Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (8 page)

<
@TomKat37
@JoneseyBJ Don’t worry dear, they’re mostly people she’s slept with or been married to.>

10.00 p.m.
Talitha tweeted back.

<
@Talithaluckybitch
@TomKat37 @JoneseyBJ Darling it’s really TERRIBLY vulgar to display the green-eyed monster on Twitter.>

Friday 10 August 2012

Twitter followers 75, then 102, then 57, then probably none, by now.

7.15 a.m.
75 followers have mysteriously, silently appeared overnight.

9.15 p.m.
102 now. Feel overwhelmed by responsibility: like am leader of a cult and they will all jump into a lake or something if I tell them to. Maybe will have glass of wine.

9.30 pm.
Must clearly show leadership and address followers.

<
@JoneseyBJ
Welcome followers. I am thy leader. Ye art most welcome to my cult.>

<
@JoneseyBJ
But please do not do anything weird like jump into a lake, even if I suggest it, as may be drunk.>

9.45 p.m
<
@JoneseyBJ
Gaah! 41 one of ye followers have drained away as suddenly as ye first appeared.>

<
@JoneseyBJ
Comest thou back!>

Thursday 16 August 2012

137lb, pages of screenplay written 45, Twitter followers 97.

4.30 p.m.
Twitter followers have surged back and multiplied, rather like Pinocchio’s broomstick. Is clearly sign or portent. Weight is coming off again, have finished Act Two of screenplay, well sort of, and just had sighting of bohemian neighbour.

Was trying to park car. This is impossible in our street as is narrow, curved and cars park on both sides. Had just reversed in and out of space fourteen times, then resorted to Braille Parking, i.e. forcing car into space by bumping cars in front and behind. Braille Parking is fine in our street because everyone does it, then every so often a delivery lorry charges through, scraping everyone, someone takes its number and we all get our dents done on the insurance.

‘Mummeee!’ said Billy. ‘There’s someone in the car you bumped.’

The bohemian neighbour was sitting in the front seat, yelling at the kids in the back. I knew we were kindred spirits. She climbed out of the car, followed by her two dark, wild-looking children. They looked the same age as Billy and Mabel: older boy, younger girl! Then the bohemian neighbour looked at her bumper, grinned at me, and disappeared into her house.

We have initiated contact! We are on the friendship road! As long as she does not behave like the spambot.

Thursday 23 August 2012

135lb, pounds lost 40 (unbelievable), dress sizes dropped 3.

Historic and joyful day. Have not got fat anything. Obesity Clinic says have now got down to healthy weight and should go on ‘Maintenance’ and losing more weight is only for aesthetic reasons and not because they think I need it!

And to prove it, I just went to H&M again and I am a 10!

I have written half of screenplay and at least ascertained that have neighbour with children the same age, I have 79 twitter followers and am part of hooked-in generation of social-media people, and I AM A SIZE 10. You see! Maybe am not completely rubbish.

Monday 27 August 2012

Acts of screenplay written 2.25, Twitter followers 87.

Mabel is so funny. She was sitting staring ahead in an eerie manner.

‘What are you doing?’ said Billy, brown eyes looking at her intently, slightly amused. Mark Darcy. Mark Darcy recreated in child form.

‘Havin’ a starin’ competition,’ said Mabel.

‘Who with?’

‘De chair?’ said Mabel, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Billy and me started giggling, then suddenly he stopped and looked at me: ‘You’re laughing again, Mummy?’

SMUG MARRIED HELL

Saturday 1 September 2012

135lb, positive thoughts 0, romantic prospects 0.

10 p.m.
Giant step backwards. Just back from Magda and Jeremy’s annual joint-birthday drinks. Was late because it had taken me twenty minutes to do up my zip, despite the time I had spent in yoga attempting to interlink my hands behind my shoulder blades and trying not to fart.

On the doorstep the memories surged up again: the years when I would stand there with Mark, with his hand on my back; the year I’d just found out I was pregnant with Billy and we were going to tell them all; the year when we took Mabel all wrapped up in her little car seat. It was so lovely going to things with Mark. I never worried about what I was wearing because he’d watch me try everything on before we left and help me choose, and tell me I didn’t look fat and do all the zips. He always had something kind and funny to say if I did something stupid, was always batting off any jellyfishing remarks (the kind that suddenly zap you as if from nowhere in the middle of a conversational warm sea).

