The Perfect 10 (23 page)

‘Now do you see?’ Christian asks, wide-eyed.

‘Jesus, he’s the Liz Taylor of Kew! Is that why you love him so much? Does he remind you of her?’

‘It is not the only reason. He has always been there for me, if I need him.’ Christian nods seriously again.

‘But three times? Jesus, did he … did he beat them?’

‘Oh, sweet buggery, no Sunny! You’ve got him all wrong! He just … he picks the wrong ones! He has shocking taste, and not just in knitwear. He’s got a spark, Sunny, even if it has faded a little recently, but he’s got this funny thing, a strange charm, when he cares to show it. But he just picks
these dull beautiful women.’ Christian moans the words, as if just saying them might put him to sleep, as if there were nothing more depressing in this whole wide world than a dull but beautiful woman.

‘Dull? How so? You mean, just, a little vacuous?’

‘No, darling, I wish that it were that simple. Shallow can be huge amounts of fun! No, it’s that they have nothing to them at all, no fire, no personality, no nothing. Of course you wouldn’t understand, being the woman that you are …’

‘What does that mean?’ I ask.

‘It means that if your personality were bell-bottomed jeans, I wouldn’t be able to walk for the acres of denim swishing at my ankles!’

‘I know … I have a “good” personality,’ I say in a mocking pathetic voice, but Christian throws away my hand in an instant.

‘Excuse me? Good? You have an amazing personality!’ Christian makes his eyes wide, and draws a big circle with his two index fingers in the night air, although I don’t really know what for, or what it is supposed to mean.

‘Oh, you don’t know me at all, Christian! A few too many wines and a few too many words thrown at your friend doesn’t make me Miss Congeniality.’

‘You might not be Sandra, darling, but then who is? What I know is that you’re feisty, and you are sassy, and you have substance, and you are determined! Look at what you did!’

‘What did I do?’ I ask, confused.

‘What did you do? Where did you go, more like? Darling, you changed your life!’

‘Oh, that.’ I visibly deflate. I thought he might say I am beautiful. He is only saying that I am thinner than I was, but that’s obvious. Something in me desperately wants
Christian to think of me as beautiful, like one of his idols, Liz Taylor or Rita Hayworth, or Diana Dors – somebody fabulous!

‘Christian, I’m not so feisty, I just get so scared that I shout. It hides it. But better to be thought of as having a good personality than nothing, I suppose.’

‘Of course, darling! Otherwise you’d just be another one of those beautiful vacant types that Cagney goes for!’ We turn the corner of my street. My feet hurt and now Christian is patronising me.

‘Yes, OK, Christian. I’m tired, I’m not stupid.’

‘Darling.’ Christian turns towards me and holds both my hands. I look up at him, and then look away. ‘Darling?’ he says again, until I relent and meet his gaze. ‘You get how pretty you are, right? You get that those big old eyes of yours were messing with Cagney’s mind tonight and making him crazy, right?’

‘Whatever, Christian, you are being very sweet, but you don’t need to go over the top.’ I try to shake off his hands, but he holds on.

‘Sunny, honey, listen to me. You are never going to mend properly if you don’t learn to say thank you when somebody tells you the truth. Take a compliment, darling. Only a silly woman can’t accept a compliment, and I don’t spend time with them.’

I look away. ‘Well then, I guess I’m silly.’

‘Why?’ Christian asks, confused.

‘Because I’m not there yet,’ I say, looking at my feet, and then back up at him again, shrugging my shoulders, admitting it.

‘Then yes, I am afraid you are a silly, silly girl’ Christian says, but kindly.

‘I know.’

We are sitting on my wall by now. It’s a warm night, and
the air smells wonderful. It is past midnight, and there is a chill, nipping at my arms, giving me goose pimples. I am already a little hungover. But Christian and I want to swing our legs off the side of my wall for five more minutes, and enjoy the guilty pleasure of staying up late and talking about nothing, and everything. We are as comfortable as it is possible to be in an Armani suit and a silk dress, sitting on old rugged slate stones.

