LOUISE KEAN

The Perfect 10

Dedication

For my sister Amy, withlove … remembering LarryMize, and his quiet village.

Epigraph

‘No one can make you feel inferior

without your consent.’

Eleanor Roosevelt

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Magic Numbers

One: Proud

Two: An Inspired Puff of Air

Three: The Monkey Nut Miracle Marvel Man

Four: Addicted

Five: Just a Side Dish …

Six: Killing Love and Sex Over Dinner

Seven: Sermon on How to Mount

Eight: Plunging In

Nine: A Nipple-flicking Road Trip!

Ten: A Prince of Wales

Epilogue: The Soles of My Feet are on Fire!

Keep Reading

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Magic numbers

The colour of my eyes is dependent on how much I weigh today. They are either the silver grey of a morning mist across a Canadian lake as the sun rises and catches the cold gleaming water. Or they are the colour of dishwater, greasy and thick with grime, dirty with all of the family’s Sunday roasting pans, and forks and knives, and casserole dishes and baking trays – murky and grimy and ugly.

Depending on what I weigh, my hair might be the browns and caramels of a thick chocolate bar that melts and shines and drips promise by the fire. Or the flat brown of a library carpet, laid in 1972, and trampled on by cheap shoes and schoolchildren every day since – tired and thin and lifeless …

Depending on how much I weigh today, my breasts may be round and full, reminiscent of a Russ Meyer vixen, ready to be grasped, voluminous and juicy. Or they are veiny and sagging, the skin at the top indented and ravaged by stretched tears, sitting lazily on my ribcage, flattened and blotchy, and dry.

I will love or hate myself, depending on how much I weigh today.

ONE
Proud

Here’s what they don’t tell you when you lose seven stones in weight.

They don’t mention the loose skin. They forget to tell you that you’ll end up with a rice cake-grey stomach that wrinkles and crumples beneath pinched fingers like tissue paper. They don’t divulge that on the upper inside of freshly toned thighs two flabby folds of stretched skin will stand guard over your pelvis, like a pair of spitefully unskinned chicken breasts, with a Stalinist determination not to budge. They don’t let on about the pubic pouch that they guard so angrily, that refuses to deflate in line with the rest of you, lending your naked profile a hermaphrodite edge.

They make believe your life will be a series of ketchup-red headlines yelling, ‘Now Sunny Can Wear a Swimsuit and Feel Fabulous!’ or, ‘Sunny Buzzes With So Much New-Found Energy She Could Burst!’

The truth is that the energy reserves alone can be spiteful. Some days I’m woken at dawn by the sun streaming in through the cracks in my curtains, and I’ll roll over in bed, hug my pillow, and determine to drift in and out of sleep until it’s too hot to stay under the duvet any longer. My new ‘healthy lifestyle’ denies me this simple pleasure. As soon as I open my eyes I am buzzing. I can no longer spend an entire Sunday in front of the television with the papers strewn out before me, carelessly picking at the foreign news, munching on Maltesers. My metabolism is so wired I wake up feeling like I’ve been drip-fed crack in my sleep. My body wants to run everywhere: to the train station, down supermarket aisles, from my bed to my wardrobe in the morning. It disconcerts people. They assume I am running from something, and maybe I am. They don’t tell you that some days you will fall so violently off the diet wagon that you will consume a family-sized tub of salted peanuts in twenty-five minutes – your hand dipping rhythmically in and out, passing nuts to lips without thought or care, and that it won’t matter an ounce if you run to the gym the next day. The perception is that anybody who loses a lot of weight has an iron will, and this is simply not true: you are mostly good, and occasionally bad. Detoxing is for monks, or freaks. A rogue band of particularly freakish monks actually invented the concept. They had remarkably clear skin, but they were still mad.

They won’t tell you that your nearest and dearest will inhale sharply if you eat a Quality Street in front of them, secure in the knowledge that the second you digest its seventy nutrition-free calories, you will regain every pound of weight you have previously lost. All seven stones of flesh will instantly bubble and gurgle under your skin – not gone, just hiding – until you suddenly and violently explode like a puffer fish into your old fat self. Despite the effort and determination and willpower you alone have mustered, people will still believe that you need to be protected from yourself. Thus the phrases, ‘But you’ve done so well so far!’ and, ‘Move the chocolates over here out of temptation’s way.’ Cue a kindly smile in your direction. Try not to speak with your fists when this happens.

They don’t tell you that you won’t find anything you actually want to wear in any of the clothes shops you were too humiliated to enter pre fat busting. The kind of shops where skin-and-bones teenage assistants used to eye you suspiciously if you so much as glanced at their carrier bags.

They don’t tell you how vain you will become. They won’t alert you to the fact, in advance, that you won’t know how to cope with looking in the mirror and seeing something you actually like, without succumbing to self-obsession, and fixating on the bits that refuse to become perfect, no matter how many miles you run, or how little dairy you eat. They don’t tell you that you will replace an addiction to food with an addiction to losing weight.

And they won’t tell you that you won’t be in love with Adrian any more.

Adrian, who couldn’t see past your belly, and who shouldered the burden of your unrequited love for so long.

Adrian, who was responsible for so many tears in front of the TV on lonely Saturday nights.

Adrian who inadvertently squished your soul daily for three years.

You just won’t love him any more, and it will really confuse you.

Because you’ll sleep with him anyway.

The sun is up, omelette yellow by 6 a.m. I am lucky enough to live in a suburb where the leaves are swept away by anonymous brooms before I leave my house in the morning. On holiday in Jamaica three years ago, my body clock refused to adjust to the time difference, and I woke every morning at 5.30. Stepping out on to my balcony to another postcard day, I witnessed an old muscled Rastafarian who called himself ‘The Original’, trawling our private beach for fish with handmade nets, before the tourists stumbled out of bed with cloudy heads full of last night’s rum, and the aftereffects of a ‘cigarette’ bought from a kitchen hand. Nature wasn’t allowed to hamper my holiday, didn’t mar my swimming and splashing fun, and living here is the same. You spend your money, you get your return. Nature – in this case excessive leaf droppage – doesn’t tamper with my walk to Starbucks in the morning.

I blow on a Grande Black Coffee-of-the-Day, put aside twenty-seven Two-Fingered Fondler orders that came in yesterday, comfortably cross my legs, and sit back.

At the outside table next to me is a guy, twenty-eight, thirty maybe. He wears jeans, and a T-shirt that demands in screaming yellow on grey ‘Who’s the Daddy?’ It tells me everything. There is no need to go to the effort of talking to anybody new any more. Just lower your eyes, and read the logo on their chest. It will say more about who they want to be than a month of conversation. My favourite T-shirt is pink, and says ‘Prom Queen’. Now you know everything you need to know about me: if you have to state it like a sandwich board hanging around your neck, it probably isn’t obvious.

His hair is spiky, and has been styled with care, if not expertise. He has ill-advised highlights that a cute gay boy-band member might get away with, but not your Average Joe. He fondles a Frappuccino and has just sat down, pulling up his chair with a confidence that suggests it has been reserved for him, for life. He has the look of a man waiting for somebody to arrive. But he is neither anxious nor nervous; he doesn’t glance around himself with apprehension, or casually pretend to read the discarded money pages left behind on his table. He waits with pleasure. His whole manner suggests that these are a few perfect moments to be snatched before whoever he is waiting for turns up, and ruins the image he has of himself, sitting at a coffee shop in a wealthy London suburb, on a perfect autumn morning, ruling the world.

And I know he’ll do it before he does. I see an almost natural blonde exit the newsagent’s and swing her hips past my table before she strays carelessly into his eye line; like a clay pigeon sprung from its contraption, I can hear a voice scream ‘PULL’ in this guy’s head. She carries the Sunday papers – one serious offering whose ten other sections will be discarded as soon as she finds the enclosed fashion magazine, and the obligatory news of the screws, which will be devoured first. She wears a pair of dirty low-slung jeans over a small pert peach of an arse. She has the messed-up dirty-blonde hair and clean clear skin of an early morning angel who has been forced out of bed to get Sunday’s essentials and is now, half dreaming, making her way back to her bed, and the man in it. She wears her genetic luck comfortably. She is the woman every man would like to wake up to. The Daddy inhales as he watches the Peach amble across the quiet road in front of us. And he watches her lightly jump to the kerb and the soft bounce in her peach of an arse as she does it. I hear his stomach grumble with hunger. There is nothing apologetic in his leer. As she moves round a corner, almost out of sight, his eyes remain fixed on those low-slung jeans, and his stare emits a residue that leaves a filthy film on my fresh coffee.

For a while I thought it was love that made the world go round, in my younger foolish days. Now I know it all comes down to sex in the end. It’s the constant screwing in every continent that makes the world turn. Every sexual spark that fizzes inside all of us sends out a peculiar energy into the stratosphere that spins us, like the men who ride the back of the waltzers at the fair – scream if you wanna go faster! – and the sun and the moon, gravity and all of that other stuff has nothing to do with it. It’s all about sexual sparkles. If everybody stopped thinking about sex, all at once, our little star would fall out of the sky like a yo-yo snapping off its string. Working on this theory I realise that I am actually placing mankind in jeopardy, not doing my fair share. But feeling defensive only hardens my heart.

The Peach disappears, and the Daddy sits back, crossing his legs, glazed and freshly raised, like his morning muffin. Moments later a reasonably attractive brunette with wide hips and a foundation line that skims her jaw appears behind him, and taps him on the shoulder. I see all the faults first these days, passing instant judgements. I’m not proud of it, but it happens automatically, and is almost impossible to stop. My therapist finds it ‘concerning’. I tell him I find his collection of snow globes concerning, but he ignores that.

The Daddy turns towards Wide Hips Foundation Line, and though the glint in his eye disappears, he shamelessly kisses her with a lust she didn’t earn. When I see his tongue flick into her mouth I look away embarrassed. She smiles, pleased and flattered by this unusual passion, then hurries inside to buy a coffee to avert any embarrassment when he makes no offer to buy it for her. She obviously doesn’t like confrontations. She doesn’t have the confidence to say, ‘Couldn’t have bought my coffee while you were buying yours? Couldn’t think that far ahead? Couldn’t be bothered? Or am I just not special enough to warrant a bagel?’ The Daddy and I wouldn’t last five minutes. He turns back and stares at the corner where the Peach disappeared moments earlier. Wide hips returns, juggling change, a cheese-covered bagel and a cappuccino, and pulls up a chair. I silently do the calorie sums. That’s too many for breakfast. She is comfort eating. I blame him, in my head. She begins to chat, and I notice that she has a habit of flicking her ring finger as she talks, stroking a band of gold with an embedded diamond, and I know what she will never know. She will never realise that in those brief moments before she arrived, her fiancé just traded up for the Peach. I can’t watch them any more.

I sip my coffee, which is still so hot that it burns my tongue. I take it strong and black, like my dustbin liners – that’s the only comparison I can truthfully make. There is no room for calorific drinks in my diet, I just need the caffeine. I look up at still trees, and yellow-brown leaves that cling to their branches, knowing their days are numbered. I glance around at a litter-free street; even the teenagers consider it rude to drop their wrappers here. A rare saloon car passes noiselessly as I wait for something important to occur to me in the way that it should when you are just watching the world go by. I have always felt that time spent on my own, in a public place like this, should be full of magnificent thoughts. It makes sitting on my own less self-conscious. But mostly it’s just shopping lists, credit card bills, errant vibrator orders, and late birthday cards. Then I generally read Vogue. But today a thought does occur to me: there may be nothing at the end of this long hungry road, and I’d be a fool to disregard it. There may be no emotional pot of gold, I may still be alone, and I’d be immature – no naïve, no breathtakingly stupid – to ignore it.

But I still ignore it.

It will be a lighter kind of lonely at least. I close my eyes and quickly dream a little dream of being emotionally dependent on somebody else, somebody bigger than me. I could maybe be a little weak, possibly a trifle pointless, just for a while. I could let somebody else make the decisions, just for once. I also decide to ignore the fact that, traditionally, arm’s length has always seemed like the perfect length to me. It’s what I’m used to, at least.

As a child, while my sister and the other girls on my street were playing kiss chase with the boys down the road, I was searching my parents’ newspapers and scouring pre-watershed television for a fat role model: a woman who was big and really beautiful. But I grew up in the eighties, when aerobics grabbed the attention of the Western world, and Olivia Newton-John sang about getting physical, and leg warmers even became fashionable outside the swing doors of the local gym. My favourite film as a child was Grease, and I would spring out of bed early on Saturday mornings and watch it on our video player before my parents woke up. ‘You’re the One that I Want’ was their weekend alarm clock for many years. I must have seen it hundreds of times, maybe even thousands, and I can still recite every character’s dialogue when it comes on at Christmas, or over Easter weekend. At the end of Grease Sandy, in hooker mode to snag her man, wore black satin trousers that were so tight they had to sew her into them.

Try as I might, I couldn’t find my fat femme fatale. In magazines or on TV fat women existed only as the big old butt of the joke, and in films fat women never made the romantic lead. But instead of just biting the bullet instead of the cake and going on a diet, I decided to be my own role model, to be big and beautiful myself. Then maybe as I grew older, little fat girls might pass me in the street and know that everything might turn out OK in the end, in the same way that I desperately scoured streets with my eight-year-old eyes to find a reason to be hopeful, even then.

But I didn’t even manage to convince myself. I didn’t think that you could be both big and beautiful in anything other than an advertising slogan, and yet I tried to live it, clung to it as a philosophy that justified my choice not to diet. As I got older, as long as I’d take in front of the mirror meticulously applying make-up each morning, concentrating solely on the face and hair and never looking down at the body beneath, I knew the body was there, bulging and bruised, and I hated it. I just wouldn’t admit it to myself.

I brush the crumbs of my Skinny Blueberry Muffin from my running trousers and note childish screams and the noisy padding of developing feet running somewhere behind me. I turn to face the commotion: three children, one barely out of nappies, one roughly three years old with a shock of red hair completely dissimilar to his brothers, one older, maybe six, and precocious. Their mother is mousy but elegant, tall and exhausted, and has wild tired eyes that dart from the pavement to the shop to the road, her long slim fingers desperately hanging on to little hands that don’t want to be held.

