Size Matters (24 page)

‘I'm OK,' Rory muttered eventually. ‘Just . . . life, you know.'

‘No luck with the chick?'

‘No, none at all. Not a hope. Given up.'

‘No don't do that. You see it, you want it, you gotta make it happen. Gospel according to Freddie.'

If only it was that easy. Getting a snog off Samantha Newton would be the equivalent of being a sub for some part-time club in a minor league being called up to play for Man. United. She was going to be the sort who only went out with men born under the Amex Platinum sign. When she was an independent grown-up she'd never get on a plane and turn right. She was destined to be forever pursued by drooling rich suckers who'd fork out to shower her with life's most expensive things. He'd have to impress her something massive even to get a look-in.

Rory trudged back across the soccer pitch trying to get himself in the mood for Geography. Not easy. When he thought of mountain ranges all that came to mind were the superb rising mounds on the front of Samantha Newton's body. Scaling those peaks, now that would be something. But first, she'd got to notice him. Got to be impressed. A small idea was taking shape. A very small idea that was uncurling and gently feeling the air like a butterfly's damp new wings. And it all fitted perfectly with the gospel according to Freddie.

Jay changed out of her work jeans and into a lightweight unlined linen skirt, ready for the Weight Watchers weigh-in. OK, she conceded that Paula had warned them that they were only fooling themselves with the clothes thing, but surely you wanted to come away from the meeting feeling that your subs weren't entirely a waste of money? Putting on something that weighed next to nothing was only human nature, and would make it the nearest thing to getting weighed stark naked in your own bathroom. She drew the line at abandoning her underwear in the pursuit of
offloading a couple more ounces, but she could sympathize with those who did.

Pat had told her about a woman who'd been weighed at her first class wearing a big fake-fur coat and gradually over the weeks had shed bits of clothing till she was down to a strappy sundress and nothing else. She even got her long hair cut short. Only then did she confess she'd actually lost nothing at all over the entire time. ‘
And
,' Pat had said in real outrage, ‘she'd been awarded her seven-pound pin! Bloody nerve, bloody mad or what?' Jay could only agree; if you could get applauded as slimmer of the week simply for putting your coat on a table, what was it all about?

She looked in the mirror, pulled her stomach in and turned sideways to see if she was noticeably skinnier. Hard to tell. Surely by now everyone she knew should be shrieking with amazement at her svelte shape? What was the point if even she herself could barely tell any difference between her body-plus-eleven-pounds and her body now?

Jay didn't hang about after the weigh-in. She was meeting Greg for something to eat at All Bar One and besides, didn't feel much like staying to be taught ways to Make Friends with Tuna. She'd already had enough tuna to last a lifetime. If every dieter on the planet was scoffing the stuff at the rate she'd been eating it then soon there'd be an environmental crisis for the poor fish, and they'd be as protected and mollycoddled as dolphins. Holly (still mountainous but sticking to the diet and very optimistic) asked her where she was going and had looked doubtful. ‘All Bar One isn't listed in the Eating Out Guide,' she warned. ‘Do you think you should be going there? You won't know what to have. You'd be better going to a Harvester.'

‘Ye gods,' Jay said to Greg as she took her first sip
of the champagne he'd ordered. (Why? Were they celebrating or was he feeling guilty about something?) ‘I'm never going to one of those classes again, somehow I'm just not a team player. I can see it makes sense but . . . hell's teeth, I've had it with adding up points for every mouthful and bargaining with myself: “If I run up the stairs instead of the escalator at Oxford Circus, please may I have a Twix bar?” Aaagh!' She gulped the tingling wine, savouring the creamy biscuity flavour and half longing to glug down the whole bottle in minutes, like a chilled beer on a hot summer day. She'd only hiccup, she told herself, she'd feel sick and past hunger. And she didn't want to be past hunger.

‘You never go to Oxford Circus,' Greg pointed out. ‘Well you haven't for ages anyway.'

‘Oh I know, I know. It's just a what-if.'

‘And you never eat Twix bars.'

Was he being deliberately obtuse? ‘You never order champagne without a good reason either, come to that,' she told him.

He smiled and took her hand. ‘I just fancied some. I thought you might. But I think I'd have clouted you over the head with it if you'd said “Ooh I can't, the diet, the diet . . .” '

‘No chance,' she said, squeezing his fingers. ‘No bloody chance. So what is this about?'

