The Year I Went Pear-shaped: A fat woman's tale of love and insanity

by Tamara Pitelen

  Chapter 7: Psychic landlady

  "No, you don't understand Anita! This is a life-changing, corner-turning, transformational event! It is a watershed moment in the existence of Darla Manners! All my life has been a build up to this cataclysmic meeting. I am going to meet Gordon bloody Worsley! The man who can cause clitoral meltdown in a female corpse at 100 paces. How can you tell me to calm down!"

  Anita gazed at me disdainfully from over the top of The Australian newspaper. She was sitting at our kitchen table, her slippered feet resting on the chair opposite, crossed at the ankle.

  "Honey, I more than anyone have witnessed the murky depths that is your obsession with this second rate, soap actor. I just don't understand it. I can’t reconcile the intelligent, cynical, razor-tongued woman I know you to be with the fawning, pathetic starfucker you turn into over this man. He's just some guy you went to high school with about a century ago. Why are you so hung up on him?"

  How could I explain an irrational, illogical obsession to her in a rational, logical way?

  "I can’t really explain it to be honest, he just totally, utterly does it for me, Neets. Starfucker? I should be so lucky! Godalmighty what I wouldn’t give to get horizontal underneath him. And stop being so sanctimonious you cow, surely you've been crazy about some guy that you didn't really know, didn't you kiss any rock star posters in your teens? Or sell your Barbie doll collection to buy a CD by some hairy macho posturer who is now a zillionnaire thanks to the pocket money of an army of pubescent girls?"

  "Ok, ok, yes, it's true that at one point I would have laid down my young life for Jon Bon Jovi but I was 12, Darla, not 34! But don't worry, I'll shut up about it and give you my total support in this insane mission. I'll even listen to your rantings and help you go through your entire wardrobe while you decide what to wear to this oh so important, mochachino appointment. But let me say just one more time that I think you're fucking nuts. But what I really don't get is why you've waited so long to meet him; surely you could’ve swung this a long time ago? God, you went to school with the guy, you could’ve figured out a way to get in touch."

  "Yeah, I know but I wasn't ready before now. I've been subconsciously building up to it and preparing myself for it at the most basic, cellular level. That kind of molecular overhaul takes time."

  "Yeah, but why bother? He's just some guy and what if you meet him and he turns out to be a real arsehole? An up-himself, arrogant, boring jerk? Would you be released from this evil spell?"

  "Well, I can"t imagine that he"ll be anything but charming, witty and personable but if that doesn't turn out to be the case, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, Neets. Anyway, shut up with your predictions of doom "cause you said you were going to be supportive so stop criticising, put that bloody newspaper down and come and help me pick out some clothes."

  Shaking her head and smiling at me, she lay the paper on the table and followed me upstairs to my bedroom where clothes and shoes were strewn all over the floor.

  "Christ, what a mess, it looks like your wardrobe has vomited all over your floor!" Anita exclaimed, clearing some space at the head of my double bed, sitting on one of my pillows and resting her back against the wall underneath the only real art I owned, which were three small hand-coloured etchings of flowers that looked like vaginas. Or maybe it was the other way round; vaginas that looked like flowers. I'd seen them at an exhibition opening held by my old friend Kate, an art gallery curator. The artist was this highly-strung, nervous woman called Irene Cooper who Kate assured me was brilliant and would "go places". I picked up the three prints for $900 each. "A steal" according to Kate, apparently I would thank her when I sold them for ten times that much. But I didn't really care whether they appreciated in value or not, I bought them because I thought they were fantastic.

  "Yeah, I've tried on just about everything I own and it all makes me look fat and dumpy. I need to lose seven kilos by tomorrow, " I said, picking up a suede mini skirt that, half an hour ago, had made me look like a potato with an elastic band stretched around the middle.

  "Rubbish, you don't need to lose weight, you need to lose the bad attitude. Now put on those black trousers hanging off the door frame and your gorgeous Anna Sui floaty blouse."

  I did as I was told; simultaneously pulling the filthy t-shirt I was wearing over my head and pulling my trackie daks down with my feet, before tossing them over my bedside lamp.