I turn back to my coffee and take an apprehensive gulp, but this time it doesn’t burn my tongue. I sit under the umbrella that shields me from the early Sunday morning sun, and try to regain some semblance of peace. I hear chairs being pushed back and open one eye to see the Daddy and his ignorance-is-bliss girlfriend hastily moving off down the road, away from the fresh childish din. I daydream that I might spring to my feet and shout, ‘Don’t be a fool, Wide Hips Foundation Line! He can’t be trusted!’ But of course I don’t. I don’t draw attention to myself like that.

It’s becoming harder, being seen. I notice people looking, men looking, and although these should be tiny triumphs, glances that spell sexual desire from the opposite sex, they unnerve me. I don’t want men looking at me uninvited, thinking things about me that I can’t control. I don’t want them picturing me late at night with one hand on the remote and the other in their pants, the way that men do with women they’ve seen during the day. And yet here I am drinking my low-calorie drink, about to go to the gym, to burn and bruise off this week’s two pounds of fat, on a quest ultimately to prove to the man that didn’t want me that he was wrong, that he should have had some imagination, should have guessed what I could be.

It is frightening to go unnoticed for so long and then suddenly pop into everybody’s sight with a magician’s puff of smoke and screaming ‘Ta-da!’. Some women have dealt with it all of their lives and either enjoy it or ignore it or have at least learnt to live with it. I was invisible before, which is ironic considering I took up twice the space. Nothing suddenly gets simple, no matter what the WeightWatchers Slimmer of the Year might tell the Sunday Mirror. When you win a bit, you always lose a bit too.

The three brothers grim descend on to the table next to me, landing themselves on metal chairs that scrape the pavement, squabbling. The red-haired horror shrieks as his older brother snatches away the piece of wood he has been playing with, and begins banging it on his legs and the table. And this is no musical child prodigy; I can’t even make out a rhythm, never mind a tune.

‘Charlie, give it back to Dougal,’ their tall and exhausted mother demands.

I smirk at the name Dougal, although I don’t know why. You hear much worse these days. I can’t think of a soap star called Dougal at least. Strangers sometimes smirk at my name when they hear it for the first time, but I am proud of it. I think that anybody who fails to see something positive in Sunny must have their own issues to deal with.

‘Sit there and be quiet. No, actually, come with me.’

All the children shriek in unison, and the youngest tugs at his mother’s hand to drag her into Starbucks. I pray she will usher them inside, but she accosts a stray waitress who has, in a moment of craziness, decided to come and clean tables. The mother asks for three fruit juices and a Skinny Mocha, and tries to settle the boys at the table again. I stare off into the distance until the oldest brother begins to run round and round my table, and little shrieking Dougal follows his lead. Short stumpy slightly unsure legs make a dash for a tree ten yards away. I glance over my shoulder to see what their mother is doing while they run amok – she is negotiating a straw into the youngest one’s mouth while furtively glancing towards her other two sons. I don’t know what I expect parents to do with their children, I just don’t think they should be allowed to shriek. If I ever have children of my own they will be impeccably behaved in public. They will have character, and be witty and charming, but they will not bang things, and they will not scream. They will only be allowed to do those things at home.

‘Dougal, come back here! Charlie, for God’s sake put it away!’ Their mother’s voice raises at her eldest son, who has decided to urinate up against the tree. Both children momentarily freeze, and Charlie pops his little penis back into his shorts. They start running round my table again – children burn off so many calories without even realising it. The older boy, Charlie, nudges my chair every time he passes, and I hastily put my coffee cup back down on the table rather than risk a stain on my white Lycra vest top with built-in cooling something or other. I check my watch – the gym will be open in twenty minutes. It is an 8 a.m. start on a Sunday, as if God won’t allow exercise before morning has truly broken on his day. Only ten more minutes of the shrieking before I can go.

Even this early, even for a Sunday, the road is peculiarly quiet. It’s getting late in the year for the tourists, despite the heat. Because of it nobody managed a good night’s sleep last night. Maybe now they are tossing and turning and kicking off sheets, trying to rescue another hour’s rest.

Charlie stops running, and stands in front of me, staring.

‘Yes?’ I ask him flatly, unimpressed.

‘Who is going to look after your dog when you die?’ He motions his little head towards an old sleeping Labrador chained to a railing five feet in front of me.

‘It’s not my dog,’ I say, and Charlie shakes his head at me and ‘tut’s.

I ‘tut’ back. Charlie raises his six-year-old eyes at me and starts running towards the tree again.

I guess the dog belongs to either an old man, practically knocking on heaven’s door at the Garden Café a little further down the street, or an elderly lady at one of the other Starbucks tables, resting from the heat. The weathermen have predicted that today will be one of the hottest days of the year, despite it being 27 September, and yet she wears a heavy charcoal-grey overcoat that looks as if it was standard issue in 1940, and a claret woolly hat with a fraying bobble. I look away quickly, gulping back tears. Her vulnerability is almost poetic. If she tried to sell me a poppy I’d be hysterical. Of course, now, as she wipes some lazy dribble from the side of her eighty-year-old collapsing mouth with a handkerchief, I am repulsed. It’s old people with all their facilities intact that I appreciate the most.

The kids are still running and screaming, and I thank merciful God that I have never had enough sex to get pregnant. Obesity was a great contraceptive at least.

A man walks past my table. He is average, forty-ish. I see his back, his jacket, his jogging bottoms, a balding head covered by thinning hair that is too long.

Before us all, an audience paying little attention, he walks calmly towards the tree ten yards in front of our tables, and with one jerky movement scoops up Dougal, and carries on walking south, away from us. I don’t see his face. Admittedly I am appreciative of the drop in noise levels, but I am also confused, and I straighten my back, turning to face his mother, to somehow check that this is OK, that he must be the child’s father, or uncle, or a family friend. Because things like this just don’t happen right in front of you. She isn’t looking up, but instead tries to wipe fruit juice from the edges of her youngest son’s mouth.

I say, ‘Excuse me,’ nervously but loudly, and she glances at me and then automatically in the direction of her elder sons. Her naturally concerned expression falls, as if all the muscles have just been sucked out of her face by a Dyson, and her eyes widen. She pushes herself to her feet as she sees Dougal’s red hair over the shoulder of the man quickly walking away. Her mouth opens and a scream leaps out as if it’s been waiting in her throat for the last ten years.

She darts forward two paces, but she hasn’t let go of her toddler’s arm and he screams. I jump up. She tries to move forwards, hoisting her youngest child in the air by his little arm as he cries out in pain, and Charlie, who has resumed urinating against the tree, turns around in confusion as he hears his mother’s cry.

‘He’s got my child! He’s got my child!’

I can’t quite believe this is happening, but I kick back my chair and start to run.

Ahead of me I can see the Stranger has his hand clamped over Dougal’s mouth, and as they turn the corner at the end of the street he breaks into a jog. They were always called Strangers when I was a child, and they were a constant threat. There were washed-out adverts tinted a dirty orange or a grubby yellow, warning us not to get into their brown Datsuns, or go and look at their puppies, or accept their sweets. Now they have longer medical-sounding names that I’m sure children don’t understand. The idea of a Stranger still scares me, and I am nearly thirty. These new words just can’t put the same fear of God into a child.

My trainers bounce off the pavement and the sudden rush of adrenalin through my muscles is sickening. My calves and thighs expand and contract as I round the corner and see the Stranger holding a struggling Dougal, but he is sprinting now towards the alleyway across the road. I have only been down that alleyway once and it scared the hell out of me: I kept expecting to see a corpse. It is full of gates to gardens and nooks and hiding places.

Feeling sick, I run faster. The man is by the road and he almost runs into a car, dodging it only at the last moment, but he isn’t as fast as I am. I push myself on, not aware of my breathing, not looking at anything but Dougal’s shock of ginger hair, which was so unfortunate five minutes ago, but is now vital. I can run five kilometres in twenty-seven minutes now. This time last year I couldn’t run to the bus stop without throwing up. Thankfully for me, for Dougal, I’ve streamlined since then. Far behind me, back by the Garden Café, I can hear his mother screaming his name, but I just run.

I hear the Stranger breathing now, wheezing and coughing hard, ten feet in front of me, making for the alleyway. My strides are long and elegant, I run on my toes, my arms pumping at my sides, my chest open, and I feel sick as my biceps and quadriceps push me on. There are no rolls of flab bouncing or ripping at my stomach now.

Three feet from the entrance to the alleyway I am almost within touching distance of the Stranger but he stops sharply and spins around to face me: he looks scared and sick as well. I see a bead of sweat streak down the centre of his nose. I slam on my own brakes as he removes the hand that is covering Dougal’s mouth, and swings it, arm outstretched, clenched fist towards my face. Uncorked, Dougal starts to scream, his face as red as his hair, his eyes wide and watery and desperate. We are all scared. I try to lurch out of the way, but the man’s punch strikes the side of my head. I stumble like a speeding car hitting a boulder in the road. I have never been punched before. I am on the pavement and cry out at an awful evil feeling that shoots behind my eyes, and I am momentarily blinded. I blink back tears, but my calves and my thighs spring me up off the floor.

I turn into the alley twenty steps behind the Stranger, who has shifted Dougal and jammed his tiny head into his shoulder to muffle his screams.

Overgrown bushes swipe at my face as I run along the dirt track alley. All of our actions seem loud, louder than usual. Every twig that snaps, my breathing, the Stranger’s breathing, the pounding of our feet hitting the dirt track. He keeps running, but he’s slowing down and tripping, and I’m getting faster, but wincing at the aching knife of pain that has been forced through my temples where his dirty hand smashed at my forehead. I open my mouth to shout at him to stop, but a feeling of dread silences me, a need not to call attention to the fact that I am a woman, chasing a man down a lonely passage.

The alley is three hundred metres long and narrow like a bicycle lane. The bushes are overgrown and make it dark, but the morning sun is so hot and bright that I can see him ahead of me. He hasn’t ducked out of sight into any openings in the shrubs, and he can hear me closing in on him in my trainers and running trousers, as if I got up this morning and chose my best ‘chasing a child snatcher’ outfit. Sweat is pouring off us all and I focus on the damp patches spreading across the back of his dirty beige polyester jacket. He is wearing his best ‘child snatcher’ outfit himself. The air is filled with flies, and smells rotten, and even though it cannot possibly be this man who smells so bad, I can’t help but believe that it is.

I am almost at his side, and I throw a hopeful arm out for Dougal as I launch myself into the Stranger’s back, terrified.

We fall messily.

Dougal is on to all fours in front of us, scraping his little hands and knees on dirt and leaves. The Stranger slams face-first into the wall and I stumble down behind him, onto him, and the dirt. Instantly we are both scrambling to get up. I hear him mutter ‘shit’ as he crawls forward to get to his feet, and I am surprised that he speaks English. He looks English, but still I am shocked.

I can hear my heart and my head pounding, and another man’s voice maybe fifty feet behind us, shouting, but I can’t tell what. The Stranger lurches to his feet, as I am on all fours, and I scream, ‘Dougal, get behind me!’

The terrified mop of red hair and tears and bloody knees, and a bruised face with the Stranger’s fingerprints embedded in his cheeks, runs as fast as his ridiculous small legs will allow, behind me, before the Stranger is fully upright.

I can hear the cries of a man getting closer behind us, shouting, ‘You sick bastard, you sick bastard …’ and the pounding of his feet on the dirt. I look up and notice that the Stranger’s glasses have smashed, and his face, an average forty-five-year-old face, is red and stained with dirt and sweat. He looks down at me, with either confusion or fear or disgust, and then his eyes dart upwards and behind me at the menacing sound of larger feet than mine running towards us all, and I can clearly hear the chasing man’s voice now, shouting, ‘You sick fuck! You sick bastard!’

I raise myself onto my knees as the Stranger lunges forward. His dirty old badminton trainer makes sharp hard contact with my stomach, and seems to sink further in than it physically should. I scream in pain, folding forwards. He calls me a ‘bitch’, but in a tone that lacks conviction.

Dougal screams as I hear a blurred and breathless voice behind me yelling, ‘You sick fuck! I’ll fucking kill you!’

The Stranger turns and runs down the alley, towards the sunlight at the other end. I lie on my side and clutch my stomach, and moan at a pain I have never felt before. I have never been kicked in the stomach before. Dougal is behind me crying and pawing at my back. I push myself up onto knees that nearly buckle, and my stomach yells with pain, and my head thuds noisily with pumping blood and bruising. I turn and accept a screaming, crying red-faced child into my arms. He holds on to me tightly, then pushes me away, then holds on again.

The pounding of large feet slows, but passes us, and the chasing man shouts as he speeds up again, ‘Go back the other way,’ and then coughs so hard I am positive he won’t catch him.

I pull little Dougal’s head away from my chest, and hold it between my hands, and ask him if he is hurt. He nods his head, and continues to cry. I push myself to my feet, and holding Dougal in my arms, ignoring the thrashing pain in my stomach, and the thumping in my head, and the aching in my legs, and the tightening in my chest, I struggle back down the pathway, back the way we came.

Dougal quietens down slightly as we walk the long walk – we were two-thirds of the way down the alley. Where was the man planning to go? Did he even have a plan? Or was it just an impulse, a shocking unexplainable moment of opportunity?

Eventually I say into Dougal’s ear, ‘There’s your mummy,’ as we reach the sunlight. His face whips around to see his hysterical tall mousy mother clutching at her other two children. Dougal starts to kick and scream and struggle with me to be set free, and I lower him to the ground. He runs into his mother’s arms, and falls instantly silent, as she cries loudly for the both of them.

I lean against the wall, wiping stinging beads of sweat out of my eyes, clutching at my stomach, trying to control my breathing. It only takes a couple of seconds for me to start to cry as well.

I hear the wail of police sirens coming close, and see a small gathering of people across the street staring at this strange soap opera by the opening of the alley. A police car screeches up, and I shield my eyes from its electric-blue lights, which remind me of the flashing neon signs outside strip clubs in Soho.

The doors burst open as the wailing siren stops, and a radio full of static says, ‘We’ve got him this end.’

I wipe my eyes, and want my mum to hug me too. I want to tell her that a Stranger with broken glasses and a rotten smell hit me, and he kicked me, and I’m finding it all suddenly very personal. He wanted to hurt me. I cry because I am scared by what I did. I am scared at the thought of chasing a child snatcher, a Stranger, down that alley. I cover my eyes with my hands and feel sick, as a nauseous sliver of pride turns my stomach and a voice in my head whispers what I know before I can silence it. I ran fast.

