Pumpkin Pie (12 page)

That was why I’d been chosen. Because I was
fat.
And when the book was published and was in the shops everyone, but everyone, would be rushing out to buy it, and people like my grans would be feeling just
so
sorry for me, poor little Jenny! What a horrid thing to do to her! Whereas people like Zoë and Twink and Dani Morris would be laughing themselves silly.

I didn’t finish reading the book. I couldn’t bear to. Saffy told me ages later that in fact Ellen turned out to be a heroine, but it still didn’t stop her being
fat.
I didn’t want to know! I got half way through and then hid the hateful thing at the back of a cupboard. If Mum or Dad asked me about it, I would say I’d lent it to someone and they’d lost it. I didn’t want them reading it! I didn’t want anyone reading it.

You might think that at this point, being such a pathetic sort of person, I would have instantly fallen into another depression and rushed downstairs to fetch myself a snackypoo. But I didn’t! I am not always pathetic. Sometimes I bounce. I get defiant. I think to myself that I will show them!

That is what I thought that evening in my bedroom. I made a vow: by the end of term, when we filmed
Sob Story
and I did my transformation scene, I was no longer going to be a fat girl. I was going to be a thin girl!

This time,
I meant it.

T
HIS IS WHEN
I became obsessed. It is very easy to become obsessed. It is a question of focusing all your energies on just one thing and sticking to it. The thing that I was focusing on was the size of my body. Big fat bloated pumpkin! The fat was going to
go.

I didn’t tell anyone; not even Saffy. It was a matter of pride. I didn’t want people knowing how much I cared. It was too pathetic! When I got thin, I wanted them to think it was just something that had happened quite naturally, all on its own, without any help from me.

“Jen!” they would go. “You’ve lost weight!”

And I would go, “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

Like just so-o-o cool. I would be able to be cool once I was thin. It’s difficult to be cool when you’re fat. It’s difficult to be
anything
when you’re fat. You can’t wear groovy gear. You can’t ever look good. You just go round hating yourself and trying not to catch sight of your reflection in shop windows. It does terrible things to your confidence. Well, you just don’t really have any.

But that was all going to change! I started counting calories. I read the information on the backs of packets.

Per pie… 350 calories.

BAD.

Per half can… 210 calories.

BAD.

Per slice… 400 calories.

Bad, bad, VERY BAD!

I soon discovered that there was almost nothing in the house that I could safely consume. I looked up pizza and pasta and chocolate fudge cake in a book that I bought called
Calorie Counter.
They were all
bad.
Chocolate fudge cake was deadly! In fact, most of my favourite foods fell into the same category.

B.A.D.

FATTENING!

All the nicest foods are. It is a sad fact of life.

So far as I could, I simply stopped eating. I weighed myself on the bathroom scales every morning when I got up and every night before I went to bed. It became a sort of ritual. My life revolved around the bathroom scales! If I found that I’d put on even so much as. 1 of a kilo, it nagged at me all day, it kept me awake all night. Even if I just stayed the same, it threw me into total despair. Usually, for some weird reason, I weighed less in the morning than I did in the evening. I couldn’t understand that, when all I’d done all night was sleep. How could you lose weight just sleeping? I thought that if I could stay in bed for a whole month without eating I would be thin as a thread without any trouble at all! But even Mum would notice if I took to my bed. She didn’t notice me not eating because she either wasn’t there or was in too much of a rush.

Dad was my really
big
problem. Pip and Petal were like Mum, too bound up in their own affairs. Just as my life revolved round the bathroom scales, Pip’s revolved round homework and his computer, Petal’s revolved round boyfriends. They wouldn’t notice if I lived on nothing but air and water.

But Dad would! Dad has eyes like a hawk where food is concerned. So what I had to do, I had to devise strategies. Being on a really determined slimming spree can make you very cunning. I would let Dad pile my plate as usual, then suddenly discover, at breakfast for example, that I was wearing the wrong shoes, or the wrong top, and go racing upstairs to change –
carrying my plate with me.
I would then dump the whole lot down the loo.

Or another strategy I had, I would pick and poke at my food, pretending to be eating it, then as soon as Dad left the kitchen I would dive across to the sink and scrape everything into the rubbish bin – being careful to cover it up with tea leaves or orange peel or whatever happened to be in the rubbish bin to start with. I told you I was cunning!

Once or twice, when I couldn’t think of an excuse for going upstairs and Dad didn’t leave the kitchen, I actually picked up my plate and wandered out into the garden with it. There’s lots of porridge and pizza and ravioli hidden behind the bushes in our garden.

I did sometimes think of all those starving people around the globe and feel a twinge of guilt, but I comforted myself with the thought that if I wasn’t chucking the stuff behind the rose bushes or dumping it down the loo, I would be eating it myself, so it still wouldn’t get to the people who needed it. Such – alas! – is the way of the world. Too much food in one place, and not enough in another. You would think by now we could have arranged things a bit better. I, for instance, would have been only too happy to save up a week’s supply and take it along to a central collecting point for redistribution. Far better than throwing it behind the rose bushes.

