The Perfect 10 (5 page)

‘Burning their bras? Are you still trying to pay in shillings? News flash: it’s the twenty-first century. If you see a
good man
do point him out to me because I’m not sure they still exist. I’ve missed them all so far!’

‘Maybe they saw you first.’

Cagney glares at me, and I glare back. If I wasn’t outside a police station I’d slap him.

‘Hello?’

We both spin violently towards the voice and see a tall, elegant but gaunt woman approaching us. It takes me a heartbeat to recognise her as Dougal’s mother. Her eyes are swollen from crying. None of the children are with her, thank goodness. Cagney and I stare at her in disbelief. This is a strange day.

‘I really, really have to say thank you, to you both.’ Dougal’s mother puts her long arms on her hips, then removes them and clasps her hands nervously, then flicks hair from her eyes, then wrings her hands in front of her. An awful thing has happened to her this morning. I feel some of the rage ebb in my stomach like sweet relief, and I am overwhelmed with gratitude to this woman for shattering whatever it was that had gripped Cagney James and me just moments ago. I wasn’t myself – that is my only excuse.

‘Please, there is no need to thank us … me.’ I glare at Cagney. ‘Anybody would have done the same thing. I’m just glad it’s … you know … as OK as it can be.’

She smiles a weary smile at us both, and flicks the hair at her eyes again.

I take a step towards her, away from Cagney.

‘The boys are with their father. Dougal is terrible – shaken and upset and … anyway, Terence, that’s my husband, Dougal’s father, when I explained, well, he can’t thank you both enough, of course. And he suggested that you both come to dinner, next week – we live locally, in Kew – and that we might say thank you that way, although of course it will never be enough to say thank you, but he suggested it, so I thought I might still catch you here …’

I am horrified. I gag with disbelief. This poor woman has been through an unspeakable horror only hours ago, the kind of hell that a mother can only dare imagine, and she is offering to make us dinner? It is the most inappropriate thing I have ever heard.

‘Oh, I really don’t think that’s necessary. I think we probably just want to forget all about it …’

‘Oh, my goodness, no, you must come. Terry wants to thank you himself, and it’s the least I can do. It won’t be anything elaborate. Probably duck, or whatever the butcher has in fresh …’ Her voice trails off and her eyes become a matt version of their previously glossy selves. I have a feeling they will be permanently matt soon: any joy she has is being slowly replaced by fear …

But her reaction is as if she has dropped a plate from my chinaware, or spilt red wine on my trousers. It is so horribly embarrassing I don’t know what to say. I stand open-mouthed, completely aghast. So she carries on talking.

‘Of course, you must bring your partners, or somebody, of course you must, but do please say you’ll come. Next Friday?’

I turn to face Cagney, who at least looks equally as appalled.

‘I just … I don’t …’

‘Please do say you can make it.’

‘Well then, I guess, I suppose … I can make it.’ I shudder as I accept.

‘That’s fantastic. Thank you. And you?’

‘Cagney James. I can make it on Friday.’

‘I’m sorry I didn’t catch your name. I’m Deidre Turnball.’ She offers her hand for me to shake and, as anticipated, she just rests her fingers in my palm for a few moments before offering it to Cagney as well.

‘Sunny Weston.’

Deidre scrambles for a pen and paper in her bag, and scrawls down ‘The Moorhouse, 12 Wildview Avenue’ for us both, and offers us separate scraps of paper. She has written ‘7 o’clock’ as well. I stare at it with disbelief.

‘See you then,’ Deidre says, flicking her hair from her eyes, turning quickly and striding elegantly away.

I look down at the paper, and hear a car toot its horn, and an old man leans out of a minicab and shouts my name.

‘She hasn’t left her phone number,’ I say numbly.

‘Probably ex-directory as well,’ Cagney replies, reminding me he is there.

I look up at him, and he looks baffled, and embarrassed as well. And then I remember that the last thing he had said to me, before Deidre appeared, was some kind of insult. I try to speak, but when nothing comes out, I exhale loudly in his direction, and walk away.

I sit in the back of the cab, close my eyes, and go over what has happened.

I can’t believe the morning I have had.

I can’t believe I have to have dinner with Deidre, and
Dougal, and the whole Turnball family, next Friday, at 7 p.m.

