by Jean Ure
I expect by now you will be thinking to yourself, what is the matter with this girl? Why doesn’t she just stop shovelling food down her throat if it bothers her so much, being fat? All I can say is this: it is easier said than done. For starters, you don’t always notice that you’re getting fat until it’s too late. You’ve already got there! You can see these huge unsightly bulges ballooning out all over, out of your waistband, out of your sleeves, and it is so utterly depressing that the only thing to bring you any solace is… FOOD. But not just any food! Not fruit or muesli bars or sticks of raw carrot. Fruit and muesli bars and raw carrot don’t bring any solace at all. It has to be chips or crisps or slices of pizza. Cheesecake or chocolate or Black Forest gateau. So you eat because you hate yourself and then you hate yourself even more so then you have to eat even more, and you just get fatter and fatter and fatter.
Well, that is what can happen. It is what probably would have happened if Saffy hadn’t rang me at five o’clock that evening, when she got back from class.
“Hey! Jen!” she cried. “Guess what?”
I said, “What?” Thinking rather meanly to myself that if it was something nice for Saffy then I didn’t want to hear about it. I was that low.
“Are you sitting down?” said Saffy.
“No,” I said. “I’m standing up. Why?”
“‘Cos I don’t want you throwing a wobbly! Just make sure you’re holding on to something… D’you remember that person that came in? That publishing person? Last term?”
I said, “Mm.”
“D’you remember she was looking for faces? For this book they were doing?”
I said, “Mm,” thinking please don’t say they’ve chosen Saffy! PLEASE! I know it was horrid of me, but that is the way it gets you when you are depressed.
“Well.” Saffy paused. (Dramatic effect. We’d practised it on Friday.) “She wants you!”
I said, “M-me?”
“Yes! You!”
I said, “W-what for?”
“To be this girl on the cover of the book! It’s called Here Comes Ellen and you’re going to be Ellen!”
I gulped. I couldn’t believe it! I just couldn’t believe that anyone would want me.
“H-how do you know?” I said.
“‘Cos Mrs Ambrose asked me where you were. She wanted to tell you… they want to take your photo! She’s going to ring,” said Saffy, “and talk to your mum.” She added that the Terrible Two had gone “green as gooseberries” when they heard.
“They really thought it was going to be one of them!”
I’d have thought so, too. Anyone would have thought so! Who’d want me rather than Twinkle or Zoë?
“Your face will be all over,” said Saffy. “You’ll be famous!”
I zoomed up out of my depression so fast it was like a space rocket taking off. One minute I was practically grovelling on the ground, the next it was like zing, zap, pow! Up to the ceiling!
I told Mum about it as soon as she got in. I told Petal and Pip. I told Dad when we went up to Giorgio’s. Dad told Giorgio and Giorgio made this big announcement in the middle of the restaurant! Lots of the customers were regulars, who knew us. They all wrote down the name of the book and promised to buy it when it was published.
Next day, Dad rang up both my grans and told them, and then he told my aunties and uncles, and then he rushed round to tell the next-door neighbours. He was so proud! I think he told almost the whole road. Even Mum was excited. She said she was going to tell everyone at the office.
“I’ll get them all to buy copies!”
Everyone was going to buy copies. Even people at school. I wouldn’t have said anything to people at school as it would have sounded too much like boasting, but Saffy insisted. She said, “Jen, you’re a star. You’re going tobe famous!”
She told Dani Morris and Sophie Sutton. She told Ro Sullivan. She even told our class teacher, Mrs Carlisle, who said, “Oh! We’ll have to make sure we get copies for the school library.” Soon it seemed that everybody knew. I was a celeb!
On Friday when I went back to class – I didn’t care so much now about being plump. Not now that I’d been chosen for a book jacket! – a photographer came to take pictures of me. The lady from the publishers was with him. She told me that Ellen was “very lovable and cuddly and pretty. You’re exactly right!”
