Size Matters

by Judy Astley

  But looking at Delphine’s triumphant consolation prize, even though Jay knew she was being shallow and greedy, right then she’d rather have sold her soul to have failed and got a bike. That night she’d woken up trembling with guilt from a dream about a tangle of flesh and metal. Even now she could still picture the black of the tarmac, the yellow of Delphine’s cascading, spun-gold princess hair and the sparkle of sunlight on new chrome.

  Ellie and Rory walked slowly and silently through the school gates together and trudged up the long driveway, heads down against the wind. Usually they arrived separately but today, Rory’s first day back after his operation, it was as if each could do with the support of the other. Both felt nervy and each had the same reason. Tasha.

  ‘She’s mad you know, lost it big time,’ Rory said for about the hundredth time since the previous afternoon when she’d crept up to the house and left the cage containing the white rat on the doorstep, then simply sneaked away again. ‘I mean, what is she on?’

  ‘I dunno. In the note she said it was a present.’

  ‘But who to? You or me?’ Then together they both said ‘You’ and laughed.

  ‘Got to be you, she’s your friend,’ Rory said.

  ‘No, it’s you she wants. She’s only being nice to me to get to you.’

  They’d had versions of this conversation at least twice, starting the day before when Charles was leaving after lunch and Audrey had discovered the box with the cross rat squeaking away in it and gnawing holes. She hadn’t completely freaked (all credit to her. They’d have expected an Old Person to jump onto the nearest chair and scream) but she hadn’t looked delighted to see it. Nobody had except Charles, who had picked up the cage and quite recklessly put his face close to the bars to coo at the occupant.

  ‘Oh a fancy rat!’ He had been pretty much amazed (well who wasn’t?) but not spooked or anything, opening the cage door carefully to stroke the creature. Even though he made sure his fingers didn’t get in the way of its teeth, Ellie had thought he was mad, especially after Daffodil’s rook had already pecked him. Suppose it was true that things like that ran in threes? Didn’t pilots need their fingers to be in tip-top condition, Ellie had wondered at the time, would he get banned from flying if he had stitches and a fat bandage on the finger he used to operate some essential in-flight computer?

  The note had said, ‘He’s for you. Be nice to him, Love from T.’ Wildly, Ellie had thought, oh that could mean it’s for anyone, but getting real, well it was hardly going to be a present for her parents.

  April and Freddie had thought it was hysterical. Gran and Auntie Win had gone all pursed lips and suggested they set it free in next door’s hedge, Greg had had the not-brilliant idea of letting Daffodil have a go at it, which made Mum give him a look.

  It wasn’t that funny though. How did Tasha know where they lived, for one thing? This worried Ellie a lot. It would be all over their year now that they lived in a big house with a Mercedes (her dad’s), a Golf (her mum’s and Moggie’s) and a silver Porsche (the visiting Charles) all parked outside like some kind of executive fleet. Where was the Dishing the Dirt van when you needed it? Round at Anya’s, ready for Monday morning and Mrs Ryan’s Regular, that’s where.

  ‘We could pretend we don’t know anything about it,’ She suggested to Rory. ‘Then she might think she’d got the wrong place.’

  ‘That won’t work. She’ll have made sure she got it right. Our address was on the hospital notes at the end of the bed when I was in there. She must have got it then.’

  ‘Or followed one of us.’

  ‘Or asked your Amanda friend or almost anyone in your class. Anyway that’s not the bit that matters. What are we going to do with the rat? Give it back to her?’

  ‘She’ll take offence. You don’t know what Tash is like when she’s upset. She goes all wild. She does things.’

  ‘Tell her you love it then, tell her it’s just what you’ve always wanted.’ She’d have to. Ellie didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Tasha. She might come round with a different sort of present, something much spookier. She might bung a lighted firework through the letterbox, or dog poo.

  They were on the school steps now. Ellie felt small whooshes as groups of people bigger than her hurtled past, eager to get inside to the fuggy warmth of the cloakrooms. She felt very tiny, even more than usual, as if she didn’t take up enough space to count as a human, because she could hardly be seen. Perhaps she couldn’t be. How brilliant would it be to be invisible? Or if you were only invisible to other people, but not to yourself, how would you know you were?

