The Desperate Bride’s Diet Club (2 page)

A New You!
That was exactly what Violet needed. A brand-new me, she thought.

Because the old one was dying inside.

MAGGIE WALSH PUT
the plate and knife in the dishwasher. Then she shoved the five empty crisp packets as far down the kitchen bin as possible so that they were hidden under more healthy debris. Like the melon that had gone off. Ditto the shrivelled grapes.

She rubbed her back as she straightened up, feeling older than her fifty-one years. A quick glance at her reflection in the back
door told her that she looked older too. That new haircut hadn’t helped. Her blond shoulder-length hair had been cut way too short and her waves had sprung into tight curls around her ears.

Maggie turned towards the kitchen counter to switch off the radio but her hand hovered over the switch as a new song came on. It was an old favourite, Tavares singing ‘Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel’.

Maggie
allowed herself a little giggle and kicked off her slippers. She began to shuffle around the kitchen floor, her pop socks slipping on the laminated wood. She huffed and puffed as she tried to keep her samba dancing in time to the beat. But it was no good. After
only
half a minute, she came to an abrupt halt, holding on to the side of the sink as she fought for breath.

‘Heaven’s missing a bloody
lard arse,’ she panted, feeling her pulse racing.

She staggered into the lounge to find her slippers. She was retrieving one from next to the sideboard when a photograph caught her eye. It was Maggie and Gordon, her husband, quickstepping around the dance floor.

Maggie picked up the frame and peered at the faded photograph. When had it been taken? Sometime in the early eighties? They looked
to be in their early twenties, sparkling under the lights in the dancing outfits that his mother had made for them. That red dress was one of her favourites.

Maggie looked closer. Had she ever really been that slim? It was hard to imagine now, especially wearing a dress with only thin straps over the shoulders. She needed a bra made out of scaffolding these days to hold up her heavy chest. She
was wearing heels too, something that Maggie hadn’t done in many years. Maintaining the heavy load on spindly heels put just too much pressure on her knees and ankles.

She and Gordon must have been so fit as well, dancing twice a week. No wonder they looked happy. Of course, this was before marriage, mortgage and a daughter. It all seemed a very long time ago.

She trudged up the stairs to fetch
a pile of ironing and had a sudden thought. She went into the spare bedroom and rummaged around in the suitcases that were hidden in the wardrobe. A couple were empty, well used on many sunny holidays. But it was the old battered brown case at the back that she was interested in.

She finally found the handle and pulled hard. The case came free and she dumped it on the bed, out of breath from
the exertion. Then she opened up the case. There were pamphlets from various dance competitions. Gordon’s velvet jacket and frilly shirt. A lace shawl. Gordon’s trousers. A net underskirt …

At the very bottom lay her red dress. As she pulled it out, she caught a faint trace of perfume mixed with cigarette smoke. The embroidered crystals sparkled in the morning light against the deep red of the
silk skirt. It was as beautiful as she remembered.

The rest of her dresses were up in the loft, buried under the Christmas decorations and boxes of old toys and rubbish. But she hadn’t had the heart to send her favourite dancing dress into the oblivion of the attic.

Maggie held it up against her in front of the full-length mirror. For a second, she allowed herself to be back on the dance floor,
Gordon leading her round and around. She clutched hold of the dress, swaying from side to side.

Then reality came into focus. She looked more like an aged Shirley Temple with those curls. And as for the rest of her – she was enormous. At some point her boobs and stomach had merged into one big, jellified mass. She couldn’t possibly get the dress on now. It was about a third of the size she was
these days. It probably wouldn’t get past her knees.

Maggie shook her head as she put the dress back in the case, firmly closing the lid and shutting both it and the memories deep at the back of the wardrobe. She knew it was her own fault. She’d gained weight with her pregnancy and had never lost it. In fact, the weight had increased year by year. Each new season, she found her clothes from the
year before were a little
tighter
, not quite so comfortable to wear. But instead of doing something about her growing weight, Maggie just bought new clothes instead.

She picked up the ironing and went back downstairs. She knew Gordon didn’t realise how she felt about her middle-aged spread. He had always maintained that she was gorgeous. And after twenty-five years of marriage, she believed him.
Sort of.

