Here's Looking at You (7 page)

Anna’s mum made his native cuisine in trencherman portions as an apology to her father for not being in his sunny homeland, even though he had left under his own steam in 1973. And while he loved Tuscany and often complained about London, he never expressed any serious desire to return.

She extended the policy of indulgence to Anna and her sister, who managed to combine the most fattening elements of two cuisines. Cheese, pasta, ragus as nod to their Italian roots, Oompa Loompa orange chicken nuggets and oven chips in nod to their Barking surroundings. Plus Somerfield’s Neapolitan ice cream to notionally combine the two.

Anna was ten stone by the time she was ten years old.

Slimming was both mind-bendingly simple and psychologically complicated, all at once. Anna realised that seeing off a whole Marks and Spencer’s tiramisu in one sitting was not her reward for being exiled from the world of the normal-sized, it was what was keeping her there. She swapped the stodgy carbs for fish and salads, and began running, pounding the streets in flapping old tracksuit trousers.

And Anna joined WeightWatchers. She didn’t do it expecting results, she did it in the spirit of testing the hypothesis she was born to be hefty. If it didn’t work, she could cross ‘ever being slender’ off the Bucket List.

As she lost pounds, then stones, her former identity melted away and a strange thing happened. She discovered she was pretty. The possibility had never occurred to her and, she was fairly sure, anyone else.

Previously, her expressive dark eyes, neat nose and sardonically amused Cupid’s bow of a mouth had been completely lost in a pillowy face, like raisins and fruit peel in dough. But as her bones sharpened, indistinct features were revealed as the regular ones of the conventionally attractive.

‘Aureliana looks like an actress!’ trilled her aunty, on the first Boxing Day where Anna was not doing the ‘roast potato challenge’ with her Uncle Ted. For once in her life, when Anna pasted on a shaky smile, then ran away and cried, it was with happiness.

Initially, the wonders didn’t cease. Anna learned there was a whole secret world of coded glances and special treatment from the opposite sex that she never knew existed before. It was like joining the Masons, with arse-pinching in place of handshakes.

Even now, ten years on, when a student was sitting slightly too closely as she leafed through their work, or she got her coffee loyalty card peppered with stamps after one drink, she had to remind herself:
they’re
flirting with you.

Some larger people could never adjust to being smaller, kept picking up Brobdingnagian trousers and getting halfway to the till before they realised they weren’t the width of a doorway anymore. Anna suffered the same perception shortfall. She couldn’t get used to being thought attractive. ‘Gorgeous and insecure, the chauvinist’s dream,’ Michelle said.

Having assumed she would only ever have the pick of serious young men of the kind she dated at Cambridge, with huge IQs, dour expressions and well-ironed shirts, suddenly, the doors to a kingdom of choice had swung open.

So who did she want? It turned out, she didn’t know.

At first, out of a sense of loyalty to her tribe and in some confusion, she dated the same kind of quiet, studious men as before, when she was bigger. These failed experiments had a pattern. At the start, she was worshipped like a goddess, as if they couldn’t believe their luck. Eventually, they decided they definitely didn’t believe it and the relationship collapsed, eroded by corrosive suspicion and buckling under the pressure of extreme possessiveness.

Anna had been completely committed to clever Joseph, her only long-term boyfriend to date, who understood jet propulsion but didn’t understand how it was possible for Anna to spend an evening out that wasn’t a hunt for his successor.

As for good-looking, confident men who sought a similar woman to be their matching bookend: Anna was too sardonic, too aware of their machinations to be suited as a partner. She bristled at any sense that it was beauty rather than her brain that had piqued their interest, and it manifested in prickly defensiveness.

And there were some negative consequences with women, too. There were rules of engagement when you were a ‘looker’ that she was very late to learning.

She didn’t recognise the signs of jealousy when they flared, and rush to douse them with buckets of self-deprecation. Or join in when females were enthusiastically listing their flaws, which had occasionally been taken to mean she didn’t think she had any. Anna had never needed to itemise her shortcomings, as it had always been done for her.

She never felt she
fitted in
, the same way she hadn’t before.

Anna was unusual, a one off, an awkward oddity, and thus finding what people blithely called their ‘other half’, someone who tessellated, seemed impossible.