  ‘If we say we like it, she might go and give us another one. Have you thought of that? I’ll think of something, tell her it’s really nice and thanks and all that but we can’t keep it, make something up, whatever.’

  ‘Tell her Mum won’t let you. She can’t argue with that.’ Ellie gave him a look. What kind of a saddo would she be if she said something like that? Tashatype girls didn’t have mums who laid down rules about what and when. They had mums who shared their fags and shouted the place down for wearing each other’s clothes and not washing them. If she said ‘Mum won’t let me’ she’d never hear the last of it.

  Ellie went into the girls’ cloakroom and left her coat on her usual peg. She hoped it would still be there at going-home time. Sometimes coats and jackets weren’t. She’d been lucky so far – hers was a bit small to fit most of the hulky great girls who did the thieving, but then they might have younger sisters who’d be happy to have her stuff.

  ‘Good weekend?’ Amanda was sitting on the radiator, picking at a small hole in her tights. She looked eager, pent up, something she was dying to say.

  ‘Not bad,’ Ellie told her, adding, ‘nothing much happened.’ You never knew, she might be in on the rat-present thing with Tasha. Maybe she’d got one as well. Unlikely, but best to make sure it came across as no big deal.

  ‘Nothing?’ Amanda’s voice emerged as an excited squeak. ‘What do you mean nothing? Who was he?’

  Ellie took a quick look at herself in the mirror. Her hair was looking a bit lank. The phrase rats’ tails came into her head. Her mum used to say that about hers when it needed washing. She didn’t want to think about the rat. What were they going to do with it? Sell it on e-bay? Take it to the petshop and hope they’d make an exception to their new ‘no live animals’ policy?

  ‘Who was who?’ she asked Amanda at last.

  ‘That boy you were with on Friday! The one you kissed? Duh?’

  ‘Him? He was no-one, just my cousin Freddie.’

  ‘God, Ellie, he was gorgeous! I thought he was like, with you? Disappointing or what.’ The registration bell rang and the two girls picked up their bags and joined the noisy throng in the corridor. ‘I was a bit pissed off, to tell the truth. I was going to text you and tell you but I’ve run out of free time. I thought you could have told me if you were going out with someone.’

  ‘Oh I would, I would,’ Ellie reassured her. She felt as if there was something going on here that she couldn’t keep up with. All around her there seemed to be people who were fancying each other. Tasha was chasing Rory; Amanda thought Freddie was gorgeous. There was a girl in their year who’d had an abortion the term before. At lunchtimes there were couples under the trees by the railway, standing a bit apart from their groups of friends, sharing cigarettes, kissing sometimes, touching – not much, just enough to be claiming each other as their own. She didn’t feel like doing any of those things. Maybe it was something to do with being a late starter, hormone-wise. Whatever it was, the idea of getting into a bed with a smelly boy rather than a good book did not at all appeal. She sometimes wondered if it ever would.

  You couldn’t miss the sign: a big ‘Welcome to Weight Watchers’ notice was propped up outside the pub like an oversized party invitation. A posse of teenagers lurked by the wall outside and Jay crossed her fingers that they wouldn’t shout rude remarks at her as she went in. She could do without being greete
d by, ‘Oy, lard-arse!’

  Temptation beckoned on the far side of the Red Lion’s frosted glass door. You could turn right for the pints of lager and prawn-cocktail crisps option, or you could choose the path of virtue and go up the stairs to the function room. Here you would learn that the lager and crisps still were an option – albeit a risky one if you were keen to stay on that vital weight-loss curve – but only if you counted them into your daily total (possibly under ‘treats’: one pint of lager = 2 points, crisps = 6 points) and didn’t even think of having that bag of chips (9 points, but no penalties for vinegar and salt) on the way home.

  At the top of the stairs there was a queue – all female and every age from teens to seventy-plus. Jay joined it, looking at the bodies of the ten or so women ahead of her and recognizing Pat from across the road, close to where the Planet Man lived. Being here was surely brave of her: Pat was head teacher at a nearby primary school. If I was her, Jay thought, the last thing I’d want would be to risk running into off-premises school mummies when you’re owning up to fat issues. This was the danger, Greg had pointed out, in picking the meeting place closest to home that the Weight Watchers website offered.

