by Lollie Barr
They were all crammed into Mand’s tiny room between piles of clean clothes, piles of dirty clothes, CDs, magazines, books and crusty plates and mouldy cups. Mand had intended to give the room a cursory tidy-up before the girls arrived but hadn’t got around to it. Her room, like her head, was a mess.
In the corner, an acoustic guitar leaned against the wall. Her dad had bought her her first guitar at the age of three. It was a little kid’s miniature one that was impossible to tune and made such an unholy racket when she played it, but Mand had carted her guitar around with her everywhere, like other girls carried their favourite doll.
Mand had started playing seriously three years ago, after her dad had left for good, and would spend countless hours noodling on her guitar. While her mother told her she definitely had her dad’s musical talent and timing, she never paid that much attention.
So Mand would hang out in her room late in the evenings and strum three-chord pop songs that she had written with titles like ‘Suburban Alien Chick’ and ‘Picking up Sticks’, until her mother would yell at her to ‘stop making such a bloody racket at this time of night’, as she watched yet another crappy crime drama on the box.
There was something unnerving about having new people over, especially with a mother like Mel, who liked to wear little crop tops that showed off her belly button ring, which she’d got to celebrate her thirty-eighth birthday earlier in the year. Everyone commented on how young Mel looked and her favourite game was getting people to guess her age. It was mortifying. But, thank god, Mel still hadn’t arrived home from lunch and shopping with ‘the girls’ – her friends who were so old, Mand couldn’t believe they had the audacity to call themselves ‘girls’ when they were, like, nearly forty!
‘Shall we call this meeting of the Mag Hags to order?’ said Maggie, who was taking her job as editor very seriously. ‘Anyone with any new business?’
‘Wanda and I got together to talk about the photo shoot over the weekend,’ said Belle, who had brought along her digital camera and a fancy-looking laptop, which she kept in a rather stylish large pink handbag.
‘Who are we going to get to model?’ asked Cat.
‘All of us!’ replied Wanda. ‘We thought we could go for a theme, and since the formal was coming up, I thought we could do something like a futuristic formal – what we’d be wearing in, say, twenty years’ time.’ Wanda had dreamed this idea up one afternoon with Mattias the Swede. She knew she was getting obsessed when not even his beautiful blue eyes could distract her from thoughts of the mag.
‘Wow, that would be so cool,’ said Cat. ‘Speaking of the formal, did you know that I’m on the organising committee? It’s going to be awesome this year. We’ve got an amazing band called Nightshade. Have any of you got dates?’
The girls shook their heads. Even though it was more than two months away, the formal was the biggest event of the year. The politics of who was taking who had been talked about since the start of the year. Cat was convinced she would be going with Nate, who by then would have seen the error of his ways.
However, she wasn’t taking any chances and had been on the hunt for a backup date, if Nate didn’t come to his senses. Cat had scanned the whole school for potentials, but had come up blank. She secretly hoped that if she got the interview with Tyler Grey, then he would fall madly in love with her and she’d bring him to the formal. The daydreams she had about the look on Nate’s face when she walked in on Tyler’s arm kept her going during the nights she lay awake missing him and wondering whether she should have done things differently.
None of the other girls had boyfriends. Wanda had been on three dates with Colm Brannigan but had found that when they spoke, it was as though they were on a faulty telephone line – she couldn’t quite understand what he was on about. Since those dates, she had preferred to fantasise about Jason Jones, or dream wistfully about her maths tutor, who at 21, didn’t even know the fifteen-year-old existed, despite the fact he saw her once a week.
Mand had put a date for the formal completely out of her head. She didn’t fancy any of the boys at school, but for some reason the boy in the photograph at Belle’s place had stuck in her mind. She shook her head to get him out but he was firmly lodged and no amount of shaking was going to get rid of him.
Maggie thought she had no chance of going to the formal with a boy, ever. As far as she was concerned, she was like the invisible woman, despite being so tall. Along with ‘MNM’ (Maggie No Mates), the boys called her ‘GG’ – Giant Giraffe – because she had long, skinny, colt-like legs and a long, slim neck. She was seriously hoping for a nasty case of tonsillitis so she wouldn’t have to go.
