by Judy Astley
Put into context, this didn’t sound in the least bit unlikely, Jay thought as she walked up her own garden path. Possibly almost as many people, women at least, attended weight-loss meetings each week as went to church. Either way, you were gathered together to take in instructive words of wisdom from an inspiring congregation leader. With food indulgence described at some of these clubs as ‘wicked’ or ‘naughty’, eating a jam-filled doughnut represented little less than a cataclysmic falling from grace. It felt mildly uncomfortable, thinking like this, that one way or another Jay had now paid up to join the global congregation for collective worship at the altar of the modern, affluent-Western goddess called Thin.
TWELVE
Jogging
If she jogged to the recreation ground at the end of the road, and then ran all the way round it twice, Jay reckoned she’d have earned herself a dollop of butter with the marmalade on her breakfast toast instead of either nothing at all or a depressing and taste-free scraping of fatless spread. Diets that worked, she decided as she retied the laces on her trainers and smoothed down her unflattering navy Boden pull-ons, were all in the detail. Weight Watchers allowed you to accrue extra points by means of exercise and she was going to spend them on things that made life worth living (olive oil, good wine), rather than frittering them away on their suggested treats (a low-fat chocolate mousse or a small can of peach slices).
It wasn’t far to the park. Surely no more than a couple of hundred yards, and there’d be few people about at seven in the morning who were likely to notice her and snigger at her efforts. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually run. Possibly it had been when playing tennis in the sixth form at school or racing for a bus during university days. She’d certainly hurtled about after the children when they were small, playing French cricket on beaches, rushing to stop a carelessly pushed swing from dashing their tiny brains out as they wandered too close. And every dutiful year she’d reluctantly joined in the ritual humiliation in the Mothers’ Race at primary-school sports days.
She recalled now, that the mothers had been firmly divided into two camps. She was one of those who, when the call came for the dreaded race, merely put down her glass of wine, kicked off her shoes and padded to the starting line hoping she wouldn’t trip over her skirt. The other lot, the Über-mothers, would already be there jogging up and down on the spot, streamlined in serious Lycra and sporting Prada running shoes, possibly with spikes. They’d been warming up, trackside, since the egg and spoon got started and would have collected their offspring, loaded them into the 4 x 4 and be halfway to Kodali violin by the time Jay and co. giggled into the home straight.
She pulled the door shut behind her as quietly as she could. Daffodil slipped out to join her on the path, miaowing an interest in this unusually early exit from the house and expressing concern that her keeper had overlooked something with regard to the provision of feline breakfast.
‘I’ll be back in a little while, Daffy.’ Jay bent to stroke the cat’s cool treacle-coloured ears. She wanted her to go back in the house. How embarrassing would it be, the first time she ventured out for a public display of activity, to have Daffodil trotting effortlessly alongside, barely having to break into a canter, racing up and down trees on the way while she gasped and plodded inelegantly, all hopeless human clumsiness. Talk about competition – fitness-wise cats won every time, paws down. This was clearly unfair, seeing as most of their lives they did nothing but laze around in patches of sunshine and sleep.
Jay shivered in her ancient Eric Clapton T-shirt. She had briefly considered wearing one of the yellow Dishing the Dirt polo shirts that she’d had made for the girls the year before, so that she’d be doing a useful bit of advertising as she ran. The idea had quickly been rejected; any potential customers were less likely to be attracted than terminally put off by the sight of her puffing along, sweating and unshowered.
Pausing only to look both ways along the road and crossing her fingers that she wouldn’t meet anyone she knew, Jay set off at a comfortable jogging pace. The early air was crisp and bright and only lightly tinged with the kerosene scent of Heathrow-bound aircraft. Daffodil ran beside her for the first fifty yards then fell back, yowling a protest that her owner was escaping beyond territorial bounds. Jay whizzed along, enjoying the breeze on her face and trying not to notice how much her flesh blobbed up and down in rhythm with her pounding feet. No wonder it was called jogging.
