Fat Chance (2 page)

Or, I can yank the dress
upwards
in a swift and decisive motion, in order to free myself as quickly and as effectively as possible from my material prison.

A less impulsive person would go with option two, but then again, a less impulsive woman wouldn’t have tried to squeeze into a dress that’s too small for her in the first place.

I take a deep breath, squeeze my eyes shut, grab the straps with both hands, and, with all the strength I can muster, I yank the dress upwards in what I think is the aforementioned swift and decisive manner.

Sadly, as I do this, the dress also twists round to the left and the tight corseting constricts around my ample upper body like one of those Chinese finger puzzles. Instead of flying off over my head, the dress becomes wedged at the shoulders, leaving me with my arms flailing above my head and my vision limited to a landscape of green material.

Compounding this terrible situation is the fact that I’m bound to be showing my enormous pink and black striped knickers to the world, thanks to the lower half of the dress bunching up and creating an unattractive pool of bulging material around my waist.

I’m in proper trouble now.

I’ve never been one to suffer from claustrophobia, but I now feel a new and acute appreciation for those who have the condition. I simply have no idea what to do.

I can’t lower my arms thanks to the stiffness of the corseting, so I can’t gain any leverage on the dress to pull it back down.

Panic really does set in now, and I start to fight against my impromptu straitjacket, wobbling my body back and forth in an attempt to shake myself free. I haven’t writhed around with my hands in the air this much since I went to a rave back in the
mid-nineties
. If somebody sticks The Prodigy on over the M&S speaker system, I’ll feel right at home.

Of course, in my mild panic, I’ve forgotten about the fact that I’m standing in a small cubicle containing a stool, which is currently adorned with my street clothes. I’m reminded of this fact when I painfully smack my knee into the stool as I whirl around on the spot for the third time, hoping that by building up some centrifugal force it might throw me clear of the dress.

‘Oww! Fuck!’ I wail in muffled frustration.

The usual human response to sharp pain is to back away from its cause as swiftly as possible. This makes me stumble into the heavy white curtain that shuts off the cubicle from the outside world. The curtain has seen how much fun the dress is having with me and wants in on the action. In my increasing distress, I twist around sharply as I hit the curtain—which neatly manages to wrap itself around my entire body, thus encasing me in
two
layers of material.

‘Oh, for crying out loud!’

Now things have reached the level of farce usually reserved for amateur theatrics.

If I keep thrashing around as I have been, I’m likely to pull the curtain off its rail and go stumbling out into the shop looking like the most uncoordinated ghost in human history. Small children will run screaming from the bulky, swearing monstrosity. The shop staff will be on the phone to the Ghostbusters before I can say a damn thing in my defence.

Time for a cooler head to prevail.

I force myself to stand still and take a few deep breaths. If I can just calm down a bit, I’m sure I can work out a simple and easy way of extricating myself from this double-layered cloth prison with the minimum of further fuss and—

‘Are you alright, madam?’

Oh for God’s sake, it’s Little Miss Bony-Arse.

I choose not to respond immediately, feeling that any explanation I try to give will be completely inadequate.

‘Do you need some help?’ the girl eventually says.

‘No love, I’m absolutely fine,’ I reply. The sarcasm manages to get past the curtain and the corset with no problem at all. ‘I often like to wrap a curtain around my head in the middle of a shop. I find it
soothing
.’

‘Really?’

Good grief.

‘Yes. If you could go and brew me up a chai tea and pour it through the hole in the top, that’d be just super.’

‘Ah . . . I think you should probably come out of there.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Yes I do, really. The manager won’t like it.’

‘Ah well, we wouldn’t want to annoy the manager, now,
would we
?’

‘No. Mister Morris is very strict about this kind of thing.’

‘You get a lot of fat women wrapping themselves up in curtains, do you?’

‘No, but customers do act up from time to time.’

‘I see. In that case, perhaps you could pull the thing off me?’

‘Okay.’

The sales girl successfully manages to unwrap me from the
curtain
, leaving only the issue of the dress.

I can’t see her face, but I know the expression she’s making.

‘Um
. . .
Do you need any help with the dress?’ she asks
tentatively.

‘What? Are you saying I’m not wearing it right?’

‘No, madam. It shouldn’t be that high up.’

‘
Really?
Because I was watching a programme about London Fashion Week recently and you wouldn’t
believe
how many models were walking down the catwalk with their arms up like someone was pointing a gun at them, showing their Primark knickers to everyone.’

This is met with stony silence.

‘Just pull the bloody thing off my head, will you?’ I ask in a weary voice.

With Little Miss Bony-Arse helping out, it takes only two tugs to free me from my bondage. As the dress comes off I can feel it sliding painfully up against the rolls of fat on my arms and back. It reminds me, sickeningly, of how a sausage is made.

This is so embarrassing. I feel like I could throw up.

Then I remember that I’m now standing in my massive
Primark
knickers and bra in the middle of the changing room corridor, and my embarrassment levels rocket to hitherto unknown levels of stratospheric humiliation. This couldn’t possibly get any worse.

‘Er, can we use the changing rooms?’ I hear a voice say from behind the bony shop girl.

I crane my head around to see no less than
four
women standing at the end of the corridor clutching a variety of garments. Two of them are thin and are therefore trying their best not to look at me with a combination of guilt and smug superiority. The third seems to be, like me, no stranger to the occasional late-night binge, and is looking at me with both pity and a certain degree of recognition. The fourth member of the party is a twelve-year-old girl, whom I’ve probably traumatised for the rest of her life. Not least because I’m about to swear at the top of my voice.