‘Right,’ said Maggie, opening her pad and changing the subject. ‘Mand, Cat and I had a features meeting yesterday. As Mand is the features editor, I’ll hand over to her.’
Mand had done a lot of thinking since the magazine project had gotten underway. After all her attempts at changing the world, she realised that The Mag Hag may be just the place to get her views out there. Like how she hated the way totally fit and healthy chicks with healthy bodies spent lunchtimes at school obsessing over food, or the fact that their generation was going to pay the price for the nightmare that was global warming.
During the features meeting, the girls had decided on the content of the magazine – Mand would write a story called ‘So you want to change the world?’ about all the things you could do to make the world a better place. There would be a double-page spread devoted to their favourite music and why they loved it; all the girls were to pick their favourite album and explain why they liked it so much. Wanda would write a feature called ‘How to look glamorous on a budget’; Cat would write a story called ‘Celebrity Love Map’ which would link up every celebrity with six degrees of sexual separation, while Maggie would write a piece about meditation and an advice page called ‘Share & Tell’.
After discussing the final line-up, Maggie was about to tie up the meeting when Mand piped up. ‘Um, er, well, er, I have written something, actually.’ Her face had turned the colour of tomato soup. ‘It’s not very good though. Actually, it’s crap. I’m crap. Now I’m crapping on. I should have never mentioned it really. I’m sure it isn’t very good.’
‘Would you read it out to us?’ said Maggie, using the voice she used on her little brother Billy when she wanted to cajole him into doing something he didn’t want to do. ‘Please, Mand, it would be brave of you to be the first person to actually read out something they’ve written.’
The other three girls joined in the chorus for Mand to read out her story. Eventually she relented and reached down and pulled up a black notepad bound with a red spring. The front cover had a Greenpeace sticker, a picture of a whale and a picture of Popstarz Jason Jones with his eyes blacked out and a pair of devil’s horns drawn on. She took out two sheets of A4 paper and carefully unfolded them. Just as she was about to start, Mand chickened out. ‘I can’t,’ she said.
After a further five minutes, the girls finally convinced her that, no matter what, they were impressed that she had actually written anything at all. ‘Okay, okay,’ she replied. ‘I’ll do it.’
Mand took a deep breath and started to read.
How to get over yourself and learn to love your body
Imagine standing in front of a full-length mirror, looking at your reflection and feeling totally at ease with your body. You love your body and your body loves you! Impossible? No, Mand Hospock shows you how.
If there’s one thing (well there’s not, there’s a whole list as you’ll gather from the rest of the mag) that gets my back up, it is when you’re talking to your girlfriends, mothers and sisters and all roads of conversation seem to start or end with the way they look.
Most women have got something they want to change, whether it’s dropping a couple of dress sizes, having smaller or larger boobs, trimmer thighs, a flatter tummy, to wanting to have a full body transplant. It drives me crazy but I’m as guilty of it as the next female! S
o why are we doing it?
Girls will always find fault with themselves, even if they’ve got a great figure, because our society teaches us that we have to look perfect and have a body that is the fashion of the day – you know, stick thin bod with an alien head.
‘Studies have shown that the ideal shape girls now crave is very thin with very little body fat and big breasts,’ says psychologist Dr Vivienne Lewis, an expert in body image from the City Western University. ‘But it’s almost biologically impossible for the average girl to obtain this. So we emotionally beat ourselves up because we have a distorted view of what is normal.’
But what is normal? Well, it’s not the model girl with hot model good looks – 5 ft 8 in, 50 kilos – that represent a tiny 0.5% of the population, which essentially means they are actually the freaks (even if they are beautiful freaks).
That inner critic (god, she can be the biggest bitch) can strike at any time, perhaps when you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, compare yourself to someone you perceive to be slimmer or more attractive, or see some girl celebrity with the body of your eight-year-old brother in a magazine. This voice feels like a toxic mate, who can’t keep her nasty comments to herself. Imagine having a friend saying to you, ‘You’re too fat’, ‘You can’t wear that, it makes you look fat’, and continuing to nag you all day about your body. You’d be outraged and tell her to chuck the toxic hellcat immediately. Yet we talk to ourselves in negative language like this every single day.