I could hear the music and laughter inside. Fought the urge to run off. But then the door opened and Jeremy was there.

I saw Jeremy feeling what I was feeling: the yawning gap beside me. Where was Mark, his old friend?

‘Ah, there you are! Excellent,’ said Jeremy, blustering over the pain, as he had consistently done since the moment it happened. That’s public school for you. ‘Come in, come in. Great! How are the children? Growing up?’

‘No,’ I said rebelliously. ‘They are stunted by grief and will be midgets for the rest of their lives.’

Jeremy has clearly never read any Zen books and doesn’t know about just being there, and letting the other person be there, just as they are. But for a split second, he stopped the bluster and we just were there as we were, which was: extremely sad about the same thing. Then he coughed and started again as if nothing had happened.

‘Come on! Voddy and tonic? Let’s take your coat. You’re looking very trim!’

He ushered me into the familiar sitting room and Magda waved cheerily from the drinks table. Magda, who I met at Bangor University, is actually my oldest friend. I looked around at all the faces I’d known since my early twenties, once the original Sloane Rangers, older now. All the couples who seemed to get married like a line of falling dominoes when they were thirty-one, still together: Cosmo and Woney, Pony and Hugo, Johnny and Mufti. And there was the same sense I’d had for all that time – of being a duck out of water, unable to join in what they were talking about because I was at a different stage of life, even though I was the same age. It was as though there had been a seismic timeshift and my life was happening years behind theirs, in the wrong way.

‘Oh, Bridget! Jolly good to see you. Goodness, you’ve lost weight. How are you?’

Then there was the sudden flash in the eyes, the remembering of the whole widowhood thing: ‘How ARE the children? How are they doing?’

Not so Cosmo, Woney’s husband, a successful, confident-though-egg-shaped fund manager, who came charging up like a blunderbuss.

‘So! Bridget! Still on your own? You’re looking very chipper. When are we going to get you married off again?’

‘Cosmo!’ said Magda indignantly. ‘Zip it.’

One advantage of widowhood is that – unlike being single in your thirties, which, because it is ostensibly all your own fault, allows Smug Marrieds to say anything they like – it does usually introduce some element of tact. Unless, of course, you’re Cosmo.

‘Well, it’s been long enough now, hasn’t it?’ he crashed on. ‘Can’t carry on wearing widow’s weeds for ever.’

‘Yes, but the trouble is—’

Woney joined in. ‘It’s very hard for middle-aged women who find themselves single.’

‘Please don’t say “middle-aged”,’ I purred, trying to imitate Talitha.

‘. . . I mean, look at Binko Carruthers. He’s no oil painting. But the second Rosemary left him he was inundated with women! Inundated! Throwing themselves at him.’

‘Hurling themselves,’ said Hugo enthusiastically. ‘Dinners, theatre tickets. Life of Riley.’

‘Yes, but they’re all “of a Certain Age”, aren’t they?’ said Johnny.

Grrr. ‘Of a Certain Age’ is even worse than ‘middle-aged’ with its patronizing, only-ever-applied-to-women insinuations.

‘Meaning?’ said Woney.

‘Well, you know,’ Cosmo was bludgeoning on. ‘Chap gets a new lease of life, he’s going to go for something younger, isn’t he? Plump and fecund and—’

Caught the quick flash of pain in Woney’s eyes. Woney, not an advocate of the Talitha school of branding, has allowed the fat-positioning of middle age freely to position itself all over her back and beneath her bra: her skin, falling exhausted into the folds of her experience, unpolished by facials, peels or light-reflecting make-up bases. She has let her once long and shiny dark hair go grey, and cut it short, which only serves to emphasize the disappearance of the jawline (which as Talitha says, can be quickly glossed over with some well-cut, face-framing layers), and has gone for a Zara version of the structured black frock and high ruffled collar favoured by Maggie Smith in
Downton Abbey
.

