Dad said there were two parts in his fitness plan – a calorie-controlled diet and daily exercise. The best exercise was a brisk jog before breakfast, and he’d worked out a route for us all that would involve plenty of hills. Mum pointed out that it would be impossible to find a route in Polgotherick that didn’t involve plenty of hills, but he let that go.
‘Why does it have to be before breakfast?’ asked Primrose, who isn’t really at her best until the afternoon. Mum says she’s just like Dad. His morning motto is, ‘The early bird wishes he was still in bed.’
Dad said if we left it till later in the day we wouldn’t do it.
‘Does it have to be jogging?’ said Mum. ‘I don’t really like jogging.’
Dad said we didn’t have to like it – we just had to do it. ‘No pain, no gain,’ he said. It was the kind of thing that Toby’s dad might say and not sound weird.
‘But tomorrow’s the first day of term,’ said Primrose.
‘Tomorrow’s the first day of our four weeks,’ said Dad, pointing to the family organiser. ‘Look – in exactly four weeks minus one day it’s your anniversary. You want to fit into that dress, don’t you? PMA, Primrose!’
Mum said a Positive Mental Attitude was all very well, but she was the one who would have to get Primrose up a whole hour earlier than usual, and it was bad enough trying to prise her out of bed at the normal time on a school day.
Dad reminded her that her goal was, ‘I will join in.’ We were a team now. We were Team Pinker.
‘I’ll get up first and make sure everyone’s awake,’ he said. We all blinked at him.
Mr Kaminski’s tummy rumbled like a train in a tunnel and he got up to go. He was probably going to get some cheese on toast or sausage and mash for his tea. The thought of it nearly made me dribble.
When he had gone I pointed out that me and Mum didn’t want to lose weight – we just wanted to get fit. So maybe we should just do the jogging and not the Eat-lite dinners and Slimsnax bars.
Dad looked a bit disappointed. He said these meals were scientific and they had all the nutrients you needed, and he really felt me and Mum could manage a few weeks sticking to the rules to support him and Primrose.
We didn’t have much choice anyway because he’d thrown all the normal food away. When Matt came round after supper we turned out the cupboards looking for a biscuit or packet of crisps to give him and we couldn’t find anything except Slimsnax, which he didn’t like the look of.
‘What’s brought all this on?’ he asked.
‘Dad’s writing a book called “Four weeks to fitness”,’ Primrose told him. ‘We’re his guinea pigs, helping him test his ideas out.’ She didn’t want him to know that she could hardly do her famous first-date dress up any more.
Matt said he hoped Primrose could stop the diet one day early because after their walk on the coast path, he wanted to take her out for a meal at the Happy Haddock to celebrate the best six months of his whole entire life.
Everyone else went upstairs and I sat down on the rug with Dennis again. I was just wondering what his chew sticks tasted like when Matt sneaked back down. He took a little black velvet box out of his pocket. Listening to check no-one was coming, he opened it and showed me what was inside. It was a silver heart on a delicate chain.
‘It’s for our anniversary,’ he said. ‘What do you think? Will Primrose like it?’
I thought, O-ooooooh, dear.
He was so excited. He had absolutely no idea what was going to happen if Primrose couldn’t fit into that dress. She would dump him for certain sure. That’s what she was like. There was no problem so small she couldn’t blow it up into a massive ginormous crisis.
‘I think she’ll love it,’ I said.
Chapter 5
The first one awake and Fitness Flakes
If you go to bed hungry you wake up feeling like you could eat your pillow – fact. On the upside, it was half past six and there was no way anyone else would actually be up, even if they had set their alarms like we agreed.
My plan was to sneak downstairs and grab a handful of Slimsnax bars to keep me going till breakfast. They tasted like sawdust and didn’t fill you up – I knew that because I’d had one for my bedtime snack – but they were supposed to be nutritious and we did have a cupboard full of them.
I put my dressing gown on and tiptoed to the door. I was just about to open it when rat-a-tattat! Someone knocked and made me jump nearly out of my skin. I wasn’t the first one awake.
