I nod. I’m taken aback by her intensity at first but she’s serious, and I only say, “I won’t.” I want to cry because she’s hit a nerve. Because I know she’s right. “I promise.”
I wonder, in life, if I’ve ever made my own heart beat fast. Sure, I get nervous and flustered and angry and scared and excited but that’s mostly out of my control and doesn’t always feel good. I’ve never caused myself to sweat and rush for the sake of it, because I can. For release or pleasure or energy. I’ve never urged my feet into a run…never heard my heart thump in my head.
And I know…
I have to bite the bullet….
I head upstairs to hunt for my swimsuit.
FRUIT SALADS
I believe I have the best swimsuit in the world. It’s vintage. Secondhand. Some people get weird about the fanny bit touching your own fanny. As if those little plastic covers you get on the gussets of swimsuits in shops when you try them on are any better. My suit is like industrial armour and it is architecturally beautiful. Pearly white dotted in navy spots. The cups make your boobs spludge out like a balcony but they never flop over the top. The waist stuffs you in all nice, holding you in tight so that your hips can swarm out. I sometimes can’t help but imagine the woman who wore this suit before me. Probably in the fifties or sixties. I bet she was really cool and wore black cat-eye reading glasses with diamonds at the corners. I bet she had a body like mine and jammed it into pencil skirts and let her body dollop out and swell from the plunging V of an open shirt or slit at the back of a dress, mesmerising people all over the world with her wonder. I bet she was amazing and had a fantastic name like Dixie. Or Lucky. Or Scrunchie.
The only problem is…I’ve never worn the swimsuit actually swimming. So that’s the first thing I’ll try for my recommended exercise. To shut Mum up. To make Dove proud of me. I’ll give this swimming business a go. Because I want to keep fit. I want to keep strong. I don’t want to lose weight but I want to be healthy.
I find the suit at the bottom of an old beach bag that I planned to take to the lido last year but I think the grumpy English weather stole that chance from me. The bag just has the suit ragged up at the bottom and the confetti of about fifteen Fruit Salad sweets. A chewy candy that is meant to taste like, well, a fruit salad. I pop one in my mouth. It tastes like eating a brick of Lego. I chew it; I can actually feel my molar being sucked out of my gum. I swallow it anyway, and for ages I feel the little blob of plastic sitting there, rotting in my gut but not. He’ll be in there for a while, that sweetie, the last one in the waiting room.
Really? Is it really happening now? Am I actually about to do this gym thing?
SAUSAGE
They put everything in a sausage. The eyeballs, the trotters. The bum, even. Gross. You know once I heard of someone who found a bumhole on their pizza with hairs on it. Actual pig hairs on a pig bum on the pizza.
My bedroom looks out onto the garden. I see the dogs sniffing about outside. I close the curtains of my bedroom to change. I always think it looks strange when the neighbours close their curtains in the middle of the day. It looks so suspicious. I strip naked to try the swimsuit on. I catch a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror. My body is wide more than anything. Plump, ripe, jacket potato-ish. Uncooked sausage-like. I have a spray of moles that decorate me like chocolate chips. A small mountain-peak triangle of a scar on my hip from the tip of the iron. My thighs touch like more lined-up uncooked sausages. I have stretch marks all over, silver silkworms like a map of roads drawn out on tracing paper. I imagine myself like the Incredible Hulk, bursting out of my skin, prising apart my tissue and muscle.
I take the mirror off the wall and lie down on the floor. I hold the mirror above me. My face sinks back. My arms out, shoulder-width apart with the view of myself top to tip. I want to see how I look naked, lying down. My boobs slide off either side of my chest like gravy dribbling off the edge of a plate, my ribs rise and my belly dips. My thighs spread and swell in the flatness of lying on my back. I have red knicker-line prints etched onto my softness like a zip. I am a sausage. A red sausage sizzling in a pan. I crane the mirror about; it’s heavy now, but I can’t put it down. I angle it over me in beams of the sun cracking through the gap in the curtain, the yellowing patches of my body. The diamond cuts from the mirror reflection sharpen the roundness of me, like slicing into a birthday cake with a knife.