I can’t believe I have to see Dougal again so soon. I can’t imagine what it will do to him to see me again so soon.

I cannot believe I have to sit at a table and play polite with a man as offensively archaic as Cagney James.

And I bet it won’t be low fat.

I meet Lisa for Box-a-fit at midday. It will clear my head before this afternoon. Unless there is a natural disaster I always see my therapist on a Monday at three. I have known my two closest friends, Lisa and Anna, for over twenty years – we practised Bucks Fizz dance routines in the playground together at eight, and attended Duke of Edinburgh sessions as a teenage triumvirate, if only to go to the discos, and not the hikes.

Lisa is married now, of course, as is Anna. They both settled down aged twenty-five with university boyfriends, who had quickly replaced sixth form boyfriends in the girls’ freshman year. Anna isn’t a member of this gym, or any gym now, as far as I am aware. She is still trying to breast-feed her first child, Jacob, who is eleven weeks old. Both Anna and Lisa have failed to recognise me on a number of occasions when we have agreed to meet outside tube stations or cinemas. They are used to seeing the old me.

Anna says, ‘You don’t even look like you any more, Sunny. Even your smile isn’t as wide …’

Lisa strides towards me confidently as I wait outside the gym, her long blonde curls swinging naturally down her
back, pulled off her face with two clips at the sides. She has a slight fluffy hair halo, because she doesn’t use any product on her hair. She never has. Natural is Lisa’s defining characteristic. Her broad face is clean and shiny. I can see a couple of tiny red veins on otherwise smooth cheeks, and she has the finest of lines playing with the corners of her eyes. She does, however, have a large angry swollen spot on her chin that glares at me menacingly as she gets closer. Lisa has never worn make-up during the day, and even on a big night out she will apply one lick of mascara to each set of eyelashes, and a hastily slicked streak of lipstick to each lip. I always admired how she looked so healthy and clean, but now I wonder whether a dab of Touche Éclat here and there would be such a sin.

Lisa ran everything, from the 100 metres to cross country when we were at school, and she is still super fit, of course – naturally fitter than I am. But that would only show in a half-marathon, not in a class like today’s, with just over an hour’s worth of fitness needed. You wouldn’t be able to tell, if you glanced through the window to the fitness studio on a tour of the gym, that she had been in training her whole life, and I had been in training for just over a year. Lisa’s husband, Gregory Nathan, is a very slim man who was the 5,000 metre steeplechase champion at her university. When he laughs I think he looks like a dog. He works in the City now. He is some kind of underwriter, big in insurance, apparently. Big enough that Lisa was able to give up her job in publishing eight months ago, to really think about what she wanted to do, and hasn’t decided yet. She keeps threatening to open a boutique of ‘lovely knick-knacks, candles, and linen, and cushions, and beautiful glass vases’, but hasn’t quite managed to bother just yet. Thankfully for the lovely knick-knack market, one hundred other shops selling exactly that have opened in that time in and around West London.
Lisa and Gregory live in Richmond, and they run by the river, together, every Saturday and Sunday morning.

Lisa was the first person to realise I was losing weight, when I had officially shed one stone and four pounds, and she was the first person to notice that I had changed my eating habits. We met for brunch one Saturday, to have a girls’ catch-up, and I ordered a tuna salad with red onions and walnuts, instead of a burger and chips with coleslaw. Anna hadn’t realised, but Lisa came right out with it.

‘Are you having salad, Sunny?’

‘I just fancied something green,’ I said with an innocent smile. I wasn’t ready to get into it with them, and at that point was unsure whether I would even be able to see it through. One stone down but eight more to go didn’t feel like something to shout about. Plus the first stone had fallen off, but now the reduction was slowing up. I realised that I was going to have to do something drastic, and join a gym, and the thought scared me. Not because I wasn’t any good at sport, but because I thought I would look like the worst kind of deluded fool, in my billowing T-shirt and tracksuit trousers, walking on a running machine, red-faced and out of puff. Now, if I see anybody even close to my old size in the gym I try and give them a big smile, if they will meet my eye, but invariably they don’t.

‘But you look like you’ve lost weight, in your face.’ Lisa eyed me with a smile, trying to get me to admit it.

‘Diet?’ Anna asked, picking up a piece of bread and soaking it in olive oil.

