arched, face down, leaning over the marble counter with your head submerged in a bowl of cold huangshan maofeng (six degrees to reduce puffiness around the eyes). You shower twice a day, and when bathing, you use an exfoliating seaweed and mildew body scrub with fossilised barnacle to cleanse and prevent wrinkles.

Tabloids speculate about the coldness of your character, the icy glare with which you look upon your husband. And maybe a few of them hold some truth. But your marriage is a commitment: to evade the limelight, to only show your face when necessary, to sit still – look pretty, support your frontman from the sidelines as long as you both shall live. You are mother to a nation, and valued by none. Sometimes you think you’d like someone to take care of, but when a small hand reaches for yours, you know it’s not what you really want. You wish you could turn back time.

When most people meet you they cannot help but think you need saving, believing that in some warped and twisted way the both of you are similar, that you are connected by your isolation, and when you flash a smile they think that maybe you care about them and their story. But when they grip the flesh of your hand, damp and cold to the touch, and you lower your rose-tinted glasses to meet their gaze, they realise that there really is nothing there.