by Keane Jessie
She could have cried.
Everyone was noticing. Her parents – although her mum was sweet about it, saying not to worry, it would grow back in no time – and Jimmy, who thought it was hilarious. Her mates at work. Everyone. Once again she was a laughing stock. She couldn’t go back into that posh place and face up to Simon. She went to another salon, where the middle-aged female stylist took one look at the damage and said: ‘Who the hell did this?’
‘Simon at Mr Fox,’ said Nula.
‘You ought to go back. Complain to the management.’ The woman lifted a few brittle strands and looked at Nula with compassion. ‘There’s only one thing to be done with this, I’m afraid.’
‘What?’
‘Cut it short to the head, recondition heavily and let what’s left of the colour grow out.’
Christ!
‘All right then. Do it.’
So an hour later Nula had patchy half-coloured hair cropped short to her round dumpling face. She looked worse, not better.
She held the tears in until she got home and was safely penned in her bedroom with chocolate bars and crisps. Then she ate – and cried.
10
Nula’s hair was growing out. Getting longer, getting – thanks to her latest stylist – stronger, too. When the last of the blonde was chopped off, there she was again: mouse-coloured Nula Perkins with her hair cropped close to her fat head.
Well, the hair would grow. And she’d try again with the colour, that could be solvable. But . . . her fat head.
The truth was, Nula loved food. It was her consolation for all that the uncaring world threw at her. Comforting Sunday dinners, sausages and mash, Sunday teatime treats of cream and tinned peaches. Salty crisps and big chocolate bars and ice cream. Her parents were fat. Her brother was fat. Even her grandparents had been fat. But she kept reading things like Vogue and Harpers, wherein beautiful young things with glossy rich-girl hair and skinny figures pranced and danced and lunched out on steak and salad. No roast potatoes. No treats.
She still went up Carnaby Street with her mates, who had been – like her – the school losers, the quiet unpopular ones; she was Nula the fat arse, then came Stella with the stutter, Hilda with the limp, Joanie with the cleft palate that made her talk funny, and Sylvia with the ears that stuck straight out from underneath her thin brown hair like radar scanners.
In misery, they’d banded together. They weren’t like the popular girls, the pretty hair-tossing ones the boys all lusted after like Jill Patterson and her mates, or the tough ones, the tomboys who’d bloody your nose if you dared talk about them. But there was strength in numbers.
Now they trawled around Carnaby Street and tried on dresses – Nula hated trying on dresses, but the others were doing it and so she had to join in. And there it was, the awful, undeniable truth. Staring back at Nula from the dreaded changing-room mirror was the confirmation of all her fears. She was fat, and fat she would stay, because she ate too much.
One or the other, you could have. But not both. A good figure . . . or all that lovely food.
It was crucifying. Nula knew two things. One: food was her only real pleasure in life. Whenever she was laughed at, mocked, depressed, she would take refuge inside the larder, would stand there covertly eating seedy cake or apple pie, one eye on the door, her ears alert for footfall. And two: Mum wanted her to eat and moaned and fretted and threatened visits to doctors if she didn’t.
So she was fighting her mother and herself. But Nula was obstinate. Once committed to a path, she wasn’t one to deviate.
Skipping family dinners became an art form to her. She said she was playing hockey (she wasn’t) or down the chess club (not there, either) or at the youth club (all lies). She skipped breakfast, ignored her rumbling stomach and the temptation of the biscuit counter, lunched on fruit, crawled home starving and pushed the food around her plate, much to Mum’s displeasure.
It was all such an effort.
But after a few months of this – she didn’t dare weigh herself on those big high-street machines in public and face yet more scorn and humiliation, and her family had never possessed any bathroom scales – she thought that something was happening to her.
She was getting thinner.
She would stand naked in front of her bedroom mirror and force herself to look. There was a suggestion of ribs now, where before there had just been a spare tyre. Her belly didn’t bulge out the way it had. Her thighs didn’t rub together quite so painfully any more.
