Size Matters (20 page)

At the top of the stairs there was a queue – all female and every age from teens to seventy-plus. Jay joined it, looking at the bodies of the ten or so women ahead of her and recognizing Pat from across the road, close to where the Planet Man lived. Being here was surely brave of her: Pat was head teacher at a nearby primary school. If I was her, Jay thought, the last thing I'd want would be to risk running into off-premises school mummies when you're owning up to fat issues. This was the danger, Greg had pointed out, in picking the meeting place closest to home that the Weight Watchers website offered.

‘Half the street might be there,' he'd warned. ‘They'll hear you confess to your worst biscuit habits.'

Jay couldn't help wondering why, quite frankly, some of these women were here at all. Most of them looked perfectly normal-sized (if ‘big-boned' as her mother used to call it) to her. One very pretty young girl with jagged blonde hair was wearing a short skirt that was barely pelmet-length and looking terrific in it, with legs that were far more sapling than tree trunk and a cute, perky bum. Perhaps she was a plant, bribed to come along and show everyone what could be achieved just by sticking to the diet. Either that or she'd once been as big as a heifer, and needed the constant backup of WW, being even now only a Cadbury's Creme Egg away from spiralling into weight-gain hell.

‘Hello? You at the back, are you new?' A curly-haired young woman in a tight seaside-rock-pink velour tracksuit called to her, leaning round from where she sat at a table at the queue's head, taking the subs.

‘Er . . . yes, I am.' Every eye in the line-up was now on her, each woman blatantly sizing her up, comparing, calculating, possibly to the nearest ounce. In their various eyes she could see herself reflected: plumper, smaller, podgier, thinner-thighed, chunkier-armed. Pat, barefoot on the scales, waved to her and grinned, doing a rueful kind of ‘welcome to Fatsos Anonymous' expression.

‘Take one of these forms and fill it in please, my love,' called the pink velour. ‘And then you need to get back in the line for paying and weighing.'

Jay took the form to a small table in the corner where a mountainous pale girl with mournfully droopy brown hair and wearing sack-shaped black seemed to be agonizing over her own answers. The questions didn't look that difficult. It was mostly a name and address kind of thing. The girl sucked on the end of her pen.

‘I don't know what to put for my Goal Weight,' she confided to Jay in a nervous whisper. ‘I mean, in an ideal world I'd be eight stone, I mean, who wouldn't? But, well I'm quite tall and, I mean, life's a long way from ideal, I find, don't you? Shall I put ten stone and hope for the best? What do you think? Or ten and a half? Or do we have to put it in metric? I'm not good at metric . . .'

Jay hadn't a clue. She smiled and said she thought ten stone would be fine. She could hardly be honest and tell the poor girl that, frankly, even twelve stone looked wildly ambitious.

The girl went on, ‘I mean, I can always change it later can't I? Maybe I should ask Paula. I'm Holly by the way.'

‘I'm Jay. Look, I shouldn't worry too much.' Jay tried to be encouraging, for surely if this bit was so anxiety-inducing, what on earth would the girl do when faced with a breakfast decision between Bran Flakes and Shredded Wheat?

‘Why don't you just put down whatever you think is a realistic aim for now? Even if it's a lot less than you'd really like to lose. Then if you do better than that you can be really pleased with yourself.'

I'd be good at this, Jay thought as she signed her name and confirmed that she wasn't pregnant, breast-feeding or on medication, I'd be excellent at telling everyone else how to turn themselves into sylph-like beings, totally in control of their eating habits. It was when it came to her own intake that things went, quite literally, pear-shaped.

‘You only want to lose a stone?' Paula-in-the-pink gave Jay a slightly disappointed smile as if she was sure she could (and frankly should) do better than that: it was only a matter of
will power
.

‘A stone will be fine,' Jay insisted, ‘I reckon that at
my age you
can
be too thin, whatever the Duchess of Windsor thought.'

Paula nodded but her bemused expression suggested that she'd filed Jay under ‘mad' and she busied herself sorting out a membership card.

A stone surely
would
be enough. Jay was now wavering. She was certain she'd been perfectly comfortable a stone ago, whenever that was. And it wouldn't require an entire new wardrobe, just a lovely feeling that she wasn't squeezing into her clothes.

