Size Matters

by Judy Astley

  Reluctantly, Jay hauled herself out of the hot, bubbly water and wrapped herself snugly in a towel, patting gently at her tender tummy skin before giving her thighs a brisk, hard rub. It was important, it said on the instructions that were in the pack of anti-cellulite cream she’d bought on the way home from Mrs Howard’s, to keep the circulation stimulated. A hot bath was just the thing, she imagined, though she suspected if she’d read to the bottom of the page she’d find she should have finished off by standing under a freezing shower scraping exfoliating grit into her skin. That particular approach seemed too brutal and Scandinavian for her. Ideally she imagined there should be a snow-fringed ice-strewn lake for her to plunge into, just to add that extra effective tingle. Horrible. Thank goodness for living in a moderate climate.

  ‘Of course, being embroiled in the vice trade might explain . . .’ she went on, pulling on a strappy silk nightie for Planet Man and his telescope to admire before wandering into the bedroom, where Greg had now started playing with the TV channels. He didn’t look up (so much for the skimpy silk), so she guessed he was in eager search of football or a film with guns and spies. She sat on the bed, blocking his view. ‘. . . it might explain how Charles can afford all those fab paintings, and that glitzy place he’s got to live in. Doesn’t explain what he’s doing marrying Delphine.’

  ‘How about that good old-fashioned word, “love”?’ Greg said softly, leaning over to kiss her. ‘Remember that?’

  Jay then felt bad. Of course it would be love. Why shouldn’t it be? And what else would it be? Just because Delphine had been a difficult, spoiled, overbearing girl who’d somehow been a blight on a good bit of Jay’s younger life, it didn’t follow that she was completely unendearing to the rest of the world. Or that she hadn’t changed over the past ten absent years. She’d have softened in that time. She must have: how could she not, losing her second husband after only five years? Win hadn’t been oversympathetic, exactly, when Bill Durant’s liver had gone into final booze overload and abruptly stopped working. She’d said it was a perfect moment for Delphine to come back home, but Delphine, understandably uppity about the word ‘perfect’, said she’d got used to the sunshine and had all the emotional support she needed, thank you very much, from the Yallingup Tango Troupe. Jay remembered Win being quite miffed that her consolation skills were not to be called on, saying, ‘I never liked that man; he was always scratching himself somewhere.’

  As she switched off the bedside light, Jay promised herself she would do her best for her cousin, make sure that her stay with the family was as much fun as it could be, and help send her off to her new life with as much generosity of spirit as she could muster. It couldn’t be that difficult. And it would be the proper grown-up thing to do. Whatever Charles was up to, either it would all become clear or it wouldn’t.

  The kitten was miaowing on the landing. Barbara had suggested shutting it in the kitchen so it wouldn’t have any choice but to sleep in its own basket, but she hadn’t taken into account that their kitchen didn’t actually have a door. Ellie climbed out of bed and picked up the little yowling creature and took it back under the duvet with her. It settled immediately, snuggling down beside her and purring and closing its eyes. It was four in the morning.

  ‘Poor baby Cicely, are you missing your mummy?’ Ellie whispered to it as she stroked its paws. ‘Why didn’t you curl up on the sofa with Daffodil?’

  But Daffodil was likely to have slunk out through the cat flap for her usual pre-dawn wander. Cats, Ellie thought as she tried to get back to sleep, had a whole secret life that their owners could only guess at. Rory was being very cat-like at the moment, smiling to himself at something secret that was happening in his own head. Usually if there was something going on he’d drop a few clues – he wouldn’t be able to resist – but this time, well . . . nothing except this sly half-smile. It was there all the time which was so completely not how he’d been for the last few weeks, when he’d had no light in his eyes and had barely smiled at anything. She wished she knew what it was, if only to help him keep whatever secret it was safe from Tasha. If Tasha saw him looking like that, all cat-with-the-cream, she’d worm it out of him. If he’d told me, Ellie thought, I could help him to distract her from burrowing into the truth somehow. Unless it was all about Tasha? Were he and Tash . . . were they seeing each other? Had Tash finally got round him and persuaded him that she was exactly what he wanted? This thought landed in her brain with all the force of a dropped bomb, this certainty that this was what was happening. She felt quite sick. Completely left out, as if she was just some little child who wasn’t being let in on grown-up secrets. Bloody sodding Tasha, she whispered to the sleeping kitten, I just hate her.

