Size Matters

by Judy Astley

  Skinny Latte (Two Sugars)

  Ellie waited at the bus stop in the drizzle, a suitable distance from her brother. They got on fine, quite well really considering, even if Rory believed deep down and unchangeably 50 Cent was the greatest star, music-wise, ever, ever ever. And he played the Darkness louder than anyone who wanted to keep their ears from shrivelling could possibly stand. All the same, you didn’t travel on the bus to school sitting next to your brother. There was no written-down reason, you just didn’t, End Of.

  Rory was huddled into one of the bus stop’s pull-down seats under the shelter, rudely ignoring an elderly woman struggling with two walking sticks and a handbag big enough to contain, Ellie shocked herself by thinking grotesquely, a severed human head. Rory looked about as miserable as it was possible to look, even at eight fifteen in the morning. Ellie watched from the back of the queue as he wrapped his arms across his chest, reaching them round as far as he could and shivering dramatically. He was really pale too, but then who wasn’t in chill March. And he was fidgety, in that way she remembered he used to be when he was little and was about to throw up but didn’t quite know it yet. She started to feel hot and panicky – she needed to make sure he was completely OK about the state of his insides before they were trapped on the bus and it was too horribly late.

  ‘Rory?’ Ellie went to the front of the queue and tugged at his arm. ‘Rory, are you . . .’

  ‘Hi Ellie! You OK babes?’ Tasha, all glittery gold eyeshadow and the chemical whiff of knocked-off market perfume, appeared beside her.

  ‘This your brother, innit?’ Ellie watched Tasha push her shoulder bag a bit further back so her breasts jutted forward inside her shiny black hooded jacket. She wondered if she was wearing the red and silver bra. Tasha had wolfy teeth, big, grinning and predatory, gnashing up and down hard on Barbie-pink gum. Rory was now staring at the floor, his head in his hands, elbows resting awkwardly on his knees.

  Please don’t, Ellie thought suddenly, please don’t chuck up on Tasha’s perfect kitten-heeled square-toed boots that must have cost a mint, if she’d actually paid for them. With them she was wearing diamond-pattern black tights. Cool-as and also not to be sicked on. Rory glanced up, looking bleary, and grunted something at the two girls, then raced off down the road, back towards home.

  ‘What’s he say? What’s wrong with him? Have I got eggy breath or something?’ Tash was staring after the running figure of Rory, which ducked down an alleyway out of sight. I was right, Ellie thought, he was feeling pukey. He was probably right now leaning on the fence round the back of Oddbins barfing his toast and raspberry jam all over the alleyway’s dog shit and wind-blown Macca wrappers. Better not to mention it to Tasha, it would be all round school in a something-to-laugh-at sort of way.

  ‘He said he’d forgotten something. His brain possibly.’ Ellie laughed. ‘If he ever had one. And anyway, how come you’re here? I thought you lived over the other side of the bridge. This isn’t your usual stop.’

  Tasha linked her arm through Ellie’s. ‘My dad was going to drop me off and then I saw you. Thought I’d come and say hi. Don’t mind do you?’ Tasha squeezed Ellie’s arm. There was pressure from Tasha’s hard, bony fingers even through her school sweatshirt and padded jacket. It was a pressure that was emphatic; it underlined that Tasha had made a thought-out choice to be with her, not just turned up by accident or coincidence.

  Across the road another uniformed girl was hurrying towards them, racing to get to the stop before the approaching bus. Amanda Harrison, Ellie’s friend, the girl she usually sat with – not just on the bus but in most classes and at lunch – was waving as she ran. There was a choice to be made here and as they all clustered to board the bus she knew with a sort of elated helplessness that it was no contest. Tasha slid into a double seat, patted the one next to her (sugar-mouse-pink nails with added heart motif in silver) and Ellie sat beside her. Amanda was great, she really, really liked her but sometimes you just needed a bit of danger in your life.

  Delphine’s handwriting was neat, upright and spiky. The envelope was pale lilac and suggested that it contained a pretty greetings card rather than the businesslike list that Jay found herself reading.