Nula started to feel something almost like happiness. It was hell, it was horrible, but – for fuck’s sake! – it was actually working.
So stuff Mum and her treacle sponges and massive portions. Nula stuck to her guns, kept avoiding mealtimes, and stared and stared at her new emerging body.
Her clothes started to hang on her. Which was OK, she hated her clothes. Then came the glorious day when she went and bought something. It was in a size she’d never even attempted before so she hadn’t dared try it on for fear it would be so tight on her she’d look like an overstuffed sausage.
She came back home with the minidress in a bright red bag. It was a multi-striped (vertical, not horizontal, she wasn’t that full of herself yet) simply cut mini with no sleeves and a zipper on the front.
It was a size fourteen.
Nervously she took it out of the bag, stroked a hand over the velvety material. Before, she’d squeezed into an eighteen, really squeezed. She unzipped it, slipped it over her head, refastened the long zipper, ruffled up her hair then dared to look in the mirror.
A stranger was looking back at her. A stranger with a good figure, wearing a mini dress, with a fuzz of soft head-hugging mouse-coloured hair making a frame around her features.
Nula turned back and forth, examining her reflection. She’d had hardly any tits before and now she had none. But she was thin. She looked at her face. Her eyes were well-shaped and hazel coloured. Her mouth was fine. But her nose was a monster. It reminded her of Schnozzle Durante. It was the Perkins family nose, they all had it. But as for the rest of it . . .
She looked OK. Her legs were nice. Long and shapely. Her arms were fine. She had cheekbones now, that was new. She stared again at her face and she frowned. She felt tears prick her eyes but she blinked, gulped, forced them back. She wouldn’t cry.
Now, she had to save up some more.
She had to save up a lot.
11
Nula went into the bank where she had a small savings account, and they laughed her right out of the place – turned her down flat because, the manager said pompously, he ‘didn’t want to encourage her to overstretch herself, financially’.
Nula went home in a low mood that day. She stood inside the larder and eyed up the chocolate cake Mum had made for Sunday tea. God, she wanted it. But she stepped back out of the larder, closed the door.
‘You all right, our Nula?’ asked Mum, coming into the kitchen and making her give a guilty start.
‘Yeah. I’m fine.’
Her mum patted her on the shoulder. ‘Can I get you anything, lovey?’
‘No. Thanks.’ Again Nula had to blink back tears. Her mother loved her and meant only the best for her, so it hurt Nula to have to go against her, to refuse the cupboard-love Mum so frequently offered.
There had to be a way to get what she needed. Next day at work she spoke to Sylvia, her old mate with the radar-scanner ears, the poor cow.
‘Where would I get a loan from?’ she asked.
‘What do you want that for?’ asked Freda, whose life was small, limited to this fuck-all work in Woolies, to home, to telly, to nothing very much at all. Sylvia had no ambition. She was a sweetheart, but she was thick as two planks covered in pig shit, there was no getting away from that fact.
‘Never you mind. No matter. Forget I said anything,’ said Nula.
But Sylvia didn’t forget it. She came in next day and said: ‘There’s a bloke does loans. My dad said. Here’s his address.’ She handed her
mate a scrap of paper.
‘Thanks.’ Nula eyed it with suspicion before slipping it into her overall pocket. She’d try another bank, see what she could come up with. She didn’t like the idea of some bloke off the street, it didn’t seem official, or business-like.
The next bank laughed at her, too. She was a shop girl with no savings, and she was asking for a sizeable loan.
Nula slunk home again and stood inside the larder door and actually ate a large slice of the cake, before going out into the yard and sticking her fingers down her throat to bring it all back up again. Crying, choking, she sat on the cobbles beside the tin bath hanging from its nail on the wall.
Then she dragged herself to her feet, went back into the scullery and pulled her dirty overall out from the washing pile. The note from Sylvia was still in the pocket and she got it out, spread it, stared at it.
She straightened, took a breath.
