A monologue

If you’d seen me as a small child you’d never have thought I’d grow up to be so fat. I had pipe cleaner legs and my school skirt hung away from my back suspended on its two grey shoulder straps. I’ve got pictures that prove it. And let me say straight away – if you think this is going to be a story about a fat girl who gets thin and finds love and happiness, you might as well stop right now. Real life’s not like that, and those who do lose it usually "lose it" after a year or two and put it all back on. That’s what happened to me when I did "slimming world" and when I did "weight watchers" and when I did the "Atkins". Every bloody time. I’ve given all that up now. I am what I am, and if you don’t like what you see you can… And anyway I’ve found love already. Been married thirteen years to Dave, and born his children. Lewis and Chloe. Boy and a girl. Perfect family.

A bit aggressive, you think? Yeah ok. But you get used to making excuses for yourself when you see the way people dismiss you in the two seconds it takes… their eyes travel over your fat-ness, if that’s a word and you see it in their faces... like you’re less somehow. More is less, that’s a good one; I’ll have to remember that. Ample, that’s what I prefer to call myself. Trouble is in my head I do buy into the myth. If only I could lose this weight - or even when I lose this weight… my happy future self will be revealed. I don’t really think that, not in my rational head, only in the other one that says "yes, but…" back to me.

And it’s not like I don’t have a sex life, don’t get me wrong. Dave’s a tit man through and through, and he loves to use my bosom to bury his face in - and… well yes, I’ll leave that to your imagination. It’s just that I can’t help feeling he’s not quite so enraptured by my belly and its stretch marks, and the way it tends to fold over a bit, like an apron. And although he often says "I love your titties" he never says "you’ve got gorgeous thighs" - which is no surprise because they’re bulgy and they’ve got the dreaded cellulite, and little blue veins break out on them from time to time.

"Nothing remarkable about our Helen," my Mum used to say. Nothing changed as I grew up, except I got fatter. I’m shortish, with medium length, brownish hair, cut in whatever style the trainees are doing this month at "Max’s", that’s that cheap salon just behind the high street, and clothes from M&S and Dorothy Perkins if I can find any that fit or Evans if I can’t. Get the picture? Working mum, wife and daughter, sister and auntie, all those family ties that peg me down like the guy ropes on a great big tent in case otherwise I might blow away.

When I was four I had that Noddy book where Noddy and Big Ears go camping at the seaside, and in the night the tent does blow away and they’re left lying under the stars. I remember that it frightened me but in a thrilling way, like when a child suddenly realises the grown up world is far bigger and has more in it than she ever imagined and she feels the first promise for her own future. I loved the picture of the stars, and I still love the real ones. Sometimes I go driving late at night just to look at them, they make me feel small and that’s soothing. Dave thinks I’m weird but he likes that in me a bit too. But sometimes I’d like… I’d like to blow away on a high wind and flap and twist off wild into the night sky with my strings hanging loose.

Another thing about me… I keep thinking about dying. At first it was a fear of dying. After I had the babies I used to think about me dying and them being left without a mum. And about Dave dying and the babies too and me being left without them, and how I’d take the car on the motorway and drive into the first bridge I came to at 100 miles an hour. Then I noticed they had crash buffers round them, like someone had already done it, or some sad someone like me had thought about it at least, in some civil engineer’s office, in the planning department. Another way they do this apparently, designing out suicide, the jumper kind, is by putting barbed wire along the edge on bridges. Did you know that people are put off jumping to their death, not from the fear of smashing their flesh on the ground below, or of knocking themselves out on the surface of the water and drowning in the deep cold flow, no, they’re put off doing this from a bridge with barbed wire on the edge because they might prick themselves on the sharp little spikes as they climb over the edge. How mad is that. I heard this on the radio once, driving in my car. When I was thinking about dying.

When I was little we lived in and out of each other’s houses in our street. My Mum had this close friend Val who lived two doors away and their garden was bigger than ours so me and the kid - my sister Claire to you - were always round there. Jenny and Paul, Val’s kids were called. Mum and Val have stayed friends but Claire and me and Paul and Jenny have hardly seen each other since we’ve grown up. Claire was the youngest of all of us, but Val’s Jenny was almost exactly the same age as me, so I suppose it was natural the mums expected us to be friends, but… well I didn’t really like her all that much to be quite honest. Paul was older so he didn’t play with us often but he did sometimes and then his games just took over, and he’d make us be wookies and droids. Star Wars. Jenny was always Princess Leia of course because she had the dressing up set with the ear-phone plaits on a head band, and the white dress. Also she was skinny and pretty and even then I was starting to get porky – that’s what Paul called me anyway. And there’s this thing, you know, pretty skinny little girls grow up full of themselves and because they expect to get it all they do. I kind of want Chloe to be like that, full of confidence. She’s so different to me, she’s not blonde like Jenny but she’s got this cute smile with dimples, like her dad, and I’ve noticed lately she’s turned into that kid there is in every class, the one with all the friends who always gets asked to parties and all that…so it looks promising. Anyway I was telling you about Jenny… no, the reason I didn’t like her was because of the games she wanted to play. They always involved going up to her room and getting undressed and… I didn’t like them.

