Size Matters (14 page)

Cathy's yoga class was held in a big aerobics studio at the back of the local leisure centre. The studio had glass doors covered by sheets of coloured paper. Jay
assumed this was because people had complained about casual gawpers in the corridor staring at the activities inside. She sympathized with these imaginary complainants, identifying with the uncoordinated and plump of thigh, furiously puffing through their paces and mortified by the background mirth. As it was, she considered there were far too many mirrors. You really couldn't miss seeing yourself from angles you'd rather not know about, and she resolved to focus on her Inner Being or whatever it was you were supposed to do to make you feel that essential yogic peace. Those who had arrived before her were already doing just that: lying around the room on their mats, under blankets and with their eyes closed. Music played softly in the background. It was the tuneless, wafty sort that Jay associated with beauty salons where she'd had facials. Greg called it ‘ambulance' music, aware it was known as ‘ambient' but judging it mournful to a suicide-inducing degree.

‘Hi Jay, I'm so glad you could make it!' Cathy greeted her as she greeted all her pupils, with a gentle hug and a feather-light kiss on each cheek. Cathy smelled faintly of vanilla and was looking inspiringly slender and fine-muscled in a tiny strappy vest and black stretchy trousers that just about balanced on her bony hips. Jay was amazed – out and about at home Cathy tended to go for the layered look, clothes-wise. To be this thin underneath she must have been piling on her entire wardrobe on a daily basis.

‘You know I haven't done yoga before, apart from a taster session on holiday once,' she told Cathy. She was beginning to feel nervous as the room filled with the sound of deep slow breathing from those on the floor.

‘Don't worry, you'll be fine. This isn't the advanced class – we've got all sorts. You should take the moves to
the level that makes you feel comfortable. Where do you want to be? At the front?'

‘Er . . . somewhere in the middle, I think.' What Jay meant was, out of range of the mirrors.

‘Fine – oh good, you remembered to bring a blanket. What we do at the start is, we lie down and just take a few minutes to settle our bodies and our minds into a calm, centred place, to leave the outside world and the events of the day behind us.'

Jay left her shoes by the wall, headed for a piece of floor a safe couple of rows from the front, unrolled her mat and lay down beneath her blanket, closing her eyes and trying to make her mind go blank. It wasn't easy. She could feel the floor's solidity through the mat, and the blanket had a shamefully dingy-looking brown furry patch. Daffodil must have been leaping into the airing cupboard to sleep on it. People were still coming in, fussing with coats and mats and huffing about as they settled into position. A body flumped down quite close to Jay and she forced herself not to open her eyes and turn to greet it, for surely that would be only polite; lying down next to someone under blankets like this was quite intimate in the same way that being in a hospital bed was, or a hostel dormitory. She also tried not to think about the chilli Greg was simmering on the cooker back at home – her stomach, starved since the gruesome lunchtime Shape-Shake (malted chocolate), was in grave danger of rumbling its way through the entire class.

She would give up those Shakes, she decided as she lay there trying to breathe evenly. She felt as if they were turning her insides to glue and her body to a beige, toneless sponge. ‘Shape-Shake' was a disappointing name for such stuff too – it made her think of the lively kind of dances popular in the seventies, where teen magazines would show you the moves with
a series of footprint drawings to follow. It could only disappoint, really, if dance-type liveliness was what you had in mind when you drank it.

‘OK everybody, welcome to the class . . .' Cathy had turned off the music, turned down the lights and pitched her voice into a soft, low tone. ‘We're going to start with some alternate nostril breathing.'

Oh I'm sure I can manage that, Jay thought. She felt confident she wouldn't fail at that bit. She might not know her chi from her chakras but it surely wasn't possible to be hopeless at breathing. She opened her eyes to see everyone else already sitting pertly on their mats, blankets neatly folded by their sides. Quickly she sat up, rearranged herself and returned to full attention, feeling rather flustered, just in time to hear Cathy completing her instructions with ‘. . . then the middle finger of the right hand to close off the left nostril as we breathe out . . .'