‘Rise and shine, Sleepy-head!’
It was Dad! I heard him knock on Primrose’s door too. Knock… groan. Knock, knock… groan. Knock, knock, knock…
‘Go away, Dad!’
‘I thought you wanted to fit into that dress,’ said Dad.
Five minutes later we were all assembled by the front door. Dad was jogging on the spot in his footie shorts. Mum was fumbling with her trainers, trying to do them up with her eyes shut. I had dug out my PE kit and Primrose was wearing last year’s beach shorts and pink canvas shoes.
Anyone who saw us taking off down the front steps would have thought we were a raggle-taggle bunch, but nobody was likely to see us because a) it was still dark except for the street lights and b) anyone with a scrap of sense would be tucked up warm in bed.
Dad’s route took us downhill towards the harbour first, which was just as well considering we were still half-asleep. Primrose trailed at the back, complaining about the cold. She said her toes were like icicles. They would probably snap off and rattle around in her shoes, and it would be all Dad’s fault.
‘Think about your goal, Primrose,’ he said, not looking back. ‘Keep running towards your goal. “I will fit into that dress!”’
Primrose mumbled and grumbled. A fat lot of good it would do her to fit into that dress if she died trying, she said. People could freeze to death, you know. People could get exhaustion and just keel over.
‘I will fit into that dress!’ said Dad, over his shoulder. ‘I will fit into that dress!’
We came to the corner by the Reading Room. The bench under the street light would have looked quite tempting if it hadn’t been covered in frost. Primrose sat down on it anyway.
‘This is stupid,’ she gasped. Her breath billowed out in clouds. ‘I’m going back.’
Mum coaxed her up onto her feet again and linked arms with her. We all trudged on down the zig-zag path.
‘I will fit into that dress!’ cried Dad. ‘I will… Oh!’
He nearly bumped into Miss Mullen as she came out of the bakery with a tray of warm bread rolls. Her eyebrows jumped like jelly-beans under her baker’s bonnet.
‘Good morning, Miss Mullen,’ said Mum, managing to keep a straight face, as we all ran by.
We turned the corner and collapsed into giggles in the doorway of Harbour Crafts.
Mum said, ‘I will fit into that dress!’
Dad said, ‘It isn’t funny.’
Primrose said, ‘Yes it is!’
I wondered what other people would find the most surprising – all the Pinkers running around in the dead of the night or Dad shouting, ‘I will fit into that dress!’
Lights were starting to come on in the houses around the harbour. Their reflections shimmered and shifted in the black water. We followed Dad up the steps on the far side of the harbour that come out onto School Lane. It actually isn’t a lane at all, but a narrow path winding up to the bottom of Thistle Hill.
By the time we got to the coastal path we were all so puffed out, we weren’t so much jogging as trudging.
I thought for a horrible minute that Dad was going to take us out of Polgotherick along the cliffs, but we cut back towards the town and took the most direct route back to our house.
By the time we got home we were starving. Dad was bright red and covered in sweat. It took him about five hours to stop gasping. Mum wasn’t too bad, but then she works outdoors digging and stuff all day long, so she’s used to it.
‘What’s for breakf
ast?’ Primrose said, which, considering she usually makes such a big thing of not eating breakfast, came as a bit of a surprise. Mum looked delighted.
Dad produced a box of Fitness Flakes and a bottle of red-top milk. In case you’re wondering, Fitness Flakes are like scraps of cardboard but not quite as tasty, and red-top milk is skimmed, which means it’s basically water and doesn’t taste of anything at all.
It was our first fit-in-four-weeks breakfast. The Fitness Flakes took a lot of chewing and, while we were chomping our way through them, Dad said he was very proud of his team. He put a tick on the family organiser to show we had all done our exercise that day.
Just when I was thinking, ‘He’ll never keep this up,’ he announced that now we knew our route he was going to be doing a longer run. He had planned it out and would be leaving a bit before us every day so he could get back at the same time.