I sense Woney has done this, or rather not done any ‘rebranding’, presumably not out of ‘feminism’ as such, but partly out of an old-fashioned British sense of personal honesty; partly because she can’t be arsed; partly out of self-belief and confidence; partly because she doesn’t define herself by how she looks or her sexuality; and, perhaps, mainly because she feels herself loved unconditionally for who she is: albeit by Cosmo who, in spite of his spherical physique,
yellow teeth, hairless scalp and unbridled eyebrows, clearly feels he would be unconditionally loved by any woman lucky enough to have him.

But for a second, at that flash of pain in Woney’s eyes, I felt a surge of sympathy, until she went on . . .

‘What I mean is that for a single man of Bridget’s age, it’s a total buyer’s market. No one’s knocking at Bridget’s door, are they? If she was a middle-aged man, with her own house and income and two helpless children, she’d be inundated by people wanting to take care of her. But look at her.’

Cosmo looked me up and down. ‘Well, yes, we ought to get her fixed up,’ he said. ‘But I just don’t know who would, you know, at a certain age . . .’

‘Right,’ I burst out. ‘I’ve had enough of this! What do you mean, “middle-aged”? In Jane Austen’s day we’d all be dead by now. We’re going to live to be a hundred. It’s not the middle of our lives. Oh. Yes. Well, actually it is the middle. Come to think of it. But the point is, the whole expression “middle-aged” conjures up a certain look.’ I panicked, glancing at Woney, feeling myself plunging helplessly into a deepening hole. ‘. . . a certain, a certain, past-it-ness, non-viability. It doesn’t have to be like that. I mean, why are you assuming I don’t have a boyfriend, just because I don’t blab on about it? I mean, maybe I do have boyfriends!’

They were all staring at me, slavering almost.

‘Do you?’ said Cosmo.

‘Do you have boyfriends?’ said Woney, as if she were saying, ‘Do you sleep with a spaceman?’

‘Yes,’ I lied smoothly, about the admittedly imaginary boyfriends.

‘Well, where are they, then?’ said Cosmo. ‘Why don’t we ever see them?’

‘I wouldn’t want to bring them here because they’d think you were all too old, set in your ways and rude,’ I was about to blurt out. But I didn’t because, ironically enough, as for the last twenty years or more, I didn’t want to hurt their feelings.

So instead I used the immensely skilful social manoeuvre I’ve been employing for the last two decades and said, ‘I need to go to the toilet.’

Sat down on the loo seat, saying, ‘OK. It’s OK.’ Put some more lip plumper on, and headed back down. Magda was on her way to the kitchen, holding – symbolically enough – an empty sausage plate.

‘Don’t listen to bloody Cosmo and Woney,’ she said. ‘They’re just in a frightful state because Max has gone off to university. Cosmo’s on the verge of retiring, so they’re going to be staring at each other across their Conran Shop 70s-style table for the next thirty years.’

‘Thanks, Mag.’

‘It’s always so nice when things go badly for other people. Especially when they’ve just been rude to you.’

Magda has never stopped being kind.

‘Now, Bridget,’ she said. ‘Don’t listen to that lot. But you do have to start moving on, as a woman. You have to find someone. You can’t carry on feeling like this. I’ve known you for a long time. You can do it.’

10.25 p.m.
Can I? Can’t see any way out of feeling like this. Not at this moment. You see, things being good has nothing to do with how you feel outside, it is all to do with how you are inside. Oooh, goody! Telephone! Maybe . . . a suitor?

10.30 p.m.
‘Oh, hello, darling’ – my mother. ‘I’m just ringing quickly to see what we’re doing about Christmas, because Una doesn’t want her cranio-facial at the spa because she’s had her hair done, and it’s in fifteen minutes – though why she had her hair bouffed when she’s got a cranio-facial and Aqua-Zumba in the morning I have no idea.’

I blinked confusedly, trying to make sense of what she was talking about. Ever since Mum and Auntie Una moved into St Oswald’s House, the phone calls have been the same. St Oswald’s House is an upscale retirement community near Kettering, only we are not allowed to call it a ‘retirement community’.