The Fat And The Thin Of It

by Julie Croft

spoke. His voice had a sensuous, velvet quality and the result was very sexy.

  I thought about the first time I saw him.

  I’d been invited to hear Terry sing at a club in Norwich by some of my university friends. They’d managed to get him a gig that Friday, but I’d arrived late as I’d wanted to finish a project that had to be handed in on the Monday and didn’t want to be rushing it over the weekend.

  When I arrived, he’d just begun You Are the Sunshine of My Life, and my friends were sitting at a table on the other side of the club. I had to walk across the dance floor to get to them, and it meant walking out into the open space of the dance floor and under Terry’s nose. It was a daunting thought as I was never one to draw attention to myself if I could avoid it. I did cross the floor, though, as discreetly as possible, but he saw me, of course. The cheeky bugger stopped in mid-verse, the band ground to a jittery halt and he sat perched on his stool with a mischievous grin on his face, watching my embarrassing progress towards my friends’ table. Once I’d sat down, he gave me a clap and the whole club joined in.

  God, I was so embarrassed! I wanted to sink under the table or rush off to the toilet, but I sat there as still as I could with my face as red as a beetroot, just knowing that my crater-like pock marks were turning a deep shade of purple, cursing the little sod. He started singing again and, to my horror, didn’t take his eyes off me during the entire song. I tried to remain as aloof as possible, tufting my fringe over my face to cover the craters, but the few times I glanced at him, I had to admit that I found him extremely appealing and was rather enjoying the attention.

  After that song there was a break in the show and Terry came over to our table. I knew I’d turned into a beetroot again and the craters were standing out like I had the plague or something and kept my head bowed so that my heavy fringe fell over my face, but he pulled up a chair beside me, took hold of my chin and lifted my face to his, stared into my eyes rather than at my craters and said, all velvet and sex, “Hello, Sunshine.”

  Well, I was totally besotted from then on. Terry had looked into my eyes! He hadn’t noticed the craters – or had pretended not to notice them – but I automatically presumed that what had drawn him to me was my figure.

  From an early age people would comment on my figure, and it had embarrassed and upset me, to be honest, as it seemed it was the only thing about me that was worth commenting on. On the other hand, my figure drew attention away from my face, so I suppose it served a purpose in that respect. I also sported a shaggy haircut which hid the majority of my face and rarely used make-up apart from foundation, and when I was younger I’d dyed my hair with strange colours – fiery red, canary yellow, and once I even tried electric blue – to stop people actually looking at anything above the shoulders. It was a British trait, so it seemed, not to stare at the unusual. I still had the same haircut, but now left it to go grey. It was also a British trait, or so it seemed, not to stare at a woman who didn’t dye her hair.

  But, if the compliments had been somewhat reassuring when I was younger, now they were damned well annoying. I’d got top grades at school and at university, I’d run my own business from the age of thirty and worked for the most prestigious modelling agency, but my figure still seemed to be the most notable thing to people.

  For instance, at the school reunion Jackie and I had gone to a few years back, all the women were happily exchanging information about what they’d been up to the past thirty-odd years, and I could hear ‘wow, five kids!’ and ‘you lived in Australia for ten years!’ or ‘God, I know that guy! You actually married him?’, but when I spoke to anyone, they’d say ‘you still have that great figure, Jill!’

  “Mm-hm, and I had my own office in…”

  ‘How do you do it?’

  “Well, I studied in Norwich…”

  ‘No, no, no; I mean how do you keep your figure?’

  “Ah, well I don’t do anything really, but I’m always so busy at work and…”

  ‘Oh, come off it! You must do something! What diet do you follow?’

  “uh....”

  And so on.

  One particular woman, Kimberly Baker, actually did listen to what I’d achieved and never mentioned my figure. She didn’t have to, really, as she had what Jackie and I had craved; a great figure and perfect face all rolled into one perfect-looking girl. She stood casually slouched on one hip, sipping her drink and flicking her incredible hair, listening attentively with a little smile hovering on her lips. When I’d finished, she said, “So you’ve been very successful, haven’t you?”