‘Now, tell me about this Adrian guy. He was kind of bland-looking, although nice and tall, I’ll grant you.’

‘Well, what do you want to know?’

‘What’s his story? What’s with the phone stapled to his ear?’

‘His story, and the phone, are because, officially at least, he is with somebody else.’

‘With?’ Christian is confused.

‘He’s engaged to somebody else.’ I nod my head with acceptance as I say it, flatly, in a tone that I hope will stop Christian being too appalled. It doesn’t work.

‘No he isn’t!’ He claps his hands once, and then guiltily puts them back down at his sides.

‘Yes he is!’ I say, and laugh. It strikes me that I might cut a desperate figure, hungry for somebody to love me, willing to take whatever scraps are thrown my way. Or maybe I seem, to everybody else, simply to want what I can’t have. Maybe everybody else can see quite clearly that I just like the idea of Adrian, and not the reality, so his scraps are more than enough. Maybe he is the tragic one. Maybe the whole world is tragic, in love with the wrong person, wanting something they can’t have, desperate for a reason to leave, desperate for some excitement to make staying more bearable, desperate not to let go. Christian isn’t quite so understanding.

‘That is just … weird! I’m sorry, it’s super weird! It’s
crazy drunken madness! Who cheats when they aren’t even married yet? Isn’t engagement supposed to be the happy time? Not that I know … but that’s right, right?’ Christian searches my face for clarification.

‘Christ, Christian, I don’t know either. I’ve got no kind of experience with this kind of thing; I’ve been on my own for ever. And as for Adrian … well,’ I think about it for a moment. ‘Well, I think he’s just confused,’ I say in my most down-to-earth and objective manner. ‘And I think he is terrified of hurting Jane.’

‘OK because Jane would be doing star jumps if she knew where he was tonight!’ Christian hits the nail on the head.

‘I know, I know … it’s a desperately hard situation, but I think I like him … or I thought I did … or maybe I do, I don’t know. I feel like somebody else being involved shouldn’t make me qualify my feelings. I should just know how I feel, and I think I do … or I thought I did … or I’m trying to work out how I do anyway …’

‘But, lovely girl, don’t you want somebody of your own? Don’t you want somebody to belong to?’

‘Of course I do, Christian, but wherever he is, he doesn’t seem overly bothered about tracking me down … and you meet who you meet … and you like who you like …’

‘Well, you think that if you want, and you keep thinking it as Mr Perfect walks on by because he sees you with Adrian.’

‘I know,’ I say again. Tonight it would seem I think I know a lot, when I really don’t.

‘You’re better than that, Sunny – you know that much, right?’

‘Maybe. Or maybe what I really honestly know is that Adrian wants me, even if it is just as an appetiser, or a side dish, but it’s still more than I had before.’

‘But still not enough. You deserve somebody just for you. He isn’t being fair.’

A milk float buzzes round the corner and motors past us in slow motion, with its distinctive hum and the gentle clink of old-fashioned milk bottles.

‘He doesn’t mean to be mean, Christian. His emotions have just gone a little cloudy.’

‘Well then, you need to be the one to see clearly now.’ Christian clicks his fingers and hums the next line of a song.

I nod my head; I can’t bear to say ‘I know’ one more time.

‘Well.’ I jump down from the wall, which is only a few feet high, my feet were basically touching the pavement anyway. Christian’s feet are firmly on the ground already, with his knees bent. I clap my hands together and childishly engage Christian in a game of pat-a-cake, as I talk. ‘I think,’ clap clap, ‘it’s time,’ clap clap, ‘for me,’ clap clap, ‘to go to bed,’ clap.

‘Weren’t you hungry tonight?’ Christian asks, between claps.

‘Not particularly.’ I shrug, and speed up my hand clapping.

‘Because I didn’t see you eat anything.’ Christian catches my hands in front of me.

I look at him with surprise. ‘Oh my God, I did! I ate loads!’

