The Perfect 10 (26 page)

‘And then what?’ my therapist asks, impressed, I think, by my vision of the future.

‘Then all the astronauts in all the shuttles orbiting the earth will look down, and see whole cities swell and relax with sighs of relief, and they’ll hear the sighs in space. We’ll all just relax.’

I continue staring out of the window, at a squirrel darting up a tree and a red car moving slowly past the office, trying to find a place to park. My therapist looks on. I am not sure what I have just said.

‘I feel like I have a choice now, a terrible choice, to be thin or fat. I could throw off the reins and succumb to my need to eat. It isn’t a physical need at all, it is absolutely psychological. My stomach has shrunk; I am full after a few mouthfuls of most things. I feel uncomfortable after eating a fifth of what I might have eaten for lunch a year ago. I have been physically sick the last three times I have eaten
my mother’s Sunday roast, a meal that I used to devour with ease, before clearing up the leftovers and topping it all off with a bag of crisps and a packet of Maltesers. I can’t do that any more, but for whatever reason, I still want to. I have taken away my own security blanket, and failed to replace it.’

I glance up at my therapist’s face for any meaningful reaction, but his expression is as good as frozen. He hasn’t used his pad or pen in fifteen minutes.

‘Jet lag?’ I ask.

‘No, I’m OK,’ he replies.

‘You’re not saying much,’ I mutter.

‘You are,’ he says with a smile.

‘Well, I’m done now, so you talk,’ I say, as I stretch my legs down and cross them in front of me, and fold my arms.

‘How is Adrian?’ he asks without looking at his pad.

I roll my eyes and sigh. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know!’ I sigh again, bored and immediately frustrated by the effort it is going to take me to answer that question. I search for other words than those that have formed themselves in an orderly and accurate queue in my head; I search for something other than the truth. I open my mouth and close it again a few times. ‘He’s … Adrian is … I mean, he is …’ I crumple up my nose and throw my hands in the air.

My therapist stares at me and I glare back. I notice that the skin on his face is flaking, little ripped shards of tissue peeling from his nose, and I look away first.

I drum my fingers on the sofa a little and glance around at the room before succumbing, through sheer laziness, to the truth as it has presented itself so politely in my mind.

‘He is clutter. Adrian is clutter. Happy now? Satisfied? I know it’s mean but it’s how I feel. I hate myself a little for feeling this way. But at least when it was just me and the food it wasn’t so messy, and emotional. He’s engaged, by
the way, and not to me, I should point out. He admitted it last week. I haven’t seen him since. He keeps leaving messages on my phone. I don’t know what I am going to do. Because I don’t know from one day to the next how I am going to feel, and it’s so tiring just thinking about it all the time, and thinking about what he is thinking. I feel like I can’t focus, or get things sorted. I can’t tick anything off my list, there are no definites and there never will be as long as he is engaged to somebody else. I have no real idea how he feels. But I know that, if not quite messing my life up, he is making my life messy, and I don’t think I like it.’

My therapist coughs, and recrosses his legs. ‘You prefer your old relationship with food to the relationship you are having with Adrian?’ he asks.

‘I suppose.’

‘But, Sunny, people aren’t sandwiches, and that’s what makes relationships so rewarding. You don’t just devour them, you experience them, and you learn from them. They interact with you, and you gain from them. You leave every relationship a different person from the one who went into it. It’s fulfilling in a whole new way.’

‘People aren’t sandwiches?’ I ask

‘Yes,’ he replies, staring at me evenly.

‘Happy with that analogy, are we?’ I ask.

‘I think it made my point,’ he says, still staring.

‘Have I ever actually seen your credentials?’ I ask.

‘And how is Cagney James?’ my therapist asks. I don’t need to see his credentials – he is too clever for me.

‘I don’t know,’ I say, clipped. My back straightens involuntarily, and I deliberately force myself to slouch again, on principle.

‘Wasn’t he at the dinner party?’ he asks.

‘You made some detailed notes there, didn’t ya?’ I say with a big fake plainly uncomfortable smile.

‘Wasn’t he there?’ my therapist asks.