I throw up a cup of black coffee and half a Skinny Blueberry Muffin on the street. That’s all there is.

Staring down at the pavement, I feel proud.

Cagney has the sick little fuck up against a wall, and the sick little fuck has the audacity to tremble. Cagney can’t punch him, but not because he doesn’t want to. Cagney wants to obliterate him, wants to bring the wall down upon him, wants to see his nose battered and black and pouring with blood, and to hear him moan as the life and the evil seeps out of him. But a policeman has a firm hold of Cagney’s arm at the elbow, and is forcefully prising him away. They should let him smash the sick little bastard apart with the fury of God; they can’t do it themselves, at least not in public, without being accused of police brutality, and sparking a peaceful protest of civil rights banners waved by bored housewives and fools. Cagney, on the other hand, has never been a policeman, so he can punch whomever he wants, if he is willing to take the consequences. And in this instance, the end very surely justifies the means. Still a constable pulls his arm away forcefully.

‘Let go of him. We’ll take it from here – let him go.’

‘You sick fucker, you want to mess with kids? They should let me kill you now!’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it,’ the man whispers as tears stream down his face.

The rage inside Cagney surges up like a twenty-foot Atlantic wave, but a second policeman grabs his other arm, and pulls him off, throwing him to one side. They spin the man around and slam the side of his face up against the wall, slapping a pair of handcuffs on him.

‘Whatever you do, it’ll be too good for him! There’s no justice any more.’ Cagney bends over with his hands on his hips, and coughs loudly. Speaking has pushed his body over the edge. His chest feels magnificently precarious; it may collapse at any moment. He feels bile rise in his throat, and throws up a little, at the end of the alley. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, stands up and leans back against the wall, clutching his sides.

He knows better than to run. A man in his condition shouldn’t run. There is no official medical term for his condition. He just knows it by the affectionate term ‘Jack Daniel’s’. He has a minor case of ‘Marlboro Reds’ as well, but he doesn’t think that one is terminal. Neither of his conditions need be life-threatening, as long as he remembers not to run.

One police car pulls off, carrying the man, and Cagney glares after it, trying to catch his breath. A policeman from a second squad car approaches him with his hands on his hips like a sheriff of a small town, about to quick-draw.

‘Are you ready to go, sir?’

Cagney looks up at Constable Cary Grant, and shakes his head, aware that nothing may come out when he tries to speak, that his trachea may have combusted from the heat and the fury in the back of his throat.

‘What?’ It is all Cagney can manage, with any clarity.

‘Sir, we’ll need you to come down to the station with us.’

‘Why?’

‘To file a report.’

‘Why?’

‘So we can prosecute that bastard for snatching kids.’

Cagney is repulsed at the constable’s efforts to appeal to some shared sense of old-fashioned ethics while nobody else is listening. He knows that in a court of law the policeman wouldn’t be calling that bastard a bastard – he’d be too busy looking over his shoulder at all the do-gooders and politically correct morons.

‘I can tell you everything I know here.’ Cagney inhales as deeply as he can, and concentrates on not falling to the ground. He steadies himself against the wall as casually as he can. ‘Some woman starts shouting outside my office …’ take a breath, ‘“He’s got my child,” et cetera …’ Breath. ‘I get downstairs, and some girl has already gone haring after him, but the mother is beside herself …’ huge breath, redness of the face, lung collapsing, ‘and what else can I do?’ Pause for emphasis, and oxygen. ‘But it’s the girl you want to talk to. She’d already got the kid back by the time I caught up with him.’ And relax. And fuck it, breathe hard.

Cagney looks down at his feet, wheezing, suddenly aware that he is impressed, which is rare these days. The girl was stupid, she was doubled up when he ran past, probably badly hurt, but it was impressive none the less. Stupidly impressive. Cagney nods his head once, in approval. And then shakes it. She got lucky. She couldn’t have fought him off if he’d gone for her instead. Some things are still meant for men to deal with.

‘You need to come and file the report, in the proper way.’

The constable looks at Cagney with confusion; Cagney shrugs it off. Why isn’t he grasping his hero moment? – that’s what this fool is thinking. But he doesn’t know Cagney, and it’s going to take a lot more than a bit of a jog and a man half his size to make him want to wear a medal.

‘I’m not involved, just speak to the girl.’

‘If you didn’t want to be involved you should have stayed in your office. Now we have to go.’

The policeman grabs Cagney’s arm, and Cagney gives up, allowing himself to be guided towards the police car. He has used up his energy store for the month. Cagney hasn’t been in a police car for ten years, but it smells the same – of fear and disinfectant – and he feels just as caged. He looks down at his lap as they stop at traffic lights, and passengers in passing cars stare in.

‘You did well today, mate,’ the officer remarks from behind the wheel.

Cagney ignores him.

The police radio crackles, and Officer Charm chats away for a minute, letting out a brief snort of laughter.

The radio lazes into a stream of static, and the officer turns round to face Cagney as the car sits at a pedestrian crossing, allowing an elderly couple with a black Lab to idle across like they own the road.

‘I don’t know what they’re putting in the coffee in Kew, but the girl didn’t want to come down the station either. She wanted to go to the gym! The pair of you have probably saved that kid’s life today, and we’ve nearly had to cuff you both to get you to make a report!’ The policeman laughs again, but Cagney looks at him with disdain. The officer turns back to the wheel, shaking his head, and muttering, loudly enough for Cagney to hear, ‘Rude bastard.’

Cagney concentrates on the view, appalled.

She wanted to go to the gym? She saves a boy’s life, and she wants to go and lift weights?

‘What was that?’ The officer partially turns his head towards Cagney in the back of the panda car.

Cagney repeats himself, loudly.

‘The world’s gone to hell.’

I fidget outside of the police station, waiting for a taxi to arrive. I said they shouldn’t waste a squad car on dropping me back home; I don’t pay taxes for them to ferry me around. In truth I didn’t enjoy the experience of sitting behind the thick smeared glass in the back seat. It reflected me badly. I’m going to go to the gym, but it’s not as if exercise is the only thing I can think about, especially after this morning’s incident. I just need to clear my head. They kept calling it ‘an incident’ in the station. There was an ‘incident report’, and it makes it sound less threatening if I think of it that way. I just need to run it out of my thoughts. I don’t want to go home and sit around and dwell on what could have been.

I was in the station for a couple of hours. It was quiet, not frenetic the way it is on the television. I didn’t see gruesome pictures hanging on the walls of dismembered prostitutes. A couple of people came and went, I had another cup of coffee, eventually, and the policemen seemed to crack a lot of jokes, appearing to enjoy their crime fighting.

It took an hour for the medical. It was all conducted in a small green room with a neon strip light, behind a battered white screen on wheels, on a tired old hospital bed that looked like it was playing host to the biggest germ party ever thrown. I was rigid with discomfort for the entire examination, afraid that I’d catch something itchy from the foam in the bed, embarrassed at the skin crêpes around my stomach when they made me lift up my top. And then, of course, I kept crying. They said it was shock – a young policewoman with stern hair and thick eyebrows held my hand a couple of times and called me brave, which made me cry even more. I’m not great with compliments, any kind. My hand would involuntarily dart up to shield my eyes, as the tears started to swell anew, but she kept yanking it down, to test my blood pressure, or witness my shame – I’m not sure which.

The result of one dirty fist to my head, and one badminton-trainer kick to my stomach is nothing more than some nasty bruising. I was surprised. I felt sure something must have been broken or ruptured, a vein popped or a bone cracked. At the time of being kicked, being punched, the pain had been obscene. It wasn’t just the force of the blows, it was the shock.

I tried my best not to forget anything. I told them about the smell in the alleyway, which seems to have smeared itself permanently on my skin like Satan’s own brand of moisturiser, but I don’t think they wrote that down. They said that the assault charges against me will actually be vital in prosecuting the Stranger, as ‘kidnapping’ for such a short period of time could be hard to prove. It seems so odd to me that the man’s intention was clear – to take the child – and yet now they have to prove it to people that weren’t even there, and the events of the morning will be painted differently by his lawyer in court. He may be able to plead temporary insanity or something similar. I told them that I thought he was scared by himself, not insane, but they didn’t write that down either. The policeman said they’d be in contact, with the details of what happens next. There is, of course, the prospect of a trial, as well as some kind of trauma counselling that I can go for, as the victim of a violent crime. When they said this I explained that he hadn’t used a gun, and they looked at me strangely again. They gave me their phone number and said I could call them if I remembered anything else, and that the counsellor would be in touch shortly, so I said fair enough, as nonchalantly as I could muster.

I didn’t tell them that I already have a therapist. It feels indulgent. I started seeing him about eight months ago, when I first realised that I might need to talk as well as run. I like to discuss abstract theories, and he likes to make me find some relevance to them in my life. Given a heavier case load, I don’t think he’d still be seeing me, but I pay my money and he listens. I find it interesting, although I’ve learnt that he doesn’t deal in answers. He doesn’t think we are talking about the right things. He thinks I am avoiding my own issues, that I need to focus on the real. He nudges me in the same direction every week, and I dodge it. But as I say, I pay my money …

I already know that I don’t want to talk about the incident, relive it or even think about it. Even with only a few hours’ hindsight it seems strangely unimportant, because I did it, I suppose. I can’t say that to my therapist; he’ll have a field day. But to retell it will make it terrifying, will give me nightmares that I am sure won’t creep up on my dreams unless I am forced to rehash it all. It almost never happened, and in fact it was over in a matter of minutes, and hopefully Dougal is young enough not to be scarred and scared for life. I have come out of it with nothing more than a black eye and a bruised midriff.

I jump up and down on the spot a few times, then lean against a railing, and check my watch. Taxi drivers always claim to be no more than ten minutes away. They are liars. The only time a taxi will ever arrive on time, or early for that matter, is on an evening when you are going out and you haven’t decided which shoes to wear. In these instances they will be tooting their horn angrily outside of your flat before you’ve even hung up the phone to taxi control.

I hear a lung-disturbing cough behind me. I turn round and shield my eyes from the sun, and make out a figure standing rigidly about fifteen feet away under an old Judas tree. I recognise him as the man who chased the Stranger this morning. He is close enough to lean against the tree trunk, but he doesn’t. He is wearing a thick, black roll-neck jumper, and black trousers – doesn’t anybody listen to the weather forecasts except me? It must be thirty degrees, and it’s not even midday yet. His arms are folded in front of him.

He is tall, over six feet. I approximate that he is late thirties, but it’s hard to tell because his face is scrunched up, squinting at the sun, so that his expression makes him seem older than he actually is. He could be thirty, or fifty, but the negativity pinching at his eyes suggests he is one hundred. He is still very red in the face, and I’m not sure if it is the heat or the run that has caused it. He looks like a man who has had the life knocked out of him, who has just lost a custody battle to a promiscuous and alcoholic wife, or finally had his sentence quashed after fifteen years in jail for a pub bombing he did not commit. I wonder what could make a man look so drained. Maybe the Stranger attacked him, and there was some kind of fight …

His face is broad and pale, and he could do with stepping out from that shade and into the sun for a while. His hair is dark and short but slightly bushy on top – he must have to tame it every morning – and I can tell he finds this irritating. I’m sure he hates his hair. It is peppered with grey around his temples, and he has distinguishable sideburns, also dusted with grey. His features are strong but cold, his eyes are deep-set and his nose is positively Roman. He reminds me, standing there staring off into the distance, of those old sepia photographs of ageing Hollywood leading men you see in documentaries, who were a harshly flawed attractive that seems inexplicable these days. He looks like a closed book that wants to stay closed, and the dust is already starting to settle on his hair. It is hard to see what is muscle and what is fat beneath his black jumper, but I only realise that I am staring when his eyes dart upwards and catch mine. Our gazes lock for a frame – not even a second – but it is enough for my cheeks to flush pink with humiliation. I spin round, and walk two paces forwards to check for my cab, but the road is completely empty, and I feel like a fool.

I hear him cough again, but not to attract my attention. His cough is out of his control – this is clearly not a man who runs regularly. My breathing had regulated itself minutes after the incident, moments even, whereas his lungs sound as if they may still collapse. I glance back over my shoulder to approximate how much he weighs and his eyes dart up and catch mine again.

I touch my toes, for no reason other than to do something quickly, and I feel ridiculous. It must actually look like I am trying to impress him with my arse, or worse, my flexibility. I am giving him the impression that I actively seek out children to rescue on Sunday mornings in an effort to meet men. But can I walk over there and explain that I was merely working out his body-fat-to-lean-matter ratio? I’m not sure, given the circumstance, which version will sound less appalling.

I am going to have to speak to him. If I see him at the trial I will die of shame. I need to clear up this awkwardness, and make it plain that I don’t find him attractive. It’s an old habit that is refusing to die, the need to reject first.

I push myself up from the railing I am leaning on, and inspect my running trousers for specks of my morning vomit, summoning up the courage to small talk. I cross my arms, and walk determinedly towards him with my head down. I hear him cough again, uncomfortably. I glance up only when I sense that I am a few feet away, feeling the temporary coolness of the shade of the tree above me.

He stands very straight and looks at me, and then away furtively for somebody that might rescue him this time, but we are the only heroes in town today. I’m going to clear this mess up as quickly and as cleanly as possible, and walk away.

‘Hi.’

He just stares at me.

I feel my throat contract, but continue, ‘I’m Batman, you must be Robin …’

I laugh; he stares at me blankly.

‘We both ran after the same man this morning … the man who took the child …’ I can’t bring myself to say the word ‘snatched’.

Even though I am now blocking him from the sun, the scrunched-up expression on his face doesn’t budge.

‘This morning, literally,’ I check my watch, ‘a couple of hours ago? We ran down that alley … I was on the floor, you ran past and told me to go back the other way …’ I am speaking too quickly, I know. And my cheeks are flushed, I know this too. ‘You know, this morning? Surely you can’t have forgotten already?’

‘I haven’t forgotten. Yes.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes I am that man.’

‘Oh. I thought you meant “yes?” as in “what do you want?”.’