‘No, you didn’t. You had the seaweed at the start and the salmon, but you had one mouthful of lamb …’

‘Yes, but I’m not a big lover of lamb.’

‘… And you didn’t have any sweet potatoes or halloumi.’

‘It’s just Nigella’s recipes give me a stomach ache – they have too much fat.’ I have a quick-fire answer for everything he can throw at me.

‘So you just had vegetables. And you didn’t eat many of those.’ Christian looks at me evenly, and waits for a response.

‘It’s not what you think,’ I say.

‘What do I think?’ he asks, and I feel silly, and paranoid, and persecuted.

‘Something dramatic,’ I say, trying to make him feel silly instead.

‘So starving yourself isn’t dramatic?’ he asks.

‘I’m not starving myself. You don’t know me, Christian. I just don’t really … eat … in public.’

‘Public? Why not in public?’

‘Because … it’s a hangover – from the old days. I feel … greedy if people see me eating.’

He stares at me, and I look away. ‘Jesus,’ he whispers, but I refuse to look up.

‘OK, well, I need my sleep.’ Christian pushes himself up, and I take a step back to clear out of his way. ‘Why don’t you pop into Screen Queen soon, lovely. We can grab a coffee, I can watch you eat a muffin, and you can advise me on my film festival; you can tell me what you think of the flyers! And then I can console you, after you tell Tarzan he leaves Jane or no more fun in the Sunny, right?’

‘Maybe,’ I say.

Christian smacks me on the bum, and I smack him back.

‘Thank you for walking me home, Christian. I don’t think I could have handled that amount of time with Cagney.’ I laugh and run a hand through my hair.

Christian says, ‘We’ll see,’ and takes a few steps backwards. ‘
Ciao, bella
,’ he whispers as he blows me a kiss.

‘Are you sure you don’t feel like changing sides, Christian?’ I ask.

Christian stops walking backwards, and takes five long
swift steps forward, kisses my forehead, and whispers, ‘Not a chance.’

As he walks away, I say, ‘I don’t blame you,’ but quietly, so no one will hear.

Adrian banged on my door for eight minutes starting at 1.10 a.m. Twenty minutes after Christian had left, and four minutes after I had climbed into bed, alone.

Should he have banged for longer? Should he have cried my name to a full-fat soft cheese Kew moon, wailing to the stars, pleading to be let in? Would that have made me answer my door? Or would I have just flicked the speed dial button on my phone that connects me to Richmond police station … ?

Eight minutes isn’t anything. It’s not completely disinterested – that would have been thirty seconds of bangs, a muttered ‘Anyone home?’ and then quick relieved steps away in time for the last bus.

But it’s not demanding or passionate either. Eight minutes is just a very average ordinary man wanting his mistress to let him into her bed. ‘Bored-inary’ as Christian calls it, as in ‘How can anybody live a life that bored-inary?’ or, ‘His shoes are soooo bored-inary, I’m staring straight at them and I couldn’t tell you what they look like. It’s as if my mind won’t allow me to compute the image, it’s just so bored-inary.’ If Adrian had a bit more imagination, he would have knocked to the tune of an Elvis song that I like, or he would have tried to make me laugh by shouting, ‘Knock, knock – who’s there? Adrian! Adrian who? You know, Adrian! You had sex with him in your kitchen a couple of hours ago!’ Or, as a last-ditch attempt, he might have stage-whispered through the letterbox that, given that it was a nice night and all, he would simply curl up on my porch until I extricated myself from my current position, trapped under something heavy, and let him in. But
Adrian knocked with no discernible rhythm for eight minutes – bang, bang … Sunny? Bang … Sunny? Bang bang bang bang … bang, Sunny? The effect being that he bored me into my paralysis. I guess he doesn’t work in IT for nothing.

I sit on a train on Monday, heading towards La Sainte Union Convent School for girls with a box of vibrators and Two-Fingered Fondlers. I’m not nervous, largely because I haven’t really thought about what it is I am going to do. I’m sure a white light of panic will grip me soon enough, as the train bounces me and my sex toys ever closer to Sutton.

