The Perfect 10. Louise Kean
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