by Anna Maxted
I shudder. That is an obscene amount of food. What a pig.
“That’s normal, Nat,” says Babs. “I get hungry otherwise. And I like eating.” She glances at me, and something seems to jolt. When she speaks, her voice is honeyed with lust. “That gorgeous sensation,” she purrs, “that delicious moment when you snap a creamy chunk of milk chocolate out of its shiny silver wrapping, and it melts over your tongue, that soft glut of sweetness, why deny yourself that casual pleasure, Nat? And spaghetti! Spaghetti with bolognese sauce so rich and thick it glitters—the joy of slurping it, sucking it up from the plate in a long splatty squiddle, the juiciness, the chewy satisfaction, my teeth ache just to think of it! And buttered toast! The oozy oily crunchiness of buttered toast, that taste is sublime, it’s a basic human right!”
I feel like a pervert panting on the end of a telephone sex line. Babs sees my popping eyes and returns to earth.
“Calories are just energy. I need that amount of food to be healthy, to do my job,” she adds, the evangelical ring less resonant. “If you don’t obsess about what you eat, you end up eating pretty much what you need. I eat a decent amount because my job is so physical. I burn most of it off. I’m telling you, one doughnut, two doughnuts, won’t make you fat. To get properly fat you’ve really got to put the work in, Nat! We’re talking dawn-to-dusk noshing—a strict regime! We’re talking twelve doughnuts daily, on top of normal meals. Look—” She flicks her red scarf over her shoulder and lifts up her sweatshirt. “Am I grotesque?” She tips like a pink teapot and her torso concertinas into rolls.
“N-no,” I stammer, goggling.
“Nat,” says Babs quietly, “I’m five foot eight and I weigh eleven stone. I am average.”
She says “average” like it’s a good thing to be.
“Go on,” orders Babs, “I can tell you want to disagree. I can always tell. You get that politely wretched look, like you’re meeting the Queen and there’s a frog on your tongue.”
I wrestle with my thoughts, but they are too fierce, too fiery to crush. “I don’t want to be average,” I snarl. “I can’t think of anything worse. I—I hate average. Who wants to be mediocre? It would be the worst. Who in the world is sad enough to be satisfied with that?” I whisper so that Babs doesn’t detect the hissing venom, but I follow her gaze to my lap and see that my hands are shaking violently, as if I’ve used them to kill someone.
Babs wills me to look at her. “But, Natalie,” she says, “you are not what you weigh. Your body is just the…the container. What makes you special, not average, is what’s inside. Your wit, your intelligence, your charisma, your quirks, your stupidity even. You were never average, Nat, you were, you are my best friend. You didn’t need to starve yourself to prove that you weren’t average. Look at you, you’re a wisp, a pale ghost of a girl. I have to hand it to you—you don’t look normal. But are you happy? I don’t think so. If it’s happiness you’re after, you won’t find it because you’re thin.”
“You won’t find it if you’re fat either,” I tell her bluntly. “And anyway, I don’t feel thin.”
“Anorexics don’t feel thin!” she shrieks. “Everyone knows that! The way you’re going, you’ll never be thin enough. It’s never enough, it won’t be enough until one morning you’ll wake up and you’ll be dead!”
I’d question her logic, but I’m reeling from this reckless slap of a word she’s thrown at me.
“I’m not”—I gulp—“anorexic.”
Babs glares at me. “You might not be Ally McBeal yet but you’re on your way. You are shrunken. Even your head is thin! Your skull looks too big for you. Frankly I’m not surprised you’ve lost your job. I’ll be honest—no one is. You’re just not there anymore. It’s like talking to a zombie. You’re barely present physically, and mentally, you’re absent. You hardly go out, and the last time you came to dinner, you mashed your potato pie around your plate like a four-year-old—”
“I don’t eat pastry,” I say.
“Nat, that’s an excuse. It’s like saying you don’t like the cut of a chicken’s jib.”
“I feel fat,” I hiss.
“But that’s your answer to everything!” she cries. “Nat, I’m asking you because I want to know. Don’t you…don’t you ever get hungry?”
I’m not sure if I know anymore.
“I want a body with sharp edges,” I say after a while, because she won’t let me wriggle out of an answer. “Sometimes I am hungry. I’m always hungry. But when I don’t eat I feel good. Pure. I feel empty and it’s wonderful. I feel so powerful. Like I could fly.”
