How could I ever have thought Cal would really be interested? I should have known it was too good to be true. I was in my 40s. Sagging and past it. Of course he would want some firm, youthful beauty – not me.
Every time I thought of myself staring drunkenly into the camera I was washed over afresh with waves of hot shame then cold dread, and something peculiar happened around my knees. It was so deeply cringe-inducing it made me feel the way I had when Daniel’s mother had insisted on sharing with me the lurid details of how one of her operations had gone wrong. However often I’d said, ‘Please don’t, I’m feeling squeamish,’ she’d carried on until I’d had to sit on the floor and put my head between my ankles.
Except this time, I wanted to put my entire body into a very deep, dark hole and leave it there.
Keeping still wasn’t working. I sat squirming with humiliation and hurt, and the sickening knowledge that I had been breathtakingly, awe-inspiringly stupid.
Out in the hall, the phone was ringing again. Fuck off, Mike, and leave me alone. I grabbed my bag and keys and ran out of the house.
I drove to the gym without thinking. Perhaps it was wanting to lose myself. I had my iPod in my handbag. I pulled into the car park thinking maybe if I could exhaust myself on the treadmill, with the music up really loud, I could block out the thoughts that ran round and round my head. Calm myself as I’d been able to at other times. I felt shivery and sick, my heart was pounding as if I’d already been running.
‘I saw you on the telly!’ As I walked toward the big glass entrance doors, a short, dark-haired woman who looked vaguely familiar was coming out, swinging a gym bag. She stopped and laughed. ‘I recognised you at once. I said to my husband – I’ve seen her up at the gym.’
I nodded. ‘I was brilliant, wasn’t I? What did you think of my bingo wings?’
The woman looked startled.
‘Sorry,’ I muttered, as the doors opened. ‘Having a bad day.’
As I came through the turnstile, my heart sank as I saw Clara and Alfie at a table in front of me, next to the huge twinkling Christmas tree. It was too late to do anything but say hello.
Clara looked radiant. In front of her was a panini and a glass of red wine, some carrot cake and a large flapjack. ‘I told Vicki to shove it,’ she said happily.
‘Oh.’ I made myself smile back.
‘She was so awful on Saturday night. Said I’d let her down by not losing more weight. I was terribly upset but then, as Alfie said, I realised real friends accept you as you are, so I told her.’
She looked lovingly at Alfie beside her, who, I noticed, was even thinner and more good-looking and was gazing back at her equally adoringly.
‘I said, stuff your bridesmaid’s dress. Alfie likes me just as I am.’ She took his hand.
‘Good for you,’ I said, a huge lump in my throat, feeling touched and overwhelmed, terrified I’d cry and spoil their happy moment. ‘That’s lovely. Well, I must go – not got long and I need to get on that cross-trainer!’
Clara looked surprised. ‘Aren’t you going to stay and see Andrew about the gym challenge? I thought I’d still do it anyway as Alfie is. He sent us all a text. Didn’t you get it?’
I shook my head. ‘He didn’t send it to me. He doesn’t want me involved any more.’
Clara frowned. ‘I’m sure he does. Are you OK, Laura? Listen, I’m really sorry I haven’t seen the film yet. I videoed it but …’ She smiled at Alfie again.
‘You haven’t missed a thing,’ I said quickly. ‘It’s rubbish.’
Alfie stood up. ‘Let me get you a coffee or something,’ he said kindly. ‘Andrew will be here in a minute – his text to you must have got lost.’
‘No!’ I took a deep breath. ‘No, sorry. I must get on.’
Clara stood up too, and took my arm. She looked concerned. ‘You seem upset. Has something happened with Cal?’
I shook my head. ‘There was no Cal. I’ve got to go. Please, Clara, please don’t tell Andrew I’m here.’ I almost ran through the doors to the changing room.
It was deserted. I shoved my handbag in a locker and dragged off my sweatshirt, finding I was trembling. The thought of coming face to face with Andrew had filled me with unspeakable panic. Grabbing my iPod, I was just about to leave, when I heard a wail of anguish from behind me, followed by loud sobbing.