All right then.
Charlie Stone.
12
What Nula hadn’t expected when she pitched up at the address on the note was that Terry Barton would open the door. It threw her completely. She felt her jaw actually drop as she stared at his handsome features. He’d always been tall, but now he’d bulked up, gained a lot of muscle. He looked fearsome. More of a man than he’d ever looked before. And worse – humiliatingly, awfully worse – he had her there with him, giggling and twining around him like bindweed. Slim pretty Jill Patterson who’d been in Nula’s class at school, her of the blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes. Nula hated Jill. Jill had been one of those capable winning girls, first a milk monitor and then a prefect, bossing the other kids around while Nula had skulked in the background, envious and silent, with all the other no-hopers.
‘Yeah, what is it?’ Terry asked.
As he stood there staring at her, half-laughing because Jill was in his arms and she was tickling him, it struck Nula: he didn’t recognize her. Didn’t know that the fat pitiful ball of lard he’d once danced with out of sympathy was her.
Well, that was good. She’d had humiliations enough to last a lifetime.
‘Can I see Charlie Stone?’ she asked. ‘Is he in?’
‘What d’you want to see him about?’ asked Terry, pushing Jill away from him with a smile. She pouted, smiling back. Then her eyes went to Nula.
Nula gulped hard, avoiding meeting Jill’s gaze. ‘I want to talk to him about a loan,’ she said to Terry.
‘Right. OK then. Come in.’
Nula went in, looking around curiously. Charlie Stone’s house was much like her own parents’ place – a plain little two-up-two-down. Nothing fancy. Not what she’d expected, at all. Someone with money to dole out to other people should have a better place to live in than this, surely?
Terry went to a door at the end of the hall, knocked once, then opened it. Nula, growing doubtful, wondered what the hell she was getting into. She stepped into a room and the door closed behind her. It was shabby in here. The sofa looked like something left over from the war. There was a desk in the corner, and behind it sat a man.
She recognized him, of course. The one that poor little Colin Crowley, who’d died doing that housebreaking job, used to hang about with. That had been tragic, really. Her God-bothering parents had taken the view that the little bastard had broken into someone’s drum, and when you did that, you got exactly what you deserved – and Col had. Torn to ribbons by a Rottweiler, apparently.
Nula shuddered. Christ, what a horrible way to go.
He was looking at her now, Charlie who had never so much as given her a second glance. She had always been far beneath his attention.
And him?
Well, she’d been always been aware of him, obviously she had. But he was on another level to her, she’d understood that for a long time. Charlie Stone was going places. Today he looked the part in a suit that was clearly bespoke and not off-the-peg. He had the air of a successful businessman already. And he wasn’t exactly bad looking.
Charlie Stone was squat, that was the word. He was about five eight, and solid. In twenty years, Nula reckoned he would run to fat. But for now he was heavy-set, compact, with Brylcreemed dark hair. His hard, dark button eyes were skimming over her without any real interest at all – the way they always had.
‘I hear you do loans,’ said Nula, going up to the desk and sitting down with every appearance of calm, while inside she was scared shitless and she could feel her knees knocking together like castanets. If her parents or Jimmy could see her here, doing this, they’d hit the roof. They didn’t believe in Hire Purchase or in loans of any kind. ‘If I can’t afford it, I don’t bloody have it,’ Dad always said primly.
Charlie eased back in his seat, king of all he surveyed. He stared at her. ‘Don’t I know you?’
That threw her. She knew him, everybody did; but she had never supposed that he had noticed her.
Nula shrugged. ‘Probably from the dance hall. I’m Nula . . .’
Charlie’s face split in a grin. He slapped the desk hard and pointed a finger bristling with gold rings straight at her. Nula jumped. ‘The little fat bird!’ he burst out. ‘Jimmy Perkins’s sister.’
Nula cringed. That was her. The little grey fat bird. Unnoticeable. Forever fading into the background. Not worthy of anyone’s attention.
