Size Matters

by Judy Astley

  Jay left her shoes by the wall, headed for a piece of floor a safe couple of rows from the front, unrolled her mat and lay down beneath her blanket, closing her eyes and trying to make her mind go blank. It wasn’t easy. She could feel the floor’s solidity through the mat, and the blanket had a shamefully dingy-looking brown furry patch. Daffodil must have been leaping into the airing cupboard to sleep on it. People were still coming in, fussing with coats and mats and huffing about as they settled into position. A body flumped down quite close to Jay and she forced herself not to open her eyes and turn to greet it, for surely that would be only polite; lying down next to someone under blankets like this was quite intimate in the same way that being in a hospital bed was, or a hostel dormitory. She also tried not to think about the chilli Greg was simmering on the cooker back at home – her stomach, starved since the gruesome lunchtime Shape-Shake (malted chocolate), was in grave danger of rumbling its way through the entire class.

  She would give up those Shakes, she decided as she lay there trying to breathe evenly. She felt as if they were turning her insides to glue and her body to a beige, toneless sponge. ‘Shape-Shake’ was a disappointing name for such stuff too – it made her think of the lively kind of dances popular in the seventies, where teen magazines would show you the moves with a series of footprint drawings to follow. It could only disappoint, really, if dance-type liveliness was what you had in mind when you drank it.

  ‘OK everybody, welcome to the class . . .’ Cathy had turned off the music, turned down the lights and pitched her voice into a soft, low tone. ‘We’re going to start with some alternate nostril breathing.’

  Oh I’m sure I can manage that, Jay thought. She felt confident she wouldn’t fail at that bit. She might not know her chi from her chakras but it surely wasn’t possible to be hopeless at breathing. She opened her eyes to see everyone else already sitting pertly on their mats, blankets neatly folded by their sides. Quickly she sat up, rearranged herself and returned to full attention, feeling rather flustered, just in time to hear Cathy completing her instructions with ‘. . . then the middle finger of the right hand to close off the left nostril as we breathe out . . .’

  Oh Lordy, she thought, trying to co-ordinate her efforts and work out what she was supposed to be doing. The word ‘why’ also came traitorously to mind, for surely, whichever of these two small orifices it went in through, all the air got mixed together at the back of your nose? Apparently not. Well then. She’d put that down as a ‘fail’. To think she’d assumed breathing was the one thing you couldn’t get wrong.

  NINE

  Cabbage Soup

  ‘Mum told me you were on a diet so I brought you this instead of chocs and cake. I wouldn’t want to be the one to put temptation in your way.’ April giggled as she handed Jay a fat Jiffy bag containing something bulky but lightweight and slightly crunchy to the touch, like a bag of autumn leaves. She’d just arrived, breezing cool spring air with her into the house, scented with almond flowers and loaded with an assortment of canvas bags and a bunch of rhubarb-and-custard tulips. Her dark red hair looked wild and windswept, as if she’d raced down from Cheshire on horseback rather than driving in her peculiarly sedate way in her Honda Civic. ‘So why are you dieting?’ she continued, standing back a little to have a proper up-and-down look at her sister. ‘You look fine to me. We just happen to be a family that morphs with age into unexpectedly rounded stock, that’s all. You’ll get used to it in a year or two. I did.’

  April was a good bit rounder (though compensatingly taller) than Jay, an effect exaggerated by her being dressed in many quasi-hippy blue-and-purple-shaded layers: floppy trousers, an ankle-length bias-cut strappy Ghost dress over a T-shirt, all topped off with a rather pretty little pale grey lace-edged cardigan. It crossed Jay’s mind that she wouldn’t want to be in a queue for a thorough medical examination behind too many people attired like that. You’d be there all day while they faffed about, scrambling in and out of a stack of clothing.

  ‘Well it’s things like that for a start: I’m challenging that morphing process,’ she told April. ‘Plus it’s realizing I’m going to be a grandma and not wanting to look like one . . . oh and there was a silly little throwaway comment from Greg. So I thought I’d see if I could trim up the body a bit before it’s too late and it runs out of control into permanent decline.’

  Jay tore the tape off her package and rummaged inside, pulling out the first of several sealed bags. So it did contain leaves, small crispy green ones. ‘Thanks for this, but . . . um what is it exactly?’ She turned it over, searching for a label.

