I began to tidy my room so that I could throw the hanger away without it seeming obvious. This was the kind of sly, dodgy behaviour girls my age save for their first cigarette.
I couldn’t wait to see the back of the hanger. It felt like a murder weapon. I already felt like it wouldn’t be the last time I’d ever see it; it would show up again in a plastic sandwich bag, grinning at me, in the court room of shame as evidence.
I want to hug the young me.
But I left her behind.
The next morning I wake feeling like a warmed-up corpse. I ground my teeth so badly my jaw is locked. The hinges around my face are tight. My teeth push against themselves. I could snap them off. Packed too tight. I just feel so grateful that my body didn’t sink to the same level as my mind had. Good old Big Bones, refusing to throw up. To give me what I wanted. Sometimes, it isn’t always mind over matter. Sometimes your body knows what’s best.
That’s why I listen to it, that’s why I eat what I fancy. And respect it.
I didn’t hang around with those girls any more after that day. I didn’t really hang around with anybody at school after that day. I just put my head down and got on with it. I wasn’t disliked. I waited for the rumours and abuse to start but I thought that if any one of those girls tried what I did, regardless of whether they got results, they’d feel just as ugly about themselves as I did about myself. And they wouldn’t want to speak about it again anyway.
I just got on.
The grinding of my teeth didn’t stop. Mum got me a gum shield. I had it fitted in a dentist’s room with weird pictures of armadillos made of out beads on the wall. The dentist said teeth-grinding can be caused by anxiety. My parents splitting up for the first time may have been the cause of it. Little did I know I’d get used to that.
My mouth was filled with an overwhelmingly minty plaster, which I actually quite liked – the suffocation of freshness was a new sensation. It was like chewing on a bouncy ball. I felt like the dogs. A week later we went to pick up the clear shield. A jelly waxwork mould of my mouth. My bottom teeth splayed out like a fan.
At first the ridges cut and gnawed fresh gills into the insides of my red cheeks and I think actually made me grind more. Like I was chewing on those fish-bone clothes tags. I think I was scared of swallowing it by accident in the night and choking to death on it. I guess it couldn’t have been worse than the coat hanger. But then I got used to it. Bit it down. The clear plastic became frosted and scratched, chewed so hard I made holes in the molars and my teeth would just clamp and grit against each other like rocks. Turning my teeth to sand.
Luckily I met Cam at Planet Coffee. She calls her trial shift there not a trial for a job but a trial for a friendship. Planet Coffee was just the right setting for two weirdo aliens to become friends. She says.
Once I met Cam, I didn’t need to use the gum shield any more …
But I feel like I have to wear it tonight.
I got an A* in art.
The rest was mostly Cs, Ds, 4s and 5s and actually one B.
An A* for my charcoal mess.
SCRAMBLED EGGS
I wake up and head downstairs to see Dove at the stove.
‘What you doing? You’re not cooking, are you?’ I accuse her sleepily. The counter is way too high for her.
‘Course I’m cooking. I’m allowed to cook, you know.’
‘Sorry. Sorry. Course you are.’
‘So annoying. Don’t baby me like that.’
I want to defend myself but there’s nothing to say. My jaw is tender. My gums are sore.
‘Mum made me a drawer down here. Look, it has pots and pans and utensils, and I can reach the two front burners.’
‘OK, that’s good.’
‘So pop the toast up then.’
‘Ah, you made some for me?’
‘Yeah, I made some for you. I’ve been waiting for you to wake up and I knew the smell of food would do it.’
‘You know me too well,’ I lie, rubbing my eyes instead of my belly, putting the kettle on. Even though I couldn’t stomach a thing.
‘It’s done. It’s in the other room, waiting.’
‘Oh amazing, thanks, Dove.’ I smile at her, watching her navigate her way around the kitchen: reaching, swivelling, her own revised version of culinary parkour. ‘What we having?’
‘Scrambled eggs.’
Dove isn’t really a cook. So I’m completely doubtful. But how bad could scrambled eggs be, really?
‘They’re horrible,’ she says after she takes a mouthful.
‘No, they’re not,’ I lie, forcing another forkful down. They are grey. Full of peppercorns that crack under your teeth like bombs.