‘As soon as you hear that inner critic saying horrible things, take a deep breath and then say, “Thanks, I’ve heard what you’ve had to say, but it doesn’t mean that it’s true. I approve of myself,” says Dr Lees. Building up your self-esteem and learning to be kind to yourself does wonders for body confidence.’
The real truth is real beauty comes from within and that means developing your inner qualities. ‘How you look isn’t the most important thing in life,’ says Dr Lees. ‘Naturally, if you present yourself well, you’ll do well, but there is more to life. If you’re intelligent, ambitious, adventurous, well read, friendly, kind, caring, have a great sense of humour – these are the qualities that will get you on in life.’
So don’t cave into the pressure of believing that beautiful people are happy people (you just have to take a look at the lives of your favourite celebrities to debunk that myth), because the truth is happy people are those who can accept who they are, and treat their body with a healthy dose of respect and love. Something we should learn to do – after all they’re the only ones we’ve got.
3 steps to total body confidence
To start loving your body you must view it as your friend rather than your enemy. Say to yourself, ‘I approve of my …’ Change the body part every day and find a reason to approve of it, such as ‘I love my arms as they allow me to cuddle my boyfriend’ or ‘I love my legs because they allow me to play netball.’ Do one body affirmation every day.
Treat compliments like gold dust. If somebody says something nice, don’t answer with an embarrassed ‘No, but my thighs are flabby.’ Learn to say, ‘Thank you.’ Write down a list of compliments you’ve received and refer back to it when you’re having a ‘bad body day’.
Start thinking of weight in terms of health, not diet, and set realistic goals for yourself. There really aren’t any quick fixes. Put simply, eat healthily and exercise more.
There was a stunned silence in the room. Mand felt breathless, and her heart raced like shoppers on Boxing Day going into the sales. She was too scared to even look up from her notebook in case the girls thought she was an absolute dunderhead. But after a torturous moment the girls broke into rapturous applause.
‘Mand, that was truly, truly great,’ said Belle, raising her hand to high-five her.
‘Really? You’re not just saying that?’ said Mand, slapping Belle’s hand, then Cat’s, and Maggie’s and Wanda’s.
Normally, Mand would never high-five anyone, as she hated any forced group activity, but for the first time ever she felt strangely accepted. The little voice in her head that could be so critical was silenced, just for a few seconds.
Suddenly, in all of the excitement, the door flung open. There stood Mel, a living embodiment of everything Mand had just spoken about – her skinny legs, her cute belly, which didn’t betray the fact she’d had two children. Mand’s heart sank, but the other girls secretly wished that their mum could be so hot. Apart from Belle, who always tried to shut out any feelings that came up when she saw other girls with their mothers.
‘Hey,’ said Mel with a peculiar little wave to Mand. ‘Hey, girls!’
‘Hello, Mrs Hospock,’ they replied in a chorus, sounding like a Year 2 class greeting their teacher.
‘Mrs Hospock Schospock!’ said Mel laughing. ‘Sounds like Mand’s granny! A woman, I never, ever, want to be compared to, thank you very much. Call me Mel.’
Mand piped up, in a slightly irritable tone, ‘Mum, we’ve got stuff to do, you know, if you don’t mind?’
Mand was sick of her mum always wanting to be one of the girls. Since Lottie had left for university she wanted to ‘hang’ with Mand. But Mand didn’t want to hang with Mel; she wanted her to be her mother. A regular mother who went shopping and actually came back home with food, not a new pair of shoes, who cooked dinner, who made her clean her room, who didn’t go out with male strippers called Kane and tell everyone all about it.
‘Okay, Mand,’ said Mel, backing out of the room. ‘There’s no need to freak out, I was just leaving.’
‘Cool mum,’ said Wanda as Mel disappeared out the door. ‘Wish my mum had her belly button pierced.’