I get a cab from the station to the school. I am early, lunchtime is drawing to a close, and teenagers in personalised uniforms amble back towards the school from the town centre, picking fries out of cartons and sucking off their salt greedily before hoovering them up.

I clearly remember an afternoon free period in my second year of sixth form college. The only jeans I could fit into were from the Marks & Spencer’s men’s department. This was before everybody got fat and women’s shops realised there was money to be made. At seventeen I was a size twenty, but Dorothy Perkins weren’t bothered back then. On a blustery November day, with my friends Anna and Lisa, I walked over the flyover that linked my college to the newsagent’s. At seventeen Anna was a brunette with shiny swinging bobbed hair and utterly symmetrical eyebrows,
with a beauty spot just above and to the left of a cupid’s bow that was too perfect to be real. But it was real. Her skin was a caramel cream, and although she had heavy legs and ankles that she bemoaned daily, she also had a tiny waist that she accentuated with well-fitted T-shirts. Nobody ever knew about Anna’s ankles. Her teeth were gloriously straight. She was naturally beautiful, and she polished herself daily. She had been my best friend on and off, the way that girls are, for fourteen years.

Lisa was as blonde and athletic then as she is now, tall and toned, with long naturally curly hair and watery blue eyes. She had a handsome face, attractive where Anna’s was beautiful. But Lisa spent her life smiling. If she wasn’t smiling, she was laughing. A big smile, long blonde curly hair, and a gifted sprinter for the county. Five feet eight inches and not an ounce of fat. These were my best friends, who wore their trendy Levi jeans and Lacoste sweaters as we walked to the newsagent’s, and I wore my M&S men’s jeans, and a sweatshirt from BhS in size XL.

We walked together, in a line, down the road. Anna shared secrets of her date the night before with her new boyfriend, David, a tall handsome third-year student at our college with a Roger Ramjet chin and a good line in sarcasm, who made me blush whenever he turned his full attention on me.

A red mark four Escort whizzed past us, filled with boys from the technical college, boys that all of us had seen but none of us quite knew. They were thrashing their first car into submission, and as they flew past us, they leant on their horn and one of them cried out of the window, ‘You’re gorgeous!’

We all laughed, excited by the fact that these were good-looking boys from the technical college, and they had, by screaming out of their window, declared to the world that one of us would be going out with one of them very soon,
in a smallish suburban town such as ours, with its limited pubs and bars.

I turned to my right to say something to Anna, and realised that she and Lisa had dropped a step behind me, as they held on to each other’s arms to stop themselves from falling as they laughed, flushed with girlish pride.

‘He was shouting at you!’ Lisa said through laughter.

‘No, he was shouting at you!’ Anna said back, glorious fun-filled tears in her eyes.

‘He wasn’t! It was you!’ Lisa said back, taking a breath, trying to regain control.

It was only then that I remembered … there was no way he was shouting at me.

My teenage years are littered with incidents like that, some worse. Jibes and comments scattered like broken glass across the years that pricked my ego until it bled to death. The loud boy at college, the joker, the little guy who got popular from picking on others around him, who could use me as an easy jibe if I walked past at the wrong time. It stung so hard and fresh, every time he made his fat comments, his ‘look at the state of that today’ comments, that it would always make me cry, just a little, especially if I had tried hard that day, with my hair, with my clothes. It didn’t matter to him, of course. When I found out that he was adopted, I plotted and twisted in my head all the comebacks I could hurl in his direction the next time he lashed out at me, how I could turn and say, ‘Well, at least I don’t have strangers cooking my tea! My parents loved me enough to keep me!’ That’s how much it hurt, that awful much. I never said it, thank goodness, but the fact that I thought it is still a source of shame. There are boys, now men, including little popular adopted guy, who I can still muster some hatred for today, a peculiar vitriol reserved only for that select band who made me hate myself for the way I looked at a time
when I was learning who I was. I learnt that I was a joke, because I was fat. I learnt that some people, especially men, wouldn’t like me, wouldn’t even want to talk to me, because I was fat. I learnt that my girlfriends could bond over their latest crush, but there was no point me ‘crushing’ anybody, because that is all it would ever be. I locked my romantic feelings away then, for the first time, to save some young pride. But if I want to be happy, and being loved is what I think will make me happy, I’m going to have to unlock them again and let them out, and risk some oaf with big clumsy hands dropping them and smashing them on the floor. Love is the stuff of all my dreams, and I’ve decided that those dreams aren’t too big for me, even if my Marks & Spencer’s jeans now are.