I knew I mustn’t let it go to my head, because I really despise people who gloat and smirk and think they’re better than anyone else, but it was hard not to be just a little bit exultant as I was led away to have my photo taken. The look on Zoë’s face! You could tell that she was thinking, “Why her? Why not me?”
And it wasn’t just honour and glory! They were going to pay me for it. It was my first professional engagement! Saffy said that I was “on the way”. She said, “Sucks to Deirdre Dobson! Sour old bag. I told you she was talking rubbish!”
Now that I wasn’t depressed any more, I didn’t have to comfort eat. But now that I’d been chosen for a book jacket I decided that I didn’t have to go on any stupid diet, either. I wasn’t fat! I was cuddly. And pretty. Just like Ellen! So I stopped raiding the fridge but I went on having snackypoos with Dad and generally mopping up all the stuff that other people didn’t want, and I sort of closed my eyes to the spare tyre and the wobbly thighs. You can do this, if you really try. I mean, you don’t have to keep looking at yourself in the mirror. Not the whole of yourself. You can just concentrate on selected bits and forget about the rest. Which is what I learnt to do.
And then one day, a few weeks later, a padded envelope came through the letter box. It was addressed to me, and inside was an early copy of Here Comes Ellen. And there was my face on the front of it! Mum and Dad, and even Petal, said that it was lovely. And it was quite nice, though it wasn’t the nicest one they’d taken. It was a bit… well! A bit sort of… not very bright-looking. At least, that’s the way it seemed to me. Mum and Dad said “Nonsense!” but Petal, after studying the picture from all angles, said she could see what I meant.
“Like she’s one slice short of a sandwich.”
Mum said, “Petal! Don’t be so unkind.”
“She said it first,” said Petal. “I’m only agreeing with her!”
I raced upstairs to my bedroom and settled down to read about this girl Ellen. This girl that was so lovable and cuddly and pretty. I discovered that Ellen was a Fat Girl. She was also a Slow Girl. A girl with learning difficulties. A girl that’s bullied and jeered at. A figure of fun!
That was why I’d been chosen. Because I was fat. And when the book was published and was in the shops everyone, but everyone, would be rushing out to buy it, and people like my grans would be feeling just so sorry for me, poor little Jenny! What a horrid thing to do to her! Whereas people like Zoë and Twink and Dani Morris would be laughing themselves silly.
I didn’t finish reading the book. I couldn’t bear to. Saffy told me ages later that in fact Ellen turned out to be a heroine, but it still didn’t stop her being fat. I didn’t want to know! I got half way through and then hid the hateful thing at the back of a cupboard. If Mum or Dad asked me about it, I would say I’d lent it to someone and they’d lost it. I didn’t want them reading it! I didn’t want anyone reading it.
You might think that at this point, being such a pathetic sort of person, I would have instantly fallen into another depression and rushed downstairs to fetch myself a snackypoo. But I didn’t! I am not always pathetic. Sometimes I bounce. I get defiant. I think to myself that I will show them!
That is what I thought that evening in my bedroom. I made a vow: by the end of term, when we filmed Sob Story and I did my transformation scene, I was no longer going to be a fat girl. I was going to be a thin girl!
This time, I meant it.
THIS IS WHEN I became obsessed. It is very easy to become obsessed. It is a question of focusing all your energies on just one thing and sticking to it. The thing that I was focusing on was the size of my body. Big fat bloated
pumpkin! The fat was going to go.
I didn’t tell anyone; not even Saffy. It was a matter of pride. I didn’t want people knowing how much I cared. It was too pathetic! When I got thin, I wanted them to think it was just something that had happened quite naturally, all on its own, without any help from me.
“Jen!” they would go. “You’ve lost weight!”
And I would go, “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
Like just so-o-o cool. I would be able to be cool once I was thin. It’s difficult to be cool when you’re fat. It’s difficult to be anything when you’re fat. You can’t wear groovy gear. You can’t ever look good. You just go round hating yourself and trying not to catch sight of your reflection in shop windows. It does terrible things to your confidence. Well, you just don’t really have any.
But that was all going to change! I started counting calories. I read the information on the backs of packets.