‘Don’t lie.’ She presses the egg and milky water sinks into the toast. It’s the colour and texture of nicotine-stained net curtains. Dove pushes the pan of eggs away from her. She growls a horrible noise from the pit of her stomach and angrily flings the wooden spoon across the kitchen, leaving little eggy sprogs across the tiles. ‘I HATE THIS! I CAN’T STAND IT! I HATE IT! I HATE IT! I just wanted to be able to … DO something!’
I want to, but I don’t hug her.
I pick the spoon up off the floor and hand it back to her.
‘Well, you chose the wrong thing to do. You were a terrible cook before your accident,’ I say. ‘Pass the eggs here. Let’s try again.’
‘Just give it to the dogs,’ she grumbles, munching on the corner of a slice of toast, ‘and pass me the jam.’
HOT EGGS, MAYBE MEXICAN STYLE
To a pan of hot oil, so hot it shimmers, we add spring onion, chilli and the half-soft green pepper we have hanging around in the fridge. I throw in tomatoes and some Tabasco, cayenne pepper and smoked paprika. We let it cook …
Dove’s eyebrows unfurl.
We don’t have tortillas but we do have pittas in the freezer. Dove toasts them quickly in the toaster, then we place them on the hob, charring them up all lovely to get the black bumpy, gnarly lumps on them. Then I dump the horrid eggs back in the pan. The whole thing sizzles. I find some Cheddar cheese and grate that into it, melting it down. Cheese and eggs are BFFs. They are both edible glue that bring everything together. Then I crumble a knob of feta on top. I say a knob. I mean, a lot.
I snip whatever not-completely-brown leaves are left of some old parsley on top and hand the pan back to my sister.
‘WOW!’ Dove’s eyes light up. ‘BB! This looks delicious!’ She grins.
‘I dunno how it’ll taste.’
‘Delicious, I bet.’ She tears some bread and scoops the egg up with it. ‘Yum! How did you come up with that? It’s so good!’
‘I think your eggs are what made it.’
While she chews she watches a neighbour’s tiger-like cat snake along a fence, slink up onto the shed and then elegantly hop up onto our windowsill. Dove’s face is red from the warmth of the spice. She smiles at the cat.
She looks over to me; her eyes are deep and serious. ‘Don’t stop moving your body, BB, even though it’s hard, even though you say it’s not for you and you don’t really like it. Keep moving. Run. Swim. Cycle. Climb. Jump. Dance. Whatever. Just don’t stop. Ever,’ she orders. ‘Promise?’
I nod. I’m taken aback by her intensity at first but she’s serious, and I only say, ‘I won’t.’ I want to cry because she’s hit a nerve. Because I know she’s right. ‘I promise.’
I wonder, in life, if I’ve ever made my own heart beat fast. Sure, I get nervous and flustered and angry and scared and excited but that’s mostly out of my control and doesn’t always feel good. I’ve never caused myself to sweat and rush for the sake of it, because I can. For release or pleasure or energy. I’ve never urged my feet into a run … never heard my heart thump in my head.
And I know …
I have to bite the bullet …
I head upstairs to hunt for my swimming costume.
FRUIT SALADS
I believe I have the best swimming costume in the world. It’s vintage. S
econdhand. Some people get weird about the fanny bit touching your own fanny. As if those little plastic covers you get on the gussets of swimming costumes in shops when you try them on are any better. My costume is like industrial armour and it is architecturally beautiful. Pearly white dotted in navy spots. The cups make your boobs spludge out like a balcony but they never flop over the top. The waist stuffs you in all nice, holding you in tight so that your hips can swarm out. I sometimes can’t help but imagine the woman who wore this costume before me. Probably in the fifties or sixties. I bet she was really cool and wore black cat-eye reading glasses with diamonds at the corners. I bet she had a body like mine and jammed it into pencil skirts and let her body dollop out and swell from the plunging V of an open shirt or slit at the back of a dress, mesmerising people all over the world with her wonder. I bet she was amazing and had a fantastic name like Dixie. Or Lucky. Or Scrunchie.
The only problem is … I’ve never worn the swimming costume actually swimming. So that’s the first thing I’ll try for my recommended exercise. To shut Mum up. To make Dove proud of me. I’ll give this swimming business a go. Because I want to keep fit. I want to keep strong. I don’t want to lose weight but I want to be healthy.
