Reality, Reality

by Jackie Kay

  Just had a big salad for lunch, tinned tuna in brine, boiled eggs, leaves, tomatoes, green beans, bit of olive oil since it is counted as good oil, squeeze of lemon. Where’s the hardship in that? The wan hardship is it is costing me mair money, a’ this organic stuff. It’s way mair expensive. Never mind, wance I shed the skins, they’ll be less o’ me to feed and I’ll save pounds. Save pounds shedding pounds, that’s my logo when I run this diet and puts masell forward for The Apprentice.

  I am just not feeling hungry. I am just not feeling hungry! It’s easy no tae slip wance you are in the zone. When you’re in the zone, nothing can stop you! You have to play tricks on your body. (I know that sounds sexual, it’s not.) What you huv to do is trick your body into burning fat. Aye! You have to not let it get complacent. Jist when yer enjoying yer egg-white omelette, when you’ve got yer heid aroond that one, it’s time to eat sashimi! You have to see yer body as yer adversary so you can trick it properly. Reduce yer carbs so yer body taps intae storage fat. Increase proteins so yer body goes into fat-burning mode. Is burning your own fat more eco-friendly or not? Is it better for the environment? These are fat philosophical questions.

  But later, when I’m putting my breasts intae ma sports bra, I suddenly feels a bit of affection for them and gies them a little pat. Why should I no be kind tae you I find masell saying later, wey a gless o wine or two doon me. The hubbie wis oot for the coont on the armchair.

  It’s all psychology, dieting; you’d be amazed. When I goes out fir my fast walk, the sweat wis pouring between ma breasts so I reckoned I was walking fast enough. It said in ma book keep yer back straight, yet tummy tight and squeeze yer buttocks when ye walk fast. I tried that and nearly put ma back oot. So I’m jist sticking tae walking fast. I canny even locate my buttocks tae be honest. Anyhow, I jist kept repeating to myself like a mantra. You’re going to do it. You’re going to beat this sack of cement.

  Day Three

  I can’t believe I’m actually excited about my date wey The Scales. I took ma earrings aff, didnae want them adding anything. Today I was doon another three! Even my mental arithmetic is getting better! So that’s six pounds already and I’m only supposed to lose twelve pounds for the whole seventeen days, so that means I just need to stay on it for another two days and job done! Then I can go on to the next cycle. Joke! I’m not trying to get oot noo. No mair excuses! I do not even have to persuade myself to steer clear o’ mashed tatties. I remarked upon this to Iain tonight. And he said, ‘Is that all you can talk aboot, this bloody diet? You’re starting to bore the arse aff me. You’ve become the tattie bore.’ He laughed to himself. I looked at him. He was stuffing his face with a kebab. I thought to myself, Suit yourself: your days are numbered, mate. And I suddenly realized why Jenny asked me that question.

  I went oot to take an early evening fast walk around ma block. Three times round my block, I thought. No bother. So I’m walking fast as I can manage and somebody comes up to me and says, ‘Excuse me? Have you got the time on you?’ I jist kept walking fast as I could till I could feel the sweat on ma fore heid. As if I could stop to look at my watch! Some people are so selfish!

  Day One

  Got side-tracked just when I wis doing so well. You can never tell when things are gonna come at ye fray the left field. Started this morning again wey a squeezed lemon and felt my eyes well up fir nae good reason. In the shower, I got hold o a ring o’ my fat and decides tae talk directly tae it. I says, Yer finished, yer over, you’re so . . . and I searched for the right word and found it – auld-fashioned. That’s what ye are. Auld-fashioned! All the trendy fifty-year-olds are fit. Yer no fit. Yer a disgrace. Yer a complete disgrace. Whit would yer mammy say if she wis still alive, dae ye think? Eh? She’d say, Pat, you’re fat; you’ve put the beef on. You’ll need to get rid of it, Patricia MacDonald. I’m telling you. Strangely, my maw wis a wee skinny woman so I canny blame a fat gene. Whit can I blame? I canny think o’ any particular time in ma childhood that’s led to this.

  When I looks up at ma face in the mirror, I’m greeting. Good, I says tae masell. Well – good. Cry like a big wean and get yersell sorted oot! I can think of other diets that have begun in tears. In point o’ fact, all the successful diets have begun in tears. And Iain’s no here any mair tae chip in or undermine me. He’s aff wey the lassie frae his office. I know! Whit a cliché. You’d think he’d be tae embarrassed tae carry it oot; but naw, naebody, it seems, is tae embarrassed tae carry oot a cliché.