  ‘It’s cabbage soup!’ April had dumped her baggage on and under the glass table and now raced around the kitchen, switching on the kettle and poking about in cupboards for tea and sustenance. ‘It’s brilliant – or so I’m told, I haven’t actually tried it myself. I got it from Bio-Beautiful round the corner at home – you should see the stuff they sell. They make their own no-carb cakes and there’s a juice range with combinations of things like ginger, pear and artichoke – or was it broccoli? – and if you want to do a detox they’ll take a blood test and package up all the right nuts and berries to balance your yin and yang. This cabbage stuff’s all pre-packed and freeze-dried and ready to go. Saves you chopping it up and messing about for hours. You just boil up a bagful with water, simmer for twenty minutes and there you are: instant breakfast, lunch and a nice soothing bedtime drink!’

  Chocolates and cake would definitely have had more yum factor, Jay was pretty sure, but April – as always – meant well and was looking thrilled with her choice of gift.

  ‘Apparently it works – so long as you do it right,’ she went on, not at all abashed by Jay’s lack of immediate delight. Jay was still wondering how much of a taste blast the juiced artichoke (or broccoli), pear and ginger would be. It sounded quite appetizing – but then almost anything would to a woman whose breakfast had been a plain no-fat yogurt and uninspiring flaky bran.

  ‘And I’m told it’s all a myth about filling you up with noxious gas, so you won’t become socially unwelcome.’

  ‘Thanks April – you’re a treasure. I’ll give it a go; it can’t be any less effective than grapefruit. What I’d like to know though is how Mum knew I was dieting? I didn’t say anything to her; she’d only have a go about “at your age you should be past bothering” or something.’

  April laughed. ‘Obvious. Ellie told her. She complained to her that you’ve been stuffing down Shape-Shakes and looking miserable and that you refuse to keep biscuits or crisps in the house. She claims she’s feeling deprived.’

  ‘Ellie said all that to Mum? Heavens, that’s more than she says in a month to me! Which reminds me, where’s Freddie? I thought he was the point of the trip?’

  April stopped riffling through a cupboard and looked at Jay. ‘It’s all true, isn’t it? I can’t find a single naughty thing to eat in here. I’d kill for a doughnut. I might have been impressed by the Bio-Beautiful store but I prefer to admire it from a bigger distance than I can throw a Hobnob.’

  Jay opened the fridge and pulled out a box of sticky, dark Florentines, handing them over quickly to her sister. ‘OK, you can eat these. I got them for Sunday but I accept it’s an emergency. So tell me about Freddie.’

  April ripped open the packet with her teeth. Jay handed her a plate and they carried their mugs of tea through to the sitting room, where April balanced the plate of gooey Florentines on the arm of the pink velvet sofa. She looked, Jay thought, set to munch her way through the lot – which was good. Really it was. She’d just watch. And she’d try not to dribble.

  Daffodil sat on the floor at April’s feet, sniffing the air and looking up at the overhanging plate, calculating whether it was worth leaping up and giving it a swipe. Another, deeper, sniff told her there was no tuna in the air and she padded away in disappointment, flicking her tail rudely at them. April watched her go, ‘Wonderful cats, Burmese. They do a great line in scorn. I can’t wait to get mine
– we’re picking it up from Barbara on Monday on the way home. Now Freddie, well I dropped him off in Egham for an open day at the Royal Holloway College,’ April said as she munched and licked melting chocolate off her fingers. ‘I offered to go in with him – most parents did – so we could compare notes and discuss it afterwards, but he just did that look that they get and I handed over his train fare and left him to it.’

  ‘I know that look – Rory does it and Ellie’s is coming along nicely with plenty of training. His fare back home or to here?’

  ‘Oh to here. He likes seeing your three.’

  ‘They like seeing him. Perhaps, oh imagine, just perhaps they’ll be all smiles all weekend.’

  ‘Imagine it?’ April laughed. ‘A house full of peaceful, jolly, cheery teenagers? Unless they’re smarming around like cats at feeding time in pursuit of hard cash, then no I can’t!’

