Pumpkin Pie (16 page)

“I thought it looked like you,” said Twinkle.

“Oh, thank you very much!” I said.

“So is that when you started slimming?” said Connie.

“I didn’t!” I said. “It just happened!”

Saffy made this noise in the back of her throat. There was a pause.

“Well, anyway,” said Portia, “you look fab in that gear!”

“If you could just manage to lose another few kilos,” said Mitch, “you’d almost l—”

“Don’t!”
That was Saffy, suddenly coming to life. “Just stop encouraging her! She’s lost as much as she needs to.”

I wondered what Saffy’s problem was. Could she be jealous? She’d always been the thin one! I’d been the fat one. Maybe she didn’t like me being thin? How utterly pathetic!

I decided yet again that I would take no notice of Saffy. We were having a party to celebrate the end of term – and the end of filming – and I was going to enjoy myself! I went marching out of the changing room with Connnie and Portia, leaving Saffy on her own. I didn’t think I liked her any more. She was jealous and mean and spiteful! She was trying to ruin my little moment of success. Just because she had gone and forgotten her lines!

The party was totally brilliant, in spite of Saffy skulking around like a big black cloud. I refused to let her spoil things. She was being mean as could be, and I wondered why I’d ever become friends with her.

As soon as we’d changed we all sat down to watch the video. I sat in the middle of the front row, next to Gareth! Saffy sat way back, where in my opinion she belonged. After all, she was little more than a glorified extra. She’d never bothered to develop her part. She’d never become a real character; just someone who occasionally spoke in a (very bad) American accent, saying things which she fondly believed to be American, such as “Gee” and “Shucks” and “Hot damn!” If she hadn’t turned up, nobody would have missed her. Whereas if I hadn’t turned up, we wouldn’t have had a proper ending. So I deserved to sit in front, in the middle, next to gorgeous Gareth. It was like I’d earned the right. I wasn’t a nobody any more. I was SOMEONE!

The video lasted three-quarters of an hour. The biggest parts were played by Zoë and Twinkle, and Mark and Gareth, but I was the next biggest! If it hadn’t been for the cast being listed in alphabetical order, I would definitely have been number 5. It quite annoyed me that simply because of her surname beginning with B, Saffy was number 2. She didn’t deserve it!

When we got to the transformation scene I held my breath thinking, “Please don’t let me look fat!”

Well! I didn’t look
too
fat. Some people might have said I didn’t look fat at all, but once you start summing you set these very high standards for yourself and know that you can’t stop until you have shed every single gram of excess weight. I still had a long way to go. But maybe not everyone agreed with me because guess what? They all applauded!

It was Gareth who started it. When I threw off my old lady raincoat he cried, “Way to go!” and burst into loud clapping, and everyone joined in. Except, probably, Saffy. I bet
she
didn’t. I bet she just sat there, all sour and scowling. But who cared about her?

For the party we had loads of nibbles. The two