I did see her again the other day actually. Well, Val her Mum has just retired from her job at the doctor’s. Doctor’s receptionist, and the classic dragon lady. Or she was. Retired dragon now, sounds a bit sad actually, doesn’t it. They had a party and my Mum dragged me along. It was a shock seeing Jenny. No I don’t mean… she had aged, ‘though. We’re practically the same age but she does look older than me, ‘though I say it myself. And thin… well I don’t think it’s attractive to that degree. Scrawny little neck like a baby turtle. She looks more like her Dad than I remembered. Of course he died a while back now. He was a bit scary, I remember him shouting at Jenny once when we were – seven or eight maybe? My Dad never shouted so it was shocking to me. But Jenny just laughed and ran round his legs like she was daring him to catch her, thrilling herself. And then he laughed and called her his princess, it was confusing. If my dad was cross with me he might not have shouted like that but he didn’t laugh either. Jenny’s dad used to ask me how I was, like he was speaking to a grown-up, and he’d say – "Here comes Helen - the face that launched a thousand ships," which I only understood later and I didn’t know then that it meant I was pretty, and I never knew what to say and I wanted to get away. One time I remember… Val wasn’t there, I can’t remember why, and he gave me and Jenny our tea. He let us cut all the crusts off the white loaf, ‘cause those were our favourite part, and eat them with loads of jam and butter, and laughed at us while we were getting jam on our cheeks. Then he sat us on his lap in turn to wipe it off with a flannel and I was embarrassed because I wasn’t a baby. I remember going in the garden afterwards and he was smoking a ciggy under the tree by the back door and his eyes were glittery through the smoke and he told me to run inside quick before I got into trouble, and I didn't understand what I'd done wrong. After that I made excuses and didn’t go round there for ages, or at any rate I can’t remember going again...

Anyway, Jenny rang me up last week, after we met up at that party. She’d asked me for my number; I gave it to her, though now I wish I hadn’t really. I can’t imagine what we might have in common any more, if we ever did. Well, shared memories I suppose. Playing in her garden and the Star Wars thing. I wonder if she kept the costume. So we’re meeting up for a coffee. She was very insistent. I don’t do this much, life’s too busy, but Dave said I should, I should have time for girl friends and do stuff for me, especially now the kids are getting bigger. So he’s dragging Chloe off to football with him and Lewis this Saturday and I’m going to meet up with Jenny at Costa’s in the High Street. We’ll see. Perhaps we’ll get on better now we’re grown up.

That was strange. I had that coffee with Jenny last week, like I said. I keep thinking about it, not sure I’ve got my head round it. I actually did like her, and we had a laugh talking about the Star Wars thing. She hated it too apparently, did it to keep Paul from bullying her, she reckons. He was a bit older than us. I told her about thinking she was the perfect girl and how I’d like Chloe to grow up that way and she said "Don’t!" very fierce, just like that, it was odd. At first I didn’t say anything but later she said something else, actually she asked me something, about her Dad. Did I remember him and what did I think of him when we were kids? Well of course I did remember him, and I said a bit about the time we went to Brighton, the two families together and I remembered him losing his rag with their Mum on the beach because she’d forgotten the ketchup and how I felt sorry for Jenny. And I also told her after a while straight out that I used to find him scary, and she sort of laughed. "You felt sorry for me, did you?" she said. Then I felt I couldn’t say anything else and the conversation went a bit strange for a while. So we got onto us as grown-ups, and she told me she’d been anorexic in her twenties; well I never knew that, and we talked a bit about that for a while and we sort of figured out that my problems saying no to food were a bit the same in a funny way, like the other side of the same coin because she couldn’t say yes, and she said - did I know fat is a feminist issue, and what did Dave think of me being fat? And I found myself saying something about how I know he loves me really but I keep thinking he only likes some bits of me and how I hate myself and she laughed and lit up another ciggy. I felt really close to her, it was strange, I don’t remember saying any of that to anyone before. Anyway - the end up of it is we’re going to keep in touch. She gave me a hug which was nice and I had a sudden really strong image of her as that little girl, sitting on her Dad’s lap and laughing at him, and something clicked into place I think, it’s like a shadow passed over us and I felt it too. I’ll have to ask her another time if I’m brave enough, though I think she might tell me anyway some day... Is it better that he’s dead? She’ll never be able to give it back to him, all that pain – I wonder…is it easier or harder to be angry with people when they can’t hurt you anymore?

September 2006