Pumpkin Pie (10 page)

But by the time we’d collected Petal and Pip and walked up the road to Giorgio’s, I’d changed my mind. I not only had a pizza, one of Dad’s specials, I also had garlic bread with cheese on top and a
big
helping of tiramisu. Food can be a real comfort when you’re feeling low.

Unfortunately, lovely though it is at the time, food isn’t what you would call a
permanent
source of comfort. It doesn’t really last very long. It’s all right while you’re actually eating it and thinking to yourself, “Yum yum!” and not caring about the rest of the world and what you might look like; but then after a bit it starts to go down, and you go down as well. Sometimes you are in such despair that you have to go and eat even more food to bring yourself back up again, which was why I went and raided the fridge the minute we got back home. But
that
didn’t help, because I just went straight up to my bedroom and burst into tears.

I forced myself to look in the mirror, the full-length one on the inside of my wardrobe door, and I just HATED what I saw. This great fat…
pumpkin.
All round and bloated. How could I ever think of being an actress? How could I ever take my clothes off in front of a camera? How could I dance? Who was going to pay money to go and watch a great fat thing flolloping about? Ugh! I wouldn’t!

As a rule when I am down I do my best to bounce back up, and usually I succeed. Maybe it is one of the advantages of being plump: you can bounce in a way that thin people can’t. Well, that is my theory.

This time it took me the whole of Sunday before I managed to bounce. I ate eggs, mushrooms-and-tomatoes
and
cereal
and
toast-and-marmalade for breakfast, a big helping of lasagne and an even bigger helping of chocolate pudding for lunch, buttered crumpets and lemon meringue pie for tea and pistachio ice cream for supper, after which I felt a bit better. I decided that I would just
show
that Deirdre Dobson!

I told Saffy at break on Monday, and Saffy said it was good that I was thinking positively. She said Deirdre Dobson deserved to be shown.

“Stinky old bag!”

I said she wasn’t an old bag
yet,
but I thought she probably would be in a few years’ time.

“Yes, and by then,” said Saffy, “you’ll be a big star! You’ll be on the way up, and she’ll be on the way down!”

I immediately had a mental picture of a ladder, with me – slim as a pin, and dressed to kill – zooming up to the top, and Deirdre Dobson – all saggy and baggy and fat – on the great slide to the bottom. I was heading for the bright lights:
she
was going to the trash heap. We would pass each other and I would smile, ever so graciously, and wave.

“I shan’t gloat,” I said to Saffy, “because that would be demeaning.”

“But you could remind her,” said Saffy. “You know, just casually. You could say,
Who’s the fat one now, then?”

We giggled.

“She might even beg to be in one of your movies,” said Saffy. “Would you let her?”

“I might,” I said, “if she humbled herself.”

“You could say,
Oh, yes, there is a part here for an old fat bag…
that’s how it would appear in the cast list,” said Saffy. “Old Fat Bag!”

We had a lot of fun, inventing parts that Deirdre Dobson could play in my movies. Old Fat Bag, Toothless Hag, Wizened Granny, Fat Woman in Bikini. I felt good. I felt strong. I would show her!

I ate a plate of chips and a doughnut at lunchtime to keep up the good feelings, and a packet of crisps during afternoon break. Dad had left ravioli and Black Forest gateau – one of my favourites! – for dinner, and I ate quite a lot of that because Petal only wanted salad and Pip won’t eat ravioli on account of the sauce being red, so he just had a tin of sardines, which he disgustingly ate straight out of the tin, then went rushing off to do his homework.

Round about nine o’clock I had a bit of a sinking feeling and nibbled some biscuits, but by the time I went to bed I was feeling really miserable. I do try very hard not to be oversensitive, like there’s this girl at school, Winona Pye (I know she can’t help her name) who just starts crying at the least little thing. I find that quite annoying. But it is horrid to be told that you are fat! Especially in front of all your classmates. It is really hurtful. I don’t care how much people go on about not being ashamed of your body, and saying how we can’t all look like fashion models, and that in any case why should we want to? They can go on all they like, it’s still horrid! ‘Cos the truth is that nobody, practically, I shouldn’t think, actually
enjoys
being fat.

That was the night I made my big decision: from now on I was going to stop behaving like the human equivalent of a dustbin. I was going to slim!

A
LL THIS HAPPENED
at the end of term. I made up my mind that when we went back after the break I would be slim as a pin. Well, perhaps not quite that slim. If I starved for an entire month I didn’t think, probably, that I could get to be
that
slim. Maybe as slim as a darning needle. But at least a size smaller than I was now! All my clothes would be loose, so that I would have to buy a whole load of new ones. That was OK. I would ask Dad if I could take my savings money out of the building society, and Dad, in his Daddish way, would say, “Oh, you don’t want to do that! You can go into Marshall’s and use the store card.”