Per pie… 350 calories.
BAD.
Per half can… 210 calories.
BAD.
Per slice… 400 calories.
Bad, bad, VERY BAD!
I soon discovered that there was almost nothing in the house that I could safely consume. I looked up pizza and pasta and chocolate fudge cake in a book that I bought called Calorie Counter. They were all bad. Chocolate fudge cake was deadly! In fact, most of my favourite foods fell into the same category.
B.A.D.
FATTENING!
All the nicest foods are. It is a sad fact of life.
So far as I could, I simply stopped eating. I weighed myself on the bathroom scales every morning when I got up and every night before I went to bed. It became a sort of ritual. My life revolved around the bathroom scales! If I found that I’d put on even so much as. 1 of a kilo, it nagged at me all day, it kept me awake all night. Even if I just stayed the same, it threw me into total despair. Usually, for some weird reason, I weighed less in the morning than I did in the evening. I couldn’t understand that, when all I’d done all night was sleep. How could you lose weight just sleeping? I thought that if I could stay in bed for a whole month without eating I would be thin as a thread without any trouble at all! But even Mum would notice if I took to my bed. She didn’t notice me not eating because she either wasn’t there or was in too much of a rush.
Dad was my really big problem. Pip and Petal were like Mum, too bound up in their own affairs. Just as my life revolved round the bathroom scales, Pip’s revolved round homework and his computer, Petal’s revolved round boyfriends. They wouldn’t notice if I lived on nothing but air and water.
But Dad would! Dad has eyes like a hawk where food is concerned. So what I had to do, I had to devise strategies. Being on a really determined slimming spree can make you very cunning. I would let Dad pile my plate as usual, then suddenly discover, at breakfast for example, that I was wearing the wrong shoes, or the wrong top, and go racing upstairs to change – carrying my plate with me. I would then dump the whole lot down the loo.
Or another strategy I had, I would pick and poke at my food, pretending to be eating it, then as soon as Dad left the kitchen I would dive across to the sink and scrape everything into the rubbish bin – being careful to cover it up with tea leaves or orange peel or whatever happened to be in the rubbish bin to start with. I told you I was cunning!
Once or twice, when I couldn’t think of an excuse for going upstairs and Dad didn’t leave the kitchen, I actually picked up my plate and wandered out into the garden with it. There’s lots of porridge and pizza and ravioli hidden behind the bushes in our garden.
I did sometimes think of all those starving people around the globe and feel a twinge of guilt, but I comforted myself with the thought that if I wasn’t chucking the stuff behind the rose bushes or dumping it down the loo, I would be eating it myself, so it still wouldn’t get to the people who needed it. Such – alas! – is the way of the world. Too much food in one place, and not enough in another. You would think by now we could have arranged things a bit better. I, for instance, would have been only too happy to save up a week’s supply and take it along to a central collecting point for redistribution. Far better than throwing it behind the rose bushes.
Fortunately, from my point of view, neither Mum nor Dad is into gardening, so they never came across the little festering piles of food. Probably the foxes mopped it up. Or the hedgehogs, or the squirrels. Or even next door’s cat. But that was OK. If the starving people couldn’t have it, I’d rather it went to the animals.
Weekends were the worst time. At weekends we always went up to Giorgio’s and I couldn’t very well keep rushing off to the loo with platefuls of pasta in the middle of a crowded restaurant. I thought even Mum might notice if I did that. One time when the weather was warm we sat at a table outside, on the pavement, and I toyed with the idea of upending my plate into a potted something-or-other, some kind of leafy thing, that stood nearby, but at the last minute I chickened out.
All I could do was try ordering the least fattening things I could find, but most of the stuff on Giorgio’s menu is smothered in oil or butter or rich creamy sauce – bad, bad, TRIPLE bad! – and even if I just asked for soup and a sorbet the waiter would come beaming up with a dish of tiramisu or cheesecake, “with the chef’s compliments”. Mum would say, “Go on! Eat it. You’ve hardly touched a thing,” and I knew if I sent it back Dad himself would come out and demand in hurt tones to know what was wrong. It was no use offering it to Mum because she would already have ordered her favourite, which was apple pie and cream, and it goes without saying that Petal wouldn’t help me out.
