by Lucy Diamond
‘My name’s Jess,’ she said in a low voice. She twisted her hands in her lap, not making eye contact with anyone. ‘Um … I work as a beauty therapist but I don’t feel very beautiful myself.’ She bit her lip. ‘I’m getting married at Christmas and want to look amazing for my fiancé, but diets never seem to work on me. I always give up after a few days.’
There was a murmur from the rest of the group – yes, they knew where she was coming from.
‘Well, you’re in the right place now, Jess,’ Alison told her. ‘We’ll all help you reach your goal. And to be quite honest with you, I must have tried every diet under the sun and not been able to stick to it before I lost my weight the FatBusters way – so take heart.’ She paused. ‘But remember, love – you say you want to look amazing for your future husband at the wedding, but you’ve got to want it for yourself too. That’s crucial.’
Jess nodded, looking up at Alison for the first time. ‘Okay,’ she said.
‘Great. Because it really winds me up, the way some people expect us all to have perfect figures,’ Alison said, talking to everyone now. ‘It’s wrong. I don’t want anyone here to feel they ought to lose weight just because they don’t look like the matchstick celebrities you see in magazines, or because they think that having a size ten figure will bring them eternal happiness. Or because they feel under pressure from another person to be slimmer! That’s not what this is about. I want everyone here to have made a positive decision about themselves – to lose weight for healthy reasons, not because society says you should be a size zero and you feel bad for having curves.’ She grinned apologetically. ‘Rant over. Sorry. Now, let’s hear from our next lady,’ she said, turning to me.
I swallowed, feeling rather unnerved as all faces swivelled in my direction.
‘Hi,’ I said, my voice coming out low and quiet. I cleared my throat and tried again. ‘Hi. My name’s Maddie. And …’ I was floored, suddenly. I didn’t want to mention the radio programme – it might seem like showing off. And as for the gym experience … the thought of trotting it out made me feel too vulnerable, especially with Jess sitting there. I went for Nightmare on School Street instead. ‘I’m here because I came last in the mums’ race at my kids’ school sports day the other day and …’ It was surprisingly hard to get the words out. ‘And I felt really ashamed of myself.’ I dared to glance around, worried I’d see jeering expressions. Thankfully there was nothing but sympathetic looks. ‘I want to lose weight now so that my kids aren’t embarrassed by me. And so that I feel confident and sexy again.’ I blushed. Where had that come from?
A large black woman nearby started clapping. ‘Amen to that,’ she said, winking at me. A couple of other people clapped too.
‘That’s what we all want, babe,’ one of the older ladies put in, a smile lighting up her lined face.
Alison was nodding in sympathy. ‘School sports days were always torture for me too,’ she confided. ‘As a kid I dreaded them. As a mum I dreaded them. Still, next year will be different, I’m sure. We want you leading the pack and getting gold, Maddie, don’t we, everyone?’
‘Well, I don’t know about that …’ I started, but my voice was drowned out by the enthusiastic ‘Yeah!’ that the others chorused.
I gulped, feeling a wash of emotions. All right, so I knew deep down they were only saying it, but there was something uplifting about feeling as if the whole room was behind me, cheering me on. I realized I was glad I’d come to the meeting. It killed me to say it, but maybe Collette had actually done me a favour.
The session continued with the introduction of the third newcomer – auburn-haired Lauren, sitting next to me, who remained tight-lipped about herself and why she was there – and then Alison launched into a pep talk.
‘I want to speak about treats tonight,’ she said. ‘I don’t know about you, but when I was dieting, the treats I lusted after were usually the calorific type: Galaxy bars, tubes of sour cream and onion Pringles, a big bowl of chocolate pudding and custard …’
‘Trifle,’ one of the grannies called out, her face a picture of longing.
‘Beer,’ Derek-with-the-slimmer-face put in, eyes heavenward.
‘Mars bars!’
‘Ice cream!’