‘He was there, but I haven’t seen him since, so I really don’t know how he is. I wasn’t being evasive.’

‘So how was the dinner party?’

I brush an imaginary crumb off my dress, and then declare in the most confident manner I can muster, ‘It was fine.’ I give my therapist a wide toothy grin.

‘Fine?’ he asks, confused.

‘Fine,’ I say, grinning and nodding my head.

‘Are there any other words you might choose, if I asked you to elaborate perhaps?’

‘I guess I’d say that it was a dinner party, and dinner parties aren’t sandwiches.’ I wink at my therapist and regret it instantly. What is wrong with me today?

‘OK, Sunny, if it was fine, can I assume that it was a quiet and reasonably pleasant evening?’

He sees, and I feel, my face drop. What am I paying for, if I’m not going to be honest? How challenging is it to watch him unpick my lies?

‘Quiet?’ I repeat.

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘No,’ I reply.

‘OK, but pleasant?’ he asks.

‘Not so much,’ I say.

‘Fine?’ he asks.

‘Maybe fine wasn’t the right word after all …’

‘So what word would you use, to describe it more accurately?’ my therapist asks, and reaches casually for his pen and pad.

‘Maybe … hellish … might be more appropriate. Awful, maybe? Uncomfortable, definitely. Adrian spent half the night on the phone to his fiancée, while Dougal was paraded by his father like a mascot they nearly lost to the opposition team. And as for Cagney James … well, he and I …’

I stare out of the window. He and I what? I’m nowhere near sure. We argued? We fell out? We passionately disagreed? We hate each other? He’s a man I have met on only three occasions, but I find myself thinking about him all the time? We are polar opposites, but thinking about him this morning gave me the most powerful orgasm of my young life? I turn back to my therapist for clues, but none is offered.

‘He doesn’t put much stock in therapy,’ I say, and my therapist grins broadly. ‘I’m sure he believes it utterly self-indulgent.’

My therapist is still grinning, and not writing anything down.

‘Are you grinning like that because you agree with him and you are laughing all the way to the bank?’ I ask.

‘People have strong reactions to things that make them uncomfortable,’ my therapist shoots straight back as if he has rehearsed it, or said it a thousand times at least. I am sure it is important, but I don’t understand quite why.

‘He would be so very wrong, for me,’ I say quietly, dreamily, strangely and slowly. ‘He is not at all the man that I should be with. He dresses badly, he looks old, he is rude, we have nothing in common, he hates me …’ I stare out of the window again, and let my eyes glaze over, and the tree and squirrel and the road beyond become a hazy blur. I stroke the ridge of my nose, between my eyebrows. It is getting dark outside and I glance down at my watch, it is a quarter to four in the afternoon. I think I might wander along to Screen Queen when we are done here. I haven’t seen Christian since the dinner party, and he said to pop in. It might be fun. And who cares if Cagney’s office is upstairs – I don’t have to see him. He will probably be working. I could take Christian a coffee, we could share a muffin. My mind drifts …

‘You see, Adrian is the right age for me. He dresses the way I think he should, he just looks right. He remembers
DangerMouse
and
Bagpuss
, not
Bill and Ben
. He slow-danced to “Angel Eyes” at school discos – he wasn’t smoking pot to the strains of a whining Bob Dylan. My family would be able to talk to him, it wouldn’t be uncomfortable, they wouldn’t be searching for things to say. He could come at Christmas …’

I spot one of my hairs resting on my dress, and I pick it up between my thumb and index finger and twist it tightly around my right little finger.

‘I have always dreamt, and wished, and I just think it would make sense not to deviate from those dreams, because I’ve wanted them for a long time. Getting distracted now would be impulsive and naïve. I always wanted somebody like me, somebody I could have a laugh with, not some great romantic hero. Adrian ticks the right boxes, but Cagney is just so … different. He’s closed off, and scared, so abrupt and dogmatic, and he lashes out if he feels he’s being even slightly hunted. The world scares him, I think, and he just wants to be left alone.’

‘You’ve only met him three times, you say?’ My therapist makes a note.