  "Now, put on those calfskin ankle boots which for some reason you've got sitting in your laundry basket."

  Anita was inspired when it came to fashion. I would never have thought of teaming the Anna Sui with the black trousers but, checking myself out in the full length mirror on the back of my door, she was right, I looked great. Hot, even. Goddamit, I was going to give Gordon Worsley something to think about.

  "You look fabulous Darla! Well, you will do once you've done something with all that hair and slathered yourself in a tonne of make-up. But you're not seeing him for another five and a half days, that should be just enough time to fix yourself up."

  I didn't dignify her comments with a response. I just leapt on top of her with a blood-curdling yell and smothered her with a pillow. It took her about three seconds to kick and squeal her way out of my death grip and suddenly it was me who was pinned beneath her and unable to move, partly because I was laughing so hard I couldn't breathe but mostly because four years of martial arts had taught Anita a thing or two.

  Just then the doorbell rang.

  Telling her that she had been saved certain humiliation by the bell because I'd been about to launch a brutal counter attack, I pushed Anita towards the door and said "you're closer". Then I sealed the deal by quickly putting my thumb on my forehead in that age-old drinking gesture that meant the onus was on her to run down and see who it was. Like the good sport she was, she recognised defeat and ran down the stairs.

  About a minute later, she yelled back up to me.

  "Daaaarrrrrlaaaaa! It's Margot, she's popped in for a cuppa!"

  "Hiiii Margot!" I shouted. "Be right down!"

  Margot Linbarrett was our landlady. Aged in her sixties, she lived around the corner by herself in a gorgeous four-bedroom terrace house. For as long as we"d been tenants, she'd dropped by every week or two for a chat and never turned up without homemade cake, or biscuits, still warm from the oven. She was the best landlady I'd ever had. She was also the strangest and had told us that she had ‘certain psychic abilities’. It came up on one of her early visits; she was in the middle of telling us something when she suddenly stopped mid-sentence, looked at the phone and said, “Anita, your grandmother’s about to ring and something’s wrong. She doesn’t want to tell you because she doesn’t want to be a bother but it’s important that you pester her until she does tell you.” That spooked us; let me tell you, but not nearly as much as we were spooked about three minutes when Anita’s gran did call. Margot and I left the room at that point but Anita told me later that, after some determined questioning, her gran had admitted having agonising stomach pains and that she’d been urinating blood. So Anita had jumped straight in her car, drove the hour or two to her Gran’s house and took her straight to hospital. It turned out to be something wrong with her bowel that would need surgery. So, after that, we took Margot’s little predictions and funny visions a little more seriously.

  Back when I first moved in, I'd thought her visits were just an excuse to check up on us but I soon realised she honestly just wanted to chat and couldn't have cared less if we"d had a huge orgy the night before; whether friends from overseas were sleeping semi-permanently on the couch, or if there was a different man in our beds every night.

  Once, Margot had come round when Anita had left a bowl of marijuana sitting on the coffee table along with the usual paraphernalia that goes along with Class C drug use, like a pipe, a bong, and packet of rolling papers with the cardboard ripped off the front. Without batting an eyelid, Margot said that she often had marijuana in her tea before bed to help get
off to sleep. Apparently she had her own plants growing out the back in her herb garden, hidden amidst the basil, rosemary and coriander plants.

  In the three minutes it took me to get downstairs, Anita had already put the kettle on and was cutting into the jam roly-poly sponge that Margot had brought round. Sitting on the bench next to the kettle were three mugs with Earl Grey tea bags sitting in them, the string tags hanging over the side.

  "Hi Margot, lovely to see you!" I said, kissing her on the cheek.

  "Hello Love, are you well?" She asked.

  "Brilliant thanks, what have you been up to?"

  "Well, I was just telling Anita that you were in my dream with me last night."

  "Really? I'm honoured. What were we doing?" I asked, pulling up a chair opposite her at the kitchen table.

  "Having tea and scones under a giant mushroom."

  'scuse me?"