Paula briefly explained the Weight Watchers system: each item of food consisted of a certain number of points: a slice of bread was one point, a serving of sugar-free cereal was one and a half. Jay was allowed eighteen points per day and could more or less choose whatever she wanted as long as she stuck within the eighteen-point limit. ‘Like counting calories you mean?' she asked.

Paula pursed her lips and frowned slightly. ‘We don't talk about calories here. You'll find the points system a lot easier to follow than counting calories.' By which, Jay gathered, there'd be no tricky long multiplication. Paula then invited her to step on the scales for the awful moment of truth. ‘If you take your shoes off today, remember to take them off every time,' she instructed her solemnly. Jay assured her, equally solemnly, that she would and went off, after the mercifully discreet weigh-in, to join several other members on the semicircle of chairs in front of a table displaying a basket of what she recognized as butternut squash. Holly was already there, fervently studying the Week One booklet they'd been given.

‘Not at all a bad week, although one or two of you . . .' Paula began her presentation and looked at the back row, where two jolly ladies were giggling happily. ‘What happened to you, Daphne? Time of the month,
dear? Because that can always add a pound or two, don't forget. We mustn't be too hard on ourselves at those times. A couple of squares of Fruit and Nut can be such a comfort and only one and a half points gone.'

Daphne at the back was still cackling. ‘I went to a wedding, didn't I!'

‘Oh did you? How lovely. So did you relax and overdo it a bit?'

‘Go on, Daph, tell her,' her companion nudged her hard. ‘Tell her how many vodka and limes you had, go on!'

‘Oh I shouldn't!' There was a general clamour for Daphne to tell.

‘All right then, I had twelve, didn't I!' More hilarity from the back. All the women turned to look at Daphne, to see what a giggling, shameless, twelve-vodkas stalwart looked like. It looked like the picture of total, uninhibited enjoyment. Pretty appealing actually, Jay considered, watching Daphne and her friend consumed with unbridled mirth.

‘Twelve!' Paula's smile was there, but was tight and forced as she sensed a revolution to be quelled. ‘Ladies, that's more than a whole day's points!'

‘Ooh I know!' Daphne was unrepentant. ‘I had a lovely time though!'

There was still a mutinous buzz going round in which several of the women discussed whether Daphne would have done better, points-wise, getting thoroughly drunk on wedding champagne (fewer glasses for the same vodka effect) or could have improved things marginally by substituting diet tonic for the lime juice.

‘Now.' Paula all but clapped her hands together for the class's attention. ‘
Ladies
. Butternut
squash
.' Her pearly-nailed finger pointed to the vegetable basket on her display table as she firmly quelled the atmosphere of
mild anarchy and returned to her schedule. ‘Terrifically versatile. If you're having people round for drinks you can make a few bowls of these lovely, delicious No-Point crisps to hand round and you won't have the temptation of the bought ones.'

No point? Jay wondered if she'd heard right. If there was no point, then what, exactly, was the point?

‘. . . simply peel, slice thinly, give them a spray with Frylite and pop them in the oven! So easy and something different, I think your guests will agree, don't you ladies?'

‘Butternut-squash crisps be buggered,' Pat snorted as she and Jay walked down the stairs together. ‘She's dead right, they're different. But what a sodding palaver.'

‘Well they sounded simple enough,' Jay admitted. ‘But . . .'

‘But what's wrong with opening a nice jar of olives? Or putting out the nuts for them but
not eating them
?' Pat suggested, eyeing the saloon-bar door with a certain amount of longing as they went out to the street. Daphne was already in there. Jay could hear her joyous cackle carrying over the usual pub din. Holly had gone in after her and Jay wondered if she'd manage to be all first-day devout and go for points-free mineral water with a slice of lime, or think what the hell, there's a whole week till the next weigh-in, and go mad with a pint of bitter and a bag of salted cashews.

‘Exactly. I'm going to give this lot a go though, it seems to make sense, at least in theory.'