I peered round the corner to see a girl crying hysterically into a towel.
As I hesitated, I recognised her as the once-gorgeous, now emaciated, fitness obsessive that Clara and I had seen running endlessly with weights. Annabel, was it? She looked thinner than ever. I looked from her to the door. I was anxious to get into the gym before Clara could come after me, but I felt bad walking away from someone this state.
I walked tentatively toward her.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked, even though she clearly wasn’t. Obviously she must have just received terrible news. Clara had said she was rich – perhaps her entire fortune had just been lost in a banking crisis. Or every living relative had died in an earthquake and she was now all alone in the world.
I patted her gingerly on the shoulder, looking to see if she was clutching a phone beneath the towel. Instead she held up what looked like a Coke can and burst into a fresh torrent of tears.
I put my arm around her skinny frame and she immediately clung to me, gulping out something I couldn’t understand. I caught the words “wrong” and “mistake” in between great, racking convulsions.
I could hardly leave her now so I led her to a bench and made her sit down. ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to say it again,’ I said, praying that she hadn’t just been told she only had six weeks to live and was clinging to the hope that the hospital had mixed up the results, because I wouldn’t know what to say. Perhaps I could call someone for her. I tried to remember if my mobile was in my handbag.
She took a huge breath and held up the drink can again. ‘It’s got sugar in it,’ she howled. ‘I picked up the wrong one.’
I stared at her. ‘Well, never mind. I’m sure one sweet drink won’t hurt you – you’re so thin already.’ I took the can from her. ‘Look, it’s only got 85 calories in it – that won’t make any difference.’
‘It’s sugar!’ she wailed again. ‘I won’t be in ketosis!’
I frowned. ‘Well, I don’t mean to be rude but someone like you shouldn’t be. It makes your breath smell and when you’re as skinny as you are, it makes the body start eating up its lean tissue – your heart and liver and things will begin to disappear.’
This made her cry even harder and I immediately regretted what I’d said – especially as I wasn’t over-sure of my science but was just regurgitating something Clara had said to justify having a digestive biscuit with her orange juice. I decided to rephrase it.
‘You don’t need to lose weight,’ I said, more gently. ‘When I first saw you, I was so envious because you had such a perfect body. And honestly,’ I added truthfully, ‘you looked much better then.’
Annabel continued to weep loudly. ‘My – husband – didn’t – think – so,’ she gulped between sobs.
‘Has he left you or something? Try to take some deep breaths,’ I advised, as she buried her head in my shoulder and howled some more and I made “I’m dealing with it” faces at two women who’d just come in and were hovering nearby.
Her husband, Annabel told me, when she’d recovered herself sufficiently to speak, and the two women had disappeared in the direction of the swimming pool, had indeed left her. For a girl with the improbable name of Jiggy, who was a size four.
In explaining why he felt moved to pack his bags and take up residence in Jiggy’s loft apartment in Hoxton when he had a beautiful home here in Broadstairs and had only been married for 18 months, he had made much of the fact that not only did Jiggy have her own political PR company, but that she was very small. ‘He kept saying,’ Annabel sniffed, ‘how tiny she was.’
She gazed at the can she was still turning around in her hands
. ‘And it made me feel,’ she went on brokenly, ‘for the first time in my life – fat.’
I knew exactly how she had felt.
‘Men are such bastards,’ I said. ‘He didn’t leave you because you were too fat – you looked absolutely beautiful that first day I saw you. He left you because he’s an inadequate shit who has problems with commitment and loyalty and is one of those men who thinks there’s always something better going on elsewhere.
‘I can just imagine this Jiggy,’ I continued. ‘She’s probably one of these high-powered women who secretly longs to be at home in a pinny. She probably over-compensates for her sterile existence by acting as his sex slave or something. When he gets fed up with her hip bones sticking into him, he’ll move on again.’
Annabel nodded, seeming to find this analysis of someone I had never met and knew absolutely nothing about, of some comfort.
I tried to reassure her further. ‘They make up a reason that turns everything into our fault because they don’t want to admit that they’re half-formed, unweaned, dick-led cretins,’ I said, warming to my theme. ‘My husband said he was leaving me because of my PMT and mood swings!’