It was no coincidence her best friends were Michelle and Daniel, two people for whom image meant little.

And as desperately as Anna didn’t want to be defined by those terrible younger years, she still felt much more like the girl who got called a hairy beast, than the woman who was wolf-whistled.

James knew the moment of reckoning would arrive eventually, and arrive it did, at 11 a.m., after Spandau Ballet’s greatest hits had left him feeling destitute.

‘Guys, just confirming we’re still on for the big night out for the company’s fifth birthday. I’ll email the itinerary soon,’ Harris said to the room. He was in his ironic t-shirt that said BOB MARLEY under an image of Jimi Hendrix and a pair of tartan drainpipes. ‘We all good?’

James had turned the options over already. He could play for time and simply say yes, he and Eva were still coming.

But the deposit was £100. He’d need a reason for Eva’s no-show. Something gastric, or a family crisis. James would be telling the kind of fibs that tie you in knots, bind your legs together and trip you over, face down onto a hard surface.

So far, failing to tell them he and Eva had split up was a lie of omission, navigating little semantic slalom courses when someone asked what he’d been up to at the weekend.

This would require active untruths – doctor’s appointments and non-transferable flights to Stockholm and remembering who’d done what, and to whom he’d told it. And when the truth of her absence was finally revealed, they’d work backwards and work it out. He could picture Harris, in one of his Playdoh-bright tank-tops, holding a hand up and saying: ‘OMFG, dudes.
That
was why she didn’t come to the five bash? I always thought the cancerous nephew was a crock of plop.’

The pity would be all the greater, mixed with derision. It was bad enough they had to know; James couldn’t bear them knowing he minded them knowing.

‘Uh. Actually, change my plus one. Eva and I have split up.’

Harris goggled at him. Ramona’s jaw dropped almost as far as her Tatty Devine
MONA
plastic nameplate necklace. A hush fell over the room, a hush punctuated by the squeak of half a dozen people turning in their chairs at once. Lexie, the pretty new copywriter, audibly gasped. Charlie, the only other married member of staff, who still dressed like he’d wandered off a skate park, mumbled a
sorry mate
.

‘Seriously?’ Ramona said, always ready with the wrong word.

No, she danced off in clown shoes squirting a custard gun.

‘Seriously.’

‘Why …?’

James mustered every last scrap of nonchalance he didn’t possess.

‘Wasn’t working out. It’s pretty friendly, it’s fine.’

He sensed Ramona’s desperation to ask who-dumped-who, but even her level of crass shrank from it. For now.

‘OK … well, I’ll put you down for one place then?’ Harris said.

James wrestled with the stigma of
divorcing loser
. Wrestled with it for only seconds.

‘Actually I was going to bring someone else. If that’s OK?’

Ramona’s jaw clunked open again.

‘Someone …? There’s someone new already? Oh. Is that why …’

James felt totally, completely justified in having not told them the truth. This was agony.

‘It didn’t help,’ he said, in a brusque, heartbreaker manner.

James turned back to his screen and congratulated himself on a job done, if not a job well done. He’d take plenty of time getting his lunchtime sandwich so that the analysis would be done by the time he returned.

So all he needed now for the birthday party was a one-night-hire-only girlfriend. Sounded like the kind of thing Laurence could help with.

‘Welcome to Sleeping Beauty. I am Sue and I can make your fairytale dreams come true!’ the boutique owner chirruped, which Anna thought was a fairly mental claim. Wasn’t Sleeping Beauty in a persistent vegetative state for a century?

Sue looked like a backbench MP in a skirt suit and pearls and Anna guessed her sales techniques would be brisk, despite all the wispy pouffiness around them.

Aggy and their mother’s eyes shone at her words, and Anna knew she was a lone cynic in the realm of true believers. It was an enchanted grotto for those who wanted to walk down the aisle looking like a Best Actress Oscar nominee.

The salon
was softly lit by peachy bulbs. It had a deep, spotless cream shag pile and lavender wallpaper with a dragonfly print, and rococo oval dressing-room mirrors – the sort wicked queens consulted.

The air was heavy with a sweet freesia scent, like some kind of sedative love gas. Michael Bublé crooned from hidden speakers, no doubt using subliminal hypnosis techniques.