Babs shakes her head, and her vanilla crunch hair frames her anxious face like a dark halo.
“Nat,” she murmurs, “you’re not a saint, you’re a human being. You’re not meant to be pure, or perfect. I wish, I so wish that just once you could leave the fucking washing up. Stay calm if someone rucks up the carpet. The minute anyone steps out of the toilet you’re in there hurling gallons of bleach down it. And if they get off the sofa—you’re there, straightening cushions. You don’t allow yourself to have fun! No casual sex—”
“I’m having sex with Chris.”
“That’s coke sex! Coke, the drug of low self-esteem! That’s cheating! God knows where he fits in, but that’s not Natalie Miller shagging—it’s the drug!”
I want to scream at Babs that I’ve gone off coke anyway, it makes me paranoid that I’ve got a snotty nose, and that I know she resents Chris because he isn’t Saul, safe, boring Saul, as dull as a woman can get without tying the knot and having a lobotomy. I’m getting my ear chewed off for Not Having Fun, yet Chris Poodle—bacchanalian Chris who spits in the eye of marriage—is dashed aside as a bad influence! What does she want from me?
“Losing control doesn’t count if it’s drug-induced, Nat,” scolds Babs, who, it appears, could teach the Dalai Lama a thing or two about the meaning of life. “That sort of losing control is just an escape. I want you to relax, be comfortable with who you are, and that means facing yourself, accepting yourself. There’s no joy, no triumph in being an iron woman. If I’m honest, I’m glad you’ve lost your job. Because that job of yours, I don’t think it helped.
“I know you love ballet, but being around that sort of discipline, that superhuman willpower, is not healthy for someone like you. You can’t compete with a bunch of elite athletes. I know it’s an art form, and it’s awesome, breathtaking, but it’s also about perfection, it’s narcissistic, anal, it’s all about physicality, looking in the mirror all day long, and that’s the last thing you need. You need to be in a freer environment where you can eat a few biscuits, gain a few pounds, and it not be a massive guilt vortex that sucks up your existence.”
I wish she’d go. She doesn’t understand.
“Babs,” I mutter, “it’s okay for you. You’re okay. But me, I’ll be uglier, I’m ugly, I feel ugly—”
“You’re not ugly, Nat!” shouts Babs, so loud and shrill I nearly topple into the bath. “You’re lovely, you are, my god—Andy and Robbie think you’re gorgeous, the pair of them drive me mad! But you’ve got to believe it, believe you’re gorgeous, but not just to look at, as a person. That’s what matters. Beauty is surface, it means so little, it’s transient. Looks are nothing. It’s what’s inside that counts, and you have that.”
I’m surprised that a large godly finger doesn’t poke through the bathroom window and strike her down where she sits. Looks are nothing! Then explain Estée Lauder and her zillion-dollar cosmetics dynasty, my bronzed born-again father and his trainer-slash-nutritionist-slash-herbalist, every celebrity back in shape three days after giving birth, my diet addict mother discarded for a younger model, all our cosmetically perfect film stars—we force them to be what they are, and what they are is our punishment—Kimberli Ann and her inflatable breasts, a million airbrushed cover girls, pint-size Robbie and his exercise addiction, the students who after fifteen years of dedication and desire and maniacal toil are rejected from the GL Ballet because w
hile their talent is unquestionable their bodies are the wrong shape for classical ballet. Oh no. Looks are nothing.
I splutter, “How can you say that? How can you pretend that looks don’t matter?”
Babs says, “I’m not pretending they don’t matter. I’m saying that looks matter less than you think they do. Yes, if you want to be a supermodel, looks matter. If you don’t, they’re less important. If you want to attract the sort of man who sneers when you eat cake and tolerates your opinions, then yes, you’ll need to be ravishing. If you want to make insecure women hate you, then yes, be born beautiful. But the kind of people you want to be around won’t judge you on your looks for longer than five minutes. And I swear it, Nat, you wouldn’t want them to.”
She pauses. “But this isn’t really about looks, is it, Nat? This isn’t about looking ugly. It’s about feeling ugly. Is that what you feel?”
She speaks so softly I could fall asleep on the sweet fairy whisper of her breath.