  "Yes, there was you, me, and a very dear friend of mine called Tobsha, she's Latvian you know. Anyway, the three of us were having a lovely time and after we"d finished tea, we went for a swim in this lake of warm cocoa."

  "Warm cocoa?" I laughed.

  "Yes" she smiled, "I think it's a sign that I'm supposed to introduce you to Tobsha."

  "I think it's a sign you've been drinking too much of that special herbal tea before bedtime, Margot."

  "Very possibly but I'd like you to meet Tobsha anyway Darla, I think she could help you."

  "Help me? How? What do I need help with?"

  "Well, I'll let her explain all that, she's very good you know."

  Margot refused to be drawn into giving me any more detail about the kind of help she felt I needed, which was probably a good thing, but she insisted I phone Tobsha right away and make an appointment. She said she wasn't leaving until I did it.

  And that's how I ended up in Tobsha Pudarneski's office the very next morning at 10am, sitting uncomfortably across from the woman herself.

  Aged somewhere between 50 and 75, Tobsha was a Latvian-born therapist who used regression hypnotherapy, psychoanalysis, and tarot card readings to sort out her clients’ problems. In heels, she stood at 5ft1 and had breasts that could be put to use as a helicopter landing strip should a state of emergency ever be declared in North Sydney.

  As well as those breasts, which surely had their own gravity pull, Tobsha had long, black -- suspiciously black -- hair that fell down to her waist in waves. Her nails were outlandishly long and her forehead ridiculously smooth. By the end of my first session I also knew that her sex life was "vunderfully satisfying with rich, resonant horgasms" and that in her spare time she wrote best selling romance novels under the pseudonym "Annetta Hardman".

  I also knew -- because Tobsha told me -- that I was far more fucked up than I realised and needed to see her every week without fail. So I signed up. Partly because I didn't want to disappoint Margot but also because Tobsha was cheap -- "Darla dahlink, I do not need ze money" -- and nothing if not entertaining. I justified the cost to myself by rationalising that it wasn't much more than a movie if you included popcorn, a large drink and one of those choc top ice creams that came in plastic bags, which of course I always did.

  Chapter 8: Bread is the devil’s work

  Dear Darla,

  Because he just kept going on and on about it, I reluctantly told my boyfriend how many men I had slept with before him. He was shocked and we’ve had a few fights since where he's thrown it in my face. Now I feel cheap, how can I convince him that I'm not a slut? Heather, QLD

  Dear Heather,

  Personally, I can count my sexual partners all on three fingers of one hand but a high number of sexual partners is nothing to be either ashamed or proud of, it's just a number. Your boyfriend is the one with the issue here and you're buying into it. Stop it. You have nothing to feel cheap about. This whole mentality is a hangover from the days when a woman's worth lay in her virginity. As an extension of that, we now have this ridiculous notion that the more sexual partners a woman's had, the more "used" she is. As if she is diminished with every new sexual encounter. This is highly insulting to all women. We are not bars of soap. Needless to say, the same rules do not apply to men, quite the opposite in fact. The higher a man's bedroom tally, the more he struts about like a peacock. To kill this stupid double standard, women must stop apologising for, or lying about, their sexual experience. In your case, your boyfriend can only make you feel cheap if you let him. Be proud of your sexual history, it's yours, own it. It has brought you to where you are now. Tell him to get over it or get lost.

  I know what you're thinking. You're thinking this is all going to turn out to be some kind of feel-good chick's story about how the fat girl loses loads of weight, has a makeover, gets the guy and lives happily ever after. Don’t hold your breath. Sure, I've dropped about 30 kilos in the last 15 years or so but no one's been mistaking me for Twiggy lately, that's for real.

  And I've still got at least another 10kgs of extra fat wobbling about all over me which, if I were to believe the ads on telly, is preventing me from living the kind of life where I have midnight beach bonfires with all my laugh-a-minute, good-looking friends, and spending my evenings in uber-cool bars where beautiful women in string bikinis dance to music mixed by people with names like Beats MC and GrooveStyler.

