by Anna Maxted
I stare as if seeing myself for the first time. I am ugly. And knowing that Babs is right, that I didn’t want Simon to take her away from me, makes me feel uglier. But she did abandon me. We were a unit. We were two peas in a pod, until Simon, a great big flashy string bean, swaggered greenly onto the scene and stole her from me. At this point I thank heaven that some thoughts are private. Did I think Babs should have refused all romantic proposals because they’d inconvenience me?!
I’m a monster! I’m one of those lunatics you read about in the tabloid supplements. I ought to be ashamed of myself. (I would add, “and go to bed without any supper”—if it weren’t unnecessary.) I am ashamed of myself. Ashamed of myself in many ways. Ashamed of growing up in Hendon. Ashamed of not getting top grades at university. Ashamed of having size-nine feet. But this is a new blend of shame to add to my list. I fiddle with the zip of a pair of navy trousers and blush. Did I expect Babs to put her love life on hold until I sorted mine out? Have I blamed Babs? On the other hand, it is not her place to criticize my family. What am I? Sad? Dislocated. As for anger, I don’t know what that is. But, if I reach into my soul and wiggle my hand about, slime clings to it. I am full of white-hot ugliness. I am not what little girls are made of. I’m slugs and snails. Even puppy dog tails are too cute a composite for my brand of nastiness. I prod my stomach, hard. This inner rot is surely more than confetti envy. But what? I’ll make it up to Babs. I’ll do something to prove that I still deserve her friendship. And I know what it is I’ll do. It would be 60 percent kind, 30 percent selfish, and 10 percent curiosity. I’ll suggest it to her.
Then again, have I been that dreadful? A little cool, a little ungracious. But Babs has to remember that she’s the winner, I am the loser. She’s the bride, I’m the one left behind. She brushed me off like a crumb from the table, and I find the best way to cope with rejection is to jump in there first.
I smooth down what remains of my hair, and decide that I will demote Babs in the friendship league. She drops to second division. She is ousted as Best Friend, and the position remains vacant until further notice. Inwardly I’m getting even, but outwardly I’m humble. And while this might not adhere to religious notions of contrition, it’s a start. Repentance is an acquired taste, like dieting. What concessions will I—
“Are you okay in there, Nat?” booms a voice outside the door.
I jump. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine, hang on, I’ll be with you in one sec.”
I pull on the brown snakeskin boots Matt made me buy—they’re high enough to make even my feet look small, but the payoff is backache the next day. I can’t help feeling sorry for myself. With me, there’s always a price. Babs’s favorite shoes would induce vertigo in mountaineers, yet she never suffers. I’m sure I’m the odd one out. Example: I’m always seeing other women in pretty coats—red mohair, or brown suede with a sheepskin ruff—and I think, where do they find coats like that? The only coats I ever see in shops are coarse and navy and look like they’ve been issued by the government. And coats aren’t it. I’ve always been unlucky. I was the only child in my school denied the once-in-a-lifetime experience of unwrapping a Kit Kat that was solid chocolate. (Not that I care now, of course.)
Wait a minute, I’m supposed to be repenting. I take a deep breath and burst into the hallway, tingling with good intentions. Babs hands me a cup of coffee. “Black, no sugar,” she says.
I feel a throb of gratitude. I hate black coffee. It’s so bitter it’s like biting into an apple pip. Babs knows I prefer it white but won’t drink it that way because milk is fattening and if I add so much as a splash of it, the remaining buttons on my slinky pink top will pop off me as I morph into the Incredible Hulk, and that when I next lumber through Primrose Hill, the entire size-eight community will run away screaming.
“Actually,” I say quickly, “I’ll have it white.”
The coffee cup wobbles in Babs’s hand.
“Just a splash. I’ll do it.”
Babs bears the coffee cup back to the kitchen like a knight bearing an infidel’s head back to the king. I don’t have to drink it. Forty-nine calories per hundred milliliters of semi-skimmed, nearly six times that in a pint. I can always do a double run tomorrow. Or after she’s gone.
“You’ve got a frog in your mouth!” shouts Babs as I dribble milk into the mug. I glance up, guiltily. I know she’s using our private shorthand (meaning: “spit it out”) to make me feel better.
“Nat,” she adds softly, “it’s very brave of you to do this.”