‘I like my woman to have a bit of meat on her bones,’ was Gordon’s favourite saying. Trouble was, she had a sackload of potatoes and Yorkshire puddings to go with all that meat.

Maggie hadn’t felt gorgeous for a very long time. She was fat and bored, with herself and with her life. It really wasn’t fair. Gordon’s belly was busting out of his trousers yet he seemed to be convinced that
he was fine.

Maggie trudged into the lounge and stood next to the ironing board, sighing at the huge mound of clothes next to her. Most of them were Lucy’s. She didn’t know how long her daughter wore them for. Was it possible that she changed her outfits between meals?

Maggie sighed and picked up yet another Primark top. She caught sight of the label and felt sad. ‘Size 16–18’, she read. Lucy
had inherited her parents’ fat genes. But at least Maggie knew that her daughter was happy with her size.

Maggie was miserable and didn’t have a clue what to do about it.

Lucy Walsh panicked when she saw the group of girls at the end of the street. It would be too obvious to cross to the other side of the road so she had to carry on along the same pavement.

She wished it had carried on raining,
then she could have hidden underneath her umbrella. But the sun had come out from behind the clouds. Besides, she knew no umbrella would cover her enormous stomach and bottom.

She tried to maintain a sense of fashion, despite her size, which was currently a generous size sixteen – or a size eighteen if nobody was looking. A long black jumper, which she had modified with shoulder pads and fake
rhinestones, hung down beyond her thighs, which were encased in black leggings. She hated her Ugg boots but couldn’t get any knee-length boots to fit over her calves. An oversized black Puffa jacket completed the look.

Lucy knew it would have looked great on Kate Moss but felt as if she was wearing a duvet and hence seemed even bigger.

Everything was black. Lucy’s clothes were always black.
She knew it made her look like a Goth but she hoped they might make her disappear altogether – because then nobody would see the size she really was. And if she couldn’t be seen, then they couldn’t say anything about her, to her. She never wanted to draw attention to herself.

She was getting closer to the group. Lucy tried not to panic when she realised that Nicola Bowles was with the other girls.
Nicola had made Lucy’s life a misery at school with the taunts, the sneers and the laughter.

Lucy had been fine until she’d reached thirteen and then her body had just expanded overnight. It hadn’t stopped until she was the heaviest in her class. And that included the boys. PE was the worst. How did they expect her to climb ropes or bounce on a trampoline? She could hear the laughter now.

It
was the same laughter greeting her on the street corner right now.

‘Oy! Fatty!’ called Nicola.

Lucy put her head down and kept walking. But she came to an abrupt halt when the girls stood in her way.

‘I’m speaking to you,’ sneered Nicola. ‘Don’t you recognise your name, Fatty?’

Lucy moved to go around her, having to walk on the road to do so.

‘No boyfriend, Fatty?’ called Nicola from behind
her. ‘Never been laid?’

The girls were all giggling.

‘Who’d sleep with that?’ someone said.

Lucy kept on walking, striding out until she was around the corner and far down the road. She hated that her eyes were stinging with tears. She hated that she could feel her fat arse wobbling as she tried to walk quickly.

Most of all, she hated that Nicola could still taunt her, even though they hadn’t
been at school for two years. Lucy had gone to college and was loving her fashion-design class. Nicola had gone straight to benefits and standing around doing nothing all day on street corners. But Nicola was still superior, still had the upper edge.

What Lucy hated most of all was the fact that she secretly admired Nicola for being so slim. If they could just invent a body swap then Lucy would
be overjoyed. With Nicola’s body and Lucy’s personality, she could go places, have a future. But all the time she was fat, she was nothing. Would continue to be nothing.

Feeling miserable, Lucy stomped through the front door to her home and up the stairs.

‘You all right, love?’ asked her mum, who was stationed in front of the ironing board with
Midsomer Murders
on the TV.

‘I’m fine,’ said Lucy
through clenched teeth before slamming the door to her bedroom shut and bouncing on to the bed.

