The Perfect 10

by Louise Kean

  Adrian came for his first interview on a Wednesday, and he was eight minutes late, because of the trains. He ran in, adjusting his suit jacket nervously.

  His second interview was on a Friday, which I took to be a good sign. He was twenty minutes early, and sat in reception nursing a strong tea made for him by our post boy, Simon, at my suggestion. I didn’t speak to Adrian that day because I was too busy. Mariella arrived, breasts high and out, and bobbed hair swinging, and greeted him with a smile as big as Julia Roberts’, and a wriggle of her arse. Adrian didn’t seem to notice. That was the day I fell for him.

  Adrian started working for the Feel Good Company five weeks later, in IT support. His predecessor had been sacked after returning to the office one night drunk to phone for a cab home from his desk, logging on to a porn site, and then promptly falling asleep. Six hours and five hundred pounds later, he woke up.

  Adrian was twenty-six, and didn’t like IT at all. It paid the bills, he said. Simon who wore his jeans so low I was familiar with every pair of underpants he owned, observed that I ‘flustered’ when Adrian was around. I would make excuses about having to be somewhere else, or pretend to be busy with building contracts, or reprimand Simon for some minor misdemeanour. Anything to avoid looking Adrian in the eye. Because when I did, I laughed. My attraction for him overwhelmed me so much it actually made me laugh out loud.

  He was tall, six foot one. He had longish shaggy dark brown hair that hung around his ears and in his eyes. He had a large nose, and a complexion that suggested he could get away with factor ten in mid-summer Rhodes, although he was prone to the odd freckle. For his first week he wore pale shirts, blues and greys, with his suits. When he realised that he could get away with wearing jeans he switched to dark denim – not baggy like Simon’s, but not tight and high like an old man’s. They fitted him well. He wore a battered old leather belt, and sweatshirts with small logos, in bottle green, and navy, and claret, and grey. He wore expensive fashionable trainers. He carried a record bag, in which he kept his Walkman and a copy of the Sun. He supported Liverpool, although he had never been to Anfield. I knew all of this without ever having spoken to him for more than thirty seconds. A minute was the absolute limit for me, and then I’d make my excuses and walk off, to laugh elsewhere, rather than laugh in front of him like a crazy woman. He made my hands shake. He made me bite my lower lip. He didn’t have a girlfriend.

  He would rove the building, retrieving lost files and restarting crashed computers, and when he wasn’t busy he would come down to reception and chat to Simon, and flick through the paper. He started taking sugar in his tea, and put on half a stone, so he began running in the mornings before work, and lost it. I heard him talking to Simon one day, about a year after he had joined, gossiping about who had shagged who in the office, who they hated, whose computer he would deliberately take an age to fix. I was using the franking machine in the post room when I heard him refer to me as a ‘lovely girl’; I thought I was going to throw up.

  I made an effort after that. He could have been one of those men who just disliked fat women, made jokes about them behind their backs, easy fodder. But I was a ‘lovely girl’. There was no mention of ‘but you wouldn’t, would you,’ or, ‘shame about her arse’.

  After that I cracked jokes in his presence, and made him tea.

  It was a dark day when he told me he thought he was falling in love. With somebody else, of course. She was a trainee PE teacher, and he had met her in his local pub. I thought I hated her. I didn’t know her, hadn’t even seen her face, but I hated her. Of course, when I pictured her she was effortlessly slim. Her hair and her eyes and her clothes changed in my mind daily, but she remained a size ten. I was morbidly jealous. I was sure that she didn’t even have an issue with food, that she could eat two biscuits and leave the rest, that she could have a couple of spoonfuls of ice cream and proclaim herself ‘stuffed’ and return the carton to the freezer for another day. She could buy a bag of chips and feel sick after eating a third of them. She wouldn’t have to force herself to stop eating them, she just could, without thinking, throw them away. She felt ‘full’. I never felt full. If you tried to take a chip from my bag you’d get my teeth in your finger. And that was the only difference between Adrian’s girlfriend and me, in my head. But she got lucky, because she got Adrian. Eleanor Roosevelt said that nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent, and it is absolutely true. I didn’t really hate Adrian’s girlfriend for being thin. I didn’t hate Adrian for not picking me. I hated myself for being fat. And what did I do when I felt bad? I comfort-ate. During the years I worked with Adrian I was a size twenty-four. On the outside I was big and jolly and made-up and polished and laughing. Everybody passed comment that I was, of course, ‘happy with myself, didn’t have a problem with my size’ and they loved me for it, in a Platonic sense, at least. Of course, while I thumped around the office being big and happy and proud I still went home at night alone. Everybody else, the ones who did ‘care’ about their appearance, started getting engaged, and married, and pregnant. I just got their compliments, about how ‘great’ I was, what a wonderful role model, to be fat and happy. ‘Sunny by name, Sunny by nature,’ they’d say …