  It was a last-ditch attempt before Delphine day. Not an ounce was budging with the low-carbohydrate diet. In fact two sneaky pounds had crept back on board and she could feel others clamouring on her personal quayside, all packed and ready to join them. This was purely, Jay felt, because although it was pretty easy to avoid bread, potatoes and such during the day, by the evening you were in dire need of a bit of ballast. According to one of the books she’d been reading, a tiny miscalculation in carbohydrate grams at this point meant that all the otherwise harmless full-cream milk, the cheese, the avocado, the steak and the eggs were suddenly diverted from their job as basic fuel to larding themselves permanently onto your hips. With a family that was used to meals which regularly featured rice or pasta, and didn’t include much red meat during the week, it would hardly be either easy or fair to inflict daily chunks of flesh, slabs of fish and endless, endless chicken on them all. How to have spaghetti Bolognese without the spaghetti? A risotto without the rice? Not possible. And besides, as quick lunches go, Jay was heartily sick of avocado and prawns or yet more tuna.

  ‘Rosemary Conley. Now that’s the one for us,’ Pat across the road told her when she found Jay dispiritedly bagging up more organic broccoli in Waitrose. ‘I’m doing OK at Weight Watchers but the Conley class has an exercise section as well, so that should gee things up even more, I feel.’

  ‘That means you can’t just slope off after the weigh-in,’ Jay pointed out. ‘Which also means you’ve got to listen to the talk bit.’

  ‘Well yes,’ Pat conceded. ‘But you never know, it might be useful. Someone might have come up with a no-calorie cheesecake.’

  So here they were, signing up for a five-week special offer in the hall of what used to be a school but was now an adult education centre. The dark-panelled walls held lists of the names of girls who’d excelled in exams over the previous half-century, all meticulously signwritten in gold.

  ‘I’m up there.’ Pat nudged Jay and pointed to the top of the 1976 list of A-level stars on the wall opposite. ‘But they spelled me wrong. Look at that: “Patrickia” Andrews, I ask you. I feel like bringing in a pot of gold paint and crossing out the “k”.’

  ‘I think you should,’ Jay said as they handed over their cash and received yet another diet-guide booklet full of you-can-do-it cheer and promise. ‘I think we should sneak in very early one morning and just do it. We could do it really neatly with car paint and a stencil.’ She meant it. Why put up with something so annoying, albeit close to frivolously trivial, that could be so easily changed?

  The Rosemary Conley diet didn’t pussyfoot around with points and sins.

  ‘We’re talking calorie control, and we’re talking getting those fat percentages down,’ Vanessa, the leader, told the class newcomers with back-to-basics, no-nonsense briskness. ‘Keep the calories below fourteen hundred and whatever you eat, look at the packaging and make sure the fat content’s always under four per cent. That’s four grams per hundred,’ she added, just to make sure the maths had sunk in. ‘And if you’re in doubt, refer to the books you’ll be given that show you all the calculations. OK?’ Vanessa beamed and turned her attention to the whole class. ‘And now ladies . . .’ she rallied them, ‘let’s talk turkey rashers!’

  A brief talk about dry-frie
d low-cal turkey-rasher breakfasts was followed by a comparison of supermarket pizzas, showing which ones were possibles for inclusion in the diet and which ones were not, all illustrated with packaging which was passed round the class.