  Day One

  Last week wis a write off, right. I’ve written it aff. I wisnae in the right frame o’ mind. I was aff my heid. Losing it. The wan thing that cheered me up wis that I read in a magazine that red wine burns off fat. So I’ve got myself a bottle tae glug the night. Organic red – no jist any rubbish.

  Day One

  It wis a waste of time, that red wine. I didnae come doon in weight at all. It didnae help mibbe that I drunk the whole bottle. It tells you jist to have a gless. But who do you know who can jist have a gless? I’m having nothing come at me frae the left field. I’ve had to go sick again because it’s starting to stress me oot, ma own fat face in the mirror. I says to masell, Do you know whit you are? Yer morbidly obese, that’s whit you are. Do you know why they use the word morbid? Because yer going to die! You are going to die if you carry on like this. Yer heart will jist give oot. Or you’ll have a stroke. Or you’ll jist drap doon deid. It’s up tae you, I says. Do you want to be morbidly obese? So. It starts right here, right now. Fir my breakfast I had a hauf o’ a pink grapefruit and a boiled egg, no toast no butter. For my lunch I had a whole cucumber and six tomatoes and a cup of green tea, which is a fat-burner too. For my dinner I had a chicken leg and a bit of broccoli. (I added a tiny knob of butter.) And another bottle of red wine. Iain phoned in the middle of my meagre meal but I let him piss off straight to answer-phone. I got up and hovered by it and listened.

  I could hear him saying, ‘Pat, this is a pattern, can ye no see that, hen? You push me away when you’re on a diet. It’s like ye have to shed me. Nae wonner I have to look elsewhere for comfort. Gie me a call back. Miss you.’ The phone goes dead. He sounds sloshed. I turn the volume doon. So it’s ma fault, again. All ma fault. I goes straight up and intae my bed. I put the telly on and watch Desperate Housewives. It’s no that funny any mair; it’s stretching it a bit, and those housewives arenie nearly as desperate as me. And that voiceover at the beginning is getting on my nerves. But I wouldnie mind having Bree’s figure. I toss and turn, must be the bloody caffeine in that green tea that’s keeping me awake. It’s no real. It’s no real so it’s no.

  Day Two

  Had a night of well weird dreams. Woke up and staggered to the scales. Doon two. Aha. I felt my stomach, definitely getting noticeably smaller. Looking forward to having just one ring round my stomach, like the rubber ring I used to wear when I was learning to swim. Then looking forward to having no rubber ring at a’. Iain’s away a while noo. Do I miss him? Naw. But it’s weird but the way your whole life suddenly seems a bit o’ a con. Like everybody wis pretending everything. What I’ve concluded is naebody knows naebody knows naebody. Do you know what I mean? Yiv had a stranger in yer ain bed for twenty-odd years.

  Last night I got oot the photie albums. Fat in that wan. Fat in that wan. Fat in that wan. I shut the book, screwed off. I couldnie see what I ever saw in Iain or what he ever saw in me. I kept hearing him say yer mine for life. But like I say, it wis me that instigated a’ this. Iain liked me big because his mammy wis big and he was breastfed. (I didnae like the amount of attention he showered on my breasts anyway. It did nothing fir me. Nothing fir me!) Naw, seriously. And he kept saying, You’re no yersell when you’ve lost a’ that weight. You look odd. Other women’s husbands would be egging them on. I don’t seem to do much of an evening except write oot my recipes for the next day and plan ma day aroond them. Iain was right. I’ve turned into a tattie bore.

  Day One Hundred and Forty-Three

  Bingo! Doon th
ree pounds in the wan go! Wis getting worried there because I’d reached a plateau and I thought I wisnae going to go any lower. But noo, here I am. Bang on twelve stone. Jist wan more stone to go. See this dieting it takes ye through a rollercoaster o’ emotions, so it does. One minute you’re high cos you’re shedding and the next minute you’re low cos you’re piling it back on. Focus, Patricia MacDonald! Stay focused. Fir ma brekkie I had a yoghurt and some raspberries. For ma lunch I had an omelette jist wey egg whites, and it wis OK. For ma dinner I had a chicken leg and a bit of broccoli with a friendly knob o’ butter. At aboot seven that night, Jenny calls me and asks me oot. ‘I haven’t seen you for ages,’ Jenny says. I put on the jeans that have been hanging in my wardrobe unworn for six years, and top, ditto. Slashes on a bit of lippy.

