She said, ‘One treat won’t hurt.’ She said it was a treat for her too because she’d got the day off. She’d given the work to one of the other mystery shoppers.
She came out the Co-op with a box of Maltesers. ‘Look,’ she said, making me hold it when she got back in the car, ‘they’re so light they won’t even show up on the scales.’ We ate them there, sitting outside the shop. She told me she’d go on a diet too, but that Gary likes his ladies large. ‘Something to grab hold of,’ she chuckled, popping several Maltesers into her mouth at once with a naughty look in her eyes.
‘Mu-um,’ I said, because I really didn’t need to be hearing what Gary does or doesn’t like.
Then she said sorry, because she knew she wasn’t being very helpful, but that the point she wanted to make was that it’s what’s on the inside that counts.
She looked really happy inside and out.
Dr Bhatt wasn’t pleased with me. He never is because every time I go I’m heavier than the time before (and I’m not getting any taller), but even so I like going to see him. He’s calm and patient and talks to me like he understands how it’s really hard to lose weight. But I like going because of the hospital too. I like the way it’s all white and quiet, the nurses and doctors walking round in their long clean coats and squeaky shoes, carrying clipboards or wheeling machines.
Ever since Dad was ill and Marion came to the house to look after him, I thought I’d like to be a nurse. You get to be kind to people, or firm with them if they won’t do what you tell them to, like taking their pills or eating their meals. I think I’d like looking after old people the most because they’re nicer and easier to talk to – especially if they’re lonely. And I’d listen to them. I wouldn’t be like those people that just pretend to listen, by nodding and saying ‘Yeah’ or ‘Oh dear’, when it’s obvious they’re really thinking about how they can escape. I’d listen for real.
Marion was nice. She chatted a lot, but at the same time she got on with all the things she had to do. She used to unpin her nurse’s watch from her pocket and let me take Dad’s pulse. She showed me how to put the inflatable thing round his arm and read his blood pressure too. Then, if I was at home, she’d call, ‘Time for stats, Nurse Yasmin’, and I’d rush from wherever I was to do all the checks and write down the numbers on Dad’s chart. I asked her once if she wished she was a doctor. She said ‘Never’. She said she’d always wanted to be just what she was. Marion went away as well when Dad died. I know it’s obvious she would, but I hadn’t thought about that. I thought I’d only lose Dad.
Dr Bhatt didn’t react as he watched the numbers on the scales settle on 219 lbs 12.472 oz, but when he wrote it on the chart in my ring-binder, I saw his eyebrows go down and his teeth pull on his top lip. I thought he was probably thinking what he could say to me this time, because he’d tried saying a lot of different things already which obviously hadn’t worked because basically I was failing the programme, as in FAILING the programme.
‘OK, Yasmin, take a seat,’ he said in his Indian accent. I sat down next to Mum and he sat down the other side of his desk. He looked at her, then at me and said, ‘Well, you have put on some weight. Almost four pounds, in fact, which means your BMI will also have risen by around point 5.’
I tried not to notice Mum wilt in her seat as he flicked through my file. At least she didn’t say anything or demand to know how it was possible when she was mostly giving me less to eat.
‘Perhaps we should have another look at your motivators,’ he said, unhooking the list from the rings. He put it on the table, turning it so it was the right way round for me to read, ‘Because clearly I think this is where the problem is lying.’
I looked at the list.
‘Take a look and think about whether each one is still relevant to you, because it may be they are not the right ones.’
‘But Yasmin made the list,’ Mum said.
He licked his lips, making them pinker than they already are. ‘Well, the things which motivate us can change,’ he said, ‘especially when we are so young.’
‘Right,’ Mum said, like she still didn’t really get it.
‘Let’s go through,’ Dr Bhatt said, smiling at Mum and tapping his finger on the paper. ‘So . . .’
‘Number one,’ I read out, ‘having friends.’
‘OK,’ Dr Bhatt said, ‘well, we all like to have friends and certainly that isn’t all about how we are looking. But do you still feel that making new friends would be easier if you were slimmer?’
I looked at him. ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘OK then!’ he said, beaming as if just saying it solved everything. ‘But are you thinking about making new friends when you get the urge to eat outside of your regular mealtimes?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘And that is the problem,’ he said.
We went through the rest of the list like that and then he asked me if there were any new motivators I’d thought of that I’d like to add to it, and like always I told him I’d forgotten to think of any and he told Mum to remind me to try.
Then he went over my diet plan, which was awkward because with Mum there I had to keep lying about not eating any sugary foods like biscuits and chocolate. He knew I was lying too, but he didn’t say anything. He just looked down at his hands. Then, without getting up, he walked his chair round the desk, wheeling it across the shiny floor, and when he got to me, he leant forward, his elbows on his knees, and licked his lips again. ‘If you stick to the plan,’ he said, his Indian accent even stronger up close, ‘you will lose the weight.’ Then he put his hands together and for a second I thought he was actually going to pray for me. ‘Try to take each moment as it comes,’ he said. ‘Think only of your goal. It will take courage, but once the weight begins to come away, I promise you this: it will feel like the sun is coming out.’