‘Kind of,’ I said with a small grin, admitting that maybe I was a little pleased with myself. ‘But more of a health kick, than a diet. I’m just trying to think about what I’m eating,’ I said, adjusting the napkin in my lap.

‘God, who can be bothered? I never thought it worried you!’ Anna said, staring at me intently, trying to get me to
admit a lifetime’s worth of bad feeling to her soberly and over a casual lunch.

‘Of course it bothers me, a little bit. I just want to be healthy,’ I said, and then I was embarrassed.

‘Are you doing any exercise?’ Lisa asked with a smile, interested.

‘I’ve been walking a lot, but I think I might need to join a gym,’ I grimaced, as excitement swept Lisa’s face.

‘Join mine! Then I can help. It’ll be fun!’

‘OK, maybe, but I’m not ready for anything too major. It’s been a long time since I have done any real exercise. I have to work my way up to it …’

Lisa mouthed, ‘It’ll be great’ across the table, and toasted her glass of lime and soda in my direction.

‘Do you remember that cabbage diet you went on in sixth form, Sunny, the one that made you fart constantly?’ Anna burst out laughing, and turned to Lisa. ‘Do you remember, Lisa, when we got into your dad’s car that time he picked us up from the cinema, we’d just seen
Ghost
, and just as Sunny sat down there was that really long farting noise! And then the car smelt so bad your dad had to wind the window down, and nobody said anything, because nobody knew what to say!’ Anna laughed so hard she knocked over her drink.

‘And do you remember the Slimfast?’ Lisa said, with a broad smile. ‘How much weight did you put on that week, Sunny? It was nearly ten pounds, wasn’t it?’ Lisa snuffled with laughter, little snorts escaping from her nose.

‘I read the instructions wrong,’ I said, trying to smile convincingly.

‘Didn’t you think you had to drink a shake
with
each meal?’ Lisa said, collapsing into laughter. ‘Poor Sunny, you know I don’t mean it like that,’ she said, wiping the tears from her eyes.

I nodded but I couldn’t say anything.

‘And that time … that time …’ Anna could barely get the words out she was laughing so much, ‘that you decided you were going to wear ankle weights everywhere,’ giggle giggle, ‘to tone up your legs,’ laughing harder, ‘and you wore them to college, and by the end of the day you couldn’t even lift your feet up, and you had to take them off …’ Anna lost control and laughed for twenty seconds, as she held her sides and tried to breathe, ‘but you still couldn’t lift your legs, and you couldn’t even step up onto the bus, and you had to shuffle … had to shuffle …’ Anna started losing it again, ‘shuffle all the way home! Not lifting your feet off the ground!’

Both Anna and Lisa were wiping their eyes, caught in the middle of a laughter downpour, drenched in it, and exhausted. Ten minutes after that they were able to order lunch.

Lisa was so enthusiastic about the gym I almost didn’t join. Her obsession with fitness had always been so alien to me. I just could not understand what pleasure she could derive from running at 6 a.m. in the rain, as opposed to, say, eating fish and chips in front of
EastEnders
every Tuesday. Part of me, although envying the way she looked in jeans, was pleased not to be her – it looked so joyless, and seemed so obsessive. But now, somewhere down a sweaty road, I have joined her sisterhood.

We kiss hello and chitter-chatter down to the changing rooms, where Lisa strips off to get changed without a second thought. I manoeuvre myself so that my back is facing her as I unhook my bra, so she can’t see how deflated my breasts have become. The talk almost immediately falls to Anna.

‘She has put on over … five stone.’ Lisa whispers it with shame.

‘God, did she tell you it’s that much?’ I ask, so sad for her already.

‘And that is with the baby … out.’ Lisa pauses before the last word to give the sentence added impact and dramatic effect, and it makes her sound a little ridiculous. As if she is one of those narrow-minded, middle-aged, middle-class women who wear too much hairspray and who have honed their sensibilities to be easily shocked just so they can wallow gloriously in the outrage. I glance around the changing room to see if anybody else is listening, but thankfully they aren’t.

‘But, Lisa, a lot of that will come off with the breast-feeding. It burns up a huge amount of calories – over one and a half thousand a day,’ I say.