Oh Lordy, she thought, trying to co-ordinate her efforts and work out what she was supposed to be doing. The word ‘why' also came traitorously to mind, for surely, whichever of these two small orifices it went in through, all the air got mixed together at the back of your nose? Apparently not. Well then. She'd put that down as a ‘fail'. To think she'd assumed breathing was the one thing you couldn't get wrong.

‘Mum told me you were on a diet so I brought you this instead of chocs and cake. I wouldn't want to be the one to put temptation in your way.' April giggled as she handed Jay a fat Jiffy bag containing something bulky but lightweight and slightly crunchy to the touch, like a bag of autumn leaves. She'd just arrived, breezing cool spring air with her into the house, scented with almond flowers and loaded with an assortment of canvas bags and a bunch of rhubarb-and-custard tulips. Her dark red hair looked wild and windswept, as if she'd raced down from Cheshire on horseback rather than driving in her peculiarly sedate way in her Honda Civic. ‘So
why
are you dieting?' she continued, standing back a little to have a proper up-and-down look at her sister. ‘You look fine to me. We just happen to be a family that morphs with age into unexpectedly rounded stock, that's all. You'll get used to it in a year or two. I did.'

April was a good bit rounder (though compensatingly taller) than Jay, an effect exaggerated by her being dressed in many quasi-hippy blue-and-purple-shaded layers: floppy trousers, an ankle-length bias-cut strappy Ghost dress over a T-shirt, all topped off with a
rather pretty little pale grey lace-edged cardigan. It crossed Jay's mind that she wouldn't want to be in a queue for a thorough medical examination behind too many people attired like that. You'd be there all day while they faffed about, scrambling in and out of a stack of clothing.

‘Well it's things like that for a start: I'm challenging that morphing process,' she told April. ‘Plus it's realizing I'm going to be a grandma and not wanting to look like one . . . oh and there was a silly little throwaway comment from Greg. So I thought I'd see if I could trim up the body a bit before it's too late and it runs out of control into permanent decline.'

Jay tore the tape off her package and rummaged inside, pulling out the first of several sealed bags. So it
did
contain leaves, small crispy green ones. ‘Thanks for this, but . . . um what is it exactly?' She turned it over, searching for a label.

‘It's cabbage soup!' April had dumped her baggage on and under the glass table and now raced around the kitchen, switching on the kettle and poking about in cupboards for tea and sustenance. ‘It's brilliant – or so I'm told, I haven't actually tried it myself. I got it from Bio-Beautiful round the corner at home – you should see the stuff they sell. They make their own no-carb cakes and there's a juice range with combinations of things like ginger, pear and artichoke – or was it broccoli? – and if you want to do a detox they'll take a blood test and package up all the right nuts and berries to balance your yin and yang. This cabbage stuff's all pre-packed and freeze-dried and ready to go. Saves you chopping it up and messing about for hours. You just boil up a bagful with water, simmer for twenty minutes and there you are: instant breakfast, lunch and a nice soothing bedtime drink!'

Chocolates and cake would definitely have had more
yum factor, Jay was pretty sure, but April – as always – meant well and was looking thrilled with her choice of gift.

‘Apparently it works – so long as you do it right,' she went on, not at all abashed by Jay's lack of immediate delight. Jay was still wondering how much of a taste blast the juiced artichoke (or broccoli), pear and ginger would be. It sounded quite appetizing – but then almost anything would to a woman whose breakfast had been a plain no-fat yogurt and uninspiring flaky bran.

‘And I'm told it's all a myth about filling you up with noxious gas, so you won't become socially unwelcome.'

‘Thanks April – you're a treasure. I'll give it a go; it can't be any less effective than grapefruit. What I'd like to know though is how Mum knew I was dieting? I didn't say anything to her; she'd only have a go about “at your age you should be past bothering” or something.'

April laughed. ‘Obvious. Ellie told her. She complained to her that you've been stuffing down Shape-Shakes and looking miserable and that you refuse to keep biscuits or crisps in the house. She claims she's feeling deprived.'

‘Ellie said all that to Mum? Heavens, that's more than she says in a month to me! Which reminds me, where's Freddie? I thought he was the point of the trip?'