  It was a happy day that Adrian announced he had split up with the now qualified PE teacher, two years later. She just wasn’t the one, he told me. He wasn’t in love with her. Then he put his arm around my shoulders and said we should run off together. I said, ‘I don’t run anywhere,’ and laughed, and he squeezed my shoulder, and answered his phone.

  A Monday was the blackest day of my life. Adrian was still single, a year after breaking up with the teacher. We had worked together for three years. I trundled into work in high-heeled boots that I convinced myself were comfortable. I bought them from the plus size shop, where the heels are wider and therefore give your legs more support. Plus the legs themselves are wider, so you can actually zip them up. It was a small victory when I was finally able, three months ago, to buy my boots from ‘normal’ shoe shops, without the zips jamming around the ankle. My legs are toned now, and those boots fit comfortably, but of course I still look down and see fat that shouldn’t be there. My legs don’t look any different to me, but they must be thinner. I wear size twelve jeans now, that magical Perfect Ten still eluding me. Logic dictates that my legs have changed, but my eyes refuse to see it.

  On that Monday, in my fat girl boots, and a pair of long grey trousers and a black shirt, with my hair freshly straightened and my make-up impeccable, I walked into the post room to chat with Peter, our new assistant. Simon had left to join the police force six months earlier. Peter was just as amiable, and just as young, but a little more forthcoming with office gossip.

  ‘Morning, Peter,’ I announced in my usual ‘bubbly’ tone.

  ‘I have gossip,’ he declared with a sly smile on his face.

  I looked at him through narrowed eyes. ‘Is it any good?’

  ‘It’s top drawer.’ The look on his face told me he wasn’t lying.

  ‘Tell me then!’ I clapped my hands together excitedly.

  ‘Adrian went home with Mariella on Friday night.’

  My world fell apart. The smile stayed fixed on my face, but the lump in my throat kicked at my words, so they barely came out. A sumo wrestler had landed on my chest, and smashed the air out of my lungs.

  ‘Oh my God! I didn’t know something was going on between them.’ My voice broke on ‘them’, but Peter didn’t notice.

  ‘I don’t think it is. But I bet he shagged her.’

  ‘No doubt!’ I smiled, and turned and walked to my desk opposite the kitchen. I checked my emails and mentally pleaded with myself not to cry. Peter had no idea. Of course Jean did. She came to find me later, while I ate a double helping of cheesy pasta for lunch at my desk.

  ‘Have you heard?’

  ‘About Adrian and Mariella?’ I asked without looking up from my lunch.

  ‘Oh, Sunny, you’ll find somebody lovely.’
>
  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘And I’m sure Adrian and Mariella won’t turn into anything.’

  ‘Jean, you know I’m not bothered about Adrian, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh. OK. I just thought you liked him.’

  ‘Why would you think that?’ I said, still not looking up.

  ‘Sunny, you’re a lovely girl, really pretty, lovely hair, you always dress nicely – why don’t you ask him to go for a drink?’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ I looked up then, and the tears in my eyes were obvious.

  ‘He could do a lot worse than you, you know.’

  ‘I know. But I’m not interested, Jean.’ One tear spilt onto my cheek. Jean looked as if it were her heart that were breaking but said, ‘OK, I have to get back.’ She smiled at me, and brushed down her cardigan.

