You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (64 page)

‘Especially not Ma!’ Neve gasped, and she was getting up too and following Celia out of the lounge even as she tightened the belt on her dressing-gown.

Neve was beginning to think that Celia might have been replaced by the pod people on her way home from work, because she sat on the edge of the bathtub and displayed huge amounts of patience as Neve fussed with the scales; moving them back and forth, until she’d centred them to the left of the weird little dip in her bathroom floor.

‘OK, I’m getting on them now,’ Neve said unnecessarily. She took a deep breath and shucked off her robe, then stood there in bra and knickers.

Celia kept her eyes fixed on a spot to the right of Neve’s elbow. ‘Um, the sooner you get on them, the sooner you can get off again.’

Neve shut her eyes and stepped on the scales. They were fancy, expensive scales that gave her weight in pounds and kilograms and had nearly given her a hernia when she’d lugged them back from John Lewis. She shuffled around on them, until her weight was evenly balanced.

‘Don’t say a word,’ she ordered Celia, her eyes still tightly shut. ‘Look at the display and don’t tell me what I weigh, just tell me if it’s lower than one hundred and sixty-five pounds.’

She could hear Celia grumbling good-naturedly under her breath. ‘Yes, yes, it is.’

‘Is it lower than one hundred and sixty pounds?’

‘Wouldn’t it be easier if I just told you how much you weighed?’

‘Just answer the question, Seels.’

‘Yes, it’s lower.’

‘Is it lower than one hundred and fifty-five pounds?’

‘Yes, and Christ Almighty, we’re going to be here all night at this rate,’ Celia said in an exasperated voice. ‘You weigh one hundred and fifty-one pounds. What’s that in English?’

‘Ten stone and eleven pounds,’ Neve said, her eyes snapping open as she stared down at the number. She jumped off the scales, then got on them again, pressing down with the soles of her feet as hard as she could. The number wavered and for one delicious moment it went down to one hundred and forty-nine pounds, before settling back to where it had been. ‘I’ve only lost a stone in three weeks.’ She sighed. ‘If I hadn’t spent five days in bed with my muscles atrophying, I’d probably have lost even more.’

‘I love you and I’m not judging you but I am so close to stabbing you through the heart with your tweezers right now,’ Celia growled. ‘You’ve lost fourteen pounds, which is fantastic though I’m not in any way condoning that stupid Cleanse – and don’t think this means you can back out of your promise, because you can’t.’

‘I’m not going to, but I should have lost more than that. I had three colonics!’ Neve stared down at her thighs, which looked as solid as ever. ‘I don’t know where this so-called stone has gone but it definitely wasn’t from my bottom half.’

Celia was already scooping up the tape measure that Neve kept on her bathroom shelf. She slipped it around Neve’s chest, and before they could go through the same rigmarole all over again, she called out numbers. ‘Thirty-six!’ She moved down to Neve’s waist. ‘Thirty!’ And then she was wrapping it around the widest part of Neve’s body where belly bulge became hips became bottom. ‘Forty!’

If she’d lost three inches off her hips, then why did they still look like she could birth quadruplets? Neve quickly slipped back into her dressing-gown and once it was securely fastened, she felt better. ‘Well, this is all good news,’ she said, and tried to sound as if she meant it. She should mean it, but from where she was standing, directly opposite the huge mirror that took up most of one wall, she didn’t look any different.

Neve had never been in the
Skirt
office before, preferring to wait downstairs in Reception whenever she met Celia from work. But that afternoon she was escorted to the seventh floor of the Magnum Media building by Celia’s latest intern, a doe-eyed, elfin-cropped boy called Seth, and led through a large open-plan office, which she’d expected to be populated by willowy, model-y fashion-magazine types. Reassuringly, there were lots of normal-sized bodies wearing normal clothes and even the remains of a birthday cake on a table as Neve walked to the back of the office where the Fashion Department held court.

Here, there were very thin women wearing the kind of clothes that Neve could never fathom but which Celia always described as ‘directional’.