I laugh sharply. He looks away. And maybe even shrugs his shoulders in agreement, but I might be dreaming that. Finding me unattractive is not a reason to be this rude, although most men I’ve met think it is reason enough to cut me dead.

‘I thought I recognised you, but I wasn’t sure because, you know, I was on the ground when I saw you the first time, which is why I was looking at you just then to make sure it was you … Anyway, I’m just waiting for a cab, to take me home.’ I try to finish brightly, but it just sounds needy.

He stands in silence.

I could walk away, of course. I may never meet this man again, we may be on different days of the trial – who cares if he thinks me rude? I could just walk off as if I hadn’t said a word …

‘I can’t believe how long it took, in there,’ I say. I gesture towards the police station with my head. ‘But some of that was the medical. I’m a little bruised.’ I point to my stomach.

I get nothing, no reaction whatsoever. I should just walk away.

‘But of course it’s nothing really, considering what happened. I guess you caught him then? Good for you.’ I give him a thumbs-up gesture, and actually recoil at myself.

Silence. Why can’t I stop talking?

‘I don’t really know what I was thinking, but I guess in those situations you don’t really think, do you? You just do … I mean you just act … or you don’t know how you’ll act … you can’t plan for it … why would you?’ My voice trails off pathetically into a whisper, ‘Or whatever …’

I think I might cry again, from the effort. My eyes start to sting. A lump grows in my throat.

He is properly older than me; a grown-up. I only ever feel like an adult if I am holding a baby. Twenty-eight doesn’t feel as mature as I dreamt it would when I was a child, and it seemed that my life would be sorted and settled by twenty-five at the latest. He looks around, and I look around, and he smiles weakly at me, unimpressed. I thought he might be different from the rest, given his efforts this morning, which makes me feel stupid. It was a rare moment of heroism that you rarely witness these days, but it doesn’t really say anything about him. I never feel that I am meeting anybody new. We are all trying to be the same person, the same ideal, and the result is that we blend into a big ugly gloop of unexceptionality. The same hair, the same clothes, the same trainers, the same opinions, the same jokes, the same lives. Why would I expect this man to be any different? I am not interesting to him, not blonde enough, not bubbly enough, or whatever his criteria, and that is all that matters in his head.

But then he juts out a hand, to be shaken. ‘Cagney, Cagney James.’

My eyes widen involuntarily. That’s not a name, it’s a 1950s detective show, complete with black-and-white opening credits, and old-fashioned sirens under the theme music, and bad edits and childish graphics.

I remember my manners and offer my hand to be shaken. ‘I’m Sunny. Sunny Weston. Just Sunny.’

I see his eyes widen too. He has trained his face into deadpan but this time his reaction was too quick to suppress. I wonder if he is ever caught so off guard that he smiles.

‘Your name is Sunny?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sunny?’

‘Yes …’

‘Like Perky, or Happy, or any of the other dwarfs?’ He looks at me with incredulity.

‘And who was Cagney?’ I ask. ‘The dwarf who liked to drink and sleep with hookers?’

We are still shaking hands, our fingers clenched in a mutual rage. Given the chance I believe we would break each other’s bones. Simultaneously we pull away, equally alarmed.

I wriggle my hand to cast him off me, and pray my cab will arrive and toot its horn and that will be that. I glance up at his face but he is staring at his fist. I won’t call it electricity. It was just … funny. Weird funny, not ha ha funny. Not good funny.

I step backwards when he speaks.

‘That was a stupid thing you did this morning, Smiley.’

‘I’m sorry, Caustic, I don’t understand.’

‘No surprise there. This morning, running after that bastard. You shouldn’t have done it. I was only a few feet behind you; you should have waited. You could have been hurt. Or can’t bad things happen in fairyland?’

‘I was hurt, as it happens, but my ego survived, getting the child back and all, and not losing a lung in the process.’

I stare at him, shocked at my own tone, shocked at his. I need to make this normal. I don’t know why I am behaving this way.

‘Anyway … he looked really scared, actually. I don’t think he quite knew what he was doing …’

‘And that justifies it, does it?’

He straightens his back. I cock my head. I feel angry, and I can’t explain why.

‘Of course not. But it’s not black and white, is it?’

‘Not black and white? Snatching a child is not black and white? Is it the colour of ice cream and butterflies, Sunny? Is it a magical adventure on a unicorn?’

‘No, but it’s not black like your lungs or white like your hair …’

‘Well, Miss …’

I stare at him expectantly until I realise he has forgotten my name, and is waiting for me to fill in the blank. ‘Weston,’ I say irritably.

‘Well, Miss Weston, what is it exactly? I’m dying for the insight.’

‘Look, Cagney,’ I enunciate his name with sarcasm, and instantly regret it, feeling ridiculous.

He looks at me with disdain.

‘I obviously didn’t mean that it was OK to do what he did.’

‘How else could you mean it?’

‘I meant that, although not making it right or justifying it in any way, there must be a reason why he did it.’

‘He is a sick bastard. That’s all the reason there is.’

‘Well, yes, he probably is sick, in some way. But he wasn’t just made that way. As a baby, he wasn’t born wanting to hurt people or … snatch children … or whatever.’

‘Of course he was! Some people are born sick.’

‘You don’t really believe that?’

‘Utterly. What do you believe, that he wasn’t breast-fed until he was eighteen and his daddy was a drunk, and it’s all his parents’ fault?’

A line of sweat trickles down the back of my neck. I hate him.

‘Is that your excuse, Mr James?’

‘I think, given who we are comparing me too, I turned out OK.’

‘Yes, ignorant and angry is very healthy.’

‘I might not be hugging this tree but I’m not hurting anybody.’

‘Maybe not hurting, but boring. I pity your wife.’

The skin around his eyes tightens and his jaw locks. My hands are shaking with rage.

‘Do I look stupid enough to be married?’ he fires back at me.

‘You look stupid enough to do most things.’

Two policemen walking into the station glance at us suspiciously as I raise my voice, and I smile at them as sweetly as I can. I wait for them to go through the swing doors, and turn to Cagney, half expecting him to be gone. But he is standing in exactly the same position, staring at me with what can only be contempt.

‘I wouldn’t be stupid enough to do you,’ he says flatly, and I flinch.

‘I, like most women, wouldn’t be stupid enough to let you try,’ I say, my voice as controlled as I can manage.

‘Well, women today are too busy burning their bras, and lifting weights,’ he motions with his eyes, just in case I didn’t realise he was talking about me, ‘to know a good man when they see one.’

‘Burning their bras? Are you still trying to pay in shillings? News flash: it’s the twenty-first century. If you see a good man do point him out to me because I’m not sure they still exist. I’ve missed them all so far!’

‘Maybe they saw you first.’

Cagney glares at me, and I glare back. If I wasn’t outside a police station I’d slap him.

‘Hello?’

We both spin violently towards the voice and see a tall, elegant but gaunt woman approaching us. It takes me a heartbeat to recognise her as Dougal’s mother. Her eyes are swollen from crying. None of the children are with her, thank goodness. Cagney and I stare at her in disbelief. This is a strange day.

‘I really, really have to say thank you, to you both.’ Dougal’s mother puts her long arms on her hips, then removes them and clasps her hands nervously, then flicks hair from her eyes, then wrings her hands in front of her. An awful thing has happened to her this morning. I feel some of the rage ebb in my stomach like sweet relief, and I am overwhelmed with gratitude to this woman for shattering whatever it was that had gripped Cagney James and me just moments ago. I wasn’t myself – that is my only excuse.

‘Please, there is no need to thank us … me.’ I glare at Cagney. ‘Anybody would have done the same thing. I’m just glad it’s … you know … as OK as it can be.’

She smiles a weary smile at us both, and flicks the hair at her eyes again.

I take a step towards her, away from Cagney.

‘The boys are with their father. Dougal is terrible – shaken and upset and … anyway, Terence, that’s my husband, Dougal’s father, when I explained, well, he can’t thank you both enough, of course. And he suggested that you both come to dinner, next week – we live locally, in Kew – and that we might say thank you that way, although of course it will never be enough to say thank you, but he suggested it, so I thought I might still catch you here …’

I am horrified. I gag with disbelief. This poor woman has been through an unspeakable horror only hours ago, the kind of hell that a mother can only dare imagine, and she is offering to make us dinner? It is the most inappropriate thing I have ever heard.

‘Oh, I really don’t think that’s necessary. I think we probably just want to forget all about it …’

‘Oh, my goodness, no, you must come. Terry wants to thank you himself, and it’s the least I can do. It won’t be anything elaborate. Probably duck, or whatever the butcher has in fresh …’ Her voice trails off and her eyes become a matt version of their previously glossy selves. I have a feeling they will be permanently matt soon: any joy she has is being slowly replaced by fear …

But her reaction is as if she has dropped a plate from my chinaware, or spilt red wine on my trousers. It is so horribly embarrassing I don’t know what to say. I stand open-mouthed, completely aghast. So she carries on talking.

‘Of course, you must bring your partners, or somebody, of course you must, but do please say you’ll come. Next Friday?’

I turn to face Cagney, who at least looks equally as appalled.

‘I just … I don’t …’

‘Please do say you can make it.’

‘Well then, I guess, I suppose … I can make it.’ I shudder as I accept.

‘That’s fantastic. Thank you. And you?’

‘Cagney James. I can make it on Friday.’

‘I’m sorry I didn’t catch your name. I’m Deidre Turnball.’ She offers her hand for me to shake and, as anticipated, she just rests her fingers in my palm for a few moments before offering it to Cagney as well.

‘Sunny Weston.’

Deidre scrambles for a pen and paper in her bag, and scrawls down ‘The Moorhouse, 12 Wildview Avenue’ for us both, and offers us separate scraps of paper. She has written ‘7 o’clock’ as well. I stare at it with disbelief.

‘See you then,’ Deidre says, flicking her hair from her eyes, turning quickly and striding elegantly away.

I look down at the paper, and hear a car toot its horn, and an old man leans out of a minicab and shouts my name.

‘She hasn’t left her phone number,’ I say numbly.

‘Probably ex-directory as well,’ Cagney replies, reminding me he is there.

I look up at him, and he looks baffled, and embarrassed as well. And then I remember that the last thing he had said to me, before Deidre appeared, was some kind of insult. I try to speak, but when nothing comes out, I exhale loudly in his direction, and walk away.

I sit in the back of the cab, close my eyes, and go over what has happened.

I can’t believe the morning I have had.

I can’t believe I have to have dinner with Deidre, and Dougal, and the whole Turnball family, next Friday, at 7 p.m.

I can’t believe I have to see Dougal again so soon. I can’t imagine what it will do to him to see me again so soon.

I cannot believe I have to sit at a table and play polite with a man as offensively archaic as Cagney James.

And I bet it won’t be low fat.

TWO
An inspired puff of air

I meet Lisa for Box-a-fit at midday. It will clear my head before this afternoon. Unless there is a natural disaster I always see my therapist on a Monday at three. I have known my two closest friends, Lisa and Anna, for over twenty years – we practised Bucks Fizz dance routines in the playground together at eight, and attended Duke of Edinburgh sessions as a teenage triumvirate, if only to go to the discos, and not the hikes.

Lisa is married now, of course, as is Anna. They both settled down aged twenty-five with university boyfriends, who had quickly replaced sixth form boyfriends in the girls’ freshman year. Anna isn’t a member of this gym, or any gym now, as far as I am aware. She is still trying to breast-feed her first child, Jacob, who is eleven weeks old. Both Anna and Lisa have failed to recognise me on a number of occasions when we have agreed to meet outside tube stations or cinemas. They are used to seeing the old me.

Anna says, ‘You don’t even look like you any more, Sunny. Even your smile isn’t as wide …’

Lisa strides towards me confidently as I wait outside the gym, her long blonde curls swinging naturally down her back, pulled off her face with two clips at the sides. She has a slight fluffy hair halo, because she doesn’t use any product on her hair. She never has. Natural is Lisa’s defining characteristic. Her broad face is clean and shiny. I can see a couple of tiny red veins on otherwise smooth cheeks, and she has the finest of lines playing with the corners of her eyes. She does, however, have a large angry swollen spot on her chin that glares at me menacingly as she gets closer. Lisa has never worn make-up during the day, and even on a big night out she will apply one lick of mascara to each set of eyelashes, and a hastily slicked streak of lipstick to each lip. I always admired how she looked so healthy and clean, but now I wonder whether a dab of Touche Éclat here and there would be such a sin.

Lisa ran everything, from the 100 metres to cross country when we were at school, and she is still super fit, of course – naturally fitter than I am. But that would only show in a half-marathon, not in a class like today’s, with just over an hour’s worth of fitness needed. You wouldn’t be able to tell, if you glanced through the window to the fitness studio on a tour of the gym, that she had been in training her whole life, and I had been in training for just over a year. Lisa’s husband, Gregory Nathan, is a very slim man who was the 5,000 metre steeplechase champion at her university. When he laughs I think he looks like a dog. He works in the City now. He is some kind of underwriter, big in insurance, apparently. Big enough that Lisa was able to give up her job in publishing eight months ago, to really think about what she wanted to do, and hasn’t decided yet. She keeps threatening to open a boutique of ‘lovely knick-knacks, candles, and linen, and cushions, and beautiful glass vases’, but hasn’t quite managed to bother just yet. Thankfully for the lovely knick-knack market, one hundred other shops selling exactly that have opened in that time in and around West London. Lisa and Gregory live in Richmond, and they run by the river, together, every Saturday and Sunday morning.

Lisa was the first person to realise I was losing weight, when I had officially shed one stone and four pounds, and she was the first person to notice that I had changed my eating habits. We met for brunch one Saturday, to have a girls’ catch-up, and I ordered a tuna salad with red onions and walnuts, instead of a burger and chips with coleslaw. Anna hadn’t realised, but Lisa came right out with it.

‘Are you having salad, Sunny?’

‘I just fancied something green,’ I said with an innocent smile. I wasn’t ready to get into it with them, and at that point was unsure whether I would even be able to see it through. One stone down but eight more to go didn’t feel like something to shout about. Plus the first stone had fallen off, but now the reduction was slowing up. I realised that I was going to have to do something drastic, and join a gym, and the thought scared me. Not because I wasn’t any good at sport, but because I thought I would look like the worst kind of deluded fool, in my billowing T-shirt and tracksuit trousers, walking on a running machine, red-faced and out of puff. Now, if I see anybody even close to my old size in the gym I try and give them a big smile, if they will meet my eye, but invariably they don’t.