  Of course, I couldn’t ask him out for a drink. The squirming embarrassment, the silence just after I blurted it out, the dawning realisation that he was going to have to let me down gently, because I was a ‘lovely girl’. A tiny part of me did scream, ‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get! Men aren’t that bright; they just don’t see it unless, like Mariella, you make it screamingly obvious.’ But then the voice of reason told me what we all know is true. If a man wants to ask a woman out, he will, especially a fat woman who isn’t exactly fending off admirers. I was there, primed and basted and ready to be plucked off the shelf, I wasn’t ‘intimidating’. If Adrian had any feelings for me he would have asked me already. But asking him, hearing the rejection out loud, was too much for me to bear. That was the day I realised I had to leave the Feel Good Company, before the irony killed me.

  It took me another six months to pluck up the courage to hand in my notice. In that time Adrian slept with Mariella again twice. She was interested, but he wasn’t, and it fizzled out, but the threat of it always loomed the morning after a heavy night before, because it is, of course, so much easier to sleep with somebody a second or third time. My leaving drinks were held in the office itself, with four hundred pounds’ worth of drink consumed in reception by eighty-five people. We had a buffet, and I can never walk away from a buffet; they are my nemesis – even now, when I can tell you the calorie and fat content of every plateful of sausages on sticks and mini quiches and peanuts and mozzarella sandwiches and mini pizzas. All that food laid out in front of me is still hard to resist. Buffets for the serious dieter are to be avoided like wine tastings for an alcoholic.

  Adrian with his big northern laugh was one of the last ones standing at my farewell do. I had masochistic daydreams that he wouldn’t even attend, or stay for a few beers, then head off for more fun elsewhere with his mates, or even worse, slide off with Mariella at about half-past nine. But at 11.30 he was opening one of the last bottles of red wine, with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, laughing with one of the guys from systems support. He poured out a couple of glasses and brought one over to me, as I stood teary-faced, waving goodbye to Jean whose husband, Jeremy, was waiting downstairs in the car and who was already angry because she was drunk and an hour late.

  ‘Here you go, love. Have another one of those!’ Adrian thrust a glass of wine at me.

  I took it, but put it down behind me on the reception desk saying, ‘I’ve had too many already, I’m starting to feel a bit sick.’

  ‘Come on, it’s your leaving do! You can’t back out on me now! Where are we going afterwards?’ Adrian did a little dance and drops of red wine threatened to fly out of his glass.

  ‘Well I don’t know where you’re going, Adrian, but I’m going home.’

  ‘No! We have to go clubbing or something, give you a proper send-off.’ He flicked ash on the carpet. My mouth opened to reprimand him, before I realised that the carpets weren’t my responsibility any more.

  ‘I don’t go clubbing.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m too old.’

  ‘You’re only twenty-seven. What are you talking about – you’re younger than me! And I’m not too old! Come on, let’s go on the pull, pick ourselves up a couple of teenagers!’

  ‘I don’t think that’s going to happen.’

  ‘Come on, Sunny, why not?’ He was pulling at one of my hands, grinning, trying to get me to dance, certain I would be persuaded, because life was simple for Adrian.

  ‘Because … I’m dressed for work.’

  ‘You look lovely!’ He winked.

  ‘It’ll be all hot and sweaty!’

  ‘That’s a good thing!’ He winked again, but this time it was accompanied by a dirty laugh.

  ‘I’ll be twice the size of everybody else in there!’ I blurted it out because of the wine, and because I felt like I was being backed into a corner, and because it was the truth. He only looked embarrassed for a moment.

  ‘Shut up! What difference does that make? Come on, let’s go and have a dance.’ But he wasn’t dancing any more.

  ‘No, you go. I’m going to go home in a minute.’

  ‘Fair enough. Where’s Peter?’ Adrian smiled, but his bubble had been burst and he stumbled off.