‘Exactly,’ Alison said, interrupting, as a stream of suggestions came tumbling out. ‘So what I did was to think about new treats to give myself instead, treats that wouldn’t add anything to my waistline.’ She grinned. ‘It’s your lucky day, girls. I’m giving you permission to go shopping.’
An excited-sounding ooooh went round the room. Everyone seemed to like the sound of that. Alison held up a slim arm and jangled a charm bracelet on her wrist.
‘See this?’ she asked. ‘When I started my diet five years ago, this bracelet was empty. I bought it for myself on the very first day of my diet because I know what I’m like – I need the thought of treats to keep me going. Now, back then, I weighed in at twenty stone … and I wanted to get down to half that. I knew I had a long journey ahead of me.’
We were all spellbound, listening to her. Yes, I thought. I’ve got a long journey too. How did you manage yours, Alison?
‘I promised myself that every time I lost half a stone, I’d go back to the jeweller’s shop and buy myself a gorgeous new charm or bead to put on my bracelet,’ she went on. ‘And do you know what? It really worked for me. All the time that I was dieting, I’d be eyeing up which charm I’d buy next, trying to choose one that seemed appropriate for that time of my life, so that I could look back and remember why I bought it. This one, for example, is a heart shape, and I bought it when my eldest daughter told us she was getting engaged.’
‘Ahhh,’ murmured the grannies, wrinkling their noses and smiling at each other.
‘And this one is like a dice,’ Alison went on. ‘I chose that one because my husband took me to Vegas for our silver wedding anniversary.’ She rolled her eyes comically. ‘What can I say, the man’s always been a bit of a gambler. He had to be, taking a chance on me, right?’
There was a ripple of laughter, but everyone was smiling at her.
Alison slipped the bracelet off and handed it to the person sitting nearest her. ‘Here, pass it around, you can all have a look,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t have to be a bracelet that you get for yourself, of course. You could save up all the money you would have spent on chocolate or crisps – it adds up fast, you know – and buy something else with it when you lose each stone. Cinema tickets for you and your loved one. A facial or a massage. A new top – you’ll be needing lots of those as the weight falls off. Or even tickets to the football,’ she said, looking meaningfully at Derek and the other bloke, Kevin, who were starting to shuffle on their chairs with all this shopping talk.
The bracelet had reached me by now and I fingered the silver charms and glass beads that had been threaded onto it. It was a Pandora bracelet – I’d seen them in the Jewellery Quarter and knew they weren’t cheap. But as a special treat … hmmm. I could see how the idea would work.
‘And the thing about buying something you can wear, like a bracelet, is that you’re always reminded of how well you’re doing,’ Alison went on. ‘If you have a moment of weakness – and God knows we all get them – you can glance down at your wrist and remind yourself of your goal and your achievement so far. So that’s this week’s advice – think about what kind of treat will keep you on the straight and narrow, and start up a fund for it!’
An excited buzz of chatter broke out amongst the group as people discussed treats. I fancied a bracelet like Alison’s, but everyone had different ideas about what to spend the money on: a new DVD, a night at the Bingo, holiday savings … One of the teenagers even said she’d like to get a tattoo for every stone she lost.
Then out came the scales and we were all weighed one by one. A big cheer went up whenever anyone had lost a pound or two … and excuses came out if someone’s weight had stalled or crept back up.
‘Sorry … it’s been a bad week at work.�
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‘It was my friend’s hen night and I had a lot to drink.’
‘I felt a bit low and had a KFC binge.’
When it was my turn, Alison presented me with a little FatBusters book containing the calorie content for all sorts of different food and a weight chart at the back.
‘Nice and steady, that’s the best way to lose the pounds,’ she advised, filling in my name and weight. ‘A pound or two a week is perfect, okay?’
It was so different from Saturday, when Jacob had shown such strong disapproval when he measured my weight, that I felt a lump in my throat. ‘Thank you,’ I managed to say.
‘This is a wonderful group,’ she told me, touching my arm and looking straight into my face. ‘We’re all rooting for you, Maddie, okay? Keep remembering that.’
