A Friend of the Family (26 page)

He stood up and tried to think positive. Think of
your CV, he thought, think of having Electrogram Records on there. You never know who you’ll bump into at the coffee machine. Someone might take a shine to you and offer you a proper job, with a desk. And windows. You never know. It’s a start, he thought to himself, it’s shite, but at least it’s a start.

He went to the coffee machine and got himself a hot chocolate and then he came back and folded another folder, wondering where the hell this particularly miserable chapter of his life was going to lead him. His mind wandered as he folded some more and he started imagining the life that had petrified him so greatly in Wood Green on Friday night, the life of watching Simon ten-pin bowling and having his hair cut with Gervase. Now he could add sitting alone in a windowless room folding bits of card all day long to his unsavoury little vision of the future.

He sighed, sniffed and folded another folder.

Fifteen Stone and Three Pounds

‘OK, Tony. If I could just ask you to take off your shoes and pop yourself on to the scales.’

Tony crouched down to unlace his shoes and pondered the idea of using the opportunity afforded to him by his ‘starting blocks’ pose to sprint out of the door and keep running until he got home.

He slipped off his shoes and slowly climbed up on to the scales. This was it. He hadn’t weighed himself since the last time he went to the gym, about eighteen months ago. He’d been just over twelve and a half stone then. In his mind he’d gone up to about fifteen stone since he met Ness, but after Gervase’s comments on Saturday he was feeling hopeful for something around the fourteen to fourteen-and-a-half mark.

He took a deep breath and brought his second foot on to the scales. Jan slid weights across a metal bar until the bar balanced itself out.

And there it was – the grim truth, staring him mean-spiritedly in the face.

Fifteen stone and three pounds.

Fifteen stone and three pounds.

Tony felt blood rushing to his head with the shock
of it. That meant that he must have been over fifteen and a half before he started losing weight. My God – he was absolutely
enormous.

‘So,’ said Jan, oblivious to Tony’s trauma. ‘Ninety-seven kilos.’ She jotted down the hideous sum on a form she was filling out. ‘And what’s your ideal weight?’

‘Well,’ he said, dismounting the scales with a heavy heart, ‘I was about twelve and a half stone a year ago. I’d quite like to get back to that.’

‘OK,’ she scribbled that down, too. ‘That sounds like a perfectly healthy and realistic goal. Given your height and build.’

‘I’ve lost a few pounds already,’ he said, trying to inject something positive into what was turning out to be a miserable experience, ‘just by cutting back on the booze, not eating out so often, that kind of thing.’

‘Well done!’ She gave him an encouraging smile. ‘Now, if you’d like to put your shoes back on and fill out some forms.’

Tony filled out the forms quickly – he’d filled out similar things so many times in his life now. No diabetes. No allergies. No heart condition (well, not that he knew about, anyway). No serious operations. Blah, blah, blah.

‘Right, Tony. The meeting’s about to start. Are you ready to join us?’

‘Er, yeah. Sure.’

‘And don’t be nervous about being a man, Tony. We get quite a few boys in the group now – ever since we put Bryan on our posters. We’ve got one at the moment, actually.’

Tony smiled at her nervously.

‘And after the meeting, maybe you could stay behind for a couple of minutes. Just for a chat. I always like to have a little chat on the first week. Find out a bit more about what makes you tick. And you can find out a bit more about us. OK?’

‘Yeah,’ said Tony, ‘no problem.’

Jan pushed open a door and there it was. The group. Oh God. About twelve of them. All fat. All chatting like they’d known each other for ever. A particularly gruesome man in a red sweatshirt looked up and smiled at him joyfully. ‘Hallelujah,’ he said, in an extremely loud voice that suggested he was a man who always said everything in an extremely loud voice. ‘A bloke,’ he boomed. ‘Praise be to Allah. Save me. Save me from all these insufferable women.’

The insufferable women all looked at the red-sweatshirt bloke as if they were used to him being overbearing and obnoxious.

Red sweatshirt patted the empty seat next to him. ‘Come and sit here,’ he said, ‘us chaps have got to stick together.’