  ‘Half the street might be there,’ he’d warned. ‘They’ll hear you confess to your worst biscuit habits.’

  Jay couldn’t help wondering why, quite frankly, some of these women were here at all. Most of them looked perfectly normal-sized (if ‘big-boned’ as her mother used to call it) to her. One very pretty young girl with jagged blonde hair was wearing a short skirt that was barely pelmet-length and looking terrific in it, with legs that were far more sapling than tree trunk and a cute, perky bum. Perhaps she was a plant, bribed to come along and show everyone what could be achieved just by sticking to the diet. Either that or she’d once been as big as a heifer, and needed the constant backup of WW, being even now only a Cadbury’s Creme Egg away from spiralling into weight-gain hell.

  ‘Hello? You at the back, are you new?’ A curly-haired young woman in a tight seaside-rock-pink velour tracksuit called to her, leaning round from where she sat at a table at the queue’s head, taking the subs.

  ‘Er . . . yes, I am.’ Every eye in the line-up was now on her, each woman blatantly sizing her up, comparing, calculating, possibly to the nearest ounce. In their various eyes she could see herself reflected: plumper, smaller, podgier, thinner-thighed, chunkier-armed. Pat, barefoot on the scales, waved to her and grinned, doing a rueful kind of ‘welcome to Fatsos Anonymous’ expression.

  ‘Take one of these forms and fill it in please, my love,’ called the pink velour. ‘And then you need to get back in the line for paying and weighing.’

  Jay took the form to a small table in the corner where a mountainous pale girl with mournfully droopy brown hair and wearing sack-shaped black seemed to be agonizing over her own answers. The questions didn’t look that difficult. It was mostly a name and address kind of thing. The girl sucked on the end of her pen.

  ‘I don’t know what to put for my Goal Weight,’ she confided to Jay in a nervous whisper. ‘I mean, in an ideal world I’d be eight stone, I mean, who wouldn’t? But, well I’m quite tall and, I mean, life’s a long way from ideal, I find, don’t you? Shall I put ten stone and hope for the best? What do you think? Or ten and a half? Or do we have to put it in metric? I’m not good at metric . . .’

  Jay hadn’t a clue. She smiled and said she thought ten stone would be fine. She could hardly be honest and tell the poor girl that, frankly, even twelve stone looked wildly ambitious.

  The girl went on, ‘I mean, I can always change it later can’t I? Maybe I should ask Paula. I’m Holly by the way.’

  ‘I’m Jay. Look, I shouldn’t worry too much.’ Jay tried to be encouraging, for surely if this bit was so anxiety-inducing, what on earth would the girl do when faced with a breakfast decision between Bran Flakes and Shredded Wheat?

  ‘Why don’t you just put down whatever you think is a realistic aim for now? Even if it’s a lot less than you’d really like to lose. Then if you do better than that you can be really pleased with yourself.’

  I’d be good at this, Jay thought as she signed her name and confirmed that she wasn’t pregnant, breast-feeding or on medication, I’d be excellent at telling everyone else how to turn themselves into sylph-like beings, totally in control of their eating habits. It was when it came to her own intake that things went, quite literally, pear-shaped.

  ‘You only want to lose a stone?’ Paula-in-the-pink gave Jay a slightly disappointed smile as if she was sure she could (and frankly should) do better than that: it was only a matter of will power.

  ‘A stone will be fine,’ Jay insisted, ‘I reckon that at my age you can be too thin, whatever the Duchess of Windsor thought.’

  Paula nodded but her bemused expression suggested that she’d filed Jay under ‘mad’ and she busied herself sorting out a membership card.

  A stone surely would be enough. Jay was now wavering. She was certain she’d been perfectly comfortable a stone ago, whenever that was. And it wouldn’t require an entire new wardrobe, just a lovely feeling that she wasn’t squeezing into her clothes.

  Paula briefly explained the Weight Watchers system: each item of food consisted of a certain number of points: a slice of bread was one point, a serving of sugar-free cereal was one and a half. Jay was allowed eighteen points per day and could more or less choose whatever she wanted as long as she stuck within the eighteen-point limit. ‘Like counting calories you mean?’ she asked.