  So we go doon to the local, the Horse and Jockey, and it’s a bit bonkers in there cos there’s a pub quiz going on. So we leave and go the other pub across the road where Jenny stares at me fir ages. She doesnie look at me like the people at work do and say you’re looking terrific. Naw. She says, ‘What’s happened to you? Where have you gone? There’s nothing of you left,’ she says. And she looks appalled, really appalled. I feel the smile being wiped off my thin face. ‘I’m jist the same auld Pat,’ I say to Jenny. ‘I telt ye I was going to lose it.’ Jenny looks serious noo. ‘Look, Pat, you’ve lost enough now. You look like a different person. You’re losing yourself. You actually don’t suit being this thin.’ ‘Here, you,’ I says, ‘this is my first night oot for ages. I don’t want it starting with being told off!’

  I suddenly remembered this from before. Your pals canny cope. Especially the fat ones! They feel bereft. And judged! And alone, alone in their creaking bones. ‘I’m hardly a skinnymalinky longlegs,’ I says to Jenny.

  And I says to Jenny, ‘Jist get me a sparkling water.’ It feels odd being oot. I feel like I’ve been isolated for ages wey a long illness. Or like I’ve been in prison, in solitary confinement. There’s quite a buzz in here. Jenny brings me a pint and a poke o’ salt and vinegar. Whit can I do? Isn’t it nice to have pals that know you? I mean a night out on a gless o’ sparkling water is no gonna dae it fir me. I canny help but smile. ‘Is Iain really gone this time?’ Jenny asks. ‘Aye, he’s buggered off for guid this time.’ ‘Is that right?’ Jenny says and I notices she’s sort of smiling. ‘Sometimes you can be lonely when you’re in a relationship,’ Jenny says. I says, ‘Aye, so you can,’ Jenny says, ‘Pat you’re a good-looking woman. Can you not just accept yourself the way you are?’ I says, ‘I’ll accept masell when I’m down to what I want to be. This pint is a one-aff.’ Jenny smiles secretively to herself, then she clinks pint glasses with me and says, ‘I’ll drink to you being what you want to be.’ And I says, ‘Cheers,’ defiantly. And Jenny says, ‘Cheers,’ and sips the froth off her pint, studying me over her glass. She rips open the bag of crisps on the table and I feel as if a hand, not my hand, has picked up a crisp and popped it in my mouth. ‘Shall I get another poke?’ Jenny says, quite excitedly. (She puts on a Glasgow accent when she says the word poke, imitating me.) ‘Naw, it’s my round,’ I says. ‘What are you having? Same again? It’s my round.’ I feel like I’m on holiday. I go up to the bar and say, ‘Two pints of Guinness please and two pokes of cheese and onion crisps.’ It won’t hurt.

  Mrs Vadnie Marlene Sevlon

  On the way home from a long and final day in Sunnyside Home for the Elderly, Mrs Vadnie Marlene Sevlon was relieved to notice a little breeze. Much better than yesterday when the weather was close, so close she felt the low pressure in the air. As long as there is a little breeze, a person can cope with most things – even if she is in the wrong place. It’s the days when there is no breeze at all when Vadnie is convinced she made a mistake. But it wasn’t like there ever seemed much choice. It wasn’t like she could just take her pick. Only people with money have choice; only rich people can take their pick; everyone else must stumble from pillar to post, from hope to promise, and believe in luck and God, or maybe just God, or maybe just luck, depending on the day and the breeze. Vadnie Marlene Sevlon often said her own name, her whole name, to herself when she was alone. Perhaps because it reminded her of back home, her mother shouting Vadnie Marlene Sevlon, come and get your dinner, or maybe because it made her feel less lonely or maybe even just to remind herself of who she was. Time for you to get up, Vadnie Marlene Sevlon, she would say in the morning; bed for you now, Vadnie Marlene Sevlon, she would say at night. And in between the morning and the night sometimes not a single living soul said her name out loud.