  ‘Bloody cheek,’ she muttered to Tristan, who had come up from the basement flat to have a look at the leaky tap in the attic shower room. In twenty minutes he’d made his way only as far up the house as the kitchen and was making himself a cup of tea, claiming that no plumber could be expected to work without a sharpening shot of caffeine. Good thing, Jay thought, that I don’t have to pay him by the hour.

  ‘Listen to this, Tris,’ she said as she scanned Delphine’s instructions. ‘She wants me to have this Charles person round for drinks before I go and give his flat the professional once-over. “Make a bit of a party of it,” she orders me. “Welcome him into the family.” Hmm.’

  No wonder Delphine preferred to write instead of phone (or e-mail, how come she hadn’t caught up with e-mailing?). She knew perfectly well no-one could argue with safely distant written instructions. You can’t simply slam down a letter like you can a phone.

  Tris swooshed hot water three times round the teapot then poured it down the sink before carefully measuring four flat spoonfuls of Twinings Darjeeling into the pot. Jay wondered what he did when he was out on his regular plumbing jobs. Did he wince at householders’ cheap tea-bagged offerings (Staff Tea – she’d seen it stashed away along with a jar of supermarket instant coffee and plenty of white sugar in many of the houses she’d cleaned) provided in thick heavy mugs? He and Delphine would get on wonderfully. They’d bond over fine bone china and an abhorrence of twice-boiled water.

  ‘But you have great parties. It’ll be well cool,’ Tris said, placing Jay’s late grandmother’s silver strainer on top of a rose-patterned Coalport cup and saucer that were so delicate you could see through the glaze. It had been a perfect joky find at the school car-boot sale, bought specially to indulge Tristan and his taste for dainty traditions. (Win had seen it on the worktop, turned over the cup and said, ‘Ooh lovely, Cole Porter’) What on earth he was doing living with slapdash, untidy Imogen – apart from the sex and procreation thing – she could hardly begin to imagine.

  ‘We do, we do,’ she agreed, though recalling that on the last Christmas Eve, the big garden flares had set fire to next-door’s fence. All the oldest ladies from the retirement home up the road had turned out in their dressing gowns to warm themselves at the blaze and shout naughty comments to the firefighters about the size of their hoses.

  ‘But all I really need to do is check over his flat, arrange this cleaning blitz that Delphine wants, give him a price and allocate a couple of the girls to do the work. I didn’t think it was going to involve . . . well involvement. I assumed we’d do the socializing bit when she actually gets here. After all, surely the introductions are her job.’

  ‘Well you could just, like, tell her that?’ Tris suggested, with the simple logic of youth. ‘Tell her no? E-mail? Phone?’

  Jay stared at the letter again. ‘Oh I suppose I could phone – she doesn’t “do” e-mail, but . . . you don’t know Delphine – she’s always got an unarguable reason for having things her own way. She says here it would really help her out if it’s me who introduces him to Win. Listen to this; she says, “He’ll be the third husband I’ve brought home for Mum to give the once-over. I know she’ll say something completely barmy if it’s just me and her and then he’ll think that in marrying me he gets part share in a family of nutters.” I hope she’s not including me in that. And she goes on, “Get it out of the way for me, Jay, would you. She’ll be on her best behaviour if she’s got a smart frock on and a g. and t. in her hand. Just make sure it’s her first, not her fourth.” Oh and get this, Tris.’ Tris took a long sip of his perfect tea, closing his eyes blissfully like Daffodil the cat after she’d had a go at a dollop of tuna.

  ‘She says – can you believe it – “You might need to know that Charles is allergic to smoke
d salmon.” ’ Jay laughed, ‘Instructions, instructions – that’s Delphine. She was born in the wrong era. She should have been a Roman with teams of slaves. I’m surprised she didn’t give me a list of acceptable canapés and a map showing a correct buffet-table layout.’

  ‘She sounds a . . . a . . .’ Tristan was groping for words as he carefully washed his cup under the hot tap.

  ‘A control freak?’ Jay finished for him. ‘Oh she’s that all right. No question. But I’m supposed to be all grown-up now. I can say no.’

  Tristan raised an eyebrow (the one pierced with a small gold bar).

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ Jay insisted. ‘Anyway, gotta go. Got a mutiny among the staff to sort out. See you later Tris, good luck with the tap.’