Neve had had vague introductions to all the members of the Fashion Department on numerous occasions but she was never entirely convinced that they remembered her. She was also deeply ashamed of her baggy boot-cut jeans and tunic top, which were completely undirectional, so she was relieved to see Celia standing in the doorway of the fashion cupboard, all ready to usher her within its hallowed portals.

That wasn’t the only reason. ‘He’s not here, is he? Max, I mean,’ Neve said in a furtive whisper, as soon as Celia closed the door.

‘He never comes in on Friday afternoons,’ Celia said. ‘In fact, another half-hour and this place will be a ghost town.’

‘But it’s only three o’clock!’

‘And your point is?’ Celia folded her arms. ‘Let’s have a look at you.’

Neve stood there awkwardly, hands hanging limply by her sides. She felt entirely frazzled after a day of back-to-back beauty appointments, which weren’t so much fun without a gaggle of WAGs there to hold your hand or keep your champagne glass topped up. The bikini wax had been particularly harrowing, and as for the hairdresser …

‘He was very bossy,’ Neve told Celia, who was scrutinising her tousled but shiny waves of hair. Neve hadn’t even known her hair had the ability to wave. ‘He absolutely refused to give me that bouffant ponytail I like. He said it was so last year.’

‘Well, it kinda is,’ Celia said, without much sympathy. ‘Your hair looks great.
You
look great!’ She seized Neve’s hand and waggled it about as if she could inject some perkiness into her through the power of touch.

‘I just keep hoping that William will ring and cancel on me. Then I wonder if I should ring and cancel on him,’ Neve confessed, sinking down on to a stool and gazing around her. The cupboard was actually a huge room lined with clothing rails, which were crammed with garments in every colour and every fabric imaginable, from leopardprint chiffon gowns to red wool coats. There were shoes paired in neat rows under the rails and a series of cubbyhole cupboards and shelves loaded with bags and crates of accessories. It was like being in Celia’s box room, which she grandly referred to as her ‘walk-in wardrobe’ but to the power of a thousand. ‘I don’t know whether to throw up or burst into tears, quite frankly.’

‘It’s been a rough few weeks,’ Celia murmured tactfully. ‘And well, this is huge, isn’t it? Three years of prep work to get you to this moment. You are a little bit excited, aren’t you?’

‘Yeah, well, I’m trying to be. I suppose there’s a thin line between nervous hysteria and excitement.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ Celia told her dryly, as she started to rifle through a rack of dresses. ‘I called some stuff in for you, but more importantly, grab that plastic crate. Second shelf to the left, third crate along. Didn’t like to say anything last night, but your bra is too big. I reckon you should be about a thirty-two DD now.’

Celia reckoned right and then after double-checking that the door to the cupboard was locked, Neve gingerly approached the rail of clothes.

She rejected 90 per cent of them without even trying them on. She wasn’t wearing anything sleeveless, anything with a hem that finished above the knee and certainly not anything with a garish floral print. That left three dresses hanging there.

Neve tried on a multi-coloured patchwork dress with a square neck, but its drop waist bunched at her hips. Then there was a vertically striped frock, which she thought would be slimming, but it made her look like the inmate of a prison camp. As she approached the last dress, both she and Celia were holding their breath.

It was a wrap dress, made of a chocolate-brown silk jersey. Compared to some of Celia’s more outrageous outfit options, it felt like an old friend. Neve slipped it on and fussed with the bell sleeves until her upper arms were adequately covered, then tied the waist sash in a bow. Only then did she deign to look at herself in the mirror that was propped against the only available piece of wall.

She looked … all right. More than all right. In fact, more all right than she’d ever looked, apart from the evening in Manchester when she was adorned in sequins and had big hair and a glow that had nothing to do with the huge amounts of make-up she had on. The dress skimmed over belly and bottom and made Neve’s waist look positively minuscule, and if it weren’t for her bare feet and her bare face and the way she was gnawing on her bottom lip, she’d look elegant and sophisticated.

‘I think this works, don’t you?’ she said at last.

‘Just so you know, that’s a size eight, Diane von Fursternberg dress that you’re looking absolutely gorgeous in,’ Celia squeaked, then she actually tried to pick Neve up and swing her round, but thankfully she came to her senses as Neve fended her off. ‘You did it, Neevy! You bloody well did it!’