April stopped riffling through a cupboard and looked at Jay. ‘It's all true, isn't it? I can't find a single naughty thing to eat in here. I'd kill for a doughnut. I might have been impressed by the Bio-Beautiful store but I prefer to admire it from a bigger distance than I can throw a Hobnob.'

Jay opened the fridge and pulled out a box of sticky, dark Florentines, handing them over quickly to her sister. ‘OK, you can eat these. I got them for Sunday
but I accept it's an emergency. So tell me about Freddie.'

April ripped open the packet with her teeth. Jay handed her a plate and they carried their mugs of tea through to the sitting room, where April balanced the plate of gooey Florentines on the arm of the pink velvet sofa. She looked, Jay thought, set to munch her way through the lot – which was good. Really it was. She'd just watch. And she'd try not to dribble.

Daffodil sat on the floor at April's feet, sniffing the air and looking up at the overhanging plate, calculating whether it was worth leaping up and giving it a swipe. Another, deeper, sniff told her there was no tuna in the air and she padded away in disappointment, flicking her tail rudely at them. April watched her go, ‘Wonderful cats, Burmese. They do a great line in scorn. I can't wait to get mine – we're picking it up from Barbara on Monday on the way home. Now Freddie, well I dropped him off in Egham for an open day at the Royal Holloway College,' April said as she munched and licked melting chocolate off her fingers. ‘I offered to go in with him – most parents did – so we could compare notes and discuss it afterwards, but he just did that look that they get and I handed over his train fare and left him to it.'

‘I know that look – Rory does it and Ellie's is coming along nicely with plenty of training. His fare back home or to here?'

‘Oh to here. He likes seeing your three.'

‘They like seeing him. Perhaps, oh imagine, just perhaps they'll be all smiles all weekend.'

‘Imagine it?' April laughed. ‘A house full of peaceful, jolly, cheery teenagers? Unless they're smarming around like cats at feeding time in pursuit of hard cash, then no I can't!'

Freddie and Rory lay side by side on the scratchy seagrass floor of Greg's office and stared up through the glass to where the young elm saplings at this far end of the garden were waving their whippy branches in the wind. Nirvana's
Smells Like Teen Spirit
raged around them from Greg's new surround-sound B. & W. speakers. Greg was out at a site meeting and Rory liked to let himself in and enjoy his father's clean, cool, arty workspace with its classy glass desk, espresso machine, brushed-steel plan chests, indigo leather sofa and icy Macintosh computers. He'd love – in an ideal world, of course – his own room to be as streamlined as this, free from scattered clothes, littered homework, stray shoes, Cheesy Wotsit packets and scuzzy old boxes of childhood leftovers under the bed. He promised himself that after his exams he would junk all his superfluous possessions, even his first-ever skateboard, Tracy Island and the Lego pirate ship, and turn his room into something like this – or better still, that Charles bloke's place, if he could pick up some fancy art. Kylie would have to go, sadly, but he'd get some posh-framed black and white photos, some excellent arty nudes, lots of shadow and attitude.

‘Trance, man,' Freddie murmured softly, inhaling on his roll-up and gesturing upwards with his thumb. ‘Who needs drugs when you can gaze at nature moving about and just lose your brain in it?'

‘Dunno,' Rory said, watching a wood pigeon clinging to a rocking bough. ‘Haven't tried any drugs. I think I might be the only one in my year.'

He could admit this to Freddie. When your cousin lived two hundred miles away you could trust your every sad confession wouldn't get all round year 11 between lunch-break and home-time.

‘You won't be,' Freddie reassured him. ‘At least half the ones who say they have will be lying. Same with all
those surveys they panic the Government with: “Ninety per cent of over-elevens are off their nuts on E.” All bollocks. They should worry about booze, stop wasting their time on the rest. We got girls of fourteen up our way doing a bottle of voddy every Saturday night and giving bj's to any bloke who looks halfway fit and claims he plays for Man. U. juniors.'

Rory thought of Tasha. Did she do that? Or would she do that if she was living her teen years in South Manchester? She looked a bit rough, but . . . no, it probably wasn't true. Freddie was just bragging in a mad sort of way, most likely. Doing the same as the survey people, exaggerating for effect.