‘Oh nothing, just felt like celebrating being a lucky bastard. Getting another baby in the house without it being you having to go through being pregnant, being glad the kids seem to be coming along OK.'

‘You sound like those people in
Bridget Jones's Diary
that she describes as Smug Marrieds.'

‘Yeah, well so what?' Greg laughed. ‘I am. And by the way I left Mog and Ellie sorting out those soft toys you wanted cleared from the shower room.'

‘Well that's a minor miracle and worth celebrating on
its own. Did they have binbags? Had they put anything in them?'

‘Now that I couldn't say. They were giggling about when they used to play
Animal Hospital
with them and line them all up with bandages and Elastoplast and invent gruesome operations for them.'

‘I remember that. Not long ago for Ellie, really, and even Mog doesn't seem that many years past that stage. Odd to think she'll have her own soon.'

‘She said she's looking forward to playing with the baby,' Greg told her. ‘At least she's young enough to still remember how. She'll be fine.'

‘She'll need a lot of back-up,' Jay said, wondering how it would all work out.

‘I know, but that's what we're for. But for tonight let's not feel all grown-up and responsible. What do you want to eat? And as we're not driving anywhere, shall we have another bottle?'

Excellent idea, Jay thought, having a look at the menu and a bit of a think. She wasn't giving up though, not quite yet. Just about everybody swore by the Atkins diet. No carbohydrates, low carboyhdrates, modified versions and the nicest of all where you could still drink wine. The steak would be suitable, lots of lovely protein there, she thought, and delicious with the tomatoes and caramellized shallots. Not chips though, absolutely not. Her tummy rumbled its own opinion on this and she sympathized with it. Well maybe chips tonight, she thought, giving her middle a reassuring pat. She could start it all off properly tomorrow, and leave Weight Watchers with a glorious bang at approximately thirty-six points for the day.

The house was almost in darkness. Apart from the unevenly flickering bluish glow coming through the windows from at least two televisions, there was no
sign of anyone being home. It wasn't particularly late, just typical that teens who were sprawled on beds and sofas almost comatose with TV viewing could never be bothered to reach out a hand far enough to switch on a light.

‘When the house needs light they never switch them on, but once on they never think to switch them off again,' Jay commented as she slid the key into the lock.

‘That's teenagers for you,' Greg agreed, laughing. ‘But don't be hard on them, it's their job to be awkward sods. Bloody hell, what's all this?'

Each side of the glass staircase was lined with soft toys, leaving only a narrow pathway up the middle. Pandas and elephants and the outsize tiger Imogen had won at the fair were there, Pooh and Piglet and Eeyore were cuddled up together and a family of Pound Puppy beagles spilled over onto a Bagpuss.

‘Would you look at this?' Jay said, picking up a pale grey seal, long-ago souvenir of the Cornish Seal Sanctuary. Each one of the animals had been ‘treated' in
Animal Hospital
style, all carefully bandaged and plastered and splinted. It must have taken the girls all evening.

There was a note halfway up the stairs: ‘Promise no. 1: They'll all be well again in the morning. Promise no. 2: Then they can go to the Charity Shop. (Boo-hoo, sniff-sniff) Love, Ell & Mog xxx'

It didn't feel right. Surely this couldn't possibly work. Surely you couldn't have a whopping great cheese and herb omelette with crispy bacon and a big tomato on the side and still get thinner? It defied all the laws of food physics, if there were such things. Guiltily, but feeling blissfully sated, Jay stashed plates in the dishwasher and washed the grill pan, stowing it and the omelette pan away in its drawer. She did all this at top speed, out of a vague fear that the calorie police would catch her destroying the evidence of overconsumption and condemn her to fat-prison as punishment for actions contrary to the due slimming process.

‘God, that was good,' Greg said, leaning back in his chair and patting his middle. ‘Can we do this every morning? And what's for lunch? A roast swan and a couple of cows?'

‘Only if you don't have rice, bread, potatoes or pasta with them,' she told him. ‘Otherwise you could literally eat a horse.'