Promise me your heart, give me your hand … and the long number on the front … now the expiry date, yeah baby.

There were racks of giant gowns, stiff and sticky-outy with net and bustles and laced corsets and an ‘aristocrat before the French Revolution’ attitude to making a bit of a show of yourself
.

Sleeping Beauty could have been called
Go Big Or Go Home
. It was one big Pavlovian memory-trigger to Disney fantasies, in a world where the magic wand tap was the swipe of the Visa card.

Brides-to-be disappeared into a changing room through a crystal beaded curtain, to reappear transformed. Anna tried to imagine uttering the words ‘something simple’ in here, and failed.

‘You must be my bride,’ Sue said to Aggy. ‘I can tell you’re going to suit everything. Some fresh-faced young women simply make natural brides. And a sample size ten; the world’s your oyster when it comes to choosing a style.’

Anna itched to say: ‘What happens to the old broiler chickens then? Do you not flog them stuff?’

Aggy near-gurgled at the flattery. Physically, Aggy was a more angular, shorter version of her sister, but what she lacked in height and width she made up for in noise.

Aggy worked in PR, specialising in event management, and she was superbly suited to the job. She’d been organising things to her liking since she was very small, and her wheedle power was second to none. You wouldn’t mistake Aggy for an academic: today she was in a puffa coat, high-heeled boots and carrying a Mulberry Alexa. She lived life in caps lock. GETTING MARRIED LOL!

There were two years between the sisters, and in some ways, a chasm of difference.

‘This must be the beautiful mother of the beautiful bride,’ Sue said, speaking to their mum as if she was serving her a soft-boiled egg in an assisted living facility. ‘And this is the gorgeous sister and chief bridesmaid.’

‘Judy’ and ‘Anna’, they said in turn, as Sue clasped their hands and gazed at them with expression set to ‘purest bliss’.

Aggy had booked an hour-long private appointment, and whilst Anna hated a stalking sales presence, Aggy revelled in the attention.

Anna shrugged her grey duffle coat off. Her family characterised her as a tomboy in contrast to her sister’s girly-girliness, but she felt it was a simplification. She liked
some
girly things. Romance – in art if not in life, so far – and dresses and shoes and fizzy wine.

She just didn’t like the full range of girly things that Aggy did. Such as nights spent on the sofa with
Vogue
, toe separators, Essie polish, spoon wedged in Ben & Jerry’s
Peanut Butter Me Up
, white iPhone welded to her ear on the gossip grapevine. Instead of Cinderella’s pumpkin coach, Aggy travelled in a Fiat 500 with rubber eyelashes on the headlamps and a bumper sticker revealing the worrying news for Saudi oil barons that it was
Powered by Fairy Dust
.

Anna was glad she liked Aggy’s intended. Aggy was capable of marrying lots of men Anna wouldn’t like, but luckily it was the affable, laddish Chris, a painter-decorator from Hornsey. He sincerely loved her sister and also knew when to say, ‘That’s henshit, Ags.’

They were tying the knot in the splendour of the Langham Hilton ballroom this Christmas.

Since the family dinner where Aggy arrived wearing a diamond solitaire the size of a glass brick and her sister and her mum did lots of squealing, Anna had felt the tiniest bit nervous.

The one thing Aggy couldn’t successfully manage was her own expectations. Anna was pretty sure the way the wedding was being organised was thus: Aggy choosing exactly what she fancied (which was usually at the top price point), and finding a way to pay for it afterwards.

Chris looked increasingly hangdog each time Anna saw him. Chris would’ve been happy with an Iceland party platters buffet at the Fox & Grapes, driving them to the venue in his company van, furry trapper’s hat sat on head, ear flaps flapping, singing along very loudly to Smooth Radio.

At this rate, Anna feared her sister might end up adjusting her priorities too late to save causing damage to sanity, relationship and credit rating.

‘Bubbles before we start!’ Sue said, pointing to a silver tray with three flutes and a bottle on the marble-topped coffee table, next to a pile of glossy bridal magazines and a bowl of water with floating lotus flower candles.

Aggy was only a mouthful through hers when Sue cried, ‘Let’s get you into the first dress!’

Aggy and Sue disappeared through the beaded curtain and Anna and her mother exchanged smiles and tapped their feet.