I feel ridiculous. “Yes,” I say. “Five-year-olds are fighting cancer, but it is very brave of me to add a drop of milk to my coffee.”
Babs pouts. “Feel the pain, Nat,” she declares in a bogus Californian accent to disguise the mortifying fact that she’s in earnest. “It’s relative, but it still hurts.”
I smile, remembering a phase Tony went through, of cracking down on people who used silly voices to say things they were embarrassed about. (“Are you leaving work early or is Peter Rabbit leaving work early?”) Babs tilts her head, to beckon me into the living room. I feel a flutter of fear as I trot in behind her. I want to please her, to avert a telling-off.
“Babs,” I say. “How’s Andy?”
If Babs is surprised, she doesn’t show it. “He’s okay. He’s fine.”
“Has he”—I resolve to ask the question tactfully but, as ever, my tact receptacles tangle with my tactless receptacles—“found anywhere to live yet or is he still living with your parents?”
“He’s still looking,” replies Babs. “I’ve said he could stay with me, but the truth is, I don’t think Si’s that keen. Newlyweds and all that,” she adds, her voice laced with sarcasm.
I exclaim, “Oh that’s brilliant! I mean, it’s perfect because, well, I’ve got a spare room. If he likes he can come and live here for a bit!”
I hope the edge isn’t taken off my charitable gesture by the glaring fact that, as of today, I do actually need a lodger if my home isn’t to be repossessed in the near future. Maybe Babs won’t twig.
“Oh!” she says, medium to joyous. “What made you change your mind? Oh, sorry, yes of course, money.”
“No!” I bleat. “It’s not that! I mean, yes I do need the money now, more than I did, but honestly, it’s not that. It’s just that…Well.”
I stop. That you’re prepared to eat humble pie isn’t enough for some people. They want to feed it to you.
“Iknowivebeenabitsulkyrecentlyandifeelbadaboutitandiknowandyslookingforaplacetoliveandyouthoughthecouldlivehereandi ignoredthehintandiwanttomakeituptoyou.”
“Run that by me again,” says Babs, crossing her long legs.
Did I say feed it to you? I meant, force-feed it to you with a shovel.
“I know,” I sigh—reluctantly granting each word its full complement of syllables and consonants—“that I’ve been a bit sulky recently, and I feel bad about it. I really do. And I know Andy’s had trouble finding a short-term let that’s under a million pounds a month, and I’ve been, er, thoughtless in not asking if he’d like to live here. So I wanted to make it up to you.”
I don’t mention that since the birthday party encounter, my interest in her brother has been growing. (I never did have the nerve to mention him to Robbie.) I wouldn’t mind observing Andy at slightly closer range. For purely scientific reasons.
Babs clunks her mug down on my glass-topped coffee table and I try not to shout “Careful!”
“That’s so nice of you, Nat,” she cries. “So bloody nice. I’ll ask him tonight, shall I?”
“Yeah,” I say, pink with pleasure and praying he’s less of an almighty slob than his sister.
Babs keeps grinning at me until I don’t know where to look. Then she twists her Ayers Rock of a ruby ring (she wanted understated but Si wanted overstated) and blurts, “And I’m sorry if I haven’t been that friendly toward Chris. I know you like him, it’s just that I…I suppose I felt sorry for Saul, and Chris is so…he strikes me as so p
hony, but Si says he used to be different, but as long as you like him and he’s good to you, that’s what matters.”
I can tell we’re heading for a girly backtracking contest (“Oh no, you’re wonderful, I am useless, why ever did I give the impression that I thought you were useless when you’re so wonderful,” etc.) and decide not to fight it.
“Thanks,” I say. I defeat the urge to give her a verbal rap on the knuckles.
“Frog!” yells Babs.
I clap a hand over my mouth. “It’s awful that you can tell,” I gasp, “it’s like you’ve got a built-in lie detector.”
“Out with it,” orders Babs.
“Well, okay,” I say, gripping my mug. I feel hot and cold at the same time.
“All I was going to say was”—I try not to insult her—“you keep going on about me lightening up and yet, when I ditch Saul for Chris, you have a go at me and try to matchmake me with Robbie!”
I cringe. The glass vase of tact lies shattered in a million pieces. Again. “I mean—” I start.
“No,” exclaims Babs, “that’s good, that’s good, you must say.” She elongates “say” into a great stretchy sausage of a word.