‘Did that once,' he said, pulling a face. ‘Well not a whole horse, obviously. In Belgium on a work trip. It was chewy and a bit gamey. Not pleasant. I kept
thinking of Shergar and wondering if he ended up as a
plat du jour
.'

There was actually nothing new about this kind of diet, it occurred to Jay, in spite of all the media fuss and furore about it and all the medicos going into health-warning overdrive. Many years ago when her mother and Win had embarked on one of their regular spats of weight loss, they'd simply decreed ‘No Starch'. It was just that one basic rule. That was the way diets were done – no faffing about with calorie-counting, fat units, zone calculation, blood-group-appeasing and what have you. No-one mentioned carbohydrates unless they were working in a food lab. Nobody had heard of cholesterol, antioxidants, lipoproteins or omega-3 fatty acids. Free radicals would have been a slogan on a demo banner. And in practice what Audrey and Win were cutting out was only bread and potatoes and pastry. As Jay remembered from plain-cooked home meals and school food, pasta came in the form of canned spaghetti, rice was for puddings or an occasional kedgeree, and bread was white sliced.

Audrey hadn't had a great deal of interest in food. It was functional stuff, fuel for getting through the day. Providing it for her family was a chore like any other domestic ritual, very much on a par with cleaning the bath. She'd have suggested to anyone who confessed to enjoying cooking that they get themselves a proper hobby. The only point she could see to standing at the cooker stirring a tricky sauce was that it gave her time to read her library books while she did it.

Win had had an extreme mistrust of ‘Continental' food (linking it with overheated Continental climate and unreliable Continental manners) and considered much of it to be deeply suspect and likely to cause stomach troubles. When Delphine went on her school's ski trip to Austria she'd been given a note for her
teachers instructing them not to let her eat anything unfamiliar for fear of it being a potentially fatal challenge to the grumbling appendix. Delphine, in a rare spirit of adventure, had torn up the note the second her mother was out of sight and later become an accomplished and adventurous cook. The day she'd persuaded Win to sample the Hungarian goulash she'd made in domestic science had been a turning point in their household. Win took full advantage after that, graciously ceding kitchen space and fattening herself up comfortably during her daughter's teenage years, as Delphine cooked her way through the recipe books of nearly every European country.

‘As long as she can boil an egg and has a light touch with pastry, you don't need much more than that,' Audrey had remarked one Sunday lunchtime, after sitting down to sixteen-year-old Delphine's excellent crown roast, stuffed with apricots, saffron rice and aubergine. She was reacting to Win queening it (as ever) with ‘Of course Delphine is practically
Cordon Blue
' and warned, rather gracelessly considering she was tucking in greedily at the time, ‘She'll find the day-to-day stuff less rewarding than all this fancy business.'

She didn't actually say ‘You Mark My Words' but they were there, hovering, just waiting in the wings.

Win smirked and wagged a finger at her. ‘The way to a man's heart is through his stomach. When my Delphine's married, her husband won't have to be embarrassed when he invites the boss round for dinner. They'll get no less than
Oat Cuisine
.'

Jay and April had raised their eyes heavenwards and giggled, partly thinking of Delphine's daily muesli but also certain that the route to a man's heart involved a knack with zips, fancy underwear and alcohol rather than a talent for cutting flower shapes out of carrots.

‘What day's Delphine getting here?' Greg asked, pouring a final cup of coffee before retiring to his office to start a day's work.

‘I was just thinking about her,' Jay said. ‘Next Monday. I've got to pick her up at Heathrow.'

‘Why you? I thought Win would be rushing down there in a limo, all red carpet and welcome balloons for the prodigal daughter.'

‘Win's got her chiropody appointment. Apparently it's an event carved in stone and completely unmissable. She says she can only get her corns filed every six weeks and if you miss an appointment they won't give you another for months and months.'

‘She could go to a private place, surely, and choose her own times? Delphine could fork out.'

‘I suggested that, but she says she likes to go to this particular Wendy person who's got a gentle way with the clippers and she always sees the same patients in the waiting room for a chat and a grumble. Anyway, I don't mind, I think of it as part of the matron of honour's duties. I'd probably have had to drive Win anyway – she'll only get flustered and lost. Last time she went to Australia I had to hand her over to the ground staff after she'd checked in to make sure she made it to the right plane. If I hadn't she'd probably have ended up in Rio.'