The Perfect 10. Louise Kean
‘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