The taxi driver offers to drop me at the top of the school drive, but I insist on being let out by the gates so that I can carry my heavy box up the long tarmac drive, and therefore start to burn off the bowl of cereal I ate for lunch before I left my flat. The kids eye me suspiciously as I stride past them, but they are almost instantly bored by me, and look away to be bored by something else. How exhausting it must be, to be constantly on the look out for something to hold your attention, disappointed by the ninety-nine per cent of the world that doesn’t involve computer game slaughters. There are significantly more overweight kids than there used to be, too many contenders for the prize of ‘class fatty’ these days. I see a girl, eleven maybe twelve, in a navy V-neck school jumper that is uncomfortably tight, the seams digging at the tops of her arms, and fat where breasts will be one day soon, giving her childish boobs that she doesn’t want, that she hates. Her face is big and pale like an uncut brie. Her arms don’t swing elegantly at her sides, but instead sit at stiff angles from her torso, where fat meets fat. I can tell from the way that she walks that her thighs are rubbing
against each other under her navy blue polyester skirt with a button missing at the waistband that her mother has got tired of sewing back on. She’ll inspect her thighs later, alone and behind a locked door in the family bathroom, the only place that she doesn’t mind being naked. She’ll sit heavily on the floor, the soles of her feet pressed together, studying the red-rashed pimply flesh, and applying E45 cream, praying the livid patch will go down before PE next Tuesday.

She walks too quickly, my little fat friend, on purpose, to prove that she can, but the truth is she really can’t, comfortably at least. She is quite out of breath, and she lets her friend, a small Chinese girl in an oversized uniform that was still the smallest in the shop, do most of the talking, nodding or shaking her head instead of answering if she can get away with it, unable to catch her breath.

A group of five skinny girls catch them up gradually from behind. Their uniform is gold hooped Argos earrings, and poker-straight one-length hair that falls to exactly the same point on their backs – regulation length, McDonald’s length, New Look length. They strop past the Chinese girl and deliberately knock into the violin case that swings heavily at her side, and it falls on to the tarmac. A couple of the girls cough a snigger and carry on walking, until a few paces further on, one swings her hair to turn back and spits over her shoulder, ‘And no staring at my tits again in PE, Marie, you fat leso bitch …’

Marie pretends to ignore her but her face turns strawberry red, and she looks down at her feet, scowling, but saying nothing. I want to run after this little teenage pregnancy in the making and ask her why she is so filled with hate, so spiteful, so ready to lash out at another woman’s expense. I want to make a thousand arguments that confound her in her youth and stupidity into a shamed silence, mouth agape, chewing gum falling to the floor. I am
fast approaching the group of girls, and another sensation grips me – fear. Fear that I won’t say anything, that I won’t fight back, for Marie, for all the other little fat kids, for the ones who hate themselves too much to answer back. There are so many things I could say, ways of making her eat her words, apologise, or at the very least point her in the direction of a new enemy, if an enemy is what she needs. I am a woman now, I’m nearly thirty for Christ’s sake, I can win her over with my cohesive arguments and make her understand that being fat isn’t easy, and her outbursts could push poor Marie over the edge. Then how would she feel? With sticky, sugar-saturated blood all over her hands?