‘But you look like you’ve lost weight, in your face.’ Lisa eyed me with a smile, trying to get me to admit it.

‘Diet?’ Anna asked, picking up a piece of bread and soaking it in olive oil.

‘Kind of,’ I said with a small grin, admitting that maybe I was a little pleased with myself. ‘But more of a health kick, than a diet. I’m just trying to think about what I’m eating,’ I said, adjusting the napkin in my lap.

‘God, who can be bothered? I never thought it worried you!’ Anna said, staring at me intently, trying to get me to admit a lifetime’s worth of bad feeling to her soberly and over a casual lunch.

‘Of course it bothers me, a little bit. I just want to be healthy,’ I said, and then I was embarrassed.

‘Are you doing any exercise?’ Lisa asked with a smile, interested.

‘I’ve been walking a lot, but I think I might need to join a gym,’ I grimaced, as excitement swept Lisa’s face.

‘Join mine! Then I can help. It’ll be fun!’

‘OK, maybe, but I’m not ready for anything too major. It’s been a long time since I have done any real exercise. I have to work my way up to it …’

Lisa mouthed, ‘It’ll be great’ across the table, and toasted her glass of lime and soda in my direction.

‘Do you remember that cabbage diet you went on in sixth form, Sunny, the one that made you fart constantly?’ Anna burst out laughing, and turned to Lisa. ‘Do you remember, Lisa, when we got into your dad’s car that time he picked us up from the cinema, we’d just seen Ghost, and just as Sunny sat down there was that really long farting noise! And then the car smelt so bad your dad had to wind the window down, and nobody said anything, because nobody knew what to say!’ Anna laughed so hard she knocked over her drink.

‘And do you remember the Slimfast?’ Lisa said, with a broad smile. ‘How much weight did you put on that week, Sunny? It was nearly ten pounds, wasn’t it?’ Lisa snuffled with laughter, little snorts escaping from her nose.

‘I read the instructions wrong,’ I said, trying to smile convincingly.

‘Didn’t you think you had to drink a shake with each meal?’ Lisa said, collapsing into laughter. ‘Poor Sunny, you know I don’t mean it like that,’ she said, wiping the tears from her eyes.

I nodded but I couldn’t say anything.

‘And that time … that time …’ Anna could barely get the words out she was laughing so much, ‘that you decided you were going to wear ankle weights everywhere,’ giggle giggle, ‘to tone up your legs,’ laughing harder, ‘and you wore them to college, and by the end of the day you couldn’t even lift your feet up, and you had to take them off …’ Anna lost control and laughed for twenty seconds, as she held her sides and tried to breathe, ‘but you still couldn’t lift your legs, and you couldn’t even step up onto the bus, and you had to shuffle … had to shuffle …’ Anna started losing it again, ‘shuffle all the way home! Not lifting your feet off the ground!’

Both Anna and Lisa were wiping their eyes, caught in the middle of a laughter downpour, drenched in it, and exhausted. Ten minutes after that they were able to order lunch.

Lisa was so enthusiastic about the gym I almost didn’t join. Her obsession with fitness had always been so alien to me. I just could not understand what pleasure she could derive from running at 6 a.m. in the rain, as opposed to, say, eating fish and chips in front of EastEnders every Tuesday. Part of me, although envying the way she looked in jeans, was pleased not to be her – it looked so joyless, and seemed so obsessive. But now, somewhere down a sweaty road, I have joined her sisterhood.

We kiss hello and chitter-chatter down to the changing rooms, where Lisa strips off to get changed without a second thought. I manoeuvre myself so that my back is facing her as I unhook my bra, so she can’t see how deflated my breasts have become. The talk almost immediately falls to Anna.

‘She has put on over … five stone.’ Lisa whispers it with shame.

‘God, did she tell you it’s that much?’ I ask, so sad for her already.

‘And that is with the baby … out.’ Lisa pauses before the last word to give the sentence added impact and dramatic effect, and it makes her sound a little ridiculous. As if she is one of those narrow-minded, middle-aged, middle-class women who wear too much hairspray and who have honed their sensibilities to be easily shocked just so they can wallow gloriously in the outrage. I glance around the changing room to see if anybody else is listening, but thankfully they aren’t.

‘But, Lisa, a lot of that will come off with the breast-feeding. It burns up a huge amount of calories – over one and a half thousand a day,’ I say.

Lisa shrugs a hopeful ‘maybe’, but I see a delighted glint in her eye as she wonders how anybody could let themselves go so badly, indulge themselves so much. I wonder if she has forgotten who she is talking to, as we both snap on Lycra training shorts.

‘I just mean, Sunny … she ate everything!’

‘Yes, I know, but she was on that crazy diet just before she got pregnant,’ I say.

‘It was only Atkins,’ Lisa retorts.

‘Yes but she’s a vegetarian,’ I say, still baffled. I gave up all the weird and wonderful diets when I was a teenager. If the cabbage soup diet does work for somebody, it is a short-term goal, a quick fix for half a stone, not a recipe for life. Admittedly I didn’t diet much during my early twenties, I mostly just ate, but I could tell even then that counting points or drinking shakes or not eating fruit was not going to keep me occupied for the time it would take to lose half my body weight. I needed to change the way that I ate, not just cut back for a while.

‘Well, anyway,’ Lisa pulls her hair into a ponytail in front of the mirror – her jaw line is so smooth, not a wrinkle in sight, ‘she’ll have to join the gym now … I mean, how much have you lost, Sunny?’

‘About seven stone so far,’ I say quietly, and hope that nobody hears.

‘Right, and you’ve got like a stone to go or something?’

‘Kind of, maybe two …’ I say.

‘Right. Well, that isn’t that much more than Anna, and she put that all on in nine months! You took a lifetime to get that big!’

‘Uh-huh,’ I say, and nod once, turning to leave the changing room. I make a mental note to go to see Anna soon, and take her some unroasted nuts and a small bar of dark chocolate as a treat.

Lisa is, of course, oblivious to the way she sounds, so there is no point saying anything. I just never want to think like her. Of course, in the class, I become her. I am zoned and focused. I can picture my muscles flexing and stretching, I monitor my breathing, I know exactly how many calories I am burning as we roundhouse kick to the left and right, and bruise the boxing bags with our jabs and undercuts, and skip like boxers for ten minutes until my cheeks fizz with saliva. Then we hit the floor and do twenty minutes of sit-ups. Lisa and I smile at each other occasionally in the mirror, sharing the high. It’s not just chemical, it’s the knowledge that we are effectively airbrushing ourselves, refining and toning and perfecting.

Barry, our instructor, is a hard squat ex-squaddie. Lisa and I shake out our muscles after an hour and twenty minutes, and only then do I notice that we are surrounded by red-faced exhaustion. The other class members are fighting for breath, and somewhere to go to sit down.

‘Good effort, girls. Ten out of ten.’ Barry puts a hand on each of our arms, anointing us with a fitness blessing. We give him a suitably reverent smile, stopping just short of genuflection.

We head to the bar upstairs with wet hair after long hot showers. Lisa’s spot has grown bigger with the heat, swelling to a dangerous level: if it were a volcano I’d be evacuating about now.

Two guys stand in suits by the bar, with fresh pints of lager, and squash rackets poking out of their gym bags. One of them smiles at us as we squeeze past, and apologises for his bag, which barely sticks out at all.

Lisa sighs and says, Thank you!’ in an exasperated tone.

He looks confused and a little insulted, and I mouth ‘It’s fine, thanks’ at him and smile a little weakly as we walk past.

We order two black coffees and the girl behind the bar says that they will take a few minutes and she will call us when they are ready. We settle ourselves in a corner away from the plasma screen showing men’s tennis on clay courts somewhere hot.

‘Have you thought about yoga, Sunny? It would help with your definition,’ Lisa says as she reads the back of a gym pamphlet, eyeing up the new classes on offer.

‘I could do. I guess I am still concentrating on the fat burning at the moment, the high impact cardio stuff, but I know that yoga is supposed to be good.’

‘I mean, it doesn’t appeal to me as much, but I’ve been working my muscles for longer, so they are in better shape. And you never know, it might help with your loose skin.’

‘Maybe,’ I say, and look over to the bar to see if the drinks are ready. They are just being poured, so I grab my purse, saying, ‘I’ll get these,’ beating a hasty retreat before I actually start to cry.

I pay, but the cups are a strange shape and they burn my fingers, so I carry Lisa’s coffee over to her, and pop it down on the table as she thanks me. I turn to go back and grab the other cup, but the guy with the squash racket from earlier has followed me over, carrying the second cup.

‘That’s what I like to see, black coffee, not undoing all your hard work, not like us boozers. Where do you want it?’ he asks with a smile.

‘Oh, you didn’t have to do that, thank you. I can take it from here,’ I say, thinking, how lovely! How chivalrous! How unusual!

‘No worries. I’ll pop it on the table,’ he says with a cheerful grin. He has an Australian accent and thinning hair. He is equal parts muscle and fat, and I think his chest looks welcoming, and I decide he must give good hugs.

‘I’m sure she could have managed,’ Lisa mumbles under her breath, but both the Australian and I hear it and I give her a strange look.

‘That was my pleasure,’ he says to me pointedly, smiling, and walks back to the bar.

‘Lisa, that was a bit rude. Do you know him or something?’ I ask.

‘No, thank God! I mean, could he have been any more obvious? Jesus! And look at him – he’s all fat! Like you want some huge fat guy hitting on you.’

‘He was just being nice, I think,’ I say, blowing on my coffee, embarrassed.

‘Well, if you flirt with guys like that, Sunny, you only have yourself to blame,’ she says, and flicks her hair, picking up the leaflet again, not making eye contact with me.

‘I wasn’t flirting … I was just … being polite …’

‘OK, if you say so.’ She throws the pamphlet down and smiles at me with quite apparent disbelief.

‘What’s wrong?’ I say, confused.

‘Just don’t be so naïve, Sunny. I could have every guy in here hitting on me if that’s what I wanted, but it’s just about respecting yourself. I know you aren’t married yet, so it’s different, but … don’t be too obvious.’

I am sure my mouth falls open.

‘Are we still running on Thursday? I know the weather report is bad, but it would be such a shame to miss it. I love that we can jog together now. It’s so much nicer having somebody to run with in the week. I’m so happy for you, Sunny – and for me too, of course, because I get you to run with!’ She lifts her coffee cup and toasts it in my direction. It’s her way of apologising but still I feel hurt.

I check my watch. ‘I’m really sorry, Lisa. I have to dash. I have a delivery at three.’

I grab my bag, and peck her goodbye. She looks slightly baffled as I run off, and I’m completely unable to make eye contact with the big Australian as I dash past.

‘It might help if you talked about the incident in a bit more detail – the emotional impact you feel it may have had on you.’

‘No.’

‘Not yet?’

‘Never.’

‘But you understand that it will need to be confronted, at some point?’

‘Not really. It’s over. It’s done. I’ve told you what happened. I don’t want to think about it. You could do with some new rugs.’

‘All you’ve told me is that a child was snatched and you helped get him back – there must be more to it than that.’

‘It wouldn’t kill you to co-ordinate in here. It would make it easier.’

‘Make what easier?’

‘Focusing. Your books aren’t even in height order. I can see one shoe poking out from under that chair. That’s off-putting.’

‘Try and cut off from that. What do you want to talk about today, if not the incident?’

‘Where’s the other shoe?’

‘What do you want to talk about today?’

‘My life is too spotless. I want romance!’

‘Do you feel we may have covered that already?’

‘No.’

‘We have gone over it in most of your sessions.’

‘It’s not resolved. In my head.’

‘Which parts?’

‘All of it. I’m still having the daydream.’

‘Which is perfectly healthy. Daydreams aren’t necessarily harmful. They can simply be a manifestation of our hopes, harmless wish fulfilment. It is only when we find them disturbing that –’

‘Maybe if I told you again?’

‘Is it the same one as before?’

‘No, it’s different.’

‘Has Adrian made a reappearance?’

He sees me bristle like some old hen at the sound of the name.

‘Why would you ask that?’

‘I’m just trying to work out how is it different, Sunny.’

‘Let me just tell you. I’m having an argument with my tall, handsome husband – who doesn’t exist – and we are bickering about unimportant things, but he can’t be mad at me for long. It’s a fight about who will drive to the dinner party we are going to. He is wearing a chunky-knit sweater. It doesn’t descend into any real kind of nastiness. It’s not one of those kinds of arguments, the way that people can be to each other, spitting out unforgivable venomous spite … You know. We don’t do that. Because my husband – my imaginary husband – loves me too much, and I him. I know he will never leave me, with a coward’s note about his lust for his secretary. And he knows that I will never get drunk and perform a sexual indiscretion on his brother – he has a younger brother, reckless and attractive, possibly bisexual, always off trekking in the Himalayas, or skydiving. The point is this: we just can’t be unfaithful to each other, in my mind, because unfaithful is for other people with weak relationships, common relationships, relationships that stream past me daily. We don’t score points, I don’t demean his manhood – he is average in length but has great girth – and he doesn’t take food out of my hands for my waistline’s good. We don’t want to trade up or trade down or trade each other in. We are in love.’

‘I see. How exactly is that different to the previous daydream?’

‘We never fought about who would drive before. Because in my daydream I hadn’t passed my test. But I passed it last week in my dream. Really, I’ve been driving for years.’

‘Congratulations anyway.’

‘Thank you. Parallel parked.’

‘Why do you think you still want to talk about this? Why do you think this daydream is in any way unhealthy?’

‘Because I don’t think I understand love! And, seriously, it’s becoming more pressing! I think I have a picture of it in my head that isn’t real, and that is going to stop me ever actually falling in love, or even recognising it! I thought I was in love with Adrian, and that was five years of my life … but now …’

‘Do you think that you might know love when you find it, and that it will replace the daydreams?’

‘No! I think that while my perception of love stays the same I won’t be able to see it in reality. I think I am emotionally unhealthy in that respect.’

‘And what would you say your perception of love is?’

‘Love is the thing that keeps you safe at night. Love doesn’t hurt.’