Tony looked at Jan imploringly as if to say, ‘Please don’t make me sit next to the horrible, overbearing man, Auntie Jan,
please
.’ But Auntie Jan just beamed at him and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Everyone, this is Tony. Tony’s our new member this week so let’s all make him feel welcome, shall we.’And then she pointed him in the direction of the empty seat next to red sweatshirt. Tony grimaced and walked through the group towards the seat.

‘Kelvin,’ said the man, extending a meaty hand, ‘nice to meet you, Tony.’

‘Yeah, you too.’ Tony shook his hand and then Kelvin leant in really close to his ear.

‘Bunch of hippos. Look at‘ ‘em. Poor things.’

Tony looked round the group of overweight women, and then back at the even more overweight Kelvin.

‘Tell you what I like about hippos, though,’ he said, wheezing slightly, ‘they’re ever so blumming grateful.’

Tony looked at him with alarm. ‘Aren’t you here to lose weight?’ he said.

‘No. Of course not. I’m here for the lovely laydeez.’

‘And have you… have you
been out
with anyone yet?’

Kelvin shrugged his enormous shoulders up and down. ‘No. Not yet. I’ve been working on the luscious Tonia, though.’ He indicated a very glamorous blonde with incredibly long fingernails.

Tony lapsed into silence and wondered if maybe he should do the decent thing and tell Kelvin that Tonia was actually quite a babe and that he didn’t stand a chance in hell, but then Jan began to talk and the session started.

In all honesty, Tony found the whole experience quite riveting, in a trashy-TV kind of a way. As he wasn’t yet participating in the programme, he could treat the session as a form of light entertainment. He was fascinated to hear about Tonia’s experience at a hen night the previous weekend when they’d gone to a TGI Friday and she’d been
that
close to eating everything on the menu – because TGI was her absolute favourite – and
how it had only been the thought of Jan and the group and how much faith they had in her that had reined her back in. He was moved by the fact that Arabella had managed to get through the week in which her elderly mother had died without breaking her diet – even at the funeral, with all those canapés. Jenny had had a terrible time, apparently. Eaten pretty much a whole leg of lamb, slice by slice, with bread and butter, over the course of the week. Tony sympathized with her hugely – he’d have done exactly the same thing if he’d had a leg of lamb lying around the place. Jan reassured her that a bad week didn’t make a bad person, that everyone lapsed occasionally and that maybe next time she had a joint of meat left over from the Sunday lunch she should put it straight down for the dog.

The group were incredibly supportive of each other and no one judged anyone for anything. With the exception of the dreadful Kelvin, they were a truly delightful and heart-warming group of people. Tony had been expecting a bunch of freaks and was pleasantly surprised by how comfortable he felt here, in among all these people with healthy appetites and a penchant for overdoing it. And, although they reflected the parts of himself he disliked, he didn’t dislike
them.
It was strangely soothing and reassuring to know that he wasn’t alone, to know that he wasn’t the only person in the world who would work his way systematically through a quarter of a sheep if left to his own devices.

After the meeting, which lasted about half an hour, he and Jan retired to her little office and had what she
referred to as a ‘nice little chat’, during which she asked him about his private life, about whether or not he lived alone, who he’d be able to call on for support, his general eating patterns, what sort of exercise he got. Then she gave him some photocopied guidelines and recipes and told him how much she was looking forward to seeing him the following week and Tony had to resist the urge to hug her and tell her she was fantastic – because she was. This was more than just a job to Jan; this was a labour of love. She did this because it made her happy.

Tony flicked through the notes and the recipes and felt a distinct fluttering of excitement. He felt evangelized, energized, enthused. He could do this, he thought as he put on his coat and headed for the exit, he could shift this weight. He could rediscover the old Tony. He could be slim and youthful again. He could, he knew it. This was just what he needed. He’d known there must have been a reason for him picking up that leaflet all those weeks ago. He’d found his destiny. His whole life might be a mess but this was something, in fact, the
only
thing over which he could actually exert any control.