It couldn’t be good for you, it occurred to her, having all your essential organs bouncing around like this. If God had meant humans to run he’d have put livers and kidneys and other internal offal on springs. Unless that was what bits like the diaphragm and pelvic floor were for. That must be right. She pictured biology textbook drawings of muscles looking like swathes of bandages, cocooning and comforting. Was she hallucinating, she wondered as she huffed and puffed, trying to bring her mind back to what she was doing and where she was going. Was dehydration madness already setting in or did all runners go into weird trains of thought, like a crazed person’s version of meditation?
Just before the park gates she heard a familiar mechanical whirring sound behind her, followed by ‘Oi, darling, fancy a pint?’ as the milkman whizzed past on his float, waving a carton of milk in her direction.
‘Morning Bill!’ She managed to summon up just enough spare breath to greet him.
‘Keep it up, love! Next stop the London Marathon!’ he laughed as he sped past, and Jay staggered into the park feeling the back of her throat burning dry with the effort of unaccustomed exercise.
‘God, I’m unfit,’ she groaned to herself. Where had those careless, youthful days gone when it had been no effort to race up and down a hockey pitch hundreds of times in half an hour? And thinking about the Marathon, could they really be true, those stories she’d read of people starting out for their first training session as utterly useless and feeble as she was, and ending up a mere few months later running twenty-six miles dressed as a penguin? How could that happen?
The park seemed crammed with early morning exercisers. A skinny young man all in white stood beneath the trees going through a slow-motion t’ai chi routine. A pair of shiny-sleek tanned girls in tiny shorts whirled past together on Rollerblades, reminding her of a TV tampon ad. There were runners everywhere – good, competent ones. No-one else seemed to have wobbly tummies and trembling legs. Joining the circuit on the path round the large play area was like being the one doing a badly co-ordinated breast stroke in the slow lane at the swimming pool while others sped past in a stylish crawl. Jay was constantly overtaken by fit, svelte twenty-something women with their hair scraped back into bouncy ponytails, wearing either serious cut-off-top-and-Lycra training kit or tight, dolly-mixture shades of Juicy Couture velour. The men were less of a pretty sight. Mostly they were pale, furry-legged middle-years ones trundling by clad in wife-beater vests and too-brief shiny shorts, looking unattractively larval in their limb exposure, huffing along with their air-punching fists clenched tight. Dog-walkers were a different shape again, roundly swaddled in snug coats. They wove about at a leisurely pace, getting in the way, then stopping in mid-path to bend with their rotund bottoms in the air and pick up their poochs’ messes, using hands encased in Tesco’s carrier bags.
It occurred to Jay that you could usefully power-walk with a dog. A dog would haul you along at a good calorie-burning speed, then give you frequent welcome breathers as it slowed to sniff out rivals and pee on the trees. She didn’t fancy the bit with the Tesco’s bags though, shuddering at the thought of dealing with still-warm animal excrement. More crazy train of dehydrated thought, she realized. Now she knew why everyone else ran along sucking liquid from bottles.
Agonized with exhaustion, Jay trailed towards the gate after her final lap and faced the much busier road. As if the good-natured derision of Bill the milkman hadn’t been bad enough, now half the neighbourhood seemed to be on the lookout for someone to tease. Pat, her Weight Watchers companion, was acr
oss the road in her driveway, stowing her briefcase into her car boot. ‘Glad to see you’re taking it seriously!’ she yelled. ‘You’ll be down to Goal Weight in a fortnight!’ Jay, exhausted and breathless, simply waved a limp hand at her.
Cathy was also out by her gate, putting her box of newspapers on the pavement ready for the recycling truck. ‘Don’t forget to cool down properly,’ she advised. ‘Eyes closed in Child Pose would be good – it stretches your back and releases tension . . .’ she was saying as Jay staggered into her own front garden, where the postman was hovering on the doorstep.
‘Morning Mrs C.,’ he said, handing over a pile of mail, ‘Mostly junk today plus a couple of bills and your Toast catalogue. Oh and a nice pink airmail one from Australia. Don’t see many of those these days, what with e-mail and cheap rate phones . . .’
Jay leaned on the door frame and panted, stretching first one leg down and then the other, trying to catch her breath. She had a vague feeling she might have overdone it.