I walked out of there at the end of the evening feeling five stone lighter and bubbling with good intentions. I was really going to do this. No doubt about it. The new, improved Maddie Lawson would emerge with a bracelet full of charms and the best bum in Brum. I would be Queen of the FatBusters, with my slim trim waist and lovely legs.
I smiled to myself as I walked down the street, the sun sinking behind the roof-tops. I could hardly wait for the next meeting.
Chapter Four
Instant Whip
Lauren
I was just about to chomp into a big sugary jam doughnut when the phone rang. Bollocks. I was almost tempted to ignore it, but times had been hard lately and we needed all the customers we could get. With a last longing look at the doughnut, I took the call.
‘Good morning, Love Hearts?’
Please note – it wasn’t me who came up with that godawful name. It was Jenny Warrington, the company founder, back in the Nineties. By the time I bought the franchise, the brand was too well established to be changed. Or at least that’s what she told me when I asked if I could rename my branch of the agency.
Privately I called it ‘Desperadoes’ – because that’s who we attracted. Sad, lonely types who were all looking for the person of their dreams. Yeah right. Like that was going to happen. As a bitter-and-single type myself, I was only too aware of the romantic nonsense that society deluded itself with. Valentine’s Day? Forgeddaboudit! Red roses? They only went rotten. Candlelit dinners? Fire hazards – and they made you fat.
‘Um … hi,’ said a bloke down the line. He sounded muffled and furtive, as if he was hunched over his phone, making the call in secret. Grrrrreat. Another wimp on the books. Just what we didn’t need. ‘I’m ringing to find out about joining the agency.’
‘Lovely,’ I fibbed, trying not to gaze at my doughnut. Would he hear me, I wondered, if I licked some of the sugar off? I imagined it rasping against my tongue and decided I had better not risk it. A new client was a new client, after all. ‘Glad to hear it, sir. We have an excellent success rate, so you’ll be in good hands. Now … You can fill in your details online at our website, or I can post you an application form, if you’d rather. Or, of course, you can come into the office and we can have a chat about what you’re looking for.’
He wanted to come in and have a chat. I knew he would. The nerds always did. So bloody needy, most of them, unable to do the simplest thing like fill out a form without someone holding their hand. I bet myself a second doughnut that this guy still lived with his mum.
‘Of course, that’s no problem,’ I gushed. The thing about the ones who came in was that, even though they were a pain and took up your time, they tended to be the keenest and most desperate – i.e. they’d feel lucky to go on a date with any old bint I matched them up with. Swings and roundabouts.
We arranged an appointment for the next day and I put the phone down. Doughnut time. Yum. I scoffed it in about three mouthfuls and licked all the sugar off my fingers. Delicious.
I had a small flicker of guilt, remembering the FatBusters class I’d been to only the night before, but quashed the feeling immediately. Rome wasn’t built in a day, right?
Now then. Work to be done. I had a few new clients to load onto our website, which always took a little while. I clicked on one of the files to check it through before I submitted it to the site, and skimmed through the details. Okay … Andrew Preston … aged forty, divorced, two children, construction project manager, six foot two, brown hair, green eyes …
Hi, ladies, he’d written. I’m a fun, athletic guy looking for friendship and maybe love.
Oh, Andrew, I thought to myself, rolling my eyes. And him with a divorce under his belt as well. You’d think they’d learn.
I’m generous, sociable, intellectual and caring, I love playing sport and the outdoors. My perfect date would be a long walk in the country, then warming up in front of a roaring fire in a cosy pub.
Favourite films: The Godfather, The Terminator, Highlander
Favourite food: chicken tikka balti, rogan josh
They always put curry, the blokes. The really macho ones put ‘vindaloo’ – like that was something to impress a woman: sitting there with a scarlet face, eyes watering from the chillis … yeah, dead sexy, that. Why was nobody honest enough to come out with good old shepherd’s pie, or sausages and mash with onion gravy? The latter would have been my meal of choice, no questions asked, although I had to admit that, in the past year, I hadn’t bothered to cook a single sausage or spud – or any proper food when it came to it – very much.