“Ugh! I don’t want it,” she’d say, giving one of her little shudders.
So then I’d try Pip, but he’d just push it right back at me like it was something repulsive. Cold sick, or nose droppings. If Pip had a pudding it was always ice cream. Green ice cream. He says that white tastes like cardboard, and pink, of course, is too close to red. Likewise chocolate. I sometimes wonder if Pip is quite normal, but maybe geniuses aren’t.
Mostly, at Giorgio’s, I had to eat what I had always eaten, for fear of drawing attention to myself. I didn’t want Mum to suss what was going on. I knew she would immediately think “Anorexia!” because that is what they always think. It is the modern bogey word for mums.
When we got back from Giorgio’s I would always feel very ill and bloated. It was truly disgusting, eating so much! I knew I had to offload it, so I would wait until Mum was relaxing in front of the television then I would shut myself in the loo and stick my fingers down my throat and bring everything up. Not very nice, but it had to be done. In any case, I remembered reading somewhere how Princess Di had done the same thing. If she could do it, so could I! It had obviously worked for her, she had always looked so beautiful. I thought that I would give anything to look like Princess Di!
As well as jumping on and off the scales twice a day, I also took to measuring myself, specially round my waist and hips. I measured once when I got up, before I weighed myself; and once when I went to bed, after I’d weighed myself. This is what you do when you get obsessed. If I could have measured and weighed during the day as well, I would have done! I did at weekends. At weekends I practically lived on the scales.
At school I didn’t really eat at all; it was easier there. I still had to go into the dining hall, but nobody checked what you had on your tray. I would just take a bit of salad and a yoghurt, and sit there nibbling at it while Saffy, as usual, tucked into chips and doughnuts and various other assorted goodies. Baddies! Saffy could eat an elephant and still look like a stick insect. Life is just not fair.
But then, whoever said it was? Certainly not me!
One lunchtime, when I was cutting up a lettuce leaf, Saffy said, “Jen! You’re not slimming, are you?”
The way she said it, you’d have thought I was planning to rob a bank or mug a little kid for his mobile phone. I felt my face surge into the red zone. Slimming! Why did it sound so shameful? I might have known that Sa
ffy would notice. We always notice things about each other. It’s what comes of being so close.
“Are you?” she said. All grim and accusing.
I said, “Yes, I am, as a matter of fact.”
“But why?” said Saffy.
Did she really need to ask? I would have thought it was obvious.
“I’m fat,” I said. We were sitting by ourselves at the far end of a table so nobody could hear us. I wouldn’t have said it otherwise. I would have been too ashamed.
“Jenny, are you mad?” shrieked Saffy.
Everyone turned to look, and I went, “Shh!”
“Well, but really,” she hissed, “we’ve already been through this! You are not fat!”
“Look,” I said, “it’s my body. I ought to know whether it’s fat or not.”
“You’re just being silly and oversensitive,” said Saffy.
I muttered, “You’d be silly and oversensitive if you looked like me.”
“I wouldn’t mind looking like you,” said Saffy.
I said, “Oh, no?”
“No! If you want to know the truth, I’d give anything to have hair like yours.”
It is true that my hair is quite thick, while Saffy’s is rather straggly. And her nose is decidedly pointy, and she is definitely not pretty. But she is thin.
“Honestly,” said Saffy, “you’re not fat, Jen! Really!”
“So what would you call it?” I said.
“I’d say you were… chubby.”
“Chubby?”
“Cuddly!”
“Cuddly,” I said, “is just another way of saying fat.”
“Oh! Well.” Saffy pushed her plate away from her. She had eaten chips and lentil bake. My stomach cried out in protest, and I rammed a lettuce leaf down my throat to keep it quiet. “If that’s the way you want to think of yourself,” said Saffy.