‘You all right Mrs C.?’ the postman asked, slightly nervous. ‘If I was you I’d have a nice cup of tea and a sit-down. That’ll sort you out.’
Cup of tea be buggered, Jay thought as, legs trembling, she let herself into the house and was greeted by the smell of bacon grilling. Greg was buttering wholemeal bread. He looked at her enquiringly, eyebrows up, and she nodded with what felt like the last of her strength. Two slices of bread (medium cut) had to be three points. Two slices of grilled bacon, six points. So it was half a day’s worth of food points but she’d earned them, she thought as she sank into the kitchen sofa and kicked off her trainers, boy had she ever earned them.
‘Thing is, Tasha,’ Ellie began, wondering how to continue without risking Tasha’s wrath. It wasn’t the best moment, being in the middle of the biology class, but it might be the only one she got that day, or even that week. Tasha was like a sort of elf, flitting about fast between her chosen people and putting spells on them. You might get her attention for half an hour, you might think you’re the Best Friend of the Day but then you wouldn’t see her again on close-up terms for ages. She’d chosen to sit next to Ellie for biology (staring out Amanda till she backed away to the far corner of the room) and somehow Ellie had to get her to accept the rat back again. Now. Nobody at home really wanted it, though her dad had got it out to play with a couple of times and said something about designing it a good cage. He’d doodled some sketches on a bit of paper and muttered something about (surprise, surprise) perspex. Right now the poor rat was living in an old fishtank left over from when Imogen had kept a couple of terrapins years ago. It kept standing up on its back legs, sniffing the air above it, leaning its long slim paws against the glass and showing its pinkish tummy. It looked a bit sad in the makeshift house, as if it knew it should only be temporary but was worried that everyone had forgotten about fixing it up with a real home.
She began again while someone was asking Mr Murray a question. ‘Thing is, Tasha, we’ve, like, got a cat, you see and . . .’ She couldn’t get any further. Mr Murray had stopped listing the different types of bone joints on the board and was expecting some kind of response to a question he’d asked. She hadn’t a clue what it was and looked down at her notes to avoid catching his eye.
‘Ellie. What about you? Any ideas?’ She’d known he’d ask her, just known. Typical. She looked up at his list. Bones. Think, Ellie, what could he want to be told about them?
‘Hinge?’ she guessed, then looked properly at the board. Hinge was already up there. They all were, as far as she could see. What was it he’d asked, then?
‘We were talking ball and socket joints, Ellie.’ He sighed, in his teacher-specialist am-I-completely-wasting-my-time way. ‘I simply asked you for an example, which you’d know if you’d been listening.’ He smiled, the chilly sort he often did with the cold stary eyes that meant he was getting angry, and that she shouldn’t even think he’d be happy if she smiled back. But she did anyway, it seemed only good manners. Mr Murray glared.
‘Hip joint,’ she said quickly. It had to be that – it always was. That or shoulder. There were only the two, weren’t there? Why was he asking them stupid questions like that? Mr Murray was smiling again, but not at her and not so coldly. Beside her, Tasha was gazing wide-eyed at him and running her pointy scarlet tongue over her top lip. She pulled gently at a tendril of hair and twirled it round her finger. Ellie kicked at her beneath the desk. What was she doing? Pretending she was out on the pull? Was there any man on the planet whom she wouldn’t consider fair game?
‘Yes, hip joint. Or you could have said shoulder.’ Mr Murray came back to earth at last and returned to the board just as the bell rang for the end of the class.
‘There y’go, I got you out of a detention for sure,’ Tasha said, aiming her huge wolfy grin at Ellie. ‘You owe me one. How’s the rat? Brilliant isn’t he? My brother breeds them. They win prizes at shows.’
Ellie sighed, beaten. ‘He’s fine. He’s lovely. Thanks, Tasha.’
Well what else could she say?
Upstairs in her little office, Jay forced herself to confront her Weight Watchers daily food diary and write down the shaming breakfast truth:
Bread (very thick-cut, chunky wholemeal): At a guess, four points.
Bacon (two large rashers): Six points.
Brown sauce (a good-sized dollop): Probably one point.
Butter (thick and melted into the hot bacon): At least another point.
