Running in Heels (15 page)

Babs hesitates while I make a strangled squeak, but when nothing more lucid emerges, resumes: “I know you're trying to say something, to everyone, with how you look—who isn't?—but sometimes, Nat, almost always, it's better to come out and say it, even if it's going to hurt people, and I know that whatever you want to say to us, to me, to everyone, I know that what you've got to say has got to be pretty lethal, because keeping it inside is killing you.”

Babs is holding my hand as tight as a farmer choking a chicken. She blinks, angrily, to blot the tears. Slowly, she gets to her feet.

“Come with me,” she says, and leads me, a Pied Piper leading a rat, to my cool white bathroom. She positions me in front of the mirror and says, “Take off your jumper.” I stare at her beseechingly, but she repeats, “Take it off.”

I am trembling, all over, and my legs are paper.

“Go on, Natalie,” says Babs, her voice so firm that I obey. In the same dominatrix tone, she orders off my skirt, and my tights, and my long-sleeved T-shirt, until I'm standing in front of my best friend in my underwear.

“Christ, Nat,” says Babs. Her bravado is gone, the words wobble. We peer into the grimy mirror—a small oasis of dirt in my immaculate desert bathroom—as if it has all the answers, as if we might step through the glass, like Alice, to another life.

“There's a saying,” declares Babs, her chin at a tilt. “I think Mrs. Simpson said it. ‘You can never be too rich or too thin.' Well, on my pitiful salary, I agree with the rich bit. But as for the rest. Woman, will you look at yourself. You've practically dissolved.”

She hesitates, as if to ensure my full attention. Then she says, “You can be too thin, Nat.”

THIN IS WHAT WORKS FOR ME. THIN IS THE ONLY
thing that works for me. And I'm
not.
I wish I were. I peer at the filthy mirror and a great swollen balloon of a fat girl stares fatly back.

“I'm not thin,” I tell Babs.

Babs looks at me as if I've just confessed to a passionate affair with Frannie.

“No, Nat,” she agrees in a voice slick with sarcasm, “you're not thin.”

I glance at her suspiciously.

“You're skeletal. It pains me to look at you. Your hipbones. Your collarbone. Your ribs. They jut so sharply through your skin I'm scared they're going to pierce it. I'm serious, Natalie. You need to eat.”

I don't
need
to do anything.

“I do eat,” I say.

“What do you eat?”

“I eat masses. I…I have coffee and crispbread with a bit of butter for breakfast, and an apple and nuts and raisins for lunch, and salad and cottage cheese and vegetables for dinner, and probably more only I can't remember. I eat a lot. I feel full.”

I feel bloated, huge, disgusting, ugly, a monstrous lumbering
sow of a woman, a greedy revolting red-faced creature, and with every bite, I feel myself swelling, I'm punished for breaking the first commandment, don't eat more than a small bird because it's unladylike and you'll get fat and no one will like you, but it's too late, I can feel the flat sharpness of my cheekbones sinking, swamped under spongy bulges of flesh, my thighs spreading like warm lard and sticking together, so it's much safer not to eat.

“Let me tell you what
I
eat in a day,” says Babs, perching on the side of my bath. “For breakfast, I have a big bowl of Shred-dies, and two slices of buttered bread—I like the butter so thick it makes teethmarks—tea, and orange juice. For lunch, I might have pizza or a chicken sandwich or a jacket potato with cheese and beans, and a packet of crisps. I'll probably have snacks, maybe chocolate, or a banana, and for dinner I'll have spaghetti bolognese, and salad, or fish, chips, and vegetables, or beef stew and dumplings, or roast chicken, or a curry, and afterward I'll have dessert, maybe apple crumble, or chocolate cake and custard, or fruit salad and ice cream, and a glass of wine.”

I shudder. That is an
obscene
amount of food. What a pig.

“That's normal, Nat,” says Babs. “I get hungry otherwise. And I like eating.” She glances at me, and something seems to jolt. When she speaks, her voice is honeyed with lust. “That gorgeous sensation,” she purrs, “that delicious moment when you snap a creamy chunk of milk chocolate out of its shiny silver wrapping, and it melts over your tongue, that soft glut of sweetness, why deny yourself that casual pleasure, Nat? And spaghetti! Spaghetti with bolognese sauce so rich and thick it glitters—the joy of slurping it, sucking it up from the plate in a long splatty squiddle, the juiciness, the chewy satisfaction, my teeth ache just to think of it! And buttered toast! The oozy oily crunchiness of buttered toast, that taste is sublime, it's a basic human right!”

I feel like a pervert panting on the end of a telephone sex line. Babs sees my popping eyes and returns to earth.