  He wasn’t hitting on me, although that’s what my nicer friends would have said, to raise my hopes. But in these instances I firmly believe in being cruel to be kind. It hadn’t even occurred to him that we could go home together, and I never would have let it happen: couldn’t have been naked with Adrian without feeling violently exposed and vulnerable. The sex would have lasted for minutes, if he could manage a sloppy erection after that many drinks, and the excuses would have lasted an hour. I’m sorry about my sagging stomach, my bulbous arse, my huge thighs, everything! Everything! Besides, I had never pictured Adrian and I just having sex, fucking. We would have to be making love, because he liked me, and I liked him. I didn’t have that animal instinct in me that craved thrashing violent passionate orgasms. I wanted somebody to love me, and to make love to me, softly, and without apologies, to look into my eyes, and only my eyes, and not even think about the body beneath them. I wanted the body to become completely unimportant, just machinery, and I wanted all the fireworks to be in our heads. I wanted mental and emotional orgasms. I wanted his eyes to stare into mine, and a moment of realisation to hit us both like a volcano erupting, convincing us both that it was the best, most intimate, most overwhelming orgasm either of us had ever had. And it would have nothing to do with how we looked, and everything to do with who we were.

  But Adrian fucks with his eyes closed. I know, because they are closed now. The first time I had sex with Adrian I just wanted to prove I was good at it. He initiated the kiss, and I didn’t want him to regret his decision. And so it was a twisted sexual theatre of shivers and breaths and acrobatics on my part. I tried desperately to be energetic and adventurous and slightly filthy, while steering him away from my body parts that I still deemed unacceptable. My stomach still hung out hungrily like a deflated dart player’s belly, the skin refusing to tighten and just accommodate the muscles that were left. It was my restricted zone, to which I tried to deny him access, twisted and turning and planting him flat on his back any time his hands, or worse, his mouth, crept near it. But he managed to kiss my belly anyway, and didn’t seem to hate it with the vitriol that I did. I scratched and sucked and made vigorous, to prove a point. It was the ultimate vindication, after years of rejection. Now I was good enough to sleep with.

  It was a bland encounter. Of course, I faked a couple of orgasms for his ego, while my own ego shrivelled inside of me, occasionally knocking on my conscience to ask, ‘What are you doing?’ I ignored it and kept on rocking. And in the thick of it I did feel good, if not satisfied. He kissed me with passion, not love, but it was a passion that hadn’t existed a year ago. Somehow, and I wasn’t even sure exactly how, I had made Adrian want me, and that was enough for that night, at least. To expect the sex to be good as well would have been plain greedy.

  The second time I had sex with Adrian I tried to concentrate on enjoying myself. I spent far less time giving him oral sex, and focused all my attentions
on having an orgasm proper. No such luck. Sex with Adrian was a pretty pedestrian affair. It was fine, if fine is not too damning a word. What man wants to be described as ‘fine’ in bed? In fairness, he had a lovely penis, long and pale and smooth and clean, and thick as well. It was so pleasing to look at, it was almost sanitised. It just didn’t seem to hit the spot. I reprimanded myself mentally, while faking my second orgasm that night, for not relaxing enough to let it happen naturally. Maybe it was my own fault. Maybe I had, in my head, built this man into a sexual demi-god, able to dish out thrills with one thrust of his wand. The sexual explosions I had imagined were almost impossible to match in reality. Plus he was a little quick with his thrust, and not quite as deep as I’d hoped. I tried to make him go slower, and harder, but he had his rhythm and he was sticking to it, like UB40. It’s reggae or nothing. I imagine slow and hard is the thing that will really do it for me. I don’t know for sure. I’ve never had an orgasm with somebody else around. If that sounds tragic I console myself that at least I have had an orgasm, and if some sexual bright spark manages to get me there I will at least recognise it for what it is.

  This is the third time I have had sex with Adrian, and doing anything more than twice makes it a habit. But this time we are approximately two bottles of red wine and eight minutes into the encounter, and Adrian has already begun his thrust for home. His erection is precarious; neither one of us expects it to last much longer. I’m a little bored. I look up at his eyes, squeezed tightly shut, and I imagine that he might open them, and slow down, and kiss me tenderly, and stir something in me that hasn’t been reached yet. I wonder if he has his eyes closed so that he can picture somebody else, but now they spring open, and he smiles, and says my name, and then carries on pumping, which sounds like a Sid James special set in a petrol station.