The Fat And The Thin Of It

by Julie Croft

eyes brim. When her bottom lip began to tremble, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I marched over to her and grabbed her in a bear-hug, braving the BO. “Will you talk to me, Jill? Please!”

  She was as stiff as a tree trunk, but felt as frail as balsa-wood. Pity and worry filled my chest, but also a twinge of envy. How on earth did she do it? Within five days of obviously worrying about being sacked, she must have dropped a dress-size. Here was me, with a son who’d given me sleepless nights since his thirteenth birthday, a daughter I adored who’d not long left home and I was pining for, and I couldn’t keep my mouth empty for longer than an hour. I was Weight Watcher’s most faithful customer, and had only, in all my dieting years, managed to prise myself into a size twelve for my wedding day. It had taken me a whole year of salads and precious little else and three days a week at the gym, and it had been a year filled with flatulence, giddiness, muscle-ache up to my eyelids and terrible mood swings, but at least I’d managed to last the day out in the strangling, size twelve cup-cake of a dress, although I could hardly drag in enough breath to whisper ‘I do’. After that, I’d fallen pregnant and gained it all back again and then some, so I vowed I would never go through such torture again. But now there she was, even though she was draped in thick PJ’s and an over-sized dressing gown, decidedly making her models look well fed, and she probably didn’t even realise!

  Still, push that aside and press on. I gave her a loving shake. “Come on sweetheart, let it go. Come on.” I coaxed as I led her to the living room.

  She was still stiff and trembling like a leaf, and I honestly thought she was on the verge of a breakdown, if she hadn’t suffered one already.

  She slumped, collapsed rather, onto the sofa and covered her face with her hands. “Oh, Jackie! I’m finished.” She mumbled, and began to shake with silent sobs.

  I sat beside her and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “What do you mean; finished? You’re not finished, you twat!”

  “I am!” she wailed as she took her hands away and revealed a screwed-up face. “I’ll never work again!”

  I cooed and rocked her. “What twaddle! Of course you’ll work again. As soon as you call your people they’ll…”

  “I can’t call them!” she yelled. “I daren’t call them! I’ll be in deep shite if I do!”

  “Why, honey?” I coaxed. She had to get it off her chest, what was left of it.

  “Harriet’s lawyer said… that… and… and…” she gulped. “Really nasty, Jackie!”

  “What did he say?”

  “More or less that if I had the merest thought to harass…”

  “Harris?”

  “Harass those people, Catwalk would take me to court for breach of contract!”

  “Did you?”

  “What?”

  “Breach something or harass someone.”

  “Of course I didn’t!” she exclaimed with frustration. “Don’t you think I know what Catwalk would do?”

  God, she was sounding like a whiney, irritated Mark, but thankfully minus the ‘like’ every other word. “Then what did he mean? How did he know if you’d called them or not?”

  “She!” she spat. “He’s a she, and a right, up her own arse bitch she is!” she sniffed. “I didn’t do anything bad, Jackie!” she whined like a child caught in the middle of something dishonest. “I didn’t like actually get a chance to call anyone!”

  Oh, there it was. Mark in Snoopy PJ’s.

  “I was like going to give it a day or two before I actually called anyone, you know? Let the dust die down, then I was going to say like…”

  “Yes, yes. I remember.” Another ‘like’ and I’d leave.

  She gave me a sullen look because I’d interrupted her, and she also had a look on her face that I couldn’t quite place. She was very distressed, obviously, but was there also a look of fear mixed with guilt? I couldn’t place it.

  “Did she threaten to sue?” I probed.

  Ah, I’d hit on something. Jill’s face screwed up like a Cabbage Patch doll giving birth.

  “Did she give you a sum?”

  Cabbage Patch Jill nodded.

  “Lots?”

  The nodding became more fervent.

  “Four figures? Five?” she was still birthing, but nothing was coming out. “Six?”

  Finally, the head crowned. “F-f-five hundred th-thousand! And possibly p-pr-prison!”

  I gaped at her in shock. No wonder she was in the state she was in. “Ruddy hell!” I stage-whispered. “Jill, don’t make any more phone calls, for Christ’s sake.”

  She gave an exasperated Mark groan. “I haven’t made any phone calls, deaf-o! Why don’t you listen?”