  “Well, yes,” I smiled. “I feel I’ve done well.”

  “I’m surprised that you’ve never thought about sorting out your face, then.”

  God that floored me. I should have been able to think of something just as stinging to throw back at her, but I went back to ‘Jill the prat’, back to school, fifteen and with a fringe that had begun from the middle of my skull and finished at just about eyelash level. Kimberly slinked off, leaving me on the verge of self-conscious tears, and I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the tortuous evening. I did, however, take off my jacket and revealed the figure-hugging dress I was wearing underneath and ponced about for the rest of the event. If the body was what got attention, then the body was what those cows were going to get; in the face.

  But Terry, although always complimentary about my appearance, never made an excessive fuss about my figure. He’d say my hair looked great, he’d get all excited about an exam I’d passed with flying colours and praise me on my idea for class projects and actually listen to me with an interest in what I had to say. When I spoke, he would look at me in such a way that I’d lose track of what I was talking about, and I’d get such a tingling in my groin that I felt like pouncing on him there and then, although we didn’t actually have sex until almost three months after we’d started dating. When I told him how I got the craters on my face, because he must have been curious about them even if he’d never asked, he casually and quickly lifted my fringe, shrugged and said, “With those eyes and smile to look at, sunshine, nobody has time for them.”

  It was when we were watching a film with Nicholas Cage that I then knew how to describe the way Terry looked at me.

  “That’s it!” I said to him all excitedly, pointing at the TV screen and bouncing on the sofa. “That’s the same way you look at me! You’ve got the Nicholas Cage look!”

  “Really?” Terry frowned at the screen then turned to me. “I thought I was more like Richard Roundtree.” He started to play air guitar and ‘whah-whah’ the opening bars of the theme tune to Shaft.

  “No!” I shoved him in the shoulder. “I don’t mean you look like Nick Cage,” I circled my face with my index finger. “I mean you look like him!” I pointed both index fingers at him from my eye-level.

  “Okay,” he said indifferently. “But I still think I look like Richard Roundtree.”

  Terry had done extremely well for himself, in his own way. At fourteen, he’d walked into the office of the car hire company and asked the boss if he could work there doing anything. He wanted the money to buy a ‘neat stereo’ so he could record himself singing and ‘see what I sound like and get better’. Mike, the manager at the time, took a shine to him and let Terry wash the cars after school and on Saturday mornings, and during that time Terry got chatting to the chauffeurs and mechanics. When he’d finished washing and polishing, he had his head under the hood learning how an engine worked, or how to help ladies out the back of the chauffeured cars so they wouldn’t ‘flash their undies’. Mike promised Terry that he would chauffeur for him once he’d taken his driving test, and now he managed that same company since Mike retired.

  It was a shame that his ambition to be a singer hadn’t taken off, as his voice was slightly raspy like Barry White but with the flexibility and range of Stevie Wonder, but once we got married and Penny came along, he gave up the gigs and his ambition waned. After becoming a chauffeur, he refined his diction until he’d
eliminated his cockney accent, and since taking charge of the company, he’d got quite posh and could quite easily have worked on the radio, lulling the listeners into relaxation while he played blues and soft jazz late at night.

  Wow, all that had happened since we’d met thirty-three years ago: where had the years gone?

  Where had the Nick Cage look and the tingling in my groin gone as well?

  The sound of the front door opening and closing roused me from thought.

  “Hello, darling.” Terry said as he sauntered into the living room.

  He sniffed the air and wrinkled his nose a little, then laid his coat across the back of a dining chair. I disliked him leaving his clothes lying about, but he was demonstrating a tit-for-tat attitude for the fact that I’d been smoking in the living room. “You’ve brought your work home again, I see.” He nodded to my lap-top lying open on the dining table.

  His sarcasm was a tad grating, but my stomach did a back flip when I remembered that I’d have to tell him I’d been fired. It wasn’t something I relished, so I bided my time. I got up from the table and went over to him for a kiss. “It’s a good thing you don’t bring your work home.” I quipped. “The limos wouldn’t go with the décor. Fancy a drink?” I moved towards the kitchen.

  “Okay. I’ll have what