Annabel was wide-eyed. ‘And you didn’t have them?’
‘Well, I did, but it was still just an excuse.’
Her husband, it seemed, was even more adept at making excuses than mine. One of the reasons he’d given for dumping Annabel was that she’d once eaten a portion of black cherry cheesecake in bed and left crumbs on his pillow.
‘He didn’t care about things like that on our honeymoon,’ she said sadly.
I was still making sympathetic noises but getting increasingly agitated inside. Clara had poked her head round the changing room door at the height of Annabel’s distress, raising her eyebrows. I’d waved her away but I was afraid she’d come back any minute and I really couldn’t bear to discuss anything that had happened. I wanted to stay out of the way until they’d all gone.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I told Annabel. ‘But you’ve got to eat or you’ll make yourself ill and no man’s worth that. Next time we’ll have a coffee and some cake.’ As I said it, I realised that I hadn’t eaten today either. I had that strange, light-headed feeling but I wasn’t hungry at all. Perhaps I was in ketosis too and had breath like stale cabbage.
‘You’ll meet someone else,’ I said, trying to sound cheery, although my throat was now tight with tears as well. ‘You get yourself back to normal and they’ll be queuing round the block.’
I left her sitting on a bench, still holding the can, staring ahead with the hopeless eyes of a famine victim. ‘I’ll see you soon,’ I said. She smiled weakly.
The irony of our conversation wasn’t lost on me as I hurried upstairs. It would be easy to mock Annabel, to think her reaction to the break-up of her marriage and her hysteria over her diet extreme if not downright deranged, but I wasn’t so very different. I was too weak-willed to lose any significant amount of weight – though post-traumatic stress was turning out to be a good diet aid – but look at what I’d done instead.
I shuddered as I got on the treadmill and pressed start. I’d allowed myself to be made a total fool of on television, by believing in the charms of a younger man who, if I’d stopped to think about it for a minute, was never likely to be attracted to someone who was the same generation as his mum.
I pushed the gradient up 15 per cent and set the speed to a brisk walk.
He’d conned and manipulated me and I’d fallen for it every step of the way. Obviously he’d never had any intention of watching the film with me and had been stringing me along from the beginning. He and Tanya probably used to lie in bed at night, laughing together at how gullible I was.
I turned my iPod on, increasing the volume as Oasis began to play.
I recalled yet again what Lenny had had to say – presumably Tanya was hanging out with him to get her own back on Cal for flirting with me – about the power of lighting and how it could make or break you on TV. Why hadn’t I thought about that earlier?
I pushed the lever on the treadmill to make it go faster.
And with a horrible sick jolt, I remembered the argument between Tanya and Cal that final night at the hotel, and Cal saying, ‘Let me do it my way.’
They weren’t talking about the artistic nuances of the film, they were planning the best way to get a shot of my massive arse in a bikini. The most effective method of getting me to look really sad. Which was for Cal to pretend he wanted to go to bed with me.
I thought of giving that wiggle as I walked to the steam room and moaned out loud in embarrassment.
I pushed the lever on the treadmill again. Noel Gallagher was advising me Don’t look back in anger . Ha, ha, ha.
I was up to 7.5 kilometres per hour now and had to break into a run. I turned the music up louder and pushed the treadmill further uphill too, wanting my legs to ache, wanting to hurt physically so I could focus on that instead of the terrible sick feeling I had inside.
What did Andrew think of me now? What would Clara and Alfie think when they saw the video? Thank God I’d responded to my mother’s lack of interest by not telling her it was on.
Had Charlotte been upset watching it? I missed Charlotte. But Charlotte obviously didn’t care about me at all and who could blame her. She was right – I’d been a rotten friend, fucking up the whole Roger-Hannah scenario like I fucked everything up …
I ran on, pushing the speed up to ten, my breath rasping in my chest, legs hurting, T-shirt sticking to me, wanting to flee it all, wanting to empty my head of everything but the throb of the music.