  Rory felt better now. He’d made an executive decision not to go to school – well he was doing the teachers a favour really, they wouldn’t want someone in their classrooms who might puke on the floor and scupper the lesson. He spent a peaceful hour in the park having a cigarette or two, a can of Coke and a mooch about by the pond to see what the ducks were up to. He’d watched two of them mating and it looked like a sadistic sort of process. Date rape at best; the male had grabbed the female by the back of the neck and shoved her head under the water while he did the deed. Then he’d let go, left her on her own to fluff up her feathers again and done a lap of honour, racing round and round, squawking. The triumphant drake reminded him of blokes at school on a Monday morning, the sporty ones like Ben Pickard and Alan Simmonson when they’d got some action at the weekend. They came in all cocky with a swaggery walk and a smirk, looking for someone to guess what they’d done. Some of them even said it, not even a lead-in, just in-yer-face with things like, ‘You know that Kelly in 5R, the fit one with the tits?’ and straight in with the details to whoever was in the way.

  He himself had nothing to report as yet, well apart from party snogging and the odd feel, nothing at the Ben-and-Alan level anyway. Not that he would report. He’d decided to be a bloke girls could trust, so that they could all agree when they talked about him and coo to each other, ‘Oh Rory, he’s just so lovely’, not a bastard who practically ran his conquests’ pants up the school flagpole for everyone to snigger at. His way, they’d like him as a friend, they’d trust him and know he wasn’t just out for what he could get. Also, being A Nice Person, he might pull more of them. Not cynical at all then, he chuckled to himself as he sat down on a damp bench next to where a couple of rooks were efficiently emptying a garbage bin with their beaks.

  Rory was starting to feel a bit sick again. It must have been that toast – he should have given the bread a proper look when he got it out of the pack, made sure there weren’t any mouldy bits on it. Jay had said she couldn’t be responsible for ensuring the bread was inside its sell-by – especially as she wasn’t eating it at the moment. Bloody diets. Or it might have been the jam. Sometimes you found stuff at the back of the fridge and it looked like someone was trying to grow their own antibiotics. Lots of the food was still Imogen’s, special sorts of honey that she liked, blueberry jam, lime pickle. She had her own fridge down in the basement, why didn’t she move all her poxy food? He hoped she’d be a bit more germ-free when the baby arrived, otherwise the poor kid wouldn’t have a chance.

  Holding onto his aching stomach, Rory put his feet up on the bench and stretched out, lying full length along the seat to see if his insides would feel better when they weren’t scrunched up. Two of the old park biddies that were always in there gave him a look and a dose of tutting as they went past. They were in full olds-out-walking kit of all-weather woolly crochet hat and tartan scarf, dragging their Scottie dogs that were supposed to be white but looked yellowy round the edges, like snow that’s been pissed on. He felt worse, if anything, lying down. The biddies would feel sorry for him if they knew; they’d pat his head and say grandmotherly comfort stuff. He wished he was at home now, groaning miserably in his own bed. The pain in his gut was getting sharper and was there all the time, not just twingeing sometimes like before. Whatever he’d had for breakfast would have to be evicted from the fridge the minute he got home, before everyone in the house got ill and the whole place was declared a deadly disease zone and headlined on the local TV news.

  The women had done their circuit of the pond and were coming back for a second round. You’d think he’d meant to do it, by the look on their faces, the pulling back the dogs and the shudder of disgust like he was some junkie on a downer. After all, you couldn’t control the moment when you barfed on the pathway. No-one could, he was willing to bet, not even this outraged pair of old wifeys.

  How wonderfully useful it was to have a functioning artisan as part of the family, Jay thought as she drove out to negotiate with Mrs Caldwell, Dishing the Dirt’s serial complainer. How much more handy that Imogen had fallen in love with Tristan the plumber rather than someone such as, for example, a City money trader whose expertise was only in the coffee futures market and how to get a good deal on an Audi TT. When the time came for career choices to be made by Rory and Ellie she would encourage them firmly away from sit-down office occupations, and try to point them in the direction of carpentry and electrical work. In an area such as this, affluent, educated and devoutly non-practical, there would never be a shortage of work. There was a course at the local college grandly entitled The Built Environment, whose students, over the past few years, had constructed a whole new art block and some very fancy walling round the car park.