  Vadnie walked past the College for Boys, past the Brondesbury Park Rail Station and the Islamia Primary School, past Willesden Lane Cemetery where sometimes if she had a little time on her hands she would sit on a bench and contemplate the differences between the living and the dead. She liked to read the gravestones and imagine the lives of the fascinating names she read, and work out the ages, practising her mental arithmetic. Some people find graveyards gloomy, but not Vadnie Marlene; she felt as if she was being kept company by the peaceful dead. There was an atmosphere in Willesden Lane Cemetery that you never found in Kilburn High Street or at work or even at home. Intense contemplation! Vadnie sometimes envisaged her own headstone, though she knew nobody in her family could afford one, and anyway they wouldn’t want her buried in England, and anyway she was too young to be thinking such thoughts. (She was fifty-two, hardly a spring chicken, but then not likely to be at death’s door any time soon, please God. Her father was dead long time back now, but her mother was still around and living in Darling Spring, Jamaica, with three of her sisters who all wanted Vadnie to come back home. ‘South of here is Grateful Hill, South West, Lucky Valley, further south then, Prospect,’ her mother used to say often, ‘I’m hoping our prospects improve soon.’) But even so her mind would wander off, as it often did, to imagining her own death, and she’d envisage her whole name and her dates and the inscription beloved daughter of Gladstone and Hyacinth Sevlon, Rest in Peace, Darling. It wasn’t perhaps what people usually did in their lunch hours, dream up their own headstones, but Vadnie found it quite entertaining and it passed away the time. Should it say passed away or should it say fell asleep, what should the exact wording be? She continued down Salusbury Road, stopped to buy a new plug in the DIY shop and a new packet of fuses, past the artisan bakery, where the bread and cakes looked lovely, like little works of art, the beauty of those breads, some so threaded they looked like fancy hair-dos, or wiring, but cost a small fortune, so she only ever looked in the window; past a fancy florist where they even had birds of paradise, which looked out of place, but cost a small fortune so she only ever went in to the florist’s to take a deep sniff; past Queen’s Park Underground Station and right into Kilburn Lane, down Fifth Avenue, which always made Vadnie think of New York, where she might have gone for her contemplation, Central Park, watching people skateboard, rollerblade, jog, meditate, dance and all the things she heard say people do in Central Park from her cousin Eldece who went over there fifteen years ago and sometimes wrote a letter with all her news. Eldece was maybe the lucky one. But the strange thing about life was that you could only live the one of them; you couldn’t live the other one, the one where you went to New York instead of London, and then compare and contrast. You couldn’t compare the life you had with the life you might have had though sometimes Vadnie Marlene Sevlon would have liked to be able to shout Stop and after the requisite minutes Start, and then catch the other life, live it for a bit, and if it was not as agreeable as the one in her imagination, well then she’d be able to return to the old life and appreciate it better by simply shouting Stop and Start again. As Vadnie turned into her own street, Oliphant Street, she wondered if it was luck or fate or God that made the decisions in your life. Or was it just a moment plucked from the ordinary that made you stick with mistakes already made? For instance, once, years ago, on the telephone, a man who was going to be coming to fix her electric sockets said, ‘Is you Miss or Mrs?’
And Vadnie answered Mrs. That was twenty years ago, when she was thirty, and was still thinking that the right man might come along. He never did but Vadnie kept the Mrs anyway. She put Mrs on her bank cards and Mrs on anything she had to sign. Mrs on her direct debits and Mrs on her television licence, Mrs on her water bill and Mrs on her gas and electric. It was Mrs Vadnie Sevlon, and she felt she got more respect that way. Strange thing was, after a number of years, she believed it herself. She was no longer surprised at the amount of post that arrived with her whole name on it. The Mrs by then didn’t give her the thrill of the early days; she took it quite for granted. So might she look back on the electric man and call that fate or luck or God? Did God want her to call herself Mrs to keep herself safe from men of disrepute? When people asked her what her husband did, she would tell them he was an electrician. She would picture him vividly, combining features of the electrician with the features of a man she once sat next to on a bus to the Lake District. She made a kind of composite husband out of the two, took the hair from one and gave it to the other so he wasn’t balding, just receding, took two inches of height from one and gave it to her husband, made his skin a rich dark brown. Her husband had lovely neat nails which you might not expect for an