‘Right!’ he said, jumping up and dumping his empty bowl in the sink. ‘I’m going to go and write some notes for my chapter on exercise.’
He took the stairs two at a time. I couldn’t remember ever seeing him do that before.
‘Is it just me or is Dad acting really weird?’ Primrose said as we walked up the hill after breakfast. ‘It’s like he’s changed into a football coach or something.’
We agreed that it couldn’t last but in the meantime we might as well go along with it. She wanted to get thin, I wanted to get fit, and like he said, sports and fitness was his specialist subject, even if up to now it had mostly been watching other people get fit and play sports.
When I got to school, I asked Toby if he had anything edible in his back-pack – he always carries emergency supplies. He produced a thick slab of Kendal Mint Cake, which is so sweet you can almost feel it dissolving your teeth. I didn’t care. I ate the whole lot.
All I could think about all morning was dinner, and buying a big double helping of chips.
Chapter 6
Girls together and the ghost at the window
The next morning, I fell out of bed when my alarm went off and fumbled out onto the landing in search of Slimsnax, only to bump straight into Mum. She told me Dad had already left for his run and therefore, just like she had said would happen, she was the one who would have to get Primrose out of bed.
‘Dad’s already gone?’ I mumbled. ‘Are you sure? It’s half past six!’
‘Go up and look for yourself if you like,’ said Mum.
I went up to their room. The houses in Harbour Row are very tall and thin. There’s the kitchen on the ground floor, the living room above that, mine and Primrose’s bedrooms up the next flight of stairs, and Mum and Dad’s room at the top. Their bed was empty. I checked the ensuite and Dad’s study. He wasn’t there.
By the time I got back down the stairs to our landing, Primrose was getting dressed and Mum had gone on down to the kitchen to find her trainers.
‘Actually, this is nice, isn’t it?’ she said, as we set off down the front steps. ‘Girls together!’
On the upside, the weather wasn’t so cold; on the downside, it was murky and damp with a fine drip of drizzle. Primrose was full-on complaining she was wet through before we had even got to the end of the terrace.
When Primrose gets whiny, Mum goes into cheery overdrive, and quite honestly I don’t know which is worse.
‘It’s only a bit of mist,’ she cried. ‘It makes the town look splendidly spooky, doesn’t it? It’s like a murder mystery film.’
‘My hair’s frizzing up – I can feel it!’ Primrose grumbled. ‘I’ve got water running down my back.’
‘Don’t let’s waste our energy chatting,’ Mum said. ‘Onwards and upwards!’
The mist swirled round the street lamps and lurked in the doorways. It covered our clothes in tiny droplets and made our lips taste salty.
Primrose stopped grumbling, and started puffing and panting like someone going for gold in the Olympic Puffing and Panting event. She kept it up all the way down to the harbour. When we hit the steps up to School Lane she suddenly stopped dead and bent double, clutching her chest.
‘I’m having a heart attack!’ she cried.
Mum stopped and turned round. She rolled her eyes and started walking back.
‘You are fifteen years old. I don’t think your heart should be quite worn out just yet.’
Primrose said her heart was beating so hard she couldn’t breathe. It felt like it was trying to dislodge itself. What if it came clean away and dropped into her stomach?
Mum said she didn’t think that was likely to happen, but if it did it would be better if we’d managed to get as far as Thistle Hill because that’s where Dr Murphy lived.
Primrose stood up, droopily. She put on her most tragic, brave, suffering face. She let Mum coax her up the steps.
I don’t know about Primrose’s heart but all this waiting around was making my stomach feel like it was starting to digest itself. I ran on ahead, up School Lane and Thistle Hill and all the way back to our house.
When I got there I stopped to catch my breath at the bottom of the steps. The lights were on in our house but the mist made everything milky, like I was looking through tracing paper.
I glanced up at Mr Kaminski’s unlit window. A pale figure goggled at me like a ghost, and then melted away in the blackness.
It freaked me out. I legged it up the front steps and burst indoors.