  Freddie and Rory lay side by side on the scratchy seagrass floor of Greg’s office and stared up through the glass to where the young elm saplings at this far end of the garden were waving their whippy branches in the wind. Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit raged around them from Greg’s new surround-sound B. & W. speakers. Greg was out at a site meeting and Rory liked to let himself in and enjoy his father’s clean, cool, arty workspace with its classy glass desk, espresso machine, brushed-steel plan chests, indigo leather sofa and icy Macintosh computers. He’d love – in an ideal world, of course – his own room to be as streamlined as this, free from scattered clothes, littered homework, stray shoes, Cheesy Wotsit packets and scuzzy old boxes of childhood leftovers under the bed. He promised himself that after his exams he would junk all his superfluous possessions, even his first-ever skateboard, Tracy Island and the Lego pirate ship, and turn his room into something like this – or better still, that Charles bloke’s place, if he could pick up some fancy art. Kylie would have to go, sadly, but he’d get some posh-framed black and white photos, some excellent arty nudes, lots of shadow and attitude.

  ‘Trance, man,’ Freddie murmured softly, inhaling on his roll-up and gesturing upwards with his thumb. ‘Who needs drugs when you can gaze at nature moving about and just lose your brain in it?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Rory said, watching a wood pigeon clinging to a rocking bough. ‘Haven’t tried any drugs. I think I might be the only one in my year.’

  He could admit this to Freddie. When your cousin lived two hundred miles away you could trust your every sad confession wouldn’t get all round year 11 between lunch-break and home-time.

  ‘You won’t be,’ Freddie reassured him. ‘At least half the ones who say they have will be lying. Same with all those surveys they panic the Government with: “Ninety per cent of over-elevens are off their nuts on E.” All bollocks. They should worry about booze, stop wasting their time on the rest. We got girls of fourteen up our way doing a bottle of voddy every Saturday night and giving bj’s to any bloke who looks halfway fit and claims he plays for Man. U. juniors.’

  Rory thought of Tasha. Did she do that? Or would she do that if she was living her teen years in South Manchester? She looked a bit rough, but . . . no, it probably wasn’t true. Freddie was just bragging in a mad sort of way, most likely. Doing the same as the survey people, exaggerating for effect.

  ‘Why did he do it, do you think?’ Freddie had moved on. ‘Kurt Cobain – why do you think he shot himself?’

  Rory considered for a minute, listening to Kurt ranting some more before answering. He felt flattered to be asked for his opinion. There was a two-year difference between him and his cousin, one that seemed to be getting gratifyingly smaller as they got older. Another couple of years and it would be practically nothing. This year they’d both got exams coming up; OK, Freddie’s were A levels compared with his own baby-level GCSEs, but they were both at life-changing stages.

  ‘I think . . .’ he started, ‘I think he just wanted to know what it was like to be dead.’

  ‘Well he knows now,’ Freddie said, chortling quietly.

  ‘Ah but no he doesn’t.’ Rory sat up, wincing as his stitches pulled. The curly chrome radiator on the wall in front of him seemed to shimmer like a heat haze and his head was spinning slightly, which he put down to getting up too quickly. Unless it wasn’t just Golden Virginia Freddie had rolled into the Rizla. He’d like to have been told if there was anything else, so he could savour the moment and check out in a proper aware state the things that spliff was doing to his head.

  ‘He doesn’t know what it’s like to be dead,’ he said, ‘because when you’re dead your knowing time is over. Kurt knows nothing. He did it for nothing.’

  ‘He’ll be regretting it then,’ Freddie said.

  ‘No, he won’t be regretting it.’ Rory was emphatic, excited at feeling sure he was close to some profound insight; sometimes you did that, got just the tiniest whisker’s width away from what was the true meaning of the whole of life, the universe, everything – as the book went. ‘See, your regretting time is over too. Your everything time is. He’s beyond aware.’

  Freddie laughed and looked at him. He had eyes like Ellie’s, blue and overknowing. ‘Beyond aware. So not imaginable. Waste of good time and a bullet then, right?’

  Rory punched him on the shoulder. The insight moment whizzed on by, escaping his grasp yet again as he said, ‘Man, are you ripping the piss?’

  ‘When polishing the top of the dresser, please DO NOT place the goldfish bowl on the shelf unit in front of the mirror.’

  Pretty decisive capitals, those. Anya was sitting next to Jay in the van and looking worried, waiting for an explanation. Jay read the note again, a note that Mrs Cooper had insisted Anya show to Jay ‘In Person’ which meant that after a anxious phone call from Anya she had driven over to the Coopers’ hacienda-style bungalow to meet her and see what the problem was, leaving April boiling up a test batch of the cabbage soup.