“You’re right,” she adds, frowning. “You’re right. Shit, I was out of order with Robbie. I’m sorry. I just want to see you with a nice guy. I suppose, what I mean is, there’s losing control in a reasonable way, and then there’s losing it in a destructive way. And I think that Chris is the destructive way. With him, it’s about reaching oblivion.”
“So what you’re saying is that I must lose control in a controlled way?”
“Yes!” says Babs, then she snorts, “Oh piss off!
“Though,” she adds, “that is more or less it. I’ll be honest, I don’t know much about eating disorders”—she mumbles this as if tasting the awkwardness on her tongue—“but I can see how hard it is for you to, to let yourself eat a proper amount. And I do know that it’s more than just wanting to be thin, this feeling ugly business and all, but, Nat, would you try to manage a little more food, get a tiny bit more energy, just for me?”
She has the wheedling tone of a mother bribing her five-year-old daughter with sweets. Or rather, she has the wheedling tone of my mother bribing her five-year-old daughter with sweets. I want to please her. I don’t want to disappoint her.
But I don’t want to be fat.
“Nat,” says Babs, shuffling in her seat, “I’ve been doing my homework. And, this is just a gobbet of information that I’m going to toss into the air. And the gobbet is, it takes thirty-five hundred extra calories more than normal for a person to put on a pound. That’s twenty Mars Bars! A squiddly little pound! There’s fourteen of them in a stone!”
“Actually,” I reply, “that’s not even twelve Mars Bars. But”—I smile to let her know I appreciate it—“thank you for the tip.”
To the casual observer, I am sitting on the sofa, arms and legs neatly crossed, but in my head I am trapped in a plush private all-you-can-eat hell, screaming, “Get me out of here!”
I want to snatch back my offer to Andy, sod the intrigue, I don’t want him here, prying, spying for Babs. Three thousand five hundred calories? Is that all? I glance at her safe, solid frame perched on my sofa, so full of hearty honest concern, and wish away the irritation that creeps across my face like a crab. I force the mug to my lips as if it’s brimful of arsenic, and take a minute sip. I swallow, and my mouth feels tacky, the milkiness clings like napalm. I swallow again, but it’s still there, coating my insides in a white smelly film. Milk. It’s revolting.
“Are you okay?” asks Babs.
I shake my head.
“Nat,” she says gently. “You are not going to swell into a sumo. But eating more will stop your hair from falling out. You need to support your body. Work with it, and, er, keep your hair on.”
Babs grips the sofa to stop herself giggling. (She often laughs at inappropriate moments and had to walk out of her grandmother’s funeral so as not to offend the priest.) So I don’t take it personally. Apart from anything else, I want to keep my hair on. How can I succeed in the world without it? Fat and hairy, or thin and bald? The choice is not encouraging. I feel like a spinster being tried for sorcery. If I float I’m burned at the stake as a witch, if I drown I’m just a middle-aged woman who never married—oops, sorry, our mistake.
I fantasize about washing my hair and not shedding like a cat.
“I’ve got to get it together,” I say, more to myself than Babs.
She nods, slowly, and reaches out, slowly. I feel like a mental patient who might lash out with a fork.
“It’s okay, Babs. I will try to eat more, and to be well. I absolutely will.”
“Nat!” cries Babs, beaming. “That is fan-bloody-tastic!”
She smashes her coffee cup down on my glass table again and crushes me in a hug. I try—think of a raisin in a nutcracker—to return it. As my arms are pinioned to my sides I feebly pat the side of her hip, the farthest I can reach. And my chin is being tickled to death by that sadist of a red scarf. It’s hardly comfortable, and yet, out of nowhere, I feel more peaceful than I have in a while. But the wonder is that when I promised Babs I’d try to eat more, I think I meant it.
A truth. You don’t get many of those to a pound.
18
A GOOD INTENTION IS A WONDERFUL THING. IT allows you to bask in the warm anticipatory glow of your own merit without shifting off the sofa. It’s the Joining a Gym=Exercise factor. So when Babs leaves I am floating on a blissful pink cloud of resolutions.