‘She’s okay,’ said Mand. ‘But she can be as embarrassing as finding out that you have a boogie poking out of your nose when you’re talking to a boy you like.’
What Mel would have thought of being compared to a boogie was anyone’s guess.
It was Saturday morning and Glitz, as usual, was packed. The scent of female hormones and endorphins going off in a shopping frenzy hung heavy in the air, as the sound of squealing coathangers scraped across the racks. Glitz was Baywood’s coolest shop. Every season, the store would copy whatever fashion appeared on the catwalk and sell it for next to nothing.
Mand refused to shop at Glitz, because she knew the clothes had been sewn by third world teenagers who, if they were lucky, got paid five dollars per week for working sixty hours. She would only buy clothes from second-hand shops or those that were certified ethically made, which were more expensive. Hence, why she stuck to black, so everything went together.
However, Cat and Wanda had no such reservations and had already been scanning the racks for the latest bargains for two hours when they bumped into each other on the second floor near the change rooms. Cat was looking at a white tailored pin-striped catsuit with a winged-tip collar, and Wanda was turning a pair of black velvet jodhpurs inside out.
‘Hey, Wanda,’ said Cat, who normally wouldn’t have ever acknowledged a ‘Them’ in public. ‘Cool pants.’
‘Yeah, I might make a copy of them, I’m just checking out the pattern. Are you going to try on that catsuit?’
‘I don’t know if it’s me,’ said Cat, who had new respect for Wanda’s opinion when it came to fashion after seeing the clothes she had made. ‘I’m going to try it on. Would you come and give me an honest opinion?’
‘Sure.’ Wanda couldn’t believe she was having a discussion about fashion with an ‘Us’, and in public too.
Cat walked into a large change room and pulled the wooden door shut, while Wanda waited out the front. From the next change room came a laugh so raucous it sounded like a gaggle of geese on a hen’s night.
‘Oh, Reanne, you’re hysterical!’ said a laughing voice. ‘God, that dress is just so you!’
‘Wait till I’m married to Adrian, I won’t be shopping in Glitz, baby. It will be high-class designer boutiques all the way,’ said Reanne, laughing a bit too hard. ‘Show me the money!’
> Cat opened the change room door and signalled to Wanda, mouthing the word: ‘Reanne’. Wanda, who had already got the drift, went into the cubicle with Cat and listened to the conversation.
‘What about his daughter? Still a nightmare?’ said the voice. It had a nasal twang so bad you’d think it was a lawnmower choking on wet grass.
‘Oh, Corabelle, she’s such a little princess,’ said Reanne. ‘Hates my guts. I’m going to pack her off to boarding school the moment her father and I are married.’
‘Oh, you’re awful, Reanne!’ said the voice, breaking into giggles again.
‘Anyway, what do you think of these white pants?’ said Reanne. ‘I reckon they make my bum look big enough to show a wide-screen movie on.’
Cat gestured for Wanda to slip out and then took off the catsuit – which had made her look like she was in a bad seventies heavy-metal band anyway – deposited the clothes with the attendant and made a run for it, before Reanne came out of the cubicle.
‘Ohmigod!’ said Wanda as they hurried across the mall. ‘Can you believe that? We’ve got to tell Belle. She’ll freak when she hears Reanne wants to send her to boarding school!’
‘Yeah, I know,’ said Cat. ‘Do you think we should call her now and get her to come down to Hoolio’s?’
‘We have to,’ said Wanda. ‘She needs to know.’
Cat pulled out her mobile and texted Belle, telling her to get down to Hoolio’s immediately, as they had some urgent news she just had to hear.
When Wanda and Cat walked into Hoolio’s it was pumping. Abdul Minary was on the decks, dropping fat hip-hop beats that had everybody in the place tapping their feet in time with the music. There was always a sweet scent in the air because Hoolio baked his cakes in the kitchen, just behind the serving counter. You could smell the apple, carrot, chocolate, cinnamon and spices floating in the air. Luckily, there was an empty booth at the back of the cafe, next to the frappé machine. The girls ordered drinks but Cat declined to share a cake, then settled into the booth to chat about the magazine.