  Obviously it was of enormous importance to Mrs Cooper, this thing with the fish, although when Jay had previously been to the house herself, the small, plastic tank had seemed no different from any other standard-issue petshop number containing a pair of very ordinary goldfish shimmying around looking bored among pondweed, gravel and a miniature shipwreck. Hard as she tried, she could recall no outstanding features about them, and unless the underside of the tank was covered in razor wire, there was surely nothing that could do damage to a perfectly sturdy-looking beech-veneer Habitat unit. Perhaps Mrs Cooper didn’t want the fish getting overexcited. Possibly she was a keen student of fish psychology and knew it would upset them deeply to see themselves reflected, only to be disappointed when returned to their usual spot to find their new ‘companions’ had vanished.

  ‘Mrs Cooper says the fish is “fish ooey” and I am not understand,’ Anya told her. ‘Is money, she says. A money fish? They’s not gold, only fishgold.’

  Light dawned and Jay laughed. ‘Fish ooey? Oh, I get it! Feng shui.’

  ‘Huh?’ Anya was no closer to understanding and there seemed no point in going into deep, linguistically tricky explanations about the mystical science of placing household objects. This might, Jay realized, also explain the mysterious coins Mrs Cooper kept under her doormat which Anya carefully removed and piled up on the dresser each week, only to find they were back in place again next time she washed the floor. Jay had assumed it was a test of trust. She suspected several clients did that, sneakily leaving pound coins around or a crafty fiver to catch out a light-fingered employee.

  ‘It’s OK Anya, I’ll talk to her. Just put the fish on the floor while you wipe down the dresser and then put them back again. I’ll talk to Mrs Cooper.’

  ‘OK, you talk.’ Anya smiled, relieved though none the wiser, and twiddled her finger beside her temple. ‘Mrs Cooper has loose head,’ she said.

  Jay laughed guiltily, feeling she should not really be conspiring with her staff in questioning the clients’ sanity. Anya was right though, it was a fine line, the one between having high domestic standards and being obsessive.
This wasn’t Mrs Cooper’s first complaint regarding Anya. Only a fortnight before there had been a stormy phone call demanding that Anya return at once because she’d left the dining chairs pulled out a little way from the table instead of pushed in underneath as far as they could go, in Mrs Cooper’s preferred way. Of course she’d made the girl do no such ridiculous thing and got out of the situation slyly by offering to send someone else the next week instead. That had Mrs C. backtracking – Anya was a top-rate cleaner, fast and thorough, and Jay would have been thrilled if all her staff were like her. The placing here or there of the set of heavy ladder-back chairs suddenly became less important than hanging onto a highly valued and sought-after worker.

  On her way back, Jay drove past the Swannery and glanced up at Charles Walton’s apartment. He’d be home the next day so there wasn’t really time to sneak April in for a quick look round, much as she’d like to. They’d have to wait till Delphine was in residence and hope she didn’t swap the fabulous grey suede sofas for gentleman’s-club earth-brown chesterfields with matching pouffes. April would love the Picasso (if it actually was one) and she’d giggle about the en suite wet-room with the TV built into the glass wall. A natty addition would be one of those Philippe Starck perspex Ghost chairs, then you could sit and watch EastEnders in comfort while you rinsed conditioner out of your hair.

  Jay had still got the Swannery keys in her bag, which wasn’t very efficient of her. They should really be tagged with a code number and hung on the rack in the cupboard in her office. None of the keys had their relevant addresses on them – if they did, and there was a burglary in her or Barbara’s office, the theft of the keys could result in dozens of households having to get the locksmiths in.

  At the traffic lights, Jay had a quick look in her bag for Charles’s keys. She intended to put them on the dashboard to remind herself to take them straight up to the office when she got in. It didn’t bother her that she couldn’t immediately find them; the bag was dark and deep and full of the usual clutter that most women, except the obsessively tidy, accumulate. She pictured her shamefaced horror if snoopers such as airport security staff asked to peer into it. The lights changed to green and she had to stop the search as a Range Rover behind beeped peevishly at her. She would wait till she got home. The keys were either somewhere in the cavernous bag or already up on her desk.