“Calories are just
energy
. I need that amount of food to be healthy, to do my job,” she adds, the evangelical ring less resonant. “If you don't obsess about what you eat, you end up eating pretty much what you need. I eat a decent amount because my job is so physical. I burn most of it off. I'm telling you, one doughnut, two doughnuts, won't make you fat. To get properly fat you've really got to put the work in, Nat! We're talking dawn-to-dusk noshing—a strict regime! We're talking twelve doughnuts daily, on top of normal meals. Look—” She flicks her red scarf over her shoulder and lifts up her sweatshirt. “Am I grotesque?” She tips like a pink teapot and her torso concertinas into rolls.

“N-no,” I stammer, goggling.

“Nat,” says Babs quietly, “I'm five foot eight and I weigh eleven stone. I am
average
.”

She says “average” like it's a good thing to be.

“Go on,” orders Babs, “I can tell you want to disagree. I can always tell. You get that politely wretched look, like you're meeting the Queen and there's a frog on your tongue.”

I wrestle with my thoughts, but they are too fierce, too fiery to crush. “I don't want to be average,” I snarl. “I can't think of anything worse. I—I hate average. Who wants to be
mediocre
? It would be the worst. Who in the world is sad enough to be satisfied with that?” I whisper so that Babs doesn't detect the hissing venom, but I follow her gaze to my lap and see that my hands are shaking violently, as if I've used them to kill someone.

Babs wills me to look at her. “But, Natalie,” she says, “
you
are not what you weigh. Your body is just the…the container. What makes you special,
not
average, is what's inside. Your wit, your intelligence, your charisma, your quirks, your stupidity even. You were never average, Nat, you were, you are my best friend. You didn't need to starve yourself to prove that you weren't average. Look at you, you're a wisp, a pale ghost of a girl. I have to hand
it to you—you don't look normal. But are you happy? I don't think so. If it's happiness you're after, you won't find it because you're thin.”

“You won't find it if you're fat either,” I tell her bluntly. “And anyway, I don't feel thin.”

“Anorexics don't feel thin!” she shrieks. “Everyone knows that! The way you're going, you'll never be thin enough. It's never enough, it won't be enough until one morning you'll wake up and you'll be dead!”

I'd question her logic, but I'm reeling from this reckless slap of a word she's thrown at me.

“I'm not”—I gulp—“anorexic.”

Babs glares at me. “You might not be Ally McBeal yet but you're on your way. You are
shrunken
. Even your head is thin! Your skull looks too big for you. Frankly I'm not surprised you've lost your job. I'll be honest—no one is. You're just not
there
anymore. It's like talking to a zombie. You're barely present physically, and mentally, you're absent. You hardly go out, and the last time you came to dinner, you mashed your potato pie around your plate like a four-year-old—”

“I don't eat pastry,” I say.

“Nat, that's an excuse. It's like saying you don't like the cut of a chicken's jib.”

“I feel fat,” I hiss.

“But that's your answer to everything!” she cries. “Nat, I'm asking you because I want to know. Don't you…don't you ever get
hungry
?”

I'm not sure if I know anymore.

“I want a body with sharp edges,” I say after a while, because she won't let me wriggle out of an answer. “Sometimes I am hungry. I'm always hungry. But when I don't eat I feel good. Pure. I feel empty and it's wonderful. I feel so powerful. Like I could fly.”

Babs shakes her head, and her vanilla crunch hair frames her anxious face like a dark halo.

“Nat,” she murmurs, “you're not a saint, you're a human being. You're not meant to be pure, or perfect. I wish, I so wish that just once you could leave the fucking washing up. Stay calm if someone rucks up the carpet. The minute anyone steps out of the toilet you're in there hurling gallons of bleach down it. And if they get off the sofa—you're there, straightening cushions. You don't allow yourself to have fun! No casual sex—”

“I'm having sex with Chris.”

“That's
coke
sex! Coke, the drug of low self-esteem! That's cheating! God knows where
he
fits in, but that's not Natalie Miller shagging—it's the drug!”

I want to scream at Babs that I've gone off coke anyway, it makes me paranoid that I've got a snotty nose, and that I know she resents Chris because he isn't Saul, safe, boring Saul, as dull as a woman can get without tying the knot and having a lobotomy. I'm getting my ear chewed off for Not Having Fun, yet Chris Poodle—bacchanalian Chris who spits in the eye of marriage—is dashed aside as a bad influence! What does she want from me?

“Losing control doesn't count if it's drug-induced, Nat,” scolds Babs, who, it appears, could teach the Dalai Lama a thing or two about the meaning of life. “
That
sort of losing control is just an escape. I want you to relax, be comfortable with who you are, and that means facing yourself,
accepting
yourself. There's no joy, no triumph in being an iron woman. If I'm honest, I'm glad you've lost your job. Because that job of yours, I don't think it helped.