  I decided to shut up as I was obviously lousy at giving advice, and sat observing her for a while.

  She did look a wreck: she couldn’t have slept much this past week, and her face was blotchy and her pock marks quite purple-looking, her eyes were red raw round the rims and her lips were parched and cracking. She looked completely lost, quite desperate and… that something else. I’d known her since we were eleven and it was difficult for her to keep much from me and I usually sussed the problem eventually. And I wasn’t stupid; I mean, the threat was enough to put the shite up anybody, but as long as she didn’t make any calls she’d be okay, wouldn’t she?

  “Sweetie, what does Terry say about all this?” I asked softly. Terry was a good, decent bloke. He was very even tempered and it took a lot to ruffle his feathers. Jill was more nervous and impetuous, and Terry complimented her by being calm and sure-footed. She gave him a little ‘get up and go’, and he pulled gently on the reins if she went whizzing off too fast. But, in my judgement, he had never been that understanding about her work.

  Jill had to work long, irregular hours during the fashion seasons, and when she took on the organisation of promoting a new product she could practically disappear for weeks at a time. Terry’s job could also be erratic, but as manager of a car-hire company, he could usually find someone to fill in for him if need be and lived pretty stress-free as far as work was concerned. He rarely got home after five forty-five, and sometimes Jill would be on her way out then for the second shift of work.

  To be honest, Jill’s work was perhaps the only bone of contention and, in my opinion, it was because he was more than just a little jealous of her glamorous job. Terry had wanted to make it as a singer, but that never happened, and Jill earned far more than he did. Thanks to her they lived in their fabulous house and drove flash cars, and I got the impression that it made him feel a tad inferior and/or resentful. It was in the male genes to want to be the one who dragged the dinosaur home while the women swept out the cave, so to speak, and in their case, it was Jill who did the dinosaur-dragging.

  Jill’s face changed a little and she showed a trace of disgust. “Oh, the usual, Jackie; ‘Why don’t you just give it up? Why can’t you stop working? Why do you have to work?’ blah, blah, blah…”

  Yep; his usual argument, but how they’d carry on their lifestyle if she did was usually Jill’s immediate reply. I’d heard it more than I liked to, because it always led to a full-blown huff and it made me feel uncomfortable for Terry to always have that thrown in his face, to be honest.

  I sat looking at Jill feeling truly sorry for her. It wasn’t just for the economical reason that Jill worked; she loved the buzz and bustle of her job and it gave her some very necessary self esteem. She was lacking in the self esteem department, and had been since I’d known her. I could never understand why, as she had everything in her favour physically. True, there were the eight little crevices left by the chicken pocks on her face, but she made more of them than anybody else. I mean, when you meet someone for the first time, you’re looking for defects – well, I do – and someone could look at Jill and think ‘hmm, pock-marks’, but then forget them, as she had the great figure and fantastic dress-sense. With me, for example, you’d look at me and think ‘hmm, fat’, but that is something that’s always in your face, regardless of perso
nality or intelligence, and can never be camouflaged with make-up or a cheeky flick of the fringe. Society accepts an imperfect face or an empty head if there’s a slim and sexy body underneath, but it wrinkles its nose at an imperfect body regardless of what’s on top. It was unfair, frustrating and downright insulting at times but that’s the way I saw it, and the superficial, ‘imperfect’ society had me in the latter brigade.

  “Well,” I began, thinking as I spoke. “How about you tried a different branch of what you do?”

  She gave me a sideways glance. “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” I was speaking very slowly as I was thinking slowly. “How about… you try to… branch into organising other types of stuff?” that sounded good, actually: quite enlightened, if I say so myself.

  “Like what?” Jill challenged. She wasn’t helping here, so I laboured on.

  “Uh, let’s see… if you organise fashion shows, for example, you could… uh… try organising presentations of another kind.”

  She continued to look at me half-on, and I thought ‘throw me a bone here, girl!’ “For example…”

  “Business conferences could work.” She suggested quietly.

  Thank goodness! “Exactly!” I exclaimed, and saw by the look on her face that the brain cells had kicked into first gear.

  “Charity dinners, record promotions, film promotions…” she gave me a look that said I was letting my imagination run away with me, so I fell silent and let her come up with