But instead a film reel ran relentlessly on in my mind, as clearly as if it were on a screen in front of me. Me, with my newly raised eyebrows, leering drunkenly at the camera, me slurring my way through a mortifying accolade to my own fading youth. Me in too-short dresses and ridiculous heels. I’m in my prime? This is my prime time. Who was I kidding?
I’d told Annabel the blokes would be queuing up for her and they would, but nobody was ever going to want me again. Men were always going to be either nice but married or unmarried because they were tossers or unmarried because they were too young for me with equally young girlfriends who were going to move in with them.
Who was going to look at a washed up 42-year-old who’d let it all hang out on prime-time TV?
I was still running, my limbs weakening, muscles sore. The monitor was flashing, warning me I had a high heart rate but still I kept going, feet pounding one after the other, gasping for breath, realising that I was crying too, the tears mixing with the sweat that was running down my face and chest, running and running, afraid to stop …
Until suddenly, I felt my legs lose their rhythm as the treadmill slowed right up and the gradient lessened and I saw the hand that had come across in front of me and reached out for the big red button to turn the machine off.
‘Stop now,’ Andrew said. ‘It’s enough.’
As the platform came to a halt, he took my damp hand and pulled me from it onto the floor beside him. I tugged half-heartedly away from him. He held on.
He was wearing dark shorts and a white T-shirt. I couldn’t look up to meet his eyes but I felt the soft, dry fabric and breathed in the scent of fresh air and soap laced with the faintest warm, smoky tones of tobacco as his arms went round me and I pressed my wet cheeks into his chest.
Chapter Thirty-nine
He was waiting for me when I came out of the changing room. I’d taken off my sticky T-shirt and underwear and showered but had had to put the same tracksuit bottoms back on and was wearing nothing under my sweatshirt.
‘I need to go home,’ I protested, when he offered to take me out for dinner. ‘I can’t go out like this and even if I got changed, suppose someone sees me who saw the programme? And I’m not really that hungry and anyway, I know you’re being very kind to me, but –’ I took a deep breath and looked him straight in the eyes now. ‘What about your wife?’
He sighed. ‘You can’t
hide away for ever. You need to eat. And if you’ll finally let me finish without interrupting or hitting me, I will tell you about Elaine.’
He put his arm through mine as I hesitated. ‘We’ll compromise. I’ll go and get us fish and chips. You go home and get the plates out.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not supposed to be eating carbohydrates and there’s about a thousand calories and God knows how much fat in cod and chips.’
He nodded. ‘Exactly. I’ll get you a large one.’
‘We separated eight months ago,’ he said, once we were sat at my kitchen table in front of two heaped plates, the scent of vinegar rising in the steam. ‘Mainly because we could no longer stand living in the same house. She got a transfer and moved back to Woking, where her parents live, taking the boys with her, of course, and terrifying a different set of clerks in the bought ledger department of CGH Building Supplies where her ability to get blood out of a financial stone is legendary.’ He gave me a wry smile. ‘We are very different people.’
I nodded, my mouth full of fish. I’d become suddenly ravenous as soon as I’d unwrapped the warm, fragrant parcels and was glad he was talking so I could keep on eating.
‘And that was fine for us,’ he continued, a hand cupped beneath his chin, green eyes serious, ‘except that the boys really missed me. Even though I’m not their father I’ve been around since they were small and I have to say I missed them too. We stayed in touch by phone but the house seemed very big and quiet and I was lonely. Elaine was having trouble with the kids not settling, suddenly she and I were talking a lot, far more than we ever did when we were together.’ He took a mouthful of wine. ‘And I guess the doubts set in. We were getting on so well, we decided to have one more go. She took some extended leave and got the boys out of school and into one down here and came back to see if we could make it work this time.’
He stopped to spear a chip with his fork. I waited while he chewed.
‘Except we couldn’t. Within days, we remembered why we’d split up. She finds me too messy and sentimental and weak-willed. She was furious that I’d started smoking again once they’d left. I found her too rigid and controlling and judgemental. The final straw came for both of us when she made a chart with colour coded stickers, informing me what I could and couldn’t eat, and I cried in front of her at the end of a re-run of Chariots of Fire .’
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