Читать книгу The Perfect 10 - Louise Kean - Страница 8

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.