  ‘I’d have thought that on any low calorie diet the simple word “no” would apply to pizza, wouldn’t you?’ Jay whispered to Pat as they prepared to get going with the exercise section of the class. They’d been advised by Vanessa to stand at the back for this first session and just ‘try to keep up as and when and don’t worry if you find it tricksy; my ladies have been learning this routine for a few weeks now,’ leading Jay to dread being expected to achieve Chorus Line skill after the first couple of classes. Instead, the steps were not too hard to follow, though the energy required was deceptive: it was only when they took a breather to get water that she realized she was a lot more puffed than she’d expected to be. Low-impact aerobics was replaced for the last ten minutes by stretchy floor exercises and ended with a peaceful, relaxing cool-down on the mats. Jay would, she decided as she lay and looked at the peeling ceiling, come again. But never, even under threat of severe torture, would she breakfast on turkey rashers.

  It was all set. So long as he could find out for sure that this Charles bloke (sleazy pimp, as he now thought of him) would still be away (and Rory was as sure as he could be, because his mum had said Charles was off to Hong Kong this week), then it was all on for the night of Friday week. A Saturday would have given him more time to get food and stuff (and himself) ready, but then it wouldn’t give him any time to sort out any bits of clearing up afterwards. This way, he’d even be able to leave the washing up till the next morning, when he’d come back in and completely obliterate all trace of people. Not that there’d be much. It was only going to be him and Samantha and Shelley and that divvy twat Hal Clegg who apparently all the girls ‘really liked’, according to Samantha, because he was just ‘sooo hilarious’. Rory couldn’t see it himself. What was funny about a bloke who was so far into the clouds that in Art he’d actually asked whether Blu Cantrell was a light blue shade or a dark one? If Rory’d said it everyone would have thrown wet paint at him and called him a tosser for not being able to tell the difference between a pigment and a pop star. But oh no, Hal comes out with it and they’re all laughing along, highly amused. Still, whatever floats their boats. So long as the guy was useful. He’d even volunteered to nick some of his dad’s champagne for them so that was a good start. There was just one more essential thing Rory had to do for now and that was sort out the keys. Charles had had them copied for Barbara and left the other set with his mum so that she could take Delphine over there when she got here. It was a risk that he’d nicked them but at least she wasn’t needing them for a few more days yet.

  Ellie seemed to be suspicious, which was a bit worrying. At home, she kept looking at him sideways and half-starting to say something. Whatever it was he wished she’d just come out with it, so he could get his lying over with and convince her there was absolutely nothing going on, nothing at all. Tasha was also hanging around a lot, which was a problem. It was like she could sniff out that there was something going down and she was working on getting it out of him. Not a chance, he thought, wondering if he ought to wear garlic round his neck to fend her off like you do with vampires.

  It was lunchtime. Rory sauntered out of the last class of the morning (Chemistry) at his usual don’t-care pace. It wouldn’t do to rush, even though he risked finding himself short of time. He didn’t want anyone following him. As he ambled casually towards the school gate he realized he was enjoying himself hugely, feeling quite excited and playing the part of a spy-type person inside his head, a man with a secret mission and everything to lose.

  At the gate he had a quick look round to see if there was anyone around that he knew. Nobody. Now he could run. He sprinted fast up the road, round the corner and across the main road into the High Street. Still no-one, not unless you counted a few of the sixth-form girls pointing at skirts in Topshop’s window. They wouldn’t notice him, or anything else; they were on a completely different kind of mission.

  Carefully (and needlessly, even he would acknowledge it now) he looked around again before he dodged into the doorway of Bowden’s Hardware and slid in through the door. There was a resinous tang of paints and wood shavings and he breathed it in, savouring the atmosphere for a moment.

  It didn’t take long. Luckily there were no customers ahead of him at the key-cutting counter. You could be there all day if you were stuck behind someone getting five door keys and a spare for the car.

  As the cutting machine ground away, Rory got absorbed in a wall full of paint charts. Idly he picked out a few shades of purple, ranging from a deep lavender through to sumptuous aubergine, and imagined having these colours on his own room walls. Would they make a good background for the arty black-and-white photo stuff he was planning? Possibly not. A request from the key cutter for £6.50 brought him back to earth.

  ‘Oh, er, right. Thanks,’ he mumbled, sorting money from his pocket.