I speed up to pass the group, who are swearing at each other as conversation, discussing ‘cheeky fuckin’ Brett Davies’ and ‘Jamie fuckin’ Sparrow, the prick, he tried to touch me up at the bus stop …’

They don’t say anything to me, barely even notice me. I remind myself that I’m not fat any more. Scared of what they might say, I feel eight years old again. But they have no spite to hurl my way – it would take far too much imagination. I wish they would say something, anything, because the diatribe that I was planning on delivering to them sticks in my throat, and my lips are dry, my tongue rigid. And then one of them speaks.

‘I like your boots, miss.’

She thinks I am a teacher, and her words are sincere. I am wearing knee-high camel-coloured Kurt Geiger leather boots with a thin three-inch heel. I know she is not lying, because they are great boots. They don’t start to hurt my feet until their fourth hour of wear. I am worthy of their admiration, I fit in now, the skinny girl from the skinny club wants my boots.

I glance back over my shoulder and smile, and say quietly, ‘Bitch.’

‘Wha?’ the girl asks, confused that a substitute teacher may have just said ‘thanks’ to her, but it sounded like ‘bitch’. I don’t look back, and am relieved when I shut the staffroom door behind me. It didn’t feel nice, being spiteful to a stranger. I wonder why so many people find it so effortlessly easy.

Rob Taggart is nervous and overexcited. He speaks too quickly, his tongue falling over his words and jumping up again at speed. His eyelids are mostly closed as he speaks, but flicker quickly as if rapid eye movement were a disease, and he has it, and it may yet be fatal.

He is thin, and pale. His shirt is blue, his trousers are grey. His glasses are wire-framed and may even be designer, but it’s too little too late. Even his hair is pointless, soft and flat. He looks as though he doesn’t dream at night. He looks as though he would come in forty seconds if a woman stood opposite him and took her knickers off. He gets drunk on three pints of lager and plays quiz machines with his mates, all huddled around in a corner of the pub shouting, ‘Not yet, not yet! Peter Shilton! The Adriatic! Rob, you muppet, I told you it was Marie Curie!’

I have no doubt he’ll be married by the time he is thirty. He is the kind of guy things work out fine for; he has had the luck to be born into the ‘easily pleased’ classes. He doesn’t think too much about the emotional stuff, or dream too much, or want to escape his life or his head or his skin. He likes his life and who he is, and if he didn’t he’d just change it. He laughs at gross-out films, and supports a football team that always comes eleventh in the Premiership, but as long as it’s eleventh, he is happy. Eleventh, consistently, is the kind of guy Rob Taggart is. I wish it had been love at first sight. How wonderful and comfortable that would have been.

Thankfully I don’t recognise any of the girls sitting in the
classroom Rob Taggart and I are peering into through a small round window in an old heavy school door. The bitch I called bitch isn’t in there.

‘They’re really excited!’ Rob Taggart says, catching the worried look on my face. We both look back through the window at the girls, bunched in groups around certain desks, young and nubile and bored. They are fifteen going on thirty. At least half of them have probably had more sex than me, know more about sex than me, tried a hundred more positions. But I am pretty sure I know more about sex aids. At least I hope I do …

I walk in with my box of sexual tricks and stand in front of the class, who pay me no attention and carry on talking. I put the box down and line up the vibrators in height order along the front edge of Rob Taggart’s desk: an intimidating black length of veined rubber direct from a Robert Mapplethorpe photo: a rabbit in pink with rounded nonthreatening ears and balls that rotate and buzz at the base, that look like they’d be fine to use in a kids’ ball pool – dive in! – a whole different kind of fun admittedly.

I place a Two-Fingered Fondler on the corner of the desk. I know the directions on the back of the box by heart. ‘How does it work?’ is a question I can answer.

‘Excuse me?’ I say loudly. Rob Taggart declined even to introduce me. I’ve been thrown to lip-glossed lions. They glance at me, and prowl nonchalantly back to their individual desks, not quite chewing gum, not quite throwing me insolent looks, not quite being stroppy teenagers, but on the brink of all of that.

When they have slammed themselves into seats with built-in desks and flipped their hair a few more times, they allow their eyes to focus on me. And finally they spot the vibrators …