  Ask most bright kids about their futures and they said they wanted to be ‘lawyers’. Did they really know what that entailed? Did they have a clue how many hours they’d waste trying to find someone to degunge the washing machine just because they’d got no simple hands-on skills of their own? How many lawyers could a country need anyway, she wondered as she made her way over the bridge and down to the Common to sort out why every one of her staff had now refused to do so much as another hour’s work for Mrs Caldwell.

  Jay pulled into the pale gravelled driveway of the double-fronted quasi-Georgian house and parked beside Barbara’s Volvo estate that still had the Cats on Board sticker in the back window from the West London Area Burmese Championship qualifiers, held the weekend before. There was a window-cleaner’s truck as well. His ladders were propped up against the house front and Jay could hear the faint squeaking of chammy on glass. Another essential worker, she thought. After all, how many householders these days were prepared to risk going up ladders with the Windolene Wet Wipes? Greg got dizzy at the top of his own glass staircase and had to drink half a bottle of Rescue Remedy when he was out on an architectural recce and had to shin up some scaffolding.

  This meeting had to be a two-hander, for Mrs Caldwell had a wide circle of book-group friends and she could, if she accumulated enough grumbles to report them, be extremely bad for business. The area had several van-and-mop businesses like Dishing the Dirt, and clients went from one to another as recommendations came and went. The casual cleaners did exactly the same of course, which meant that a client, changing companies simply because a girl had missed a dusty skirting board once too often, might well get the same girl back again but wearing a different logo on her apron.

  ‘Do come in.’ Mrs Caldwell had the door open before Jay was out of the car. Disconcertingly, Jay noticed she was wearing almost identical clothes to her own – black trousers and top with a honey-coloured fine wool cardigan. She’d guess Mrs Caldwell’s was cashmere as opposed to lambswool and that her trousers were Joseph, not M & S. Oh and two sizes smaller than her own. Bloody grapefruit, she thought, giving Mrs Caldwell what she hoped was a smile that combined both a business-like attitude and reassurance. Neither offering was returned with any warmth.

  ‘Come through to the kitchen. Your business colleague is already here.’ Jay could see Barbara sitting at a long oak table and looking uncomfortable behind a row of folded garments. She caught her eye as she followed the cashmere cardi into a kitchen full of cerise lacquered units polished to
a standard of blinding reflectiveness. If Dishing the Dirt’s Monique had done this, it would be impossible to agree she was incompetent. Barbara gave her a weak smile that wasn’t easy to interpret. Jay hoped fervently it didn’t mean ‘total nutter’. She still shuddered at the memory of the woman who’d made a Battenberg-effect birthday cake for her dog out of chopped liver and tripe and then offered her cleaner a slice.

  ‘We have a problem.’ Mrs Caldwell almost pushed Jay into a chair beside Barbara and stood looking down on them like a headmistress facing a pair of persistent truants. She was straight in, no faffing about being social. Coffee would have been nice, Jay thought, and a biscuit selection that she could virtuously resist.

  ‘Ironing.’

  ‘Ironing,’ Barbara repeated, leaning forward and looking attentive.

  ‘Ironing,’ Mrs Caldwell said again.

  We’re going to be here all day, Jay thought, fighting the urge to look at her watch. Her phone was vibrating in her pocket too; it might be a new client. Perhaps she could sneak off to the loo (left of front door, under the stairs, walls decorated with cases of gloomy stuffed trout caught by Mr C. To be taken down fortnightly and all glass polished) and see if Mrs Caldwell could be dealt with by a pleasing deletion from the rota.

  ‘Ironing.’ Mrs Caldwell pointed a square-nailed sapphire-ringed finger at the assortment of items in front of her on the table. ‘Your girls don’t seem to get the hang. I’ve left notes, I’ve had words – not that they understand, most of them – I’ve even shown by example, as here. But do they take notice?’

  Both Barbara and Jay opened their mouths to reply but Mrs Caldwell was in first. ‘No they do not. Shirts.’

  ‘We’ve taught them the right order: collar, cuffs, sleeves and body.’ Barbara defended her trade, her voice as crisp as starched fine linen.

  ‘Oh I’m sure. But then they hang them up!’

  ‘Well yes, of course. As instructed.’