I find the costume at the bottom of an old beach bag that I planned to take to the lido last year but I think the grumpy English weather stole that chance from me. The bag just has the costume ragged up at the bottom and the confetti of about fifteen Fruit Salad sweets. A chewy candy that is meant to taste like, well, a fruit salad. I pop one in my mouth. It tastes like eating a brick of Lego. I chew it; I can actually feel my molar being sucked out of my gum. I swallow it anyway, and for ages I feel the little blob of plastic sitting there, rotting in my gut but not. He’ll be in there for a while, that sweetie, the last one in the waiting room.
Really? Is it really happening now? Am I actually about to do this gym thing?
SAUSAGE
They put everything in a sausage. The eyeballs, the trotters. The bum, even. Gross. You know once I heard of someone who found a bumhole on their pizza with hairs on it. Actual pig hairs on a pig bum on the pizza.
My bedroom looks out onto the garden. I see the dogs sniffing about outside. I close the curtains of my bedroom to change. I always think it looks strange when the neighbours close their curtains in the middle of the day. It looks so suspicious. I strip naked to try the costume on. I catch a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror. My body is wide more that anything. Plump, ripe, jacket potato-ish. Uncooked sausage-like. I have a spray of moles that decorate me like chocolate chips. A small mountain-peak triangle of a scar on my hip from the tip of the iron. My thighs touch like more lined-up uncooked sausages. I have stretch marks all over, silver silkworms like a map of roads drawn out on tracing paper. I imagine myself like the Incredible Hulk, bursting out of my skin, prising apart my tissue and muscle.
I take the mirror off the wall and lie down on the floor. I hold the mirror above me. My face sinks back. My arms out, shoulder width apart with the view of myself top to tip. I want to see how I look naked, lying down. My boobs slide off either side of my chest like gravy dribbling off the edge of a plate, my ribs rise and my belly dips. My thighs spread and swell in the flatness of lying on my back. I have red knicker-line prints etched onto my softness like a zip. I am a sausage. A red sausage sizzling in a pan. I crane the mirror about; it’s heavy now, but I can’t put it down. I angle it over me in beams of the sun cracking through the gap in the curtain, the yellowing patches of my body. The diamond cuts from the mirror reflection sharpen the roundness of me, like slicing into a birthday cake with a knife.
Maybe I’m not a sausage. Maybe I’m a birthday cake?
I place the full-length mirror to the side, leaning against the fridge-cold radiator. I roll over to my side like a half-moon. My belly gives in to gravity, sliding down, puddling to the floor. My chin looks big. YOU DON’T WANT TO GO TO THE GYM BECAUSE IT MEANS YOU ARE GIVING IN. YOU WORRY YOU MIGHT BE LETTING YOURSELF DOWN, THAT YOU’RE GIVING IN. YOU PUT ON A BRAVE, PROUD FACE EVERY DAY. YOU LOVE YOUR BODY SO OTHERS DON’T HAVE TO AND YOU THINK THAT THE GYM IS YOU THROWING THE TOWEL IN ON THAT SELF-LOVE. THAT YOU’RE AGREEING WITH THE REST OF THE WORLD THAT IT WAS A LIE ALL ALONG, A DEFENSIVE FRONT. THAT THEY WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG. THAT YOU DO HATE YOU BODY.
BUT IT’S NOT RIGHT.
YOU LOVE YOUR BODY.
YOU ARE REWARDING YOURSELF BY GETTING STRONGER. IT MEANS YOU LOVE YOUR BODY MORE, BLUEBELLE. NO MATTER HOW BIG YOUR BONES ARE.
That’s more like it.
CHLORINE
Already the girls at the desk are looking at me.
I know that look.
‘I’d like to join the gym, please.’
I am counting the seconds until they offer to sign me up to a weight-loss programme or, better still, ask if I want to be introduced to a personal trainer. They like the idea of sitting there and perving over my transformation, waiting for me to reappear at the front desk one day wearing a pair of jeans that I can pull out to show a gap big enough for a whole other person to fit into and go ‘Can you BELIEVE I lost THIS much weight?’ Carrying my spare, baggy skin around with me like a rucksack. The gym might make me their poster girl.
They’ve seen millions of mes before with our good intentions and high hopes.