I reply stiffly, “I feel nothing but ugly through and through.”
“Oh, Nat,” says Babs sadly, “you break my heart. How can you feel that? What else do you feel?”
The agony of this interrogation is turning my spine to chalk. (This may also be linked to perching on the side of the bath for an hour.) “I feel…nothing,” I say. “I feel…not nice.”
Babs holds up a hand. “Nat,” she murmurs. “Let me remind you of something. Not so long ago, you and I were walking to the station. I can’t remember why. Anyway, we’re walking along and you shout, “Wait!” And you crouch down and I see this hideous fluorescent green caterpillar on the pavement. It’s the biggest bloody creepy-crawly I’ve ever seen, I wouldn’t even dare stamp on it. And I watch you pick up this creature…”
“Oh yeah,” I say, “he was really cute, he was a bright green pudgy thing, he was stranded—”
“And I watch you flap around looking for the right leaf to place this thing on, and eventually you find one, and the caterpillar won’t stick, and I hear you say—hear you with my own ears, say—‘Come on, darling, you’ve got work to do, you’ve got to become a butterfly!’ ”
Babs pauses. “Now that,” she adds softly, “is a person with a beautiful soul.”
Everything blurs. After a long time I whisper, “It doesn’t feel like that. I don’t know why. But it doesn’t.”
Babs flops her head in her hands. I glance at her luscious hair, rich with dancing curls, playful twirls, chocolate ripples, vanilla streaks.
“You’re a liar,” she states. “A liar, and you don’t even know it. I don’t think you want to accept what you feel.”
She stops for a second, then blurts, “You’re so stubborn. I think when I got married, you were angry, but you were angry way before that. My engagement might have been the trigger, Nat, but that was just an excuse. If kids don’t feel valued by their parents for themselves, they grow up looking for other ways to be valued. And Nat, when your dad pissed off, you suffered the emotional equivalent of being dropped on your head. But you won’t admit it.
“You just replay the scenario with every man you’ve met since—good men some of them, but you push them and push them until they leave you. You don’t feel valued but you’re blaming all the wrong people. Yet you won’t admit you feel angry. You’re as thin as tissue paper, but all you allow yourself to feel is ‘fat.’ It’s a code word for something else.”
I’m trapped in a pop psychology class with no doors. “Fat is fat, Barbara. There is nothing in the Western world—apart from pedophiles and murderers—quite so reviled as a fat woman. Except a fat woman talking with her mouth full. Fat is poor, Babs. Fat is stupid, greedy, indulgent, and disgusting.”
“I don’t think fat is any of those things,” she replies coolly. “That’s just your warped perception. I know lots of big women who are smart, powerful, ha—”
“If you say ‘Oprah Winfrey’ I’m going to scream.”
“Natalie,” snaps Babs. “I’m not talking about celebrities, I’m talking about women I know. But when you say ‘fat,’ Natalie, you don’t mean women who are clinically obese. You mean women who weigh over nine stone. That’s ninety percent of the female population. Has it occurred to you that what you think is ‘fat’ is normal?”
“People feel sorry for you if you’re fat, it’s seen as failure.”
Babs replies primly, “So being Miss Skeleton Head shows your success and sophistication, does it?”
“Pretty much,” I snap. “Pretty being the operative word.”
A nasty thought occurs to me. Babs nabs it. “Oh Christ,” she says, “you think I’m jealous. Natalie. Please. I care about you. I want you to be well. And I know that thin doesn’t work. The one time I went on a diet, years ago, the Cabbage Soup Diet—I smelled like a bog and farted like one. And I looked a right state! Like a thawing snowman, my top half melted away. I had a chest as flat as Holland. It took me a while, but I realized I like my body how it is. It works for me. I use it. I enjoy it. I want to smell a rose, run up a hill, pat a dog, watch a sunset, make love to Si—it sounds cheesy, but my body lets me do those things. It’s perfect for what I need it to be. What does your body do for you, Nat? You treat it like a prison.”
I shake my head. As far as I can see, I’m in the dock for not clearing my plate and we’re looking at a life sentence. All this fuss.
“I was not angry when you got married,” I squeak. “I was pleased for you. I’m sorry,” I add silkily, “if it came across that way.”