My therapist adjusts his glasses. He looks as if he is in his late fifties, but he is sixty-two, with dark brown hair smeared in grey. He wears a jumper and jeans. The jeans are old man jeans – they don’t really fit, in any acceptable way. His jumper is navy and cream and claret, diagonals and squares and lines. It doesn’t really fit either. His clothes just sit on him. He doesn’t write things down often, although he has a pad and a pen on the desk behind him in case of emergencies. He doesn’t have a deep or soothing voice. It’s quite bland. Some days I find it annoying. He sounds like a bank clerk, or a travel agent, or any of those faceless voices at the end of a phone line who just want to put you on hold. He crosses his legs. He always sits in the same position, and rubs his left elbow with his right hand every few minutes. He is divorced, but has a long-term girlfriend now, although they don’t live together. I have been seeing him for eight months. It costs me eighty pounds a session, and I come once a week, on a Monday afternoon, for an hour and a half. The ‘incident’, as I am now referring to it, was yesterday, but I’m feeling fine about it already.

I talk with my hands. I grab my knees and pull them up close to my chest. I do that a lot now that I can. I always sit in the big low chair, although there is a sofa. I scrape my fingers from the front to the back of my head when I am really thinking. Not hard, just to feel my hair. Today I am wearing jeans that fit, with a feint line that runs vertically down the middle of each leg, which is slimming. My black shirt is soft but has a large stiff collar that sits slightly away from my neck, avoiding foundation smears. I wear clear lip-gloss. I apply my mascara heavily at the roots of my eyelashes to give a lengthening effect without clogging the tips. When I see photos of myself I never look the way I think I might. My nose is slightly longer than I imagine it to be, my cheekbones slightly higher. I think of myself with a big round face, but it is actually quite angular now. I have the ‘first signs of grey’ in dark brown hair, but I colour them out so you wouldn’t know, but then the world is turning grey these days. I look anywhere between twenty-six and thirty-two, depending on who you ask. I am actually twenty-eight. Everybody says I look younger now I’ve lost the weight, but in my head at least, I look exactly the same.

I don’t think I have ever been in love, which is the reason I started seeing my therapist. He doesn’t seem to think it’s a problem, but at twenty-eight I beg to differ. Of course, previously, when I hadn’t taken control of the fat situation, I couldn’t have seen him, for fear of the criticism. But now that I can say, no matter what he throws at me, I’m not hiding any more, I’m working hard, I’m being a good girl and I’m on a diet, we can talk about the possibility of fat being the problem. Now I am winning this battle I can consider dropping those walls of defence. He thinks I have bigger issues to confront, but he won’t tell me what they are exactly. We have to ‘find them’ together. I enjoy our time, though. It’s nice just to blurt it all out – things that you can’t say to the people in your life, who would be upset, or concerned, by the rubbish in your head.

‘Do you feel under pressure to fall in love, Sunny?’

My therapist is trying a new tack today, it would seem. Good for him. He must be so bored with me by now.

‘No. It’s completely the opposite. I have never had any pressure, from anybody, to date or to marry. Nobody. Which is a relief, of course. I think they are all just too embarrassed to say anything. My mother doesn’t even meddle – how are you, still single? Why aren’t you seeing anybody? Your standards are too high! None of that. No pressure at all.’

‘Do you see her often?’

‘My mother? She comes to visit every couple of weeks, and vents about my father, and his obsession with the car parking spaces in Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose … I think all men of that generation eventually become obsessed with supermarket car parks. Are you?’

‘No.’

‘Well, you’ve got a couple of years yet.’

‘We were talking about your mother.’

‘Yes. She comes to see me, on the train because my dad doesn’t like her driving the car – she mounts kerbs like a crazy woman – and she asks me to make her a cup of milky tea and then we chat about other people’s lives really. With a feigned interest, at best. We don’t mention mine.’

‘Do you feel that she is interested in your life?’

‘Well, sometimes she’ll ask about work, but only how I am getting on financially, whether it makes me happy working for myself. She doesn’t like to talk about the nature of my business – not that she officially disapproves of sex toys: she watches Channel Four.’

‘Do you think she might not want to intrude? Do you think she might be waiting for you to offer some information?’

‘I really don’t know what she thinks … about the lack of men in my life … I don’t think I want to know. Maybe she believes I am happier on my own, or assumes things go on that I don’t choose to share with her. She talks about the inadequacies of my sister’s latest flings as if they are all the same man, and all a disappointment at that.’

‘Do you feel inadequate compared to your sister? Do you feel that your mother doesn’t see you as enough, on your own?’

‘No, there has never been any suggestion from anybody that I am not enough on my own. I think they consider me more than enough on my own. Nobody seems to think that I might like to be taken care of. I just take care of myself. I always have.’

‘How does that make you feel?’

‘Strong.’ I run my fingers through my hair. ‘And sad.’

Some would say it was a strange sequence of events that led me to establish shewantsshegets.com. But rather, it was one rather pedestrian happening, coupled with a slightly crazier occurrence, in addition to my deep-rooted wish to quit my then job. In the first instance I just happened to catch a TV programme that I wouldn’t normally have watched. I fell upon it late one night as I lay in bed cracking my way through a family-sized bar of Galaxy and a mug of hot chocolate, after a vanilla-scented bath. There was European Championship football on BBC1, Young Musician of the Year on BBC2, a crime reconstruction show that terrified me on ITV, and a party political broadcast for the Liberal Democrats on Channel Four. So I flicked to Channel Five, and settled down with a documentary about an ex-porn star in the US who claimed to be called Elixir Lake. She had huge blonde hair that looked as if it must have been set in rollers every half an hour. She also had swollen, precarious-looking breasts, on the brink of explosion: the nipple of her left breast was constantly erect and pointing diagonally down towards the floor in rock-hard shame.

Elixir Lake had, after a particularly unpleasant attack of herpes, decided to get out of porn, but porn was all she had known since she was a girl – a common problem. It was then that Elixir had her brainwave. She decided to cherry-pick pornography that she believed would appeal to an underexploited sector of the market – women – and sell it via this strange new phenomenon called the World Wide Web. Elixir’s porn stream exploded, so much so that within eighteen months she was selling warehouse loads of soft-core videos. Elixir herself had only ever done soft core; ‘No shit, no anal, those were my rules,’ she said seriously through plumped-up frosted-pink lips and a deep red lip line. But as well as the videos she was also being asked for dildos and vibrators and all manner of toys by her female clientele. So Elixir seized upon the demand, and now she was living in a six-bedroom house with a pool shaped like a vast pair of bosoms, and a tennis court shaped like a tennis court, in the hills above Los Angeles. Selling rather than swallowing proved more profitable for Ms Lake. But then maybe if she’d done shit or anal …

A week later Mrs Browning died. Mrs Browning lived three houses along from me. But whereas I lived on the top floor of a converted house, Mrs Browning lived in a four-bedroom house alone in the heart of wealthy Kew. Her husband had died eight years ago, and she had been on her own ever since. She had nieces and nephews who she was close to, because she and Rudolph had never had children of their own. They were German Jews, who had been fortunate enough to make it out of Germany in 1934, as teenagers. Rudolph had found a job as an apprentice on Savile Row, working his way up until finally he was running the business for the last twenty years of his life. Elsa dedicated a bench in Kew Gardens to her husband after his stroke. The plaque read, ‘He loved this place, and its peace.’ It made me cry every time I saw it, when I would sit with Mrs Browning after a walk around the Gardens on alternate Thursday mornings. Rudolph’s bench was on top of a small hill, overlooking the Thames at the bottom of the gardens, and shaded by an oak tree.

Mrs Browning was the first person I spoke to when I moved to Kew three years ago. She watched me from her window for fifteen minutes, before walking slowly but precisely to my front wall, leaning on it patiently as I unpacked a large box full of books from my car, then introduced herself, and asked why my husband was letting me lift all the heavy boxes.

I liked her from the start. She had some mischief in her. For the past two years she had received a gentleman caller every Tuesday afternoon for tea. I called him her boyfriend, and she would laugh and shake her head and say that boyfriends were for beautiful young women like me, and she was merely the only person left in Kew as ancient as Wilbur Hardy, who was ninety-two and walked with a cane, but walked none the less. She would smile and refer to him as a harmless rogue. And I don’t know if it was because of those words, but I always thought that he grinned like an old-time crook. His suits were either mustard yellow, or apple green, or plum purple, and all had matching waistcoats. If I happened to be there when Wilbur rapped on the door on a Tuesday afternoon, Elsa would wink and say, ‘Don’t trust them, Sunny. Only one in one thousand will be worth the wait.’ Wilbur would always kiss my hand as I squeezed past him on the doorstep, and I would get embarrassed, even by such a mannerly show of affection from a ninety-two-year-old man. Elsa would wink again and mouth, ‘Don’t trust them,’ one more time, before she let him in.

Wilbur Hardy had died on New Year’s Day. His son had paid Elsa a visit to tell her and she had smiled sadly and said merely, ‘He was ancient. It was bound to happen sooner or later.’ His son had then informed her that Mr Hardy had managed many businesses and bought many licences, working from his study, right up until that New Year’s Day. Some of these businesses were highly profitable, and had been for many years, and were administered by his sons, and nephews, and nieces. Some of these businesses were dormant, however, acquired often just for fun and what Wilbur Hardy regarded as pocket change. Wilbur had left Elsa a number of these dormant concerns in his will. He had not left her property or money, but merely things that might make her smile. He had left her the exclusive UK licence to distribute Female Belly-Dancing Garden Gnomes for the next twelve years. He had left her the exclusive licence to distribute fingerless gloves in Ethiopia for the next seven months. And he left her a newly acquired licence, bought only two months previously, to distribute two new sex toys for women, known as ‘Three-Fingered and Two-Fingered Fondlers’. They had just started to be distributed in the US, and Wilbur had read about them as a funny fanciful ‘and finally’ story in the Sunday Telegraph, and enquired about the licence. Finding that it was up for sale, and this time predicting a healthy profit margin, he had snapped it up for a little more than eight years, and a little more than fifty thousand dollars. He had changed his will yearly, his son told Elsa, on the thirty-first of December. And so Elsa got the licence for the Two-Fingered Fondler and, following Wilbur’s lead, had changed her will the following week.

Mrs Browning simply fell asleep on a Sunday night, and didn’t wake up on Monday morning. When her nephew paid her a visit on the Monday lunchtime as arranged and received no answer from repeated rings of the doorbell, he let himself in and found her comfortably in bed, peacefully passed away. Her nephew, having met me on a couple of occasions, kindly let me know that evening.

I cried for an hour, and then remembered what Elsa had said about Wilbur. She was ancient, it was bound to happen sooner or later. And with that I resolved to stop crying but make sure I put a bench next to Rudolph’s in Kew Gardens, and think of something suitably appropriate to say on its plaque that wouldn’t be too sentimental for her. A week later her nephew called me again, one evening as I sat with macaroni cheese and a jacket potato for dinner, watching Dirty Dancing on video. Elsa had left me fifteen thousand pounds and the licence to distribute something called a ‘Two-Fingered Fondler’ in the UK for the next eight years …

‘Do you think, given the nature of your business, that people around you might assume that you have a healthy attitude towards sex, and that you just aren’t telling them about your sex life?’

‘No. There were definitely raised eyebrows when I started the business, because it was sex-related and because it was me. But I suppose nobody actually said anything disparaging. My Uncle Humphrey laughed a little too long for my liking.’

‘How did that make you feel?’

‘It bothered me at the time, but I have never liked him anyway. He’s an aggressive man, and his skin flakes so badly that my Aunt Lucy makes jokes about the snowstorm that is changing their bedding. It makes me retch.’

My therapist turns in his chair and writes something down on his pad. I know what it will be. Something to do with physical imperfections. He tries to steer me on to that a lot. We’ve discussed it. I roll my eyes, but he isn’t looking. There are no photos in this room, hanging on the walls. The wallpaper is a cappuccino colour, with a brown flower swirl pattern, quite modern in comparison to everything else. Maybe they had to redecorate the walls recently. Maybe some nut job slashed an artery and graffitied the walls with his blood. The windows are big, and the curtains are well made but a depressing rust colour like dried ketchup on a cracked plate. He turns back to face me.

‘Do you think you might think about love and sex a disproportionate amount, given the nature of your business? And the fact that you work alone and from home? Did you dwell on these things when you worked at the office, for instance?’

‘Not as much, no. But working from home is a positive thing, I am sure of that. It has changed my life dramatically, for the better. Office work didn’t suit me; I was too sensitive to the politics. I’m much happier now. I can’t bitch at myself – not consciously, anyway – and I can’t stab myself in the back. I don’t berate myself for being ten minutes late to my computer in the morning and then ignore the extra hour and a half I put in every night. The office environment almost made me lose my faith in mankind. The petty bitterness at the core of so many people, men and women, depressed me to the point of tears, daily. My business is – ironically – much more wholesome than that.’

‘Tell me again, how long have you been working from home?’

‘I resigned a year and three months ago today.’

‘You told me that was because of Adrian.’

‘Yes. About that – I feel like I may have painted him in a harsh light, to you. I was thinking about it yesterday. He is perfectly nice, you know. He just subscribed to a female aesthetic that wasn’t me. All he really did was show a complete disinterest in me, sexually. He wasn’t cruel or unusual, in finding me unattractive. I just wasn’t his kind of eye candy … then.’

‘And you resent him for that?’

‘Not at all. It’s the way of the world.’

‘Did you ever think that he might change his mind, that he might fall in love with you anyway?’

‘When I was still fat? I imagined it, a couple of times. But when does that ever happen? The preference for personality only exists in the movies, or soap operas, where ugly ducklings manage to bewitch the heart of some local stud, but then suddenly transform, courtesy of some decent hair straighteners and daily contact lenses, into models. Personality is only important when differentiating among the beautiful women. Beautiful and boring is so less appealing than beautiful and interesting. But interesting on its own, without the arse to go with it, wasn’t ringing Adrian’s bells.’

My therapist turns to write something down, but then changes his mind.

‘Do you think you might be harbouring a subconscious grudge against him for this? Do you think you might subconsciously believe that men are only interested in sex?’

‘There is nothing subconscious about it. I do believe it. Men are only interested in sex.’

‘And yet your business, which is based on sex, is mostly funded by women?’