Maybe I’m not a sausage. Maybe I’m a birthday cake?
I place the full-length mirror to the side, leaning against the fridge-cold radiator. I roll over to my side like a half-moon. My belly gives in to gravity, sliding down, puddling to the floor. My chin looks big. YOU DON’T WANT TO GO TO THE GYM BECAUSE IT MEANS YOU ARE GIVING IN. YOU WORRY YOU MIGHT BE LETTING YOURSELF DOWN, THAT YOU’RE GIVING IN. YOU PUT ON A BRAVE, PROUD FACE EVERY DAY. YOU LOVE YOUR BODY SO OTHERS DON’T HAVE TO AND YOU THINK THAT THE GYM IS YOU THROWING THE TOWEL IN ON THAT SELF-LOVE. THAT YOU’RE AGREEING WITH THE REST OF THE WORLD THAT IT WAS A LIE ALL ALONG, A DEFENSIVE FRONT. THAT THEY WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG. THAT YOU DO HATE YOUR BODY.
BUT IT’S NOT RIGHT.
YOU LOVE YOUR BODY.
YOU ARE REWARDING YOURSELF BY GETTING STRONGER. IT MEANS YOU LOVE YOUR BODY MORE, BLUEBELLE. NO MATTER HOW BIG YOUR BONES ARE.
That’s more like it.
CHLORINE
Already the girls at the desk are looking at me.
I know that look.
“I’d like to join the gym, please.”
I am counting the seconds until they offer to sign me up to a weight-loss programme or, better still, ask if I want to be introduced to a personal trainer. They like the idea of sitting there and perving over my transformation, waiting for me to reappear at the front desk one day wearing a pair of jeans that I can pull out to show a gap big enough for a whole other person to fit into and go “Can you BELIEVE I lost THIS much weight?” Carrying my spare, baggy skin around with me like a rucksack. The gym might make me their poster girl.
They’ve seen millions of mes before with our good intentions and high hopes.
“Sure.” One gazes at the computer. “Have you done an induction?” She’s typically sporty. Dressed like somebody who enjoys blowing a whistle angrily, while parading along the edge of a swimming pool. Probably showing off because she gets to wear her outdoor trainers indoors. The other one is a tiny dart of a female with cheekbones that could spiralise vegetables. She has slicked-back black hair pulled into a face-lifting ponytail, and shimmery lip gloss. All she needs is a plastic bottle of something E-number-orange and she’s partying in Ibiza. She looks me over, like looking for a snag of thread in a dress she is searching for a reason not to buy. Up and down. She can’t stop looking. It’s like she’s addicted. Her narrow eyes try to take me in. Her pupils try to box me into their rings. I want to cower, so instead, to combat that, I hear Dove’s little voice telling me to push my chest out. Puffing myself out all confidently like when you see pigeons out on the pull trying to meet a girlfriend.
“Yes,” I lie. I look at the wall of personal trainers. Their faces are lined up like a hall of fame, posing awkwardly with white teeth and hormone-charged eyes. I don’t want to know ANY of these people. That’s the last thing I want, some built-up tanned man called Todd embarrassing me by showing me how to work these machines.
How hard can they be, anyway? Press start. Easy.
“What’s your name?”
“Bluebelle Green.”
Ibiza starts to look over the PE-teacher lookalike’s shoulder now too, trying to find my name, squinting behind fake eyelashes. But also bouncing her head to the terrible noise of the dance music blaring out. One whispers to the other—they are never going to turn down the commission of a new member.
“Can’t find you…How unusual…Anyway…let’s get you signed up.”
“ ’K.” I flush bright red. Splotchy. I wonder why I’m
embarrassed now, when I’ve blagged myself into the gym without doing the induction and not at the moment when I was actually doing the blagging. Is it because now I have to face it? Physically enter the vortex of physical activity? While I fill in the fussy membership form I think about the little me laughing at me now. Like I am betraying myself by joining a gym, how out of character that is. I think about all the times when I was younger, excused from sport at school, sat, fat and sweaty, panting on the wall or bench while the others played rounders or cricket. Half-moons of sweat under my first-person-in-class-to-get-tits breasts from doing absolutely nothing. I was last on the wall to get chosen for any sport—except for a bit in primary school, when I was good at being “in goal.” The boys worked out that I could just stand there in the position of the boy’s toilet sign and block balls like a giant gingerbread man. Until I got hit in the face and my icing smile turned to a frown.