‘Well, that’s an American size eight, which is really a twelve and it’s a wrap dress so it doesn’t count.’

‘A size eight designer dress,’ Celia said again, with heavy emphasis. ‘How does it feel?’

Neve did a slow 360 degrees. ‘I didn’t think that size twelve would feel this flabby,’ she said at last, pinching her tummy rolls. ‘And I’m not a proper size twelve, I cheated my way into a size twelve.’

‘For fuck’s sake, Neve! Can’t you be happy and just take a moment to bask in that happiness?’

Neve tried with all her might – and just as she felt the first flicker of euphoria, she heard the echo of his voice.

You’ll always be a fat girl. You don’t know how to be anything else
.

‘I’m trying, Celia,’ she said imploringly. ‘I was fat my entire life, I’ve been a size twelve for all of five minutes. It takes some adjustment.’

‘You know, there was about a month when you were all loved up with Max and you never talked about your weight, or complained about what you looked like, or went on and on about how much better your life would be if you were a size ten,’ Celia informed her sister savagely. ‘God, I think that was the happiest month of my life.’

‘Seels, that’s not fair!’

‘What’s not fair is that I’ve gone to all this trouble blagging beauty appointments and calling in clothes for you, even though I’m meant to be sorting out three fashion shoots, and you haven’t even said thank you.’

Neve hung her head. ‘You’re right. I’m so sorry.’ As well as the fat girl jibe, hadn’t Max also said that she was the most self-involved person he’d ever met? ‘I swear I’ll make this up to you.’

Celia looked unconvinced. ‘You don’t need to do that, but would it kill you to crack a smile?’

Neve obediently lifted up the corners of her mouth. ‘How’s that?’

‘Like you’ve just had your wisdom teeth taken out,’ Celia said, but she sounded less sulky, and when Neve stuck her tongue out, she grinned. ‘It’s just as well you’re my sister, otherwise I’d have killed you by now.’

‘I do appreciate this, Seels, and now that William’s back and we can be together, I’ll be happy,’ Neve said, even as she wondered why her happiness had to be dependent on someone else. Shouldn’t she be able to find happiness from within?

Celia certainly seemed to think so. ‘I can get happy just from logging on to net-a-porter.com and adding expensive clothes to my wish-list,’ she said. ‘Or listening to Gloria Gaynor really loud. Or eyeing up gross men on the tube so they get all hot and bothered because they think they’re in with a chance. Happiness really isn’t that hard to find.’

‘You’re obviously more evolved than I am.’ Neve fluffed out the skirt of her dress. ‘This is actually very pretty. What shall I wear on my feet?’

‘Oh, I picked you out these great Alaia sandals,’ Celia enthused, her attention immediately diverted away from Neve’s total happiness fail as she dropped to her knees so she could rummage through the rows of shoes on the floor. She pulled out a pair of perilously high sandals with delicate taupe leather straps. ‘I had to put gaffer tape on the soles, so try to avoid any wet floors.’

Neve didn’t dare argue about the wisdom of putting her in a five-inch heel. She even sat quietly and docilely on the stool while two girls from the Beauty Department smeared products all over her comparatively pimple-free face. Neve was told that the smoky-eyed look was even more last season than bouffant ponytails and that they were going for a dewy, natural look.

The dewy, natural look took over an hour to achieve, but when the beauty girls finally returned Neve’s face to its rightful owner, she was forced to concede that it had been time well spent.

Her skin looked as flawless, if not more, than it had done before she started detoxing. She had a radiant glow, her eyes were enormous, and her glossy pink lips seemed more pouty than usual.

She looked like a girl who’d get second glances as she strolled through the metropolis in her chic outfit, swinging her tan leather bag (Celia had confiscated Neve’s battered satchel) and giving the impression she was someone with places to be and people to see. And actually she
was
that girl … with a panicked shriek, Neve looked up at the clock and realised she had half an hour to get from the
Skirt
offices in Marble Arch to the South Bank in the middle of the Friday rush hour.