‘A sprint finish,’ goes Dad. ‘Impressive!’
As soon as I was inside I felt a bit silly for getting spooked like that. Probably, if you got really, really hungry you started seeing things. Yes – that would be it.
I flopped down on the chair next to Dad and he poured some skimmed milk over my Fitness Flakes.
For someone who had got up at six o’clock and run twice as far as we had, he didn’t look too bad. His face was glistening with sweat and his shirt had a damp patch all down the front; he had a towel round his neck and his socks were wet, but he didn’t seem very tired.
I was still trying to chew through my first mouthful of Fitness Flakes when Mum and Primrose arrived.
‘Didn’t Primrose do well?’ Mum said to Dad. ‘It was a struggle, but she made it!’
Ahem! Excuse me – younger sister here, who did even better!
‘You shouldn’t have gone running off like that,’ Mum said to me. ‘What were you thinking?’ She actually wagged her finger. ‘You are far too young to be out in this fog on your own.’
See, that’s the other thing that happens when Primrose gets whiny – Mum manages not to explode at her, but then gets tetchy with me! It was annoying, and I was still annoyed by the time I got to school. I stayed annoyed all day and I didn’t feel like going straight home afterwards.
I texted Mum to tell her I was going to the Happy Haddock to see Gran after school. When I got there, Magnus was lying across the doorway, fast asleep. You could hear his snores half way round the harbour. He wasn’t going anywhere so I had to step over him, which wasn’t easy, what with him being so bulky. I had to do more of a jump.
The net of twinkly lights on the ceiling was lit up as usual because the windows were so small and the walls were so thick that hardly any daylight could get in. I spotted Jane in the gloom at the far side of the room, reading her Three Towns Gazette. She smiled and said hello.
I went on up to Gran’s room. She had popped out to the baker’s for a bag of yum-yums when I told her I was coming, and she had just opened a bottle of my favourite raspberry-and-apple.
We sat at the little round table in front of her window, watching the boats bobbing on the water, and I told her everything that had happened since New Year – the walk to Pike’s Bluff, and wanting to get fit, and Primrose’s problems with her anniversary dress.
I told her about Dad’s fit-in-four-weeks plan, the Eat-lite dinners and Slimsnax bars and early-morning jogging. She said Mr K had already given her the gist. He wasn’t very taken with his Eat-lite chocolate pud!
‘The thing is, Dad’s act
ing really weird,’ I said. ‘He’s getting up early and doing runs and organising all our food and stuff. I mean, you know what he’s usually like.’
Gran nodded. She got that faraway smile she sometimes gets when she thinks about Dad, as if she can see right back across the years to when he was a little boy.
‘Well, you know,’ she said, ‘I have once seen him get all fired up like this before. It was when he first met your mum and he was desperate for her to fall in love with him.’
Gran said perhaps Dad was a slow-burn kind of person – it took him about fifteen years to work himself up to something, but when he did, he went all out. He must really, really, really want to write that book, she said.
Gran offered me the last yum-yum. She said Dad probably did know his stuff but he was writing a book for grown-ups. He might not have thought about how it might be a bit different for children. I was still growing, and when you’re still growing you need plenty of good food to fill you up.
Suddenly there was a volley of barks and snarls from downstairs. Someone who wasn’t very good at long jump must have tried to get past Magnus.
Gran said, ‘Let’s have a little walk!’
Jane was behind the bar pouring some beer for a customer and Magnus was glaring at him as if he would like to take a bite out of his leg. Outside, it was already starting to get dark.
Gran marched purposefully into Harbourside Stores. She always does her shopping there. Her mum used to send her down there with a list when she was a little girl and she says some of the wooden shelves on the end wall are still the very same.
She bought a box of berry oatcakes and stuffed it in the top of my school-bag.
‘Emergency supplies,’ she said, ‘just in case you need a little top-up.’
Chapter 7
The proof of the pudding and Toby’s tepee
How to Get the Body You Want by Peony Pinker Page 3