“Because you’re under eighteen there’s no joining fee.”
I should think so too! My money should be going on really great life experiences, not running it away in an air-conditioned torture dungeon.
“You don’t look sixteen.” The Ibiza one smiles; she means it as a compliment but I find it bitchy. Like she’s trying to suss me out. Perhaps she is envious of all the clubs I could get myself into underage. If I ever wanted to do that, which I just do not.
They make me have my picture taken. At this point I feel my confidence steal away like Peter Pan’s shadow. It suddenly whips off my back like a scarf in the wind and bolts for the door. I manage to grab it back. Oh. No. You are not going ANYWHERE. You’re coming with me.
“Smile!” And I do. In a short, muffin-mouthed attempt, like a Cabbage Patch doll.
And off we go…me and my confidence locked into a gym membership.
“Do you need me to show you where the changing rooms are?”
“It’s fine, thank you,” I say. “I know my way. I’m using the pool.”
Course you are, I bet they think. She’s just gonna flop about like a starfish hippo and sink to the bottom like a submarine.
Swimming, they think, is NOT real exercise. They probably think swimming is what you do when you’re taking a break from exercise. To recover. On the off-days when you’ve spent all week bench-pressing and lifting a…whatever one might lift.
Already I am regretting even coming here. Why am I regretting coming swimming? SHUT UP, BRAIN.
I find the women’s changing rooms. It’s different from when we used to go swimming with Mum. With Mum, it was fun. We would all pile into one family changing room and laugh as Dove wedgied me up the stairs. And we obviously didn’t do swimming. We just dunked each other and played mermaids or pretended to work in a pub in a sea of beer and sink and float and gargle chlorine while Mum did breaststroke.
But now it’s just me. Just me, trying.
Trying really badly to look like a grown, confident woman knowing what I’m doing when all I want to do is be in the family changing room with Mum and Dove. I’m not sure I’m ready to be grown up. Independent and alone.
The changing room is a gloomy, damp place. Full of black, coiled hairs, strong like hedgehog spikes, snailed around the bumpy-nippled floor. I am wearing my swimsuit under my clothes already and it’s making me feel really hot and panicky and trapped. What do we talk about? Me and these women? Will everybody in here know that I’m a fraud? Will they judge me? This is the secret life of people who aren’t at desks, this is the rabbit hole of the world. The swimming pool.
I feel enormously hot again and worried somebody might ask me if I need help and that will mean I’ve failed at my challenge of independence and keeping fit. I could faint any second and I cannot wait to get out of my clothes and into the water. I shove my stuff in a locker, dropping my jumper onto the disgusting tepid floor. Gross. The ground is so clingy. I forgot my coin too for the locker but no one’s going to steal anything of mine, so I dump it all in, even though I’m tempted to just put all my clothes back on and go home. My thighs are rubbing a bit. They are also covered in purple-green trademark witch-coloured bruises from my constant clumsiness and misjudgement of small spaces. Anyway…you can’t be expected to live in England and have evenly toned skin. It’s cold: the heating dries us out and then it rains all the time, which is great for potatoes but it doesn’t mean it has to make ME look like a potato. Rough and gnarly and knobbly.
Splat. Splat. Pad. Pad. Towards the pool. I LOVE that my toenails are painted green. They look so exciting next to the hideous beige of the floors.
I edge into the water. Underwater makes every part of everybody look like a mirage, a blurry painting, a circus mirror…
The fat under my arms is here.
The fat on my back oozing over my straps—here.
The print of my cave of a belly button squeezing behind my costume—also here.
The squiggles of silver stretch marks that sprint down the backs of my legs and arms. All here.
All present and correct.