‘Thanks a lot!’ I wail at the shop girl. ‘You could’ve warned me there were people waiting!’

She gives me the look of a kicked puppy.

I sigh, straighten my shoulders, and attempt to collect what is left of my dignity as I step back into the cubicle. The curtain is thrown across the rail with a growl.

On my own inside, anger gives way to misery. I slump onto the stool and feel the tears welling up. This isn’t the first time I’ve felt like this recently, but at least on every other occasion I’ve been able to have a good weep in the privacy of my own home.

I have a little silent cry to myself on the stool for about a
minute
, before managing to pull myself together and get dressed.

I look in the full-length mirror once I’m back in my clothes and take in the hectic, blotchy red face staring back at me. I look an absolute state.

Great stuff.

Now I just have to get out of Marks & Spencer without another person seeing me—and hold myself together long enough to reach my front door.

With a leaden sigh, I pull the curtain back slowly and step out into the corridor. I walk down to the end and back out into the shop, where I see my friend the bony shop girl standing next to a rail of colourful t-shirts. She sees me coming and has the sheer audacity to give me a sympathetic look.

How bloody
dare
she.

It’s one thing to look down your nose at me because I’m a fatty; it’s entirely another to feel sorry for me.

I don’t want you to feel sorry for me! I just want you to treat me like anybody else! Alright, I may need a bit more room than most
people
. . . and don’t ask me to run the four hundred metres any time soon, but other than that I’m normal, so please give me a break, okay?

I want to say all of this to her narrow face, but being British, chubby, and horrifically embarrassed, I instead give her a little nod and a wet smile, before swiftly walking towards the exit.

By the time I do get home, I can barely lift my head, thanks to the curtain of self-loathing I’ve now wrapped myself in. It feels much heavier and more shameful than the shop curtain I was wrapped in less than an hour earlier. Unfortunately there are no skinny shop assistants around to help pull me out of this one, and Greg is off out with his mates, so I’ll get no husbandly support until he gets home. I therefore spend the next hour sitting disconsolately in front of a blank TV screen, before going to the fridge and eating the rest of the black forest gateaux.

This bleak frame of mind persisted right through the weekend and into Monday, so I was feeling very vulnerable when I met up with Elise at the Costa Coffee near the radio station for our regular mid-afternoon natter. Both being Stream FM employees, this daily time-out is much needed, and as far as I’m concerned, the only thing that keeps me sane. Working in local radio is rather like trying to herd cats, while someone pokes you in the eyeball every four seconds.

‘I’ve got something I think you might be interested in,’ Elise says as she takes a sip of her eggnog cappuccino.

‘What’s that?’ I say, and grimace as I also take a swallow of my skinny latte.

‘Please don’t be offended,’ she continues. This means she’s about to say something related to my weight. People only ever start a
sentence
with ‘please don’t be offended’ when they’re about to tell me how fat they think I am. This usually pisses me off no end, but I’m pretty sure Elise doesn’t have a nasty bone in her toned and tanned body, so I effect a pleasant smile that doesn’t quite reach my eyes.

‘Go on, Elise. Don’t worry.’

‘Okay. We’re running a new competition early next year.’

. . . Oh, this is something to do with work. I’ve not read the signs right at all.

I feel strangely uneasy. When the most popular DJ at the station tells you to not be offended and then mentions a new project, it can only mean she’s about to say something bad concerning your job.

‘This is the first I’ve heard of it,’ I say defensively. ‘We can’t turn around a good promo campaign in the marketing department if we’re not given enough notice, you know.’

Elise shakes her head. ‘No, no! It’s nothing like that, Zoe! The higher-ups will sort all that stuff out in the New Year. I’m
mentioning
it to you now because you might be interested in
taking
part.’

‘Taking part in what?’

‘The competition.’

‘What competition?’

Elise then spends five minutes laying out all the details of Fat Chance.

‘You and Greg would be perfect for it,’ she says when she’s done. ‘I’m sure if you put your name forward, you’d be in strong contention to be one of the six couples.’

‘Elise . . . I work for the station. There’s no way I could enter even if I wanted to.’

‘Nope. You can! I asked Pete from legal about it. You’re employed by Regency Marketing, right? Not Stream?’

‘Yeah, but I still work in the same offices.’

‘Doesn’t matter. It’s another company on a long-term contract. You can enter!’

‘Well, I don’t
want
to enter.’ I take another sip of the disgusting skinny latte and try not to gag.

‘Why not?’ Elise’s beautiful face scrunches up in a look of total incomprehension. Someone who spends as much time in the
limelight
as she does probably has no idea why I wouldn’t want to be a part of a major event in the station’s calendar.

‘Because it’ll be embarrassing,’ I say in a low voice.

‘Why?’

Because I’m fat, you gorgeous idiot.

‘Because I’m . . . heavy, Elise.’

‘Well, yes. That’s the point though, isn’t it?’ The girl has always been blunt, I’ll give her that. I first realised it two years ago on the day we met, when she told me my highlights made me look like a tart.

‘I don’t want to parade the fact that I’m overweight in front of thousands of people, though!’ I point out to her.

‘It’s on the radio, Zoe.’

‘You know what I mean. There’ll be stuff on the website, at the road shows . . . it’ll be horrible.’