On the way home in the car it was raining. I could feel Mum wanting to ask me about exactly when and what I’d been eating without her knowing, but also that she didn’t want to ask me. Maybe because she was feeling guilty about the Maltesers and about saying that it’s what’s on the inside that counts when it isn’t really true.
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it would feel like physically to be thin: to have thin arms, thin legs, a flat stomach. But even though I haven’t always been fat, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t remember. Instead, my body just felt even bigger than it is, then started swelling till it was taking up the whole car and pressing against the windows which were going to explode any second if I didn’t stop . . .
So instead I imagined what it’d be like to go into school thin. I imagined Alice coming out of the English room at the other end of the corridor, chatting to the girls around her and walking towards me. She loops her bag over her head and that’s when she spots me. She stops – stops dead in her tracks, peering in disbelief at me. Then, breaking free from the others, she comes running up, smiling in amazement, her mouth open in shock and saying Yasmin, is that really you? and then everyone else crowds round saying that too.
I went up to my room when we got home. I wanted to be on my own. I sat on my bed and thought about really trying to make an effort to lose weight this time. I thought about getting the chocolate and Hobnobs out of my suitcase and bedside table and throwing them all away. I thought about giving up on the idea that you were going to take Alice and me being a hero and all of that as well, because it was pretty much all I’d been thinking about and Dr Bhatt said I should focus only on losing weight.
My file says I tend towards obsessive thoughts, which is how I got fat in the first place, so I knew I’d been obsessing about you. And I didn’t really know anything about you anyway. I’d only seen you once. I thought about how you could just’ve been a completely normal person that was staring at Alice for some innocent reason, like because she reminded you of your granddaughter who’d died in a horrific car accident, or something like that – and not at all because you were going to do something very bad.
I thought how you taking Alice was just a stupid fantasy, the same as all the other stupid fantasies I’d had – like Alice getting ill and me researching her symptoms online for weeks and weeks till suddenly I figure out what it is that’s wrong with her just as she’s about to die . . . That one never happened for real either. I thought about Miss Ward telling me last year how it was high time I realised that this life was the only one I was going to get and that I should start living it that way before it was too late. I remembered thinking what a load of horse crap – ‘before it’s too late’ – but even though I knew it was the kind of dramatic rubbish that teachers come out with that sounds like it means something when it doesn’t really mean anything at all, and even though I walked out of her office telling myself that joke that isn’t really a joke because it’s true: Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach – what she’d said got into my head. I’d remembered it, anyway.
I thought about Dr Bhatt’s hands pressed together and his worried eyes looking into mine and I thought, I’m going to do it. I’m going to forget about you and I’m going to live in the real world and not let myself imagine stuff anymore. I’m going to lose weight and become so gorgeous that no one’ll even believe it’s me. So gorgeous that even I don’t believe it’s me. Because more than anything, I wanted to feel like the sun was coming out.
The next day was Saturday and I decided to walk into town, even though the insides of my thighs were still sore with angry red spots on them from going up and down the wooded path looking for you. My plan was to get a Diet Coke in McDonald’s, then look in some shops and walk home again. I put loads of talcum powder on my legs but they were already stinging by the time I got to Deacons Hill.
It’s a lot further into town than it seems on the bus and by the time I got there my feet were killing me and my stomach was like a cave. I stood in the queue in McDonald’s feeling the coins in my pocket and staring at the menu board. I was thinking I should’ve only brought the exact money for a Diet Coke and that I definitely was not going to get a vanilla milkshake and a McChicken Sandwich with large fries, even though I had enough, when I got the feeling I was being watched.
Sophie reacted with a shriek when I looked over, then ‘hid’ behind the collar of her denim jacket. She was with Alice, Katy and two boys that aren’t from our school. She’d been telling them what a legend I am, I expect.
I took my Diet Coke into Gap across the road and went upstairs to the little kids’ section. I stood by the window between the rails of doll-like dresses, chewing the end of the straw and sucking tiny amounts through it, waiting for them to come out.
I’d never seen Alice out of school. She was wearing faded skinny jeans, flat pumps and a long, pale blue cardigan. Her hair was in a loose plait over one shoulder. She looked effortless – that’s the best word I can think of – like that, even though all the world was hers, she’d chosen to set it free.
She was laughing, her arm draped over one of the boy’s shoulders. He was black – really black – and doing all the talking. He kept covering her hand with his, then taking it off again to gesture round, like it was no big deal that she was touching him. It’s only because she’s so nice that she didn’t mind. I thought it was pretty rude, though. I thought, who does he think he is?
They headed down the High Street then, so I went back downstairs. They were standing outside Waterstones, looking in at the display. Alice was telling them something, about a book, I suppose. I imagined it was The Poems of Robert Browning, even though I knew his book wouldn’t be in the window because he’s really old – dead, even. I hate English, but the poem of his we did in class was brilliant. It’s about a man who’s Porphyria’s lover (they had funny names then). He knows he can’t have her, even though they’re in love, because she’s upper class and rich, so to make sure she’ll always be his, he kills her. He says:
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her.