I’ll find the perfect new job, I’ll be the perfect daughter (second helpings—just say yes), the perfect sister, the perfect girlfriend, the perfect ex-girlfriend (it’s about time I apologized to Saul), the perfect friend, the perfect landlady (no rebuking lodgers for rucking up the carpet or leaving tea bags in the sink). I’ll eat just enough to stop molting, I’ll be what everyone wants and I’ll be happy.
First on the grovel list is my mother. I dial with the fervor of a convert. “Doctor’s office,” declares a bored voice. “Hello?”
“Mum, it’s me,” I say. “I just wanted to tell you not to worry, because everything’s going to be okay. Andy’s going to be my lodger—the brother of the bride!—so that will help pay the mortgage, and I’m going to start looking for a new job straightaway. I’m not, not quite sure what, what I want to do, what I could do, but at least now you don’t have to worry so much.”
“That’s wonderful, but you will charge Andy the going rate, won’t you, dear?” replies my mother anxiously. “I know he’s a friend of sorts, but now you’ve lost your job you need the money. I don’t know what people charge for a double room in an upmarket area of London these days. Fifty pounds a month? Sixty?”
“Something like that,” I say, refusing to sag. “It’s nice, though, isn’t it, it’s one problem solved, isn’t it?”
“Sixty pounds! I suppose it’s one less thing to worry about. It’s good to have a man in the house, it makes burglars think twice. A man or a Peke—the smaller they are, the bigger the racket. As for a new job, you’ve hit the nail on the head, Natalie. What can you do? That’s my biggest worry.”
My biggest worry is whether the polar ice cap will melt and drown the whole world, but I suppose the possibility of me spending the rest of my days watching Wheel of Fortune and calling it “educational” is an equally legitimate concern. “I thought I might—”
“There’s nothing here, so I spoke to my colleague Susan, and as luck would have it her husband, Martin, owns a dry-cleaning firm, you know Martin, big jolly man, known locally as something of a raconteur, he’s looking for a junior to help out behind the till. It might not sound much but it’s a fairly responsible position, and there are prospects of promotion. They’re based in Borehamwood, so it wouldn’t be too far to travel, and you could start next week. I know it’s not ideal, dear, but beggars can’t be choosers, and you might enjoy it.”
I am speechless. I feel as mor
tified as a cat in a floppy red bow. I envisage a life of scrabbling amid other people’s dirty linen. A Groundhog Day existence of smiling patiently and pinging a button and declaiming, “That will be twenty-four pounds and fifty pence, please!” A deadly job in the suburb of Boring-wood under the gimlet-eyed supervision of Susan’s husband, Martin the raconteur (an old fart who bores people professionally), who would joyfully detail my every move to his snoopy wife (who wears a green sun visor all day, every day, because she thinks it makes her look like a professional golfer) who would dutifully pass the informational baton to my mother. Cheaper, but as effective as government surveillance.
“Mum,” I bleat, “it’s nice of you but…” I trail off, paralyzed by a flashback of the last time I set foot in a dry cleaner’s. A thin-lipped woman nudged me and sniffed, “See that crimson velour trouser suit hanging there, that belongs to my sister-in-law. She comes in here every week. Mind you, she can afford it.” Much as I want to be perfect for my mother, I’m not saintly enough to sacrifice myself to Martin Pipkin’s Eeesy-Kleen empire. How to break it to her?
“Mum,” I chirrup, inspired, “it’s a brilliant idea except for one thing.”
“Wh-at?” she says, her voice cracking with hurt.
“Till girl at the Borehamwood branch of Eeesy Kleen! I’d be a laughingstock for every eligible man this side of Reykjavík! No self-respecting professional snob would dream of dating me ever again.” (Not that the legal, financial, and medical fraternities have been wildly fantasizing over me in my current state of employment. And not that I’m bothered.)
There is a terrifying pause.
“I see what you mean,” she says finally. “I’ll call Tony. Maybe he’ll find you something.”
Not if I call him first. I speed-dial the number and wonder what I can offer him. Tony is like a B-grade celebrity in that you can’t bother him on a whim, he’ll want to know what’s in it for him and how much you’re paying. I don’t have any supermarkets for him to open (though I might have access to a dry cleaner’s if I play my cards wrong) but I do, for the moment, have access to Mel. Anyway, he’s shunned me for a week so he should have worked off his fury by now. Tony shouts, threatens, intimidates, then—as you crawl bloodily to a corner to lick your fatal wounds—finds it in his heart to forgive you.