I wouldn’t ask Mum because Mum was harder than Dad. She was more likely to say that I didn’t need new clothes, I’d just had new clothes. Which was true! We’d gone into Marshall’s just before Christmas. Only then I’d been
plump
and now I was going to be
thin.
Now I could enjoy the experience! I would choose all the tightest, brightest, funkiest clothes that I could find. I would wear crop tops! I would wear skirts that showed my knickers! I would wear everything that I’d never been able to wear before.

Well, that was the theory. Unfortunately, when you have spent twelve years of your life as a human dustbin, it is not very easy to break the habit. Being holiday time just made it worse! I didn’t even have Saffy to help me, because she was away for two weeks visiting her gran. I went out a few times with a girl from our class at school called Ro Sullivan, who lives just a couple of streets away, but we are not all that close and it wasn’t like being with Saffy. I couldn’t tell Ro about my struggles!

Mostly I just stayed home and practised voice exercises and dreamt about how it would be when I was thin. Petal was out every day, screaming round town with her friends, and Pip spent most of the time at his computer club or round at his friend Daniel’s, which meant that I was on my own with Dad. A fatal combination! For a would-be thin person, that is. Dad’s day is punctuated at regular intervals by what he calls “snackypoos”. Like every two hours he would cheerily sing out, “Pumpkin! Time for snackypoos!”

At first I tried to resist.

“I’m not hungry!” I would nobly cry (while in fact being
starving,
having done my best not to eat any breakfast).

Alternatively, “I’m too busy!” “I’m working!” “I haven’t got time!”

But Dad is not someone who will take no for an answer. Not where food is concerned. He’d knock on my bedroom door and when I opened it he’d be there, beaming, with a plate of macaroons that he’d just made, or a wodge of gorgeous sticky chocolate cake. I can’t resist chocolate cake! Even more, I can’t resist it when I know he’s done it specially for me.

“Done it specially for you! Special treatie. Don’t let me down!”

Before I knew it, we’d be cosily perched on the bed together, eating yummy chocolate cake. Two hours later it would be lunchtime. Then another snackypoo. Then teatime at about half-past three, then dinner at five, before Dad left for work. Maybe even supper if I was still awake when he came back. We were fellow foodies! It was Us against Them. (Mum and Petal and Pip.) How could I disappoint him? If I went over to the other side, it would leave Dad on his own! How many times had he said to me “It’s me and you, Pumpkin! Got to keep the flag flying.”

Not that I can blame it all on Dad. I mean, he was just as used to me being a human waste disposal unit as I was. He wasn’t to know that I’d become sickened by the sight of my own body. I did sort of try, in a half-hearted way, to tell him. One evening when Petal was out smooching with her latest boyfriend and Pip was round at Daniel’s, and Dad and me were tucking into spaghetti bolognese together, I was overcome by this sudden burst of willpower and pushed my plate away from me. Dad was immediately concerned.

“What’s the matter? Aren’t you feeling well?”

He knew it wasn’t his cooking. So it had to be me! I muttered that I was getting fat. Dad said, “Fat? Rubbish! Well-covered.”

I said, “But I don’t want to be well-covered!”

“Now, Pumpkin, don’t be like that,” said Dad. “You’ll have me worried. We don’t want any of that anorexic nonsense!”

I said, “It’s not nonsense. This stuff is
fattening.”

“It’s good for you,” said Dad.

“It’s not good to be fat,” I said.

“You are
not fat,”
said Dad. “You’re my little plump Pumpkin and just the way you ought to be. You take after your dad, there’s nothing you can do about it. Now eat your spaghetti and don’t upset me!”

I didn’t have to buy any new clothes. I didn’t even have to take in any waistbands. I still couldn’t roll them over, like Petal. I didn’t dare step on the scales. By the time I went back to drama classes I was even plumper than I’d been before. I looked at all those cool thin people that first Friday of the new term and I hated myself worse than ever. I hated myself so much that I almost couldn’t bear to change into my leotard and tights ready for our work-out session. I didn’t want to be seen! I had a spare tyre, I wobbled when I walked. I felt like running away and hiding!

I really thought that I would have to tell Saffy I was going to give up. I would tell her that I wasn’t going to come to classes any more. I would say that I was bored or that I wanted to do something else. Something such as… cooking. At cookery classes there would surely be other fatties; I wouldn’t feel so grotesque.