Sadly, lots of the women ignored the ‘favourite food’ section of the questionnaire. Too scared of looking greedy, I reckoned. No man liked a porker with her nose in the trough, did they?
It was probably why all the clients felt comfortable with me. As a larger-than-average woman (as I was these days), the men saw me as a safely unattractive type – not intimidating, and not someone worth lusting over. And the women didn’t feel that they had to compete with me for blokes. They looked me over and felt better about themselves, and that was that. I was cool with it. Most of the time, anyway.
But back to Andrew:
In a woman, I look for: sense of humour, long hair, a nice smile and a sexy bum! Slim, sporty figure essential.
If they hadn’t already disappointed me with their predictable food choices, I tended to go off the male clients at this point. I mean, how shallow could you get, specifying that your perfect woman had to have ‘a sexy bum’ and be slim? What happened to beauty being in the eye of the beholder and all that? What happened to personality?
I wasn’t feeling too obliging towards Andrew Preston any more – I felt sorry for his ex-wife, to be honest, for ever having been married to such a superficial shit – but uploaded his profile anyway and sent out an alert to all the female clients who might be interested. More fool them.
I was a cynic, yes, but that hadn’t always been the case. Just two years earlier, I had been giddy with excitement about getting married myself, believe it or not. I spent every evening poring over wedding magazines and websites, deliberating for hours about my dress and the menus and the table plans, practising walking in my high silver sandals without going arse over tit, the works. It was as if a mist had descended on me … a pink, sparkly mist, filling my mind with a temporary madness.
Oh, I thought I was happy, I thought I was headed for the big, loved-up fairytale with my handsome prince, Brendan Davies, I thought I was the luckiest girl alive. And that was why I took on the Love Hearts franchise in the first place, because I wanted everyone else to feel the same way I did – to find their so-called perfect partner and to ride off into the sunset with them.
How wrong could you get. Six months into the marriage, Brendan Cheating Davies had only gone and got the pink sparkly mist for somebody else. And if that wasn’t enough, she was a colleague of mine, too, who I’d met when she came in to put her details on the dating database. She’d been so capable and assured that I’d ended up giving her a job as my assistant, as well as her own Love Hearts web profile. Ruth McGregor, looking for love and friendship. Should have looked a bit further than my bloody husband, Ruth.
But hey ho. A job was a job. And sometimes the Love Hearts agency did make people’s dreams come true. Occasionally a couple was mad enough to get married. In fact …
I turned on my swivel chair. ‘Patrick, when are Damon and Francesca getting hitched?’
‘What, Dumb and Dumber?’ he shot back. ‘First weekend in August, isn’t it? Plenty of time for you to choose your hat, darling.’
‘Plenty of time to think up an excuse not to go, you mean,’ I said tartly. Weddings weren’t exactly my thing any more.
‘Oh, sweets,’ Patrick said sympathetically. ‘Take me as your plus-one, we’ll have a riot. Dumb will get his vows completely mangled and Dumber’s relatives will start a punch-up, you wait. Sheer entertainment from start to finish.’
Patrick was my assistant, my mate and pretty much my saviour. After I’d lost my husband and personal assistant in the space of a week, I’d been in a bit of a mess. My life had fallen apart, I was comfort eating for Britain, and I’d become somewhat slack on the personal hygiene front. I’d also lost a client by telling him, after a large lunchtime gin and tonic, that he stood no chance of ever finding a life partner because his eyes were too close together.
So everything was going down the swanny, basically, when Patrick came into my world. And thank God he did. He spotted my ad in the Evening Mail and applied for the job. Within two minutes of the interview starting, he had me in hysterics with his Tyra Banks impression, went on to pique my curiosity with his interest in modern art (a passion of mine), and then, when he commented on how much he liked the font I’d used in the Love Hearts logo (‘You can’t go wrong with Bodoni’), I knew for certain he was a kindred spirit and hired him on the spot.