Twelve points gone left only six for the rest of the day, although she had earned back a good two by running (well she called it running, an unkind observer, one who lacked any genes of generosity might snigger and call it ‘staggering’). If she was to keep within the Weight Watching guidelines she would have to stick to No Point soup, a tuna salad and sliver of skinless chicken. It could be done, just.
A thank-you card from Charles had arrived in the same post as Delphine’s letter. The front of it featured a photo of a Siamese cat watching a caged budgie, which she took to be evidence of a sense of humour rather than a comment on Daffodil’s delinquency. He was effusive about the food (‘exquisite’) and about the company (‘delectable’ – a strange word to use if it encompassed the watchful, silent Rory, gushing Win and Ellie noisily slurping Coke) and hoped they’d meet up again soon, although he was ‘Horribly busy, off to Singapore in the next few days and with fingers in so many pies.’
He must mean this club he’s involved with, she thought, wishing he’d been a bit more forthcoming about it. Possibly he would have been if the cat-plus-rook hadn’t interrupted the conversational flow. By now she could have been up to speed about whether he was involved in the kind of thing where gentlemen of a certain age sat on gnarled leather grunting behind the Daily Telegraph, or something more to Delphine’s taste: a hall with parquet and a glitterball where ladies (also of a certain age) took their partners for the military two-step.
Delphine’s carnation-scented letter told Jay that in two weeks she would be back in England. Not only would she be back, but she’d be here in the house occupying the spare room next to Jay’s office. Why? Surely at this stage in life she wasn’t preserving her maidenly virtue? What was wrong with moving in with Charles right from the off? Superstition, probably, she decided. Delphine and Win had always been keen on touching wood and coaxing black cats across their paths.
‘You don’t mind, do you? I don’t want to stay with Mum – she’ll only fuss.’ Delphine had written. ‘I’m a bit beyond all that.’
Jay could only sympathize there, really. It would be hard not to agree with Delphine on this in spite of initial horror at having her on the premises for a front-row view of her family’s disordered existence. With Delphine comfortably installed in her mother’s bungalow’s second bedroom (musk-rose-chintz overload, accented with gilt, frilled broderie anglaise cushions lined up to attention, corners up, on the bed), Win would be sure to go into princess-pampering overdrive. She’d be straight back into shoving cedar shoe trees into
all Delphine’s footwear and getting up Before God to concoct the muesli that Delphine hadn’t tasted since the morning she’d left the house under an acre of white tulle and satin to marry Peter Bicton. She’d been barely nineteen then, she and Win both triumphant that all their efforts had succeeded. This was life’s great prize they’d been aiming for since Delphine had come top in domestic science at thirteen and started amassing cookery books, small domestic gadgets and Tupperware.
The two of them made an annual pilgrimage to the Ideal Home Exhibition with the same reverence that other folks went to Lourdes. April and Jay used to mock. In their bedroom, during occasional futile attempts to put away their hopelessly untidy possessions, they’d parody Win, singing ‘She’ll make someone a lovely little wife’ while they tried to stuff clothes into overfilled drawers. Delphine’s years of ballroom dancing had, when she’d become a teenager, been topped up with evening classes in cake decoration, floral art and home furnishings. If you had to concoct a list of things Delphine would never, ever do, Jay reckoned at number one would be: slinging up a pair of IKEA tab-top ready-made curtains, hemmed with iron-on Wundaweb. She’d feel cheated at the waste of a chance for lining, interlining and triple goblet pleats.
‘Brains are all very well, Jay,’ Win had gloated when Jay had come back from university for the wedding weekend. ‘My Delphine’s got herself nicely married without faffing about with too much education.’
For Win, this wedding knocked into eternal oblivion any starred double first in Classics or Law. There would be no glittering career on the planet that she’d rate higher than housewifery. She’d leaned in close to Jay and, in a spirit of genuine generosity, whispered her sure-fire tip. ‘It doesn’t do to look too clever, dear. Always remember men like to think they know more than we do.’ Jay had managed to keep a straight face and solemnly thanked her aunt for the advice. It was Win’s day, after all. Hers and Delphine’s.