Tromp. Tromp. Tromp. And weightlessness…
Swimming becomes calm. I find a rhythm. It’s OK. So at least I haven’t forgotten how to swim. Am I sweating? Wait, can you sweat in water? I imagine it to look like sun cream on the surface of the pool, oily and rainbow-coloured.
My baby curls tickle my ears as I breathe deep, arms swanning in and out, rippling the water, butterflying. I am not sure if I am enjoying this or not. Is that normal? To not know if you’re having a good time or not? I think about the view of me from behind. The gusset of my suit sucking in between my bum cheeks and my two round legs. My big legs. Knees frogging in and out. I do feel short of breath. This swimming is not as easy as it looks. I keep staring at the clock. Why do the seconds seem to freeze? I stop.
I catch a glimpse of myself in the grooves of the pool’s reflection. I lean forward and tie my hair up into a big topknot. A bony old woman with grey hair does a breaststroke past me. She looks at me and then tears her eyes away like she’s seen something she doesn’t want to see but is trying to be polite.
It seems that exercise has given me nothing but a belly full of chlorine.
BANANA
My wee is boiling hot. I feel tired and energised at the same time and at last, actually, for the first time in ages, truly hungry. I feel taller. Great.
My banana is bruised brown and smushed. I don’t really mind, it makes them sweeter. I eat it while I rummage for my inhaler. Swimming makes me starving. Why is that? I think of somewhere to sling the skin.
The showers are in this big communal steamy box of different women of every kind looming and cleaning like pecking flamingos…like talking trees…like willowy flamingo talking trees. Hanging goggles, splodges of creamy silver conditioner and chlorine-flavoured yellowing bikini bottoms, the snap of latex swimming caps. The ground, all urine- and shampoo-splattered tiles, peppered with more crop circles of hairs and toenail half-moons. The women look up as I go in. Swamped like squids smothered in clouds of fake vanilla-smelling foam. They herd together, like cattle. They mostly look like mums. I’m the youngest, bar the small toddler clinging to his mum’s big cliff-face legs with sucky barnacle hands and the baby clutched in one of her strong arms. She has drooping ripe purple nipples that almost touch her pelvis, belly clumpy like soil. Quivering rivers of streaky stretch marks. Once a baby’s house. A kangaroo pouch. A sacred nest for creation. Arms muscular and defined from carrying shopping bags and pushing prams and swimming lengths of breaststroke. Wheeling shampoo into her knots of fuzzy hair. She has bumps and lumps earned from living. Hips like the Big Dipper. Great for that little boy, I bet, for driving toy cars up and down. The little boy stares at me. At my body. I’m in my swimsuit still. I feel like a child. I wonder if the mum is thinking I’m a child too. They dry off and leave, the mum talking nonsense about rice cakes.
Funny how women are the ones that suffer the
most attack and punishment for their bodies when they are the ones that have to change the most….What a weird world we’re in.
There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Notice how when we watch a nature programme and see fifty elephants washing themselves by a lake and they all look the same to us, but really they are all unique, all have their own quirks and ways—but we can’t see that; we just see fifty elephants. Well, that’s us showering. In the grand play of the world, we all look the same; we are all a flock, a species, of quite beautiful women, just taking a shower, just taking care of ourselves. That’s all.
I am proud to be a girl. Because that’s a fact. But prouder that I love myself. Because that’s a choice.
CORN ON THE COB
Cam and I both have lipstick on our chins from the corn nibbling. Hers is purple and mine pink.
The salty butter dribbles down our forearms as we go in again for another bite each. Black charcoal flakes stuff our gums and replace our teeth with small golden squares. I know I have to say it. My heart thumps.
“I’m sorry I was horrible last week,” I admit.
“You weren’t.”
“I was.”
“You weren’t. I’m sorry for speaking to you like that, BB. I just know you’ve got it in you to know how to deal with this properly. I know it’s hard and every day is new, but Dove needs you. More than ever.”
“I know I have to be strong for her.”
“Not even strong; just be yourself, just be you, you know, normal. Annoying. Normal.”
“You’re right.”
“And I’ll be there for you.”
My Ideal Boyfriend Is a Croissant Page 22