Fortunately, from my point of view, neither Mum nor Dad is into gardening, so they never came across the little festering piles of food. Probably the foxes mopped it up. Or the hedgehogs, or the squirrels. Or even next door’s cat. But that was OK. If the starving people couldn’t have it, I’d rather it went to the animals.

Weekends were the worst time. At weekends we always went up to Giorgio’s and I couldn’t very well keep rushing off to the loo with platefuls of pasta in the middle of a crowded restaurant. I thought even Mum might notice if I did that. One time when the weather was warm we sat at a table outside, on the pavement, and I toyed with the idea of upending my plate into a potted something-or-other, some kind of leafy thing, that stood nearby, but at the last minute I chickened out.

All I could do was try ordering the least fattening things I could find, but most of the stuff on Giorgio’s menu is smothered in oil or butter or rich creamy sauce –
bad, bad, TRIPLE bad! –
and even if I just asked for soup and a sorbet the waiter would come beaming up with a dish of tiramisu or cheesecake, “with the chef’s compliments”. Mum would say, “Go on! Eat it. You’ve hardly touched a thing,” and I knew if I sent it back Dad himself would come out and demand in hurt tones to know what was wrong. It was no use offering it to Mum because she would already have ordered her favourite, which was apple pie and cream, and it goes without saying that Petal wouldn’t help me out.

“Ugh! I don’t want it,” she’d say, giving one of her little shudders.

So then I’d try Pip, but he’d just push it right back at me like it was something repulsive. Cold sick, or nose droppings. If Pip had a pudding it was always ice cream.
Green
ice cream. He says that white tastes like cardboard, and pink, of course, is too close to red. Likewise chocolate. I sometimes wonder if Pip is quite normal, but maybe geniuses aren’t.

Mostly, at Giorgio’s, I had to eat what I had always eaten, for fear of drawing attention to myself. I didn’t want Mum to suss what was going on. I knew she would immediately think “Anorexia!” because that is what they always think. It is the modern bogey word for mums.

When we got back from Giorgio’s I would always feel very ill and bloated. It was truly disgusting, eating so much! I knew I had to offload it, so I would wait until Mum was relaxing in front of the television then I would shut myself in the loo and stick my fingers down my throat and bring everything up. Not very nice, but it had to be done. In any case, I remembered reading somewhere how Princess Di had done the same thing. If she could do it, so could I! It had obviously worked for her, she had always looked so beautiful. I thought that I would give anything to look like Princess Di!

As well as jumping on and off the scales twice a day, I also took to measuring myself, specially round my waist and hips. I measured once when I got up,
before
I weighed myself; and once when I went to bed,
after
I’d weighed myself. This is what you do when you get obsessed. If I could have measured and weighed during the day as well, I would have done! I did at weekends. At weekends I practically lived on the scales.

At school I didn’t really eat at all; it was easier there. I still had to go into the dining hall, but nobody checked what you had on your tray. I would just take a bit of salad and a yoghurt, and sit there nibbling at it while Saffy, as usual, tucked into chips and doughnuts and various other assorted goodies.
Baddies!
Saffy could eat an elephant and still look like a stick insect. Life is just not fair.

But then, whoever said it was? Certainly not me!

One lunchtime, when I was cutting up a lettuce leaf, Saffy said,
“Jen!
You’re not
slimming,
are you?”

The way she said it, you’d have thought I was planning to rob a bank or mug a little kid for his mobile phone. I felt my face surge into the red zone. Slimming! Why did it sound so shameful? I might have known that Saffy would notice. We always notice things about each other. It’s what comes of being so close.

“Are
you?” she said. All grim and accusing.

I said, “Yes, I am, as a matter of fact.”

“But why?” said Saffy.

Did she really need to ask? I would have thought it was obvious.

“I’m fat,” I said. We were sitting by ourselves at the far end of a table so nobody could hear us. I wouldn’t have said it otherwise. I would have been too ashamed.

“Jenny, are you mad?” shrieked Saffy.

Everyone turned to look, and I went, “Shh!”

“Well, but really,” she hissed, “we’ve already been through this! You are
not fat!”

“Look,” I said, “it’s my body. I ought to know whether it’s fat or not.”

“You’re just being silly and oversensitive,” said Saffy.

I muttered, “You’d be silly and oversensitive if you looked like me.”

“I wouldn’t mind looking like you,” said Saffy.

I said, “Oh, no?”

“No! If you want to know the truth, I’d give anything to have hair like yours.”

It is true that my hair is quite thick, while Saffy’s is rather straggly. And her nose is decidedly pointy, and she is definitely not pretty. But she is
thin.