It didn’t matter. Nicola Bowles was a nobody. A thickie with no future. Lucy was going to be a fashion designer. A famous, fabulous fashion designer. Preferably a thin one, as well.

She lay back on her bed, thinking about what one of the girls had said about nobody wanting to sleep with her. Actually,
they were wrong. She had lost her virginity the previous summer.

A guy from college called Robert had taken her to see
Eclipse
at the cinema. Lucy had watched the movie and hoped for a big romance. What she got in return was a quick fumble on the back seat of her dad’s Nissan when she drove Robert home and a lot of unanswered texts.

Lucy knew what his problem was. She was the classic fat, easy
lay.

She sat up and glanced at herself in the mirror. It was a good thing she had some clue about fashion. It meant she could disguise her large body with trendy clothes. Trouble was, as soon as she stripped off, all the rolls of fat would appear.

Her brown hair was all right. At the minute it had been straightened but Lucy thought it made her round face look huge. She had a few spots from her
poor diet but at least she didn’t have as many as Nicola Bowles, who had loads across her forehead and chin.

With a sigh, she reached into her handbag and drew
out
the Mars bar. She scowled at it, the enemy. But she savoured every last, glorious mouthful.

Then she felt miserable once more.

Edward Conley shuffled in his seat. You would have thought that they would make the chairs in a doctor’s
waiting room more comfortable. And bigger. At 6 feet 3 inches, it was like sitting on a child’s seat. And at twenty stone, he was oozing off the sides as well.

He rubbed his chest. He’d been practising in the cricket nets at the weekend so perhaps he’d pulled something. Whatever it was, the pain was keeping him awake at night and his work was suffering during the day. He’d nearly fallen asleep
in a meeting that afternoon.

He caught the eye of a pretty woman sitting opposite him. She gave him a brief smile and then looked away. Edward knew he wasn’t bad-looking. OK, so he was a bit overweight, but he still had all his own hair, unlike Tom from the cricket club, who was in his mid-twenties and already very thin on top. Edward ran his hand through his short brown hair, grateful that he
was thirty but not bald.

Edward’s name was called over the tannoy. As he got up, he attempted to catch the woman’s eye once more but she was deeply engrossed in her magazine. Maybe he could strike up a conversation if she was there when he left.

‘Hello, Edward,’ said Dr Gillespie, smiling at him as he went through the door. ‘What can I do for you today?’

She was gorgeous but completely out
of his league. Not that Edward was unlucky with women. It was just that as he headed towards thirty, what he really wanted to find was ‘the one’. She hadn’t turned up yet.

‘I think I’ve pulled something in my chest,’ he told her as he sat down. ‘The pain comes and goes but it’s mostly at night. I played cricket at the weekend so maybe it was something I did then.’

She nodded before getting him
to reach across his back with his arms.

‘Any pain now?’ she asked.

‘Not at the minute.’

‘Let’s do a few other checks, shall we?’

She took his blood pressure before asking him to stand on the scales. Edward waited for the inevitable prescription for anti-inflammatory pills and two weeks’ rest from the cricket nets.

‘I’m afraid it’s not a muscle pull,’ the doctor told him. ‘Your blood pressure
is dangerously high. You’re twenty-one stone, Edward. That’s morbidly obese.’

Edward sank back in his chair. He was shocked. His weight had crept up by another stone.

‘But I play cricket,’ he spluttered. ‘I’m not a couch potato.’

Edward didn’t add that he was normally stuck out on the boundary because he wasn’t up to leaping around the wicket. He couldn’t run or leap at all these days.

‘Do
you run? Work out?’ she asked.

Edward shook his head.

‘The additional weight is far too much for your body to cope with. Your pulse is racing to keep up and it’s causing your chest pains.’

Edward was speechless. He ought to have known this. He should have realised. It wasn’t as if he was stupid.

‘Do you have a healthy diet?’

‘I try,’ he replied.

He blushed at the lie. He hadn’t eaten well
since moving out of home four years previously. Away from his mother’s large but relatively healthy meals, as a bachelor his diet consisted of vast amounts of toast, pot noodles and takeaways. The weight had piled on in the years since. ‘You must lose weight,’ the doctor told him.