‘Yeah,’ she said, feeling a hot blush of shame colouring her cheeks. ‘That’s me.’
‘So you want to borrow?’
‘Yeah. I do.’ But now it all seemed like madness.
‘OK.’ Charlie whipped a notebook and pencil out of the drawer, put it down on the desk and looked at her expectantly. ‘How much?’
Just like that?
Nula couldn’t believe it. After the bank, this seemed like child’s play. But this bloke, who could grin at her and look friendly one moment, then look downright threatening the next, this bloke she knew from schooldays – him and Terry had been two years above her – squat little Charlie Stone, was a loan shark.
‘Um . . . a thousand?’ she ventured.
Charlie’s mouth dropped open. ‘How much?’
‘A thousand,’ mumbled Nula. ‘If I can pay it back over – say – two years? Would that be OK?’
‘Yeah, but the interest,’ said Charlie, staring at her. ‘What you want a sum like that for then, girl? That’s a lot of brass.’
‘It’s for something personal,’ said Nula, her lips in a thin line. She wasn’t going to tell him about that. What, give them all something more to laugh at her about? At Nula, the little fat girl with the big conk?
Charlie was still watching her face. Then he nodded. ‘All right then,’ he said, and started to explain about the interest rates while Nula sat there, amazed, not listening to a word.
As easy as that!
She was going to get the money she needed.
It was going to be done.
She nearly floated out of the door when their business was concluded. Then Jill, still out in the hall with Terry, said: ‘Hey – you’re Nula, aintcha?’
And her balloon was popped. ‘Yeah,’ she said, deflated.
‘Gawd, you’ve dropped a bit of timber aintcha, girl?’
Nula didn’t answer, she just shoved past her to the front door, and out.
13
Charlie was ambitious, wanting to make the next move, wanting to be respected.
‘You got that,’ Terry told him. ‘Everyone around here respects you.’
People stepped carefully around the Charlie Boys on the manor now. Nodded. Smiled. Charlie liked that. Terry didn’t mind it. He didn’t crave it, not like Charlie did. He was happy that they had cash, and that Jill loved him. He didn’t want more. But Charlie always did.
They started watching security vans. Whenever Charlie saw one, he’d make a note of the date, the time, the location and the registration number of the van. Then he’d be back a week later to see if this was a regular thing. Then a week after that, seeing how the people involved operated, which route they took i
n and out of the premises. Then again, checking the fine detail.
When Charlie was happy that everything was covered, him and the gang did the job, tooled up with one shotgun, two toy hand pistols. They targeted a clothing manufacturer’s place, where Charlie believed the pickings would be rich.
The boys crashed into the factory in hoods and boiler suits and went straight to the small glassed-in office where an inside operator had told them the wages were kept. Machinists started screaming as they kicked at the door. It was locked. Inside, through the bulletproof glass partition, they could see the female cashier.
‘Open the bloody door!’ yelled Charlie.
She backed away, shaking her head.
‘Fuck it!’ Charlie booted the door but it wouldn’t give. He motioned to big heavy-set Terry, who came up and rammed it with his shoulder. No good.
Then Terry kicked it hard, splintering the lock.
Another kick, and the door juddered open, the partition beside it caving in, glass and all, with a monumental crash.
‘On the floor!’ Charlie shouted at the cashier, and she got down straight away. He looked around for the safe. Couldn’t see one.
‘Where’s the safe?’ he asked her, prodding her back with the shotgun. ‘Where’s the money?’
She pointed a shaking finger at the desk. ‘In the drawer,’ she said.
Charlie almost laughed. A proper business, and some silly bastard had been too mean to fork out for a safe! He went over and wrenched open drawer after drawer – each one was stuffed with money and small half-filled brown envelopes. The cashier had been in the middle of doing up the wages.
They emptied the loot into their bags and scarpered. Then they went back to one of their safe houses on the manor and counted the takings. They’d expected a hundred grand – and ended up with sixty.