He still had Ness’s proposal hanging over his head and yes, it sounded simple, didn’t it? Just to give her a call and say, ‘Well, I’ve given it some thought and, well,
no,
I don’t want to move in with you.’It
sounded
simple but life
wasn’t
simple. It wasn’t simple because for some inexplicable reason he and Ness had ended up having a really nice weekend together. Not for any particular reason, just one of those nice, drifty, carefree weekends.
Dinner at Rob and Trisha’s had been surprisingly convivial and then they’d woken up yesterday morning and it had been all sunny and spring-like so they’d had some particularly pleasant sex and driven over to Dulwich for a pub lunch (Tony had a toasted sandwich instead of the full Sunday roast he’d usually have ordered). Then they’d gone for a long walk on the common and Ness had just been… well,
Ness,
he supposed. But for some reason she hadn’t got on his nerves and Tony had allowed himself to enjoy her company for once. It was one of those strange and unfathomable things. But pleasant as it was it didn’t make things intrinsically any
different
He still didn’t want to move in with her. He still didn’t want to end up with her. He still wanted to be with Millie. In fact, he’d spent a large portion of the weekend imagining Millie watching him and thinking how much fun it looked to be his girlfriend.

But he wasn’t ready to finish it either. Relationships, in Tony’s experience, got a sort of stench about them when their time was up. It was impossible to pinpoint the precise moment that a relationship went on the turn, but if you tried to end a relationship before it was over in that stinky sort of way, it always went wrong and you usually ended up getting back together and splitting up again further down the line, a pattern that at its worst could go on repeating itself ad infinitum. No, Tony was sure of this, you had to wait until a relationship was a stinking rotten carcass before bailing out; that way everyone concerned could just walk away from it without any desire to turn around and have another look.
His relationship with Jo had gone stinky a few months before she left him. They’d both known it and both politely ignored it, until Jo had done the decent thing and fallen in love with someone else. But his relationship with Ness hadn’t reached the rotten-carcass stage just yet.

It could be argued that Tony was being unfair to Ness by stringing her along. She was twenty-nine, nearly thirty. She was looking for stability, a future and children and every day that she spent with Tony was a day lost in the pursuit of her own happiness. But really, it was her own fault. Tony had never given her any indication that he wanted to settle down with her. He was rude to her, thoughtless and inconsiderate. He didn’t tell her that he loved her, buy her gifts or talk to her about babies and weddings. She was an intelligent woman and it was her informed choice to hang around with him while her youth faded away. Maybe she was subconsciously waiting for the stench, too, Tony pondered. Maybe he was on some invisible countdown, maybe suggesting that they move in together had actually been some kind of masked ultimatum. Maybe she was going to finish it if he said no. Which was exactly why he couldn’t say no. Because he wasn’t ready for it to finish. He wasn’t ready for empty weekends and going to weddings and work dos on his own. He wasn’t ready to be perceived as single, by Millie or by anyone else. It wasn’t time. Not yet.

A few of the people from the group were milling around on the pavement outside the centre. Kelvin, who
was busy sweet-talking Tonia, looked up as he saw Tony leave the building. ‘We’re all off to the pub. Fancy a drink?’ he said.

Tony looked at his watch.

‘Go on,’ said Tonia, eyeing him desperately.

‘OK,’ he said, thinking that he could be a hero just for one night, by helping Tonia to extricate herself from the foul Kelvin’s attentions. ‘Just a quick one.’

They went to a stripped-pine-and-blackboard wine bar called Bubbles – Tony didn’t think that there were any wine bars with names like Bubbles still in existence, thought they’d all disappeared with the economic crash of the early nineties. It reminded him of being in his twenties, of the business starting to take off, of marrying Jo, being young and being richer than his wildest dreams. It reminded him of wearing Hugo Boss suits and going for dinner with Jo every night to trendy restaurants full of men in Hugo Boss suits and being served microscopic portions of food. It reminded him of how good life used to be and of how much he’d lost.

After a few minutes, Tony became aware that Tonia was flirting with him, and, although he could see that she was an extremely attractive and utterly charming woman, the awareness made no impact on him at all. He sipped his wine and asked Tonia automated questions about herself – she was thirty-three, lived in Bal-ham, worked in theatre, liked ethnic food, didn’t like dieting, etc., etc. – and felt a terrible despondency engulf him. How had he ended up here? How had his golden life become so tarnished?