  The thing is, having worked on Lush! Mag for the past three years, I've been inside that world and most of the time it doesn't exist unless a camera is rolling. On the off-chance that you do happen to wander into a party that looks like something straight out of a Justin Timberlake video, you'll probably find that most of the people are boring, self-centred twats, focused on nothing but where their next line of coke is coming from. Their cheekbones may be wider than their hips but they are not special. They are not talking about things that are more interesting, or more important, than the things you're talking about.

  Believe me, the people you see each week in the trash mags, walking up red carpets on their way to see the premiere of some "groundbreaking" new movie where the lead is played by a large lump of sculptured plasticine brought to life by computer wizardry, often have the personality of sod. I've met celebrities worth squillions who I reckon must need instructions printed on the lid of their pedal bins at home. Yet, if these people get a haircut, or wear a new outfit, it gets more attention than war in the Middle East. Is it any wonder we’re all so fucked up? Is it any wonder most of the women in the western world put more energy into shaping their thighs than shaping history? And maybe all this has something to do with why, at the age of 30 something, I feel like I'm still waiting for my real life to start.

  So how did I lose those thirty kilos? It took a very, very long time and it didn't all just "melt away" because I started taking the stairs instead of the elevator; or because I drank a big glass of water when I felt like three kilos of Cadbury's Dairy Milk; or because I ate off a small plate to ‘trick’ myself into thinking I was having more (how thick would you have to be to fool yourself with that one?). The idiots who come up with "top slimming tips" like those clearly don’t understand your average common-or-garden eating disorders, the very disorders that are now as much a part of being a western woman as shaving your armpits. Actually, forget shaving; shaving is, like, sooo last year. Now, the only de rigueur way to rid oneself of "ugly and unnecessary" body hair is laser treatment, just eight excruciatingly painful and expensive sessions means never having to smear wax on your bikini line or take a razor to your legs ever again! Finally, the answer to that age-old question, what do women want? Answer: A permanently neat pubic triangle.

  Anyway, as I was saying, the fundamental mistake that do-gooder diet experts make is thinking that overeating is about hunger. Wrong! Inhaling a packet of Tim Tams dunked in a cup of hot Milo, followed by half a litre of ice cream eaten straight from the container while standing at the fridge, is not about hunger.

  Fooddicts do not think "hmm, I'm feeling a bit peckish, I think I'll eat 17 slices of fluffy, white bread slathered in a layer of
Nutella thicker than a shagpile carpet to keep me going till dinner's ready".

  Fooddicts are never hungry. We don't stop eating for long enough to get physically hungry. For fooddicts, food is emotional and telling a fooddict to just stop eating so much is like telling someone with chronic diarrhoea to come away from the toilet because they could stop if they really wanted to, they just need a bit of self control.

  With fooddicts, eating is the symptom - not the problem. The real problem lies buried somewhere in the subconscious and until you dig that evil little root out of your brain dirt, you may as well hold onto your "preferred customer" discount card for the local fish and chip joint.

  It took me a long time to figure this out. The problem is that knowing it is only half the battle so I still get sucked in when I hear about a new, "this time it really will work" diet. I get lured into the diet myth, for example, "just cut out bread and the weight will drop off" because bread is the enemy. Of course! Evil, wicked Foccacia. Why didn't I see it before?

  Another recent one was "just eat loads of boiled chicken and egg whites", then your life will totally transform, handsome strangers will give you flowers in the street, and you'll feel happy, fulfilled and worthwhile.

  So how did I do it? Nothing really, I just found that I started to slowly, slowly lose weight once I left home at the age of 20. First, I just moved into a house share, but then I moved all the way to London in search of excitement and all-night, ecstasy-fuelled dance parties. By the time I moved back to Sydney several years later, Mum and Joseph had up and relocated to the Gold Coast. Basically, it seemed that the further I got away from my childhood, the less I binged. I was still trapped in the vicious dieting cycle of starvation, guilt, denial, binge, and good ol" self-hate but I wasn't spinning around it as fast I used to.

  Chapter 9: Let’s Talk About Sex