‘It’s true, ninety per cent of my sales are to women. Where are you going with this?’

‘So do you think everybody is obsessed with sex?’

‘No, not everybody. Maybe most people. Most people are obsessed with sex, yes. But not all. Most.’

‘Where does the belief come from? Because your business is doing well?’

‘Maybe, but I think my business is doing well because women in particular find it easier to buy sex-related items over the internet, because it reduces their embarrassment. It means they can avoid the humiliation of eye contact with an Ann Summers sales assistant in a too-tight T-shirt knotted under her breasts and a mouth full of sexually liberated attitude and chewing gum. You can’t walk into a sex shop, peruse the vibrator wall, pretend not to look shocked at the gimp masks, pick the least intimidating-looking vibrator – to prove you aren’t taking it too seriously – carry it to the counter, pay for it, walk out of the shop without making eye contact with any passers-by, and get all the way home on the District line with a “discreet” bag that everybody knows came from a sex shop, without confronting certain truths. That is a torturous amount of time to be carrying a mechanical penis in public. And do you know that the traditional vibrator – penis shaped, I mean – isn’t even my biggest seller, in any shape or size? A vibrating hand is my biggest seller – the two-fingered version with a pulsing thumb. There is a three-fingered version, but the words “vulvic bruising” are used twice in the small print, and it puts people off. The Two-Fingered Fondler has a “hot breath” function as well: if you hit a certain button a puff of air emits from the knuckle of the second finger, which should be positioned as per diagram G on the box for maximum impact on the necessary biology.’

‘Am I missing a point?’

‘My point being that women don’t even want a penis. They just want a hand and a puff of air. I think that means something.’

‘What do you think it means?’

‘I don’t know. But it means something. Do you know what I always wonder? I always wonder who draws those diagrams on the boxes, the Fondler boxes, and whether somebody had to “sit” for them? But I suppose it wasn’t an easel and beret moment, some old French artist, holding his thumb up in front of him. Plus the diagrams aren’t in oil or watercolour or even charcoal – it’s a 2B pencil at best. Some expense was obviously spared. Did you know that the knuckles can rotate? If the fingers are in rotate position themselves, and not “thrust” or “tickle”? But it’s the puff of air that does it, apparently. I get a lot of positive feedback about it, via the website, as if I am in some way responsible. Apparently it’s inspired.’

‘Is it?’

‘Is it what?’

‘Is it inspired? The puff of air … ?’

‘I don’t know. The customers seem to think so.’

‘Haven’t you tried it yourself?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say a little too defensively. ‘There was this one time, I did get one out of its box, and not just, you know, “inspecting it for delivery damage”.’

‘And?’

‘And I got distracted …’

‘Distracted?’

‘I tried to make it play chopsticks on my keyboard.’

My therapist gives me a strange look. He doesn’t usually register any kind of emotion, or surprise, or anything. But that was definitely a ‘look’.

‘Sunny.’ He says my name as if he has reached some kind of conclusion, and my back straightens for a life-changing insight that has so far, in eight months of therapy, eluded me. ‘Do you think you might put too much emphasis on sex?’

I’ve heard that one before. This is nothing new.

‘You feel relatively sexually inexperienced and instead of seeing sex as merely just one of any number of natural human instincts, you are building it up into something that it is not? You are putting it, and in fact your lack of it, at the core of your life, when it deserves no more importance than say talking, or laughing, or eating?’

‘Eating?’

‘Not just eating. Talking, or laughing, or any number of human instincts.’

‘But you said eating last. With emphasis.’

‘There was no emphasis, Sunny.’

‘Are you suggesting that I’ve replaced one obsession with another? I still eat, you know.’

‘Of course you eat.’

‘I’ve had a coffee, and a yoghurt drink, and a Skinny Blueberry Muffin already today. I’m not starving myself. I was in Starbucks for an hour before I came here.’

‘Starbucks? Are you going there now? You were so against it when it first opened! It wasn’t local, or atmospheric enough for Kew – weren’t those your words?’

‘I know. But then I tried it. Now I’m addicted to their Skinny Blueberry Muffins. It is a tasty yet low-fat snack.’

‘How does that make you feel?’

‘Well, it doesn’t exactly fill me up, but it’s breakfast.’

‘No, I mean how does it feel to sacrifice your principles for your diet?’

‘Look, I have a healthy relationship with food now. My diet is not the enemy, and food is not the enemy, necessarily. I know that you think that there is something unhealthy, emotionally, with the diet thing, but truly I am just focused. I had a lot of weight to lose. You could never understand.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you’ve never been fat.’ I state it with force, like a dare. I challenge him to disagree, because I have a thousand arguments up my old fat sleeve on this one and he will never win.

It still feels strange to say the ‘f’ word out loud, and not cringe, or whisper. Just the word still manages to hurt me a little.

‘We all want to lose a few pounds at some point,’ he says, and it’s like a starting pistol in my head.

‘But a few pounds is not fat! Not properly self-conscious afraid-to-go-swimming-for-being-laughed-at unloved fat!’

‘But, Sunny, it is this perception – that you were unlovable because you were overweight – that interests me. Many overweight people are very much in love, and are loved in return. A person’s weight is by no means their defining characteristic.’

‘Maybe before it wasn’t, in “the olden days”, but not today. Nobody loves fat any more. That’s the last century speaking. I know, I live it. Complete strangers whispered “fat bitch” to me as I walked past them in the street. They didn’t know me, but they wanted to hurt me, because of it. Tell me that is not a defining characteristic – a person you’ve never even seen before hates you, and that’s not “unlovable”?’

‘But is it possible you lost the weight without addressing your own issues, not those of the strangers in the street, but your own?’

‘No, I just woke up. I was unhappy and I confronted that. That was healthy, I think.’

‘Not if the only answer you have found is losing another pound. When will you stop? If you still feel unloved in two months’ time, or whenever it is that you hit your “target weight”, will losing more weight be the only answer? This is what concerns me, Sunny. There are bigger issues than just “fat” involved.’

‘OK, now I want to talk about the emotional impact of the incident.’

‘Anything other than the diet, right?’ my therapist smiles. He has the measure of me now.

Adrian joined the Feel Good Company, specialists in vitamins, minerals and homeopathic painkillers, seven months after I did. I was the office manager, and spent most of my days hanging around the reception area, listening to Seema from accounts complaining about the photocopier. Our offices were furnished like a bad living room, with large vases of deteriorating dried flowers and burnt-amber sofas that had seen better days. Posters advertising Calcium and Fibre hung on the walls with a pride of place usually reserved for photos of grandchildren. The carpet was thinning in front of the reception desk, and the daily papers were spread across a glass coffee table, alongside Pharmaceuticals Monthly and Scientific Nutrition Quarterly, which nobody ever read. I dished out the better parking spaces to my favourites. Jean from distribution was a lovely lady, the same age as my mother, and prone to wonderful endearing ridiculous statements. As the year 2000 approached, she asked me seriously if the Millennium Bug might affect her Carmen rollers.

My boss was the head of human resources, a terribly serious Canadian woman who could only laugh at pain. Her assistant, Mariella, was a jumped-up brunette in secretary’s spectacles, who wore short skirts and tight T-shirts, and who hung the phone up on me daily. She had a way of walking that accentuated both her breasts and her arse, and all the men agreed that she was vacuous and pompous and a fool, but they still wanted to sleep with her. It took me a while to get my head around that, and it can still confuse me on my less lucid days. A man doesn’t have to like a woman, or respect a woman, or enjoy her company, to want to have sex with her. She just needs big breasts or long legs. Her face really isn’t important either, as long as she’s not buck-toothed or cross-eyed. I suppose what confuses me is that I am attracted to potential husbands, whereas Greg from Royalties, a tall handsome boy with blond hair and blue eyes that Hitler would have endorsed, was enticed by the possibility of a quick vigorous shag. He had plenty of time to find a wife, or she would find him, and for now at least he just wanted to have fun. I didn’t have that luxury. I was looking for somebody to see past my big old trousers and my big old belly and take me on wholesale, for life. I was sure time was running out for me, at twenty-four. Young and fat had to be more attractive than old and fat I chided myself; snag somebody quick!

Adrian came for his first interview on a Wednesday, and he was eight minutes late, because of the trains. He ran in, adjusting his suit jacket nervously.

His second interview was on a Friday, which I took to be a good sign. He was twenty minutes early, and sat in reception nursing a strong tea made for him by our post boy, Simon, at my suggestion. I didn’t speak to Adrian that day because I was too busy. Mariella arrived, breasts high and out, and bobbed hair swinging, and greeted him with a smile as big as Julia Roberts’, and a wriggle of her arse. Adrian didn’t seem to notice. That was the day I fell for him.

Adrian started working for the Feel Good Company five weeks later, in IT support. His predecessor had been sacked after returning to the office one night drunk to phone for a cab home from his desk, logging on to a porn site, and then promptly falling asleep. Six hours and five hundred pounds later, he woke up.

Adrian was twenty-six, and didn’t like IT at all. It paid the bills, he said. Simon who wore his jeans so low I was familiar with every pair of underpants he owned, observed that I ‘flustered’ when Adrian was around. I would make excuses about having to be somewhere else, or pretend to be busy with building contracts, or reprimand Simon for some minor misdemeanour. Anything to avoid looking Adrian in the eye. Because when I did, I laughed. My attraction for him overwhelmed me so much it actually made me laugh out loud.

He was tall, six foot one. He had longish shaggy dark brown hair that hung around his ears and in his eyes. He had a large nose, and a complexion that suggested he could get away with factor ten in mid-summer Rhodes, although he was prone to the odd freckle. For his first week he wore pale shirts, blues and greys, with his suits. When he realised that he could get away with wearing jeans he switched to dark denim – not baggy like Simon’s, but not tight and high like an old man’s. They fitted him well. He wore a battered old leather belt, and sweatshirts with small logos, in bottle green, and navy, and claret, and grey. He wore expensive fashionable trainers. He carried a record bag, in which he kept his Walkman and a copy of the Sun. He supported Liverpool, although he had never been to Anfield. I knew all of this without ever having spoken to him for more than thirty seconds. A minute was the absolute limit for me, and then I’d make my excuses and walk off, to laugh elsewhere, rather than laugh in front of him like a crazy woman. He made my hands shake. He made me bite my lower lip. He didn’t have a girlfriend.

He would rove the building, retrieving lost files and restarting crashed computers, and when he wasn’t busy he would come down to reception and chat to Simon, and flick through the paper. He started taking sugar in his tea, and put on half a stone, so he began running in the mornings before work, and lost it. I heard him talking to Simon one day, about a year after he had joined, gossiping about who had shagged who in the office, who they hated, whose computer he would deliberately take an age to fix. I was using the franking machine in the post room when I heard him refer to me as a ‘lovely girl’; I thought I was going to throw up.

I made an effort after that. He could have been one of those men who just disliked fat women, made jokes about them behind their backs, easy fodder. But I was a ‘lovely girl’. There was no mention of ‘but you wouldn’t, would you,’ or, ‘shame about her arse’.

After that I cracked jokes in his presence, and made him tea.

It was a dark day when he told me he thought he was falling in love. With somebody else, of course. She was a trainee PE teacher, and he had met her in his local pub. I thought I hated her. I didn’t know her, hadn’t even seen her face, but I hated her. Of course, when I pictured her she was effortlessly slim. Her hair and her eyes and her clothes changed in my mind daily, but she remained a size ten. I was morbidly jealous. I was sure that she didn’t even have an issue with food, that she could eat two biscuits and leave the rest, that she could have a couple of spoonfuls of ice cream and proclaim herself ‘stuffed’ and return the carton to the freezer for another day. She could buy a bag of chips and feel sick after eating a third of them. She wouldn’t have to force herself to stop eating them, she just could, without thinking, throw them away. She felt ‘full’. I never felt full. If you tried to take a chip from my bag you’d get my teeth in your finger. And that was the only difference between Adrian’s girlfriend and me, in my head. But she got lucky, because she got Adrian. Eleanor Roosevelt said that nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent, and it is absolutely true. I didn’t really hate Adrian’s girlfriend for being thin. I didn’t hate Adrian for not picking me. I hated myself for being fat. And what did I do when I felt bad? I comfort-ate. During the years I worked with Adrian I was a size twenty-four. On the outside I was big and jolly and made-up and polished and laughing. Everybody passed comment that I was, of course, ‘happy with myself, didn’t have a problem with my size’ and they loved me for it, in a Platonic sense, at least. Of course, while I thumped around the office being big and happy and proud I still went home at night alone. Everybody else, the ones who did ‘care’ about their appearance, started getting engaged, and married, and pregnant. I just got their compliments, about how ‘great’ I was, what a wonderful role model, to be fat and happy. ‘Sunny by name, Sunny by nature,’ they’d say …

It was a happy day that Adrian announced he had split up with the now qualified PE teacher, two years later. She just wasn’t the one, he told me. He wasn’t in love with her. Then he put his arm around my shoulders and said we should run off together. I said, ‘I don’t run anywhere,’ and laughed, and he squeezed my shoulder, and answered his phone.

A Monday was the blackest day of my life. Adrian was still single, a year after breaking up with the teacher. We had worked together for three years. I trundled into work in high-heeled boots that I convinced myself were comfortable. I bought them from the plus size shop, where the heels are wider and therefore give your legs more support. Plus the legs themselves are wider, so you can actually zip them up. It was a small victory when I was finally able, three months ago, to buy my boots from ‘normal’ shoe shops, without the zips jamming around the ankle. My legs are toned now, and those boots fit comfortably, but of course I still look down and see fat that shouldn’t be there. My legs don’t look any different to me, but they must be thinner. I wear size twelve jeans now, that magical Perfect Ten still eluding me. Logic dictates that my legs have changed, but my eyes refuse to see it.

On that Monday, in my fat girl boots, and a pair of long grey trousers and a black shirt, with my hair freshly straightened and my make-up impeccable, I walked into the post room to chat with Peter, our new assistant. Simon had left to join the police force six months earlier. Peter was just as amiable, and just as young, but a little more forthcoming with office gossip.

‘Morning, Peter,’ I announced in my usual ‘bubbly’ tone.

‘I have gossip,’ he declared with a sly smile on his face.

I looked at him through narrowed eyes. ‘Is it any good?’