Babs grits her teeth. “Nat,” she says. “You play this game, this polite, meek, pardon-me-for-speaking game. But there’s a lot about you that isn’t meek. There’s a lot about you that’s powerful. You’re a wolf disguised as a lamb. And sometimes I feel that you’re taunting us with it.”
“Who’s us?” I say coldly, displeased at the wolf analogy.
“Me. Your mother. Your dad. Even Tony, if he ever bloody opened his eyes to notice.”
How she has the nerve. “Please don’t talk about Tony like that,” I say. I dig my nails into my skin until the pain is gaspingly sharp. “This is nothing to do with you or my family. You and they are fine. I am quite aware that you have less time for me now you’re with Simon. Admittedly, my mother is hard work, but she is kind and caring and I love her. And I love my dad and I adore Tony. He might not be touchy-feely, but so what?”
“They are fine, you are not fine. Starving yourself is not a good way of communicating that you’re sad and angry, Nat. You’ve got a voice. Use it.”
I need to shut her up fast. “Babs,” I say, “don’t worry about me. I’m just a vain foolish silly little girl who wants to look like a supermodel.”
17
NO ONE LIKES TO HAVE THEIR CHARITY THROWN back in their face. They’ve gone to the great trouble of stuffing their old, stained fashion mistakes into a plastic rubbish bag so that those less fortunate can shuffle about Kosovo in Frankie Says Relax T-shirts, striped A-line skirts, and purple snoods, so to have their generosity rejected hurts. Babs jumps up and I watch her, heart hammering.
“Fine,” she says, her tone so chilly it would have a polar bear reaching for his down jacket. “If that’s how you want it.”
She marches into the hall with long haughty strides, me scampering after her like a puppy. She reaches for the latch and adds crisply, “I tried.”
Then she yanks open the front door, and slams it roughly behind her. Which would be all very soap opera, were it not that her red scarf catches in the door and, judging from the surprised yelp, hauls her back by the neck as she tries to flounce off. I listen to Babs struggling with the scarf for about thirty seconds, and consider waiting for the rude shrill of the doorbell and the bitterly spat “thanks”—no compensation for the shriveling of dignity that follows making a sod-you exit, then being forced to crawl back again.
I open the door. I in my underpants, she scowling in fury, we stare at each other for a fragile moment and burst out laughing. We shriek and
howl so much I have to squeeze my legs together and do a Mick Jagger walk to prevent an unseemly accident. “Stop it!” I gasp, “Stop it or I’ll”—squirm, wriggle, Jumping Jack Flash—“oh, it’s okay, it’s gone back up!”
Babs teeters on the edge of hysteria, and blurts, “Bloody bastard scarf!”
I grin, shy suddenly, as our laughter drains to a trickle. “Don’t go,” I mumble. “Stay for a bit, and we’ll, we’ll”—I squeeze out the words—“talk about things.”
Babs smiles at me, a luscious full-cream crinkly-eyed smile. “On one condition.”
“What?” I say.
“That you get dressed. You’ll catch your death of cold,” she adds, aping my mother.
I realize that my teeth are chattering and my hands are blue and I’m in my underpants. “Okay,” I say, “but let me make you a cup of t—”
“I’ll do it,” says Babs, “I know where the kettle is, be off with you.”
I grin, and trundle toward my bedroom. I don’t want to wear the clothes I was in when Babs outed me. Oh god. I feel like a heavyweight boxer with a closet interest in needlepoint. Am I even a little of what she says I am? She thinks I’m angry with her for getting married. How selfish am I? I see myself as she must see me, a fat, selfish, red-faced girl, stamping her unfeasibly large foot at the world. Ought I to have spent more on her wedding present?
If this is the truth, it makes me feel small. At least something does. But I can’t stand to have Babs think badly of me. I rummage through my wardrobe, and snatch the soft clingy pink top that Matt chose to hasten my first step to infidelity. I pull it on and it hangs off me, like a sheet off a scarecrow. More or less since Babs got engaged, I have avoided squaring up to the wardrobe mirror. Now, I force myself to meet my own eyes. My hair is tufty—my head hair, my armpits are bald, thank you—where I’ve back-combed it, to make it seem thicker, and my complexion is the shade of natural yogurt. Hello, Edward Scissorhands.