‘I know, that’s a lot of babble with no real substance, but it just seems so obvious with him! Or maybe I’ve just been spending too much time on this sofa. Anyway, Adrian ticks all the right boxes. He is the Brett to my Babs.’

My therapist nods.

I told him about Babs in my second session – how she is another me, a perfect me. Except not really. I don’t have a clone or a twin or anything. I made her up when I was younger, during my addiction to
Beverly Hills, 90210
. She’s me, but she lives in Beverly Hills in a big house with a pool. She has a younger brother called Parker. She dyes her hair
blonde, but she looks like me, except she’s had a nose job. And, of course, the main difference is that she is thin. She was always the thin version of me, somewhere just out of reach. I dreamt her a life and she lived it for me. Every time my soul got a little bruised by a fresh jibe, I wished myself away to LA. I could spend hours pretending to be her, having her conversations, going on her dates – she saw Brett all through high school. They had a break for a while, during their first year of college, and she saw a couple of guys, a Jock, and then a Poetry Major, but she ran into Brett again over the summer, and they got back together. She works for a fashion house now. She’s a personal shopper, and she’s been married to Brett for two years. They went to Fiji for their honeymoon. She’ll want to start trying for a baby in two years. Before that they have a big trip to Europe planned. Maybe she’ll get pregnant then … I’m not crazy, I know it’s not real, and my therapist assured me it was normal, a normal projection of my dreams, and harmless. It just made me happy for a while, even if arguably my time would have been better spent doing something about my own issues, which were preventing me living a perfect life here instead. And now, well, she’s just been around for so long, I just check in with her, see where she’s at, and measure myself accordingly. Some days it’s like firing a rocket up me. I refuse to let Babs have my dreams all for herself now.

‘Babs wouldn’t go near Cagney with a barge pole. She’d name him the loser that he is.’ I look up guiltily at my therapist. ‘If Babs was real, which she isn’t.’

‘You do realise that you are Babs now, Sunny, that you got your wish, not through magic, but through your own hard work. There isn’t anybody out there to live the life you want to live, but can’t, any more. You have to grab your life now, Sunny, if you really want to. There is nothing you can’t do, and nothing to hold you back. No more excuses.’

I look up at him, and the earnest expression that he wears, and I am embarrassed. I look at the clock instead, on his desk, which reads 15.59. I have one minute left.

‘Any homework?’ I ask with a smile.

‘Don’t just accept what you are given. If you see something you want, grab it,’ he says.

The clock ticks and the numbers change.

I walk a short perfect walk to Kew Village, and Screen Queen. I try not to imagine a thousand different scenarios where I run into Cagney James, bursting out of a coffee shop and spilling his latte all over my dress, or bursting out of the newsagent’s and knocking me sideways, the contents of my bag flying everywhere, except the tampons that just stay hidden at the bottom. To be frank, I don’t try that hard not to imagine these things. I have been thinking of little else all weekend, since the dinner party in fact. I feel childish when I catch myself halfway through a scene I am playing with in my mind, and I stop it in case anybody else sees. As if somehow there is a wire plugged into the back of my head, and when a remote control is pointed at my eyes it explodes into action; electricity is pumped through me like a cheap standard lamp, and I emit a stream of light from my forehead like an undead character in some crazy Japanese horror film, and my thoughts and desperate daydreams are projected on to the side of the nearest building for everybody to look away from, embarrassed. If Cagney saw them he would think me childish. He thinks me childish anyway, because he is a proper adult. I am behaving ridiculously. He has been married three times …

It is cold and dark, but that bright kind of darkness, when everything seems clearer than during the day. All the lampposts are old-fashioned here, dirty old iron, and the stars sparkle big and fat, and the moon looks swollen and
expensive. The beams from the streetlights, and passing car and bicycle headlamps, and descending 747s bound for Heathrow, and satellites and rocket ships and alien craft and the moon and the stars all reflect beautifully in the paintwork of the Mercedes and the BMWs and the Porsches and the Land Rovers parked arrogantly along the streets. I kick through leaves, knowing really I shouldn’t but I have never been caught out before. I feel utterly safe with just the bright dark for company. My stomach rumbles and I feel a little giddy. Today has been a good day.