‘Oh it does. I've done Slimming World but I never got the hang of it. Entirely my own fault rather than theirs. There was a loose wasp in the room when they were explaining the basics and I just didn't concentrate. After that I kept mixing up my Original days and my Green days and gobbled down so many sins I thought I'd have to go to Confession.'

Put into context, this didn't sound in the least bit unlikely, Jay thought as she walked up her own garden path. Possibly almost as many people, women at least, attended weight-loss meetings each week as went to church. Either way, you were gathered together to take in instructive words of wisdom from an inspiring congregation leader. With food indulgence described at some of these clubs as ‘wicked' or ‘naughty', eating a jam-filled doughnut represented little less than a cataclysmic falling from grace. It felt mildly uncomfortable, thinking like this, that one way or another Jay had now paid up to join the global congregation for collective worship at the altar of the modern, affluent-Western goddess called Thin.

If she jogged to the recreation ground at the end of the road, and then ran all the way round it twice, Jay reckoned she'd have earned herself a dollop of butter with the marmalade on her breakfast toast instead of either nothing at all or a depressing and taste-free scraping of fatless spread. Diets that worked, she decided as she retied the laces on her trainers and smoothed down her unflattering navy Boden pull-ons, were all in the detail. Weight Watchers allowed you to accrue extra points by means of exercise and she was going to spend them on things that made life worth living (olive oil, good wine), rather than frittering them away on their suggested treats (a low-fat chocolate mousse or a small can of peach slices).

It wasn't far to the park. Surely no more than a couple of hundred yards, and there'd be few people about at seven in the morning who were likely to notice her and snigger at her efforts. She couldn't remember the last time she'd actually
run
. Possibly it had been when playing tennis in the sixth form at school or racing for a bus during university days. She'd certainly hurtled about after the children when they were small, playing French cricket on beaches, rushing to stop a
carelessly pushed swing from dashing their tiny brains out as they wandered too close. And every dutiful year she'd reluctantly joined in the ritual humiliation in the Mothers' Race at primary-school sports days.

She recalled now, that the mothers had been firmly divided into two camps. She was one of those who, when the call came for the dreaded race, merely put down her glass of wine, kicked off her shoes and padded to the starting line hoping she wouldn't trip over her skirt. The other lot, the
Über
-mothers, would already be there jogging up and down on the spot, streamlined in serious Lycra and sporting Prada running shoes, possibly with spikes. They'd been warming up, trackside, since the egg and spoon got started and would have collected their offspring, loaded them into the 4 x 4 and be halfway to Kodali violin by the time Jay and co. giggled into the home straight.

She pulled the door shut behind her as quietly as she could. Daffodil slipped out to join her on the path, miaowing an interest in this unusually early exit from the house and expressing concern that her keeper had overlooked something with regard to the provision of feline breakfast.

‘I'll be back in a little while, Daffy.' Jay bent to stroke the cat's cool treacle-coloured ears. She wanted her to go back in the house. How embarrassing would it be, the first time she ventured out for a public display of activity, to have Daffodil trotting effortlessly alongside, barely having to break into a canter, racing up and down trees on the way while she gasped and plodded inelegantly, all hopeless human clumsiness. Talk about competition – fitness-wise cats won every time, paws down. This was clearly unfair, seeing as most of their lives they did nothing but laze around in patches of sunshine and sleep.

Jay shivered in her ancient Eric Clapton T-shirt. She had briefly considered wearing one of the yellow Dishing the Dirt polo shirts that she'd had made for the girls the year before, so that she'd be doing a useful bit of advertising as she ran. The idea had quickly been rejected; any potential customers were less likely to be attracted than terminally put off by the sight of her puffing along, sweating and unshowered.

Pausing only to look both ways along the road and crossing her fingers that she wouldn't meet anyone she knew, Jay set off at a comfortable jogging pace. The early air was crisp and bright and only lightly tinged with the kerosene scent of Heathrow-bound aircraft. Daffodil ran beside her for the first fifty yards then fell back, yowling a protest that her owner was escaping beyond territorial bounds. Jay whizzed along, enjoying the breeze on her face and trying not to notice how much her flesh blobbed up and down in rhythm with her pounding feet. No wonder it was called jogging.