Lisa shrugs a hopeful ‘maybe’, but I see a delighted glint in her eye as she wonders how anybody could let themselves go so badly, indulge themselves so much. I wonder if she has forgotten who she is talking to, as we both snap on Lycra training shorts.

‘I just mean, Sunny … she ate everything!’

‘Yes, I know, but she was on that crazy diet just before she got pregnant,’ I say.

‘It was only Atkins,’ Lisa retorts.

‘Yes but she’s a vegetarian,’ I say, still baffled. I gave up all the weird and wonderful diets when I was a teenager. If the cabbage soup diet does work for somebody, it is a short-term goal, a quick fix for half a stone, not a recipe for life. Admittedly I didn’t diet much during my early twenties, I mostly just ate, but I could tell even then that counting points or drinking shakes or not eating fruit was not going to keep me occupied for the time it would take to lose half my body weight. I needed to change the way that I ate, not just cut back for a while.

‘Well, anyway,’ Lisa pulls her hair into a ponytail in front of the mirror – her jaw line is so smooth, not a wrinkle in sight, ‘she’ll have to join the gym now … I mean, how much have you lost, Sunny?’

‘About seven stone so far,’ I say quietly, and hope that nobody hears.

‘Right, and you’ve got like a stone to go or something?’

‘Kind of, maybe two …’ I say.

‘Right. Well, that isn’t that much more than Anna, and she put that all on in nine months! You took a lifetime to get that big!’

‘Uh-huh,’ I say, and nod once, turning to leave the changing room. I make a mental note to go to see Anna soon, and take her some unroasted nuts and a small bar of dark chocolate as a treat.

Lisa is, of course, oblivious to the way she sounds, so there is no point saying anything. I just never want to think like her. Of course, in the class, I become her. I am zoned and focused. I can picture my muscles flexing and stretching, I monitor my breathing, I know exactly how many calories I am burning as we roundhouse kick to the left and right, and bruise the boxing bags with our jabs and undercuts, and skip like boxers for ten minutes until my cheeks fizz with saliva. Then we hit the floor and do twenty minutes of sit-ups. Lisa and I smile at each other occasionally in the mirror, sharing the high. It’s not just chemical, it’s the knowledge that we are effectively airbrushing ourselves, refining and toning and perfecting.

Barry, our instructor, is a hard squat ex-squaddie. Lisa and I shake out our muscles after an hour and twenty minutes, and only then do I notice that we are surrounded by red-faced exhaustion. The other class members are fighting for breath, and somewhere to go to sit down.

‘Good effort, girls. Ten out of ten.’ Barry puts a hand on each of our arms, anointing us with a fitness blessing. We give him a suitably reverent smile, stopping just short of genuflection.

We head to the bar upstairs with wet hair after long hot
showers. Lisa’s spot has grown bigger with the heat, swelling to a dangerous level: if it were a volcano I’d be evacuating about now.

Two guys stand in suits by the bar, with fresh pints of lager, and squash rackets poking out of their gym bags. One of them smiles at us as we squeeze past, and apologises for his bag, which barely sticks out at all.

Lisa sighs and says, Thank you!’ in an exasperated tone.

He looks confused and a little insulted, and I mouth ‘It’s fine, thanks’ at him and smile a little weakly as we walk past.

We order two black coffees and the girl behind the bar says that they will take a few minutes and she will call us when they are ready. We settle ourselves in a corner away from the plasma screen showing men’s tennis on clay courts somewhere hot.

‘Have you thought about yoga, Sunny? It would help with your definition,’ Lisa says as she reads the back of a gym pamphlet, eyeing up the new classes on offer.

‘I could do. I guess I am still concentrating on the fat burning at the moment, the high impact cardio stuff, but I know that yoga is supposed to be good.’

‘I mean, it doesn’t appeal to me as much, but I’ve been working my muscles for longer, so they are in better shape. And you never know, it might help with your loose skin.’

‘Maybe,’ I say, and look over to the bar to see if the drinks are ready. They are just being poured, so I grab my purse, saying, ‘I’ll get these,’ beating a hasty retreat before I actually start to cry.

I pay, but the cups are a strange shape and they burn my fingers, so I carry Lisa’s coffee over to her, and pop it down on the table as she thanks me. I turn to go back and grab the other cup, but the guy with the squash racket from earlier has followed me over, carrying the second cup.