  Paula pursed her lips and frowned slightly. ‘We don’t talk about calories here. You’ll find the points system a lot easier to follow than counting calories.’ By which, Jay gathered, there’d be no tricky long multiplication. Paula then invited her to step on the scales for the awful moment of truth. ‘If you take your shoes off today, remember to take them off every time,’ she instructed her solemnly. Jay assured her, equally solemnly, that she would and went off, after the mercifully discreet weigh-in, to join several other members on the semicircle of chairs in front of a table displaying a basket of what she recognized as butternut squash. Holly was already there, fervently studying the Week One booklet they’d been given.

  ‘Not at all a bad week, although one or two of you . . .’ Paula began her presentation and looked at the back row, where two jolly ladies were giggling happily. ‘What happened to you, Daphne? Time of the month, dear? Because that can always add a pound or two, don’t forget. We mustn’t be too hard on ourselves at those times. A couple of squares of Fruit and Nut can be such a comfort and only one and a half points gone.’

  Daphne at the back was still cackling. ‘I went to a wedding, didn’t I!’

  ‘Oh did you? How lovely. So did you relax and overdo it a bit?’

  ‘Go on, Daph, tell her,’ her companion nudged her hard. ‘Tell her how many vodka and limes you had, go on!’

  ‘Oh I shouldn’t!’ There was a general clamour for Daphne to tell.

  ‘All right then, I had twelve, didn’t I!’ More hilarity from the back. All the women turned to look at Daphne, to see what a giggling, shameless, twelve-vodkas stalwart looked like. It looked like the picture of total, uninhibited enjoyment. Pretty appealing actually, Jay considered, watching Daphne and her friend consumed with unbridled mirth.

  ‘Twelve!’ Paula’s smile was there, but was tight and forced as she sensed a revolution to be quelled. ‘Ladies, that’s more than a whole day’s points!’

  ‘Ooh I know!’ Daphne was unrepentant. ‘I had a lovely time though!’

  There was still a mutinous buzz going round in which several of the women discussed whether Daphne would have done better, points-wise, getting thoroughly drunk on wedding champagne (fewer glasses for the same vodka effect) or could have improved things marginally by substituting diet tonic for the lime juice.

  ‘Now.’ Paula all but clapped her hands together for the class’s attention. ‘Ladies. Butternut squash.’ Her pearly-nailed finger pointed to the vegetable basket
on her display table as she firmly quelled the atmosphere of mild anarchy and returned to her schedule. ‘Terrifically versatile. If you’re having people round for drinks you can make a few bowls of these lovely, delicious No-Point crisps to hand round and you won’t have the temptation of the bought ones.’

  No point? Jay wondered if she’d heard right. If there was no point, then what, exactly, was the point?

  ‘. . . simply peel, slice thinly, give them a spray with Frylite and pop them in the oven! So easy and something different, I think your guests will agree, don’t you ladies?’

  ‘Butternut-squash crisps be buggered,’ Pat snorted as she and Jay walked down the stairs together. ‘She’s dead right, they’re different. But what a sodding palaver.’

  ‘Well they sounded simple enough,’ Jay admitted. ‘But . . .’

  ‘But what’s wrong with opening a nice jar of olives? Or putting out the nuts for them but not eating them?’ Pat suggested, eyeing the saloon-bar door with a certain amount of longing as they went out to the street. Daphne was already in there. Jay could hear her joyous cackle carrying over the usual pub din. Holly had gone in after her and Jay wondered if she’d manage to be all first-day devout and go for points-free mineral water with a slice of lime, or think what the hell, there’s a whole week till the next weigh-in, and go mad with a pint of bitter and a bag of salted cashews.

  ‘Exactly. I’m going to give this lot a go though, it seems to make sense, at least in theory.’

  ‘Oh it does. I’ve done Slimming World but I never got the hang of it. Entirely my own fault rather than theirs. There was a loose wasp in the room when they were explaining the basics and I just didn’t concentrate. After that I kept mixing up my Original days and my Green days and gobbled down so many sins I thought I’d have to go to Confession.’