electrician. ‘Oh, he works long hours; he’s an electrician you see. You have to be very well qualified to be an electrician, you know. You have to know your wires, your blue and brown and black and yellow. And you need to know that blue used to be neutral, but black also used to be neutral,’ Vadnie would say, whenever she got a chance, to whoever would listen, even strangers, knowledgeably quoting the most recent electrician who stood explaining his job to her for some time on the last visit to Oliphant Street. Vadnie didn’t quite know what it was that made boiler men and electricity men and plumbing men always like to explain to her the exact ins and outs of what they were doing in a supremely technical way, but when an electrician came around, Vadnie listened intently. (In fact, she had found herself sometimes putting in extra plugs she didn’t exactly need and could ill afford, just to be sure she was up to date.) She had to have her husband keep up with the changing times and colour codes, she couldn’t have him caught short, her husband, dear Preston, Preston Sherwin Audley Sevlon; she felt such a tenderness for him. Preston: a quiet man, a man of few words, but kind deeds, whose parents were also from Jamaica but had come to England once and worked in Preston before returning to Montego Bay – well this was the story Vadnie first of all made up and later believed. When she got home from work, Preston would say, ‘Put your feet up, Mrs Sevlon, and I’ll make you a cup of tea.’ He never raised his voice or his hand to her. He was the kind of man that is a father to daughters rather than sons, a gentle kind man, intense and protective. And of course their daughters, Lady-blossom, Marsha and Grace, were all daddy’s girls. If you’d had a son, Preston would say, he would have been a mummy’s boy. What would we have called a son? she heard herself asking Preston. A name after an English place, he’d say, like me, chuckling, enjoying himself, Carlisle or Kendal or Lancaster. I couldn’t call a little boy Lancaster, she’d find herself saying out loud in the kitchen – then startle herself with his absence. Was it luck that got her the job as a care home orderly at Sunnyside Home for the Elderly? Or was she being deliberately led down the wrong path? It was only two days a week but it seemed like a beginning in the beginning. And she well remembered the first day all that time ago, why, it must be fifteen years at least, walking down the driveway and glimpsing the garden with the bench, the table with the green umbrella, thinking the place was really something quite, quite special. The grounds were grand and made her feel she was definitely in England. They were a people that knew how to make a garden, the English! And during the first few weeks Vadnie would eat her Coronation chicken sandwich in the palatial garden with the blossom on the trees and the green grass under her feet and feel almost content; at least, the worry about money and the future would lift and she would be in the unusual position of just being able to sit and eat her sandwich and watch the birds flit about in the trees. She always kept her eye out for a Barbuda warbler even though she didn’t think they ever came to this country. But if birds of paradise could be in the florist then Barbuda warblers could be in the garden. It would have lifted her heart to see a bird from back home in the garden of Sunnyside Home for the Elderly. She didn’t much like the two women who ran Sunnyside, and they didn’t get any better over time. For a start they had no sense of humour, which was quite a problem. Vadnie had never realized how big a problem this could be until she first ran into the two sad Sunnyside women. All the good conversation has to have a little light-ness! Well, the first thing Vadnie said to the matron was, ‘The garden is quite something. What lovely borders! You do all the weeding yourself?’ (Of course she was joking, and was going to go on to mention the beautiful garden design, but the matron – she didn’t get it.) She replied seriously, snooty-like, ‘No, no. We have a gardener.’ Just like that. And Vadnie nodded, undaunted, and said, ‘Handsome man is he, this gardener? About my age do you think?’ Matron stared and said, ‘He’s Irish,’ as if that might be something that would put Vadnie off. ‘And he’s in his seventies.’ That would be the clincher, then. So after that Vadnie never joked with Matron, which meant there was no basis for conversation; there was only a way of receiving instructions. And the head nurse was even worse. She had something nasty about her, that woman, and no mistake. She was always picking fault. She’d say to Vadnie, ‘Did you say you had washed the kitchen floor?’ when the floor was gleaming, gleaming, so shiny Vadnie could see her face in it, which was the test her mother had given her when she was a little girl. She would say, Have you polished so bright you can see your reflection? Whenever Vadnie did see her reflection in some domestic surface, it never looked like her, and she’d have to pause for a minute and say, Is that me, is that really me? Sometimes she loomed in things. She appeared all out of proportion.