‘It’s top drawer.’ The look on his face told me he wasn’t lying.

‘Tell me then!’ I clapped my hands together excitedly.

‘Adrian went home with Mariella on Friday night.’

My world fell apart. The smile stayed fixed on my face, but the lump in my throat kicked at my words, so they barely came out. A sumo wrestler had landed on my chest, and smashed the air out of my lungs.

‘Oh my God! I didn’t know something was going on between them.’ My voice broke on ‘them’, but Peter didn’t notice.

‘I don’t think it is. But I bet he shagged her.’

‘No doubt!’ I smiled, and turned and walked to my desk opposite the kitchen. I checked my emails and mentally pleaded with myself not to cry. Peter had no idea. Of course Jean did. She came to find me later, while I ate a double helping of cheesy pasta for lunch at my desk.

‘Have you heard?’

‘About Adrian and Mariella?’ I asked without looking up from my lunch.

‘Oh, Sunny, you’ll find somebody lovely.’

‘Sorry?’

‘And I’m sure Adrian and Mariella won’t turn into anything.’

‘Jean, you know I’m not bothered about Adrian, don’t you?’

‘Oh. OK. I just thought you liked him.’

‘Why would you think that?’ I said, still not looking up.

‘Sunny, you’re a lovely girl, really pretty, lovely hair, you always dress nicely – why don’t you ask him to go for a drink?’

‘Are you crazy?’ I looked up then, and the tears in my eyes were obvious.

‘He could do a lot worse than you, you know.’

‘I know. But I’m not interested, Jean.’ One tear spilt onto my cheek. Jean looked as if it were her heart that were breaking but said, ‘OK, I have to get back.’ She smiled at me, and brushed down her cardigan.

Of course, I couldn’t ask him out for a drink. The squirming embarrassment, the silence just after I blurted it out, the dawning realisation that he was going to have to let me down gently, because I was a ‘lovely girl’. A tiny part of me did scream, ‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get! Men aren’t that bright; they just don’t see it unless, like Mariella, you make it screamingly obvious.’ But then the voice of reason told me what we all know is true. If a man wants to ask a woman out, he will, especially a fat woman who isn’t exactly fending off admirers. I was there, primed and basted and ready to be plucked off the shelf, I wasn’t ‘intimidating’. If Adrian had any feelings for me he would have asked me already. But asking him, hearing the rejection out loud, was too much for me to bear. That was the day I realised I had to leave the Feel Good Company, before the irony killed me.

It took me another six months to pluck up the courage to hand in my notice. In that time Adrian slept with Mariella again twice. She was interested, but he wasn’t, and it fizzled out, but the threat of it always loomed the morning after a heavy night before, because it is, of course, so much easier to sleep with somebody a second or third time. My leaving drinks were held in the office itself, with four hundred pounds’ worth of drink consumed in reception by eighty-five people. We had a buffet, and I can never walk away from a buffet; they are my nemesis – even now, when I can tell you the calorie and fat content of every plateful of sausages on sticks and mini quiches and peanuts and mozzarella sandwiches and mini pizzas. All that food laid out in front of me is still hard to resist. Buffets for the serious dieter are to be avoided like wine tastings for an alcoholic.

Adrian with his big northern laugh was one of the last ones standing at my farewell do. I had masochistic daydreams that he wouldn’t even attend, or stay for a few beers, then head off for more fun elsewhere with his mates, or even worse, slide off with Mariella at about half-past nine. But at 11.30 he was opening one of the last bottles of red wine, with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, laughing with one of the guys from systems support. He poured out a couple of glasses and brought one over to me, as I stood teary-faced, waving goodbye to Jean whose husband, Jeremy, was waiting downstairs in the car and who was already angry because she was drunk and an hour late.

‘Here you go, love. Have another one of those!’ Adrian thrust a glass of wine at me.

I took it, but put it down behind me on the reception desk saying, ‘I’ve had too many already, I’m starting to feel a bit sick.’

‘Come on, it’s your leaving do! You can’t back out on me now! Where are we going afterwards?’ Adrian did a little dance and drops of red wine threatened to fly out of his glass.

‘Well I don’t know where you’re going, Adrian, but I’m going home.’

‘No! We have to go clubbing or something, give you a proper send-off.’ He flicked ash on the carpet. My mouth opened to reprimand him, before I realised that the carpets weren’t my responsibility any more.

‘I don’t go clubbing.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m too old.’

‘You’re only twenty-seven. What are you talking about – you’re younger than me! And I’m not too old! Come on, let’s go on the pull, pick ourselves up a couple of teenagers!’

‘I don’t think that’s going to happen.’

‘Come on, Sunny, why not?’ He was pulling at one of my hands, grinning, trying to get me to dance, certain I would be persuaded, because life was simple for Adrian.

‘Because … I’m dressed for work.’

‘You look lovely!’ He winked.

‘It’ll be all hot and sweaty!’

‘That’s a good thing!’ He winked again, but this time it was accompanied by a dirty laugh.

‘I’ll be twice the size of everybody else in there!’ I blurted it out because of the wine, and because I felt like I was being backed into a corner, and because it was the truth. He only looked embarrassed for a moment.

‘Shut up! What difference does that make? Come on, let’s go and have a dance.’ But he wasn’t dancing any more.

‘No, you go. I’m going to go home in a minute.’

‘Fair enough. Where’s Peter?’ Adrian smiled, but his bubble had been burst and he stumbled off.

He wasn’t hitting on me, although that’s what my nicer friends would have said, to raise my hopes. But in these instances I firmly believe in being cruel to be kind. It hadn’t even occurred to him that we could go home together, and I never would have let it happen: couldn’t have been naked with Adrian without feeling violently exposed and vulnerable. The sex would have lasted for minutes, if he could manage a sloppy erection after that many drinks, and the excuses would have lasted an hour. I’m sorry about my sagging stomach, my bulbous arse, my huge thighs, everything! Everything! Besides, I had never pictured Adrian and I just having sex, fucking. We would have to be making love, because he liked me, and I liked him. I didn’t have that animal instinct in me that craved thrashing violent passionate orgasms. I wanted somebody to love me, and to make love to me, softly, and without apologies, to look into my eyes, and only my eyes, and not even think about the body beneath them. I wanted the body to become completely unimportant, just machinery, and I wanted all the fireworks to be in our heads. I wanted mental and emotional orgasms. I wanted his eyes to stare into mine, and a moment of realisation to hit us both like a volcano erupting, convincing us both that it was the best, most intimate, most overwhelming orgasm either of us had ever had. And it would have nothing to do with how we looked, and everything to do with who we were.

But Adrian fucks with his eyes closed. I know, because they are closed now. The first time I had sex with Adrian I just wanted to prove I was good at it. He initiated the kiss, and I didn’t want him to regret his decision. And so it was a twisted sexual theatre of shivers and breaths and acrobatics on my part. I tried desperately to be energetic and adventurous and slightly filthy, while steering him away from my body parts that I still deemed unacceptable. My stomach still hung out hungrily like a deflated dart player’s belly, the skin refusing to tighten and just accommodate the muscles that were left. It was my restricted zone, to which I tried to deny him access, twisted and turning and planting him flat on his back any time his hands, or worse, his mouth, crept near it. But he managed to kiss my belly anyway, and didn’t seem to hate it with the vitriol that I did. I scratched and sucked and made vigorous, to prove a point. It was the ultimate vindication, after years of rejection. Now I was good enough to sleep with.

It was a bland encounter. Of course, I faked a couple of orgasms for his ego, while my own ego shrivelled inside of me, occasionally knocking on my conscience to ask, ‘What are you doing?’ I ignored it and kept on rocking. And in the thick of it I did feel good, if not satisfied. He kissed me with passion, not love, but it was a passion that hadn’t existed a year ago. Somehow, and I wasn’t even sure exactly how, I had made Adrian want me, and that was enough for that night, at least. To expect the sex to be good as well would have been plain greedy.

The second time I had sex with Adrian I tried to concentrate on enjoying myself. I spent far less time giving him oral sex, and focused all my attentions on having an orgasm proper. No such luck. Sex with Adrian was a pretty pedestrian affair. It was fine, if fine is not too damning a word. What man wants to be described as ‘fine’ in bed? In fairness, he had a lovely penis, long and pale and smooth and clean, and thick as well. It was so pleasing to look at, it was almost sanitised. It just didn’t seem to hit the spot. I reprimanded myself mentally, while faking my second orgasm that night, for not relaxing enough to let it happen naturally. Maybe it was my own fault. Maybe I had, in my head, built this man into a sexual demi-god, able to dish out thrills with one thrust of his wand. The sexual explosions I had imagined were almost impossible to match in reality. Plus he was a little quick with his thrust, and not quite as deep as I’d hoped. I tried to make him go slower, and harder, but he had his rhythm and he was sticking to it, like UB40. It’s reggae or nothing. I imagine slow and hard is the thing that will really do it for me. I don’t know for sure. I’ve never had an orgasm with somebody else around. If that sounds tragic I console myself that at least I have had an orgasm, and if some sexual bright spark manages to get me there I will at least recognise it for what it is.

This is the third time I have had sex with Adrian, and doing anything more than twice makes it a habit. But this time we are approximately two bottles of red wine and eight minutes into the encounter, and Adrian has already begun his thrust for home. His erection is precarious; neither one of us expects it to last much longer. I’m a little bored. I look up at his eyes, squeezed tightly shut, and I imagine that he might open them, and slow down, and kiss me tenderly, and stir something in me that hasn’t been reached yet. I wonder if he has his eyes closed so that he can picture somebody else, but now they spring open, and he smiles, and says my name, and then carries on pumping, which sounds like a Sid James special set in a petrol station.

My feelings for him are old, and forgotten. I am having sex with him simply because I can. We are not in love, and never will be. He is a sweet man, but he doesn’t know how to hold my hand or stroke my hair in a way that will move me. It is all mechanical, insertion and lubrication and squeezing and pulling. We make random impersonal sex noises, both of us lost in our own worlds, trying to please ourselves. We are not a couple, having sex. We are two individuals using each other to get off. I think this should be the last time we have sex, but I doubt it will be.

The first time, three weeks and four days ago, we met for a drink on a Thursday to catch up, and he had been astounded at how different I looked. Men often dish out ‘compliments’ lazily, and Adrian is no exception. His words were, ‘You look about two hundred per cent more attractive than the last time I saw you!’ I could have cried. Men don’t seem to realise that I have just lost weight, and not become a whole new person, and thus an insulting remark about my appearance last year is still an insulting remark about me, even if they are cushioning it with some current nicety. ‘You look good’ or, ‘You look great’ would have done nicely, but Adrian messed it up. I had to ignore it, if I was going to stay in my seat. Even the smallest reprimand for his choice of words would have made things uncomfortable. Plus Adrian isn’t the kind of man who thinks about things like that. He is ‘easy-going’. Intellectual effort is a fun time wasted.

He didn’t see the need to be subtle in his advances, because that would require thought. It didn’t occur to him to tread softly, or try to mask the fact that he now found me attractive, simply because my body shape had changed. My face was and is still the same, just thinner. My eyes are still my own. I haven’t had surgery. Yet. The words coming out of my mouth are exactly the same, the only difference being that Adrian seems to find them more interesting now, or is going to the effort of pretending to, at least. We had a few drinks and got a cab to go home, and he kissed me. Despite the two hours leading up to it, and how obvious it would have been to any onlooker, I was still surprised when he did it. He had rejected me, albeit unknowingly, for four years, but his kiss wasn’t hard to earn. I just had to be thin enough. This confused me. Now, instead of being ‘Sunny’ I was ‘Sunny who he would like to have sex with’. Nothing groundbreaking had been said during the evening, no pivotal conversation had. It’s a depressing thought. I had been good enough all along, just not thin enough. We had both exited at my house, and we had the first night of sex. At the time it didn’t feel as rushed as it sounds – I didn’t feel like a slut – I’d been waiting for four years, after all.

We had sex twice that night, but not in the morning. He had promised to call me when he left for work the next day, and sure enough he did … two weeks later, last Friday, drunk in a cab and en route to my house but he couldn’t remember the number.

Foolishly I reminded him.

This evening, Monday, thirty-five hours after the ‘incident’ – I’ve almost forgotten all about it – we at least arranged to meet when we were both sober. We went for a coffee, but that turned into wine, and we ended up back at mine, and now we are having sex again. I am afraid that we have become fuck buddies, but I don’t want to confront him because I have nothing to say. Adrian is a nice but average thirty-year-old bloke, with a big laugh and good hair and trendy trainers. He works in IT. I know what I am getting, I know that his favourite film is Rocky IV, I know he prefers Indian to Chinese, I know he reads his horoscope, and is mildly left wing.

Adrian is still somebody’s dream man, if such a thing exists, but I am starting to wonder whether he is still mine, now that I am learning to differentiate between liking somebody and being attracted to somebody. I realise that I have to feel something deeper: he can’t just be funny, or bright, or look right. There has to be something that makes him right for me, even though I admit that I don’t know what that something is. Maybe it will be something small. Maybe we will both like film quizzes, and sit late into the night on his battered old leather sofa making our way through two bottles of wine and a bar of dark chocolate, and quizzing each other, until we decide to go to bed … It could be that small, I think, but it will matter, of course.

Adrian rolls off me onto the bed. This time I made the necessary pleasurable noises without going to the effort of actually faking an orgasm in its entirety. I don’t have the energy or the inclination. He doesn’t seem bothered.

Adrian mumbles something into the pillow.

‘Sorry?’ I ask.

He raises himself up on to his elbows and looks at me seriously. ‘Who would have thought it, eh?’

‘Thought what?’ I stroke the hair out of his eyes.

‘You and me.’ He smiles at me, and kisses my forehead.

‘It’s not the strangest thing that’s ever happened.’

‘No, I know. Not now. It just shows …’

‘Shows what?’ I ask.

‘You know,’ he closes his eyes and hugs me, drifting into sleep, ‘what a difference a year can make.’

‘Well, people’s feelings change all the time,’ I say, nervously trying to stop him before he goes too far.

‘Hmmm?’ His eyes are still closed, and he presses his face into my neck. ‘You’ve done so well …’ And he falls asleep.

Three hours later I am still awake, while Adrian snores loudly on the other side of the bed. Yep, I’ve done so well.

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