‘Sure.’ One gazes at the computer. ‘Have you done an induction?’ She’s typically sporty. Dressed like somebody who enjoys blowing a whistle angrily, while parading along the edge of a swimming pool. Probably showing off because she gets to wear her outdoor trainers indoors. The other one is a tiny dart of a female with cheekbones that could spiralise vegetables. She has slicked-back black hair pulled into a face-lifting ponytail, and shimmery lip gloss. All she needs is a plastic bottle of something E-number-orange and she’s partying in Ibiza. She looks me over, like looking for a snag of thread in a dress she is searching for a reason not to buy. Up and down. She can’t stop looking. It’s like she’s addicted. Her narrow eyes try to take me in. Her pupils try to box me into their rings. I want to cower, so instead, to combat that, I hear Dove’s little voice telling me to push my chest out. Puffing myself out all confidently like when you see pigeons out on the pull trying to meet a girlfriend.
‘Yes,’ I lie. I look at the wall of personal trainers. Their faces are lined up like a hall of fame, posing awkwardly with white teeth and hormone-charged eyes. I don’t want to know ANY of these people. That’s the last thing I want, some built-up tanned man called Todd embarrassing me by showing me how to work these machines.
How hard can they be anyway? Press start. Easy.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Bluebelle Green.’
Ibiza starts to look over the PE-teacher lookalike’s shoulder now too, trying to find my name, squinting behind fake eyelashes. But also bouncing her head to the terrible noise of the dance music blaring out. One whispers to the other – they are never going to turn down the commission of a new member.
‘Can’t find you … How unusual … anyway … let’s get you signed up.’
‘’K.’ I flush bright red. Splotchy. I wonder why I’m embarrassed now, when I’ve blagged myself into the gym without doing the induction and not at the moment when I was actually doing the blagging. Is it because now I have to face it? Physically enter the vortex of physical activity? While I fill in the fussy membership form I think about the little me laughing at me now. Like I am betraying myself by joining a gym, how out of character that is. I think about all the times when I was younger, excused from sport at school, sat, fat and sweaty, panting on the wall or bench while the others played rounders or cricket. Half-moons of sweat under my first-person-in-class-to-get-tits breasts from doing absolutely nothing. I was last on the wall to get chosen for any sport – except for a bit in primary school, when I was good at being ‘in goal’. The boys worked out that I could just stand there in the position of the boy’s toilet sign and block balls like a giant gingerbread man. Until I got hit in t
he face and my icing smile turned to a frown.
‘Because you’re under eighteen there’s no joining fee.’
I should think so too! My money should be going on really great life experiences, not running it away in an air conditioned torture dungeon.
‘You don’t look sixteen.’ The Ibiza one smiles; she means it as a compliment but I find it bitchy. Like she’s trying to suss me out. Perhaps she is envious of all the clubs I could get myself into underage. If I ever wanted to do that, which I just do not.
They make me have my picture taken. At this point I feel my confidence steal away like Peter Pan’s shadow. It suddenly whips off my back like a scarf in the wind and bolts for the door. I manage to grab it back. Oh. No. You are not going ANYWHERE. You’re coming with me.
‘Smile!’ And I do. In a short, muffin-mouthed attempt, like a Cabbage Patch doll.
And off we go … me and my confidence locked into a gym membership.
‘Do you need me to show you where the changing rooms are?’
‘It’s fine, thank you,’ I say. ‘I know my way. I’m using the pool.’
Course you are, I bet they think. She’s just gonna flop about like a starfish hippo and sink to the bottom like a submarine.
Swimming, they think, is NOT real exercise. They probably think swimming is what you do when you’re taking a break from exercise. To recover. On the off-days when you’ve spent all weak bench-pressing and lifting a … whatever one might lift.
Already I am regretting even coming here. Why am I regretting coming swimming? SHUT UP, BRAIN.
I find the women’s changing rooms. It’s different from when we used to go swimming with Mum. With Mum, it was fun. We would all pile into one family changing room and laugh as Dove wedgied me up the stairs. And we obviously didn’t do swimming. We just dunked each other and played mermaids or pretended to work in a pub in a sea of beer and sink and float and gargle chlorine while Mum did breaststroke.
Big Bones Page 21