“I know you love ballet, but being around that sort of discipline, that superhuman willpower, is not healthy for someone like you. You can't compete with a bunch of elite athletes. I know it's an art form, and it's awesome, breathtaking, but it's also about perfection, it's narcissistic, anal, it's all about physicality, looking in the mirror all day long, and that's the last thing you need. You need to be in a freer environment where
you can eat a few biscuits, gain a few pounds, and it not be a massive guilt vortex that sucks up your existence.”

I wish she'd go. She doesn't understand.

“Babs,” I mutter, “it's okay for you. You're okay. But me, I'll be uglier, I'm ugly, I feel ugly—”

“You're not ugly, Nat!” shouts Babs, so loud and shrill I nearly topple into the bath. “You're lovely, you are, my god—Andy and Robbie think you're gorgeous, the pair of them drive me mad! But
you've
got to believe it, believe you're gorgeous, but not just to look at, as a person. That's what matters. Beauty is surface, it means so little, it's transient. Looks are nothing. It's what's inside that counts, and you have that.”

I'm surprised that a large godly finger doesn't poke through the bathroom window and strike her down where she sits. Looks are nothing! Then explain Estée Lauder and her zillion-dollar cosmetics dynasty, my bronzed born-again father and his trainer-slash-nutritionist-slash-herbalist, every celebrity back in shape three days after giving birth, my diet addict mother discarded for a younger model, all our cosmetically perfect film stars—we force them to be what they are, and what they are is our punishment—Kimberli Ann and her inflatable breasts, a million airbrushed cover girls, pint-size Robbie and his exercise addiction, the students who after fifteen years of dedication and desire and maniacal toil are rejected from the GL Ballet because while their talent is unquestionable their bodies are the wrong shape for classical ballet. Oh no. Looks are nothing.

I splutter, “How can you
say
that? How can you pretend that looks don't matter?”

Babs says, “I'm not pretending they don't matter. I'm saying that looks matter less than you think they do. Yes, if you want to be a supermodel, looks matter. If you don't, they're less important. If you want to attract the sort of man who sneers when you eat cake and tolerates your opinions, then yes, you'll need to be
ravishing. If you want to make insecure women hate you, then yes, be born beautiful. But the kind of people you want to be around won't judge you on your looks for longer than five minutes. And I swear it, Nat, you wouldn't want them to.”

She pauses. “But this isn't really about looks, is it, Nat? This isn't about looking ugly. It's about
feeling
ugly. Is that what you feel?”

She speaks so softly I could fall asleep on the sweet fairy whisper of her breath.

I reply stiffly, “I feel nothing but ugly through and through.”

“Oh, Nat,” says Babs sadly, “you break my heart. How can you feel that? What else do you feel?”

The agony of this interrogation is turning my spine to chalk. (This may also be linked to perching on the side of the bath for an hour.) “I feel…nothing,” I say. “I feel…not nice.”

Babs holds up a hand. “Nat,” she murmurs. “Let me remind you of something. Not so long ago, you and I were walking to the station. I can't remember why. Anyway, we're walking along and you shout, “Wait!” And you crouch down and I see this hideous fluorescent green caterpillar on the pavement. It's the biggest bloody creepy-crawly I've ever seen, I wouldn't even dare stamp on it. And I watch you
pick up
this creature…”

“Oh yeah,” I say, “he was really cute, he was a bright green pudgy thing, he was stranded—”

“And I watch you flap around looking for the right
leaf
to place this thing on, and eventually you find one, and the caterpillar won't stick, and I hear you say—hear you with my own ears, say—‘Come on, darling, you've got work to do, you've got to become a butterfly!' ”

Babs pauses. “Now
that
,” she adds softly, “is a person with a beautiful soul.”

Everything blurs. After a long time I whisper, “It doesn't feel like that. I don't know why. But it doesn't.”

Babs flops her head in her hands. I glance at her luscious
hair, rich with dancing curls, playful twirls, chocolate ripples, vanilla streaks.

“You're a liar,” she states. “A liar, and you don't even know it. I don't think you
want
to accept what you feel.”

She stops for a second, then blurts, “You're so stubborn. I think when I got married, you were angry, but you were angry way before that. My engagement might have been the trigger, Nat, but that was just an excuse. If kids don't feel valued by their parents for themselves, they grow up looking for other ways to be valued. And Nat, when your dad pissed off, you suffered the emotional equivalent of being dropped on your head. But you won't admit it.

“You just replay the scenario with every man you've met since—good men some of them, but you push them and push them until they leave you. You don't feel valued but you're blaming all the wrong people. Yet you won't admit you feel angry. You're as thin as tissue paper, but all you allow yourself to feel is ‘fat.' It's a code word for something else.”