  ‘I’ll take those, for you, shall I?’ A harsh and familiar girly voice cut across his thoughts and long pale fingers, decorated with fright-pink nail varnish, reached forward and took the keys out of the hands of the technician before Rory could get them. ‘Tasha! What are you doing in here?’ He didn’t really need to ask – the sly sod had obviously followed him.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be? Free country innit?’ she said pertly, grinning a challenge at him. ‘And what are you looking so guilty about, Rory Callendar?’ Teasing, she dangled the keys at him then snatched them back as he lunged to grab them.

  ‘What we got here then? Two sets of keys. Hmm. One with a tiny little label. “The Swannery”! Oooh I know where that is. Big new block by the river with a posh bit on the top. You shouldn’t leave keys around with labels on, you know, Rory, people could take them and break in, couldn’t they?’ She backed towards the shop door, still holding out the keys, just out of range. At this rate he was going to have to rugby-tackle her and pin her to the ground outside in the precinct. Not a good move.

  It was undeniable that he’d been stupid about the label. He’d just quickly tagged the keys the night before in case somehow in the night they got mixed up with all the others his mum had in her key cupboard. He didn’t know what he’d have done if she’d found it – just tried to convince her she was losing it in the granny-brain department, he assumed.

  ‘So what are you doing with these?’ Tasha said, linking her arm through his and almost dragging him out of the shop and back in the direction of school. He surrendered, hopelessly.

  ‘I’m getting some spares cut for my mum,’ he told her. ‘She’s too busy to do it herself so I said I would.’ Not bad, he thought. Surely that would do?

  ‘So why’s she want them?’

  ‘She’s cleaning the penthouse.’ Shit. He hadn’t meant to say that. Just any old flat would have done. Now he’d given something away.

  ‘Cleaning? Your mum doesn’t do cleaning.’ Tasha laughed. ‘I’m not a complete muppet, Rory.’

  ‘She does! You’ve seen her, driving a Dishing the Dirt van!’

  ‘Yeah but . . . OK,’ she said suddenly, letting go of him and handing over the keys. ‘OK you can have them back. I believe you,’ she said. Quickly, so fast he barely knew it had happened, she kissed him briefly on his mouth and skittered away into the school grounds, giving him the faint taste of minty gum and lipstick and a feeling that she wasn’t going to leave things at that.

  One of the Henrys had gone missing, along with a floor mop, a bag of dusters and J-cloths and the standard box of cleaning products that went on every job. Monique, it turned out, had been in overnight charge of a van and had been due to meet Barbara that morning to clean Charles Morgan’s apartment.

  ‘Bloody Monique,’ Barbara said down the phone to Jay. ‘She went out with her boyfriend in the van last night and decided it would be a good idea to drop off all the stuff ready for t
oday. Probably wanted it all cleared out so they’d have space for some back-seat action, though she says they were moving a carpet. So what does she do? She can’t get into the flat so she parks all the kit in a dustbin ready to pick up in the morning. And guess what – the bin men have been. We’re going to be late starting at the Swannery now and it’ll run into Mrs Prentice’s time for her Regular. Have you got any spare stuff at your place? Selina and Mandy are out with my other van.’

  ‘I have. Now Mrs Caldwell’s off the list one of the vans is here, all loaded up and ready to go. I’ll bring it round to the flat now.’

  Oh this was a great start, Jay thought, thanking her stars that Charles was out of the country. What a terrific example of non-efficiency this would have presented. She could just see Delphine cackling about it, telling her how typically disorganized she’d been, employing someone who managed to lose the entire tools of the trade. What was Monique thinking about? Was her brain completely ruled by her hormones? She’d have done better to leave the lot in the Swannery’s doorway. Someone would probably have taken it all inside, if only to keep it out of the way of the rain. It was hardly a place where people were going to pounce on it gleefully and have it down the next car boot sale before you could say ‘nicked’.

  Charles actually being on the premises was quite a shock. Jay wasn’t surprised to see the Porsche in the car park – she assumed he’d left it safely parked and gone off to work in a taxi. To arrive at the open door and find him standing there waving her in was not what she’d intended. Bugger, she thought, while at the same time beaming a jolly hello at him as he stood there, obviously on his way out with one of those pilot’s bag-on-wheels.