I love imagining the two of them in his little cottage in the forest: him pressing her soaked crimson dress and ample tits against his shirt as the storm lashes at the windows, possessing her with his mouth as he twists her hair into that long, wet rope.
Anyway, it wasn’t The Poems of Robert Browning in the window. When they walked on down the High Street, I stopped in the same place they’d stood and looked at the books. There was some crappy-looking vampire trilogy, a book with a shiny black cover called The Doll and, up on a plinth, Alice in Wonderland – a big hard-back. Probably a new edition or something, seeing as it was in the window.
I thought Alice’d probably been telling them something about that one – like that maybe when she was little, her parents told her that she was the Alice in the story. She did look a bit like her. The Alice on the cover was kneeling and looking down into the rabbit hole at me, as if I was down the hole already and would be going into Wonderland with her. She had a funny expression on her face, though, like she might decide to bury me there instead.
I kept a good distance behind when I carried on down the High Street, and I made sure there were always people between us so that I’d only catch a glimpse of one of them every few seconds. Then I thought I’d lost them till I passed the cinema and saw them inside. They were queuing to get tickets.
I didn’t go in: I wouldn’t know what they’d all be going to see and anyway, I didn’t have enough money. I hung around outside, finishing my drink and thinking I should go home. Then I saw them disappearing into the gloom of the foyer and went up the steps. I watched them hand their tickets to a girl and go into Screen 4.
I was so hungry the smell of popcorn nearly made me faint, so I counted the change I had and got an extra large box – sweet, because the Odeon hasn’t caught onto sweet ’n salty yet. I asked the boy serving if he could do half ’n half, but he looked at me like I was out of my mind, so I left it.
I went to the loos. I was still in one of the cubicles (thinking it would’ve been cleverer to go for a pee before getting the popcorn) when some girls came crashing in, laughing and screeching and going, ‘Quick, we’ll miss the beginning’, and that kind of thing. I hate it when girls get all lairy, so to avoid them, I went back out to the foyer without washing my hands. Just as I was heading for the steps to the street again, though, they suddenly burst out behind me, all cackling idiotically, one of them saying she couldn’t remember which screen they’d come out of. Then her friend pushed her sideways, saying ‘4 you idiot’ and holding four fingers up in her face.
And I went with them. Just like that.
I turned round and stuck close behind. The girl taking tickets looked at me like she didn’t remember me from before, but then she looked at the popcorn in my arms and didn’t say a thing.
It was dark inside. The film had started.
I headed up near the back and shuffled in past a few people to a seat in the side block. It took me a while to find where Alice was because it was pretty full in there. When I did (they were in the centre block in front of those VIP seats), it was Katy I saw, only she wasn’t looking at the screen, she was twisted round and looking at me. Then the boy that was sitting the other side of Alice – the black one – turned and looked at me too.
I concentrated on the shapes moving on the screen. I ate my popcorn. I told myself it wasn’t a crime to be watching a film just because it happened to be the same one they were watching. When I dared to glance at them again, though, they were still looking. Not Alice; the other two.
Then the boy got up. He jigged sideways along the row, his hands held in fists like a boxer, hood bouncing. I thought he was probably going for a slash, but when he got to the aisle, he clocked me again and started up the steps.
I felt my skin burn and prickle, my heart start to thump.
‘Hey, Yasmin!’ he c
alled when he got close enough for me to hear.
I put more popcorn in my mouth. I told myself I had no idea who he was, that he must want someone else because my name’s not Yasmin. It’s Doner. Doner, Fatso, Blubber-butt . . .
He kept coming, though, the whites of his eyes shining in the changing light.
The people sitting around me looked at him. Someone shushed. A woman on the row behind said, ‘’Scuse us, d’you mind?’
But he didn’t. He didn’t mind at all. He just stood there, staring at me. Then he said, ‘Come out’, like I’d better do it quick.
There was another angry shush.
He said, ‘I’ve got a message from Alice.’
I thought, why would Alice have a message for me? But I stood up anyway. I squeezed past the people, spilling my popcorn, saying sorry, thinking maybe she wants me to sit with them; would she want me to sit with them?
Then suddenly, before I was even properly out in the aisle, he grabbed my arm up near the top and pulled me so my ear was right up against his mouth. ‘Leave her alone, yeah?’ he breathed. The words were hot. They filled my ear and spilled down my neck. Flecks of his spit hit my cheek. ‘You’re really creepin’ her out.’ Then he tightened his grip even more, making me cry out, and hissed, ‘Got it?’
I nodded quickly, just wanting him to let go, then as soon as he did, I stumbled away up the steps towards the exit door at the back. My throat and chest felt like they were being squashed. I turned, afraid he was following me, but he was gone, jogging back down to the others.
I put the popcorn on the floor, whispering to help myself think which pocket my inhaler was in, and reached out to steady myself on the back of an empty seat. And there you were, on the far side near the wall, your face pale like milk in the darkness, your eyes staring blankly ahead at the screen.
Strawberry Tarts
‘Lesbo,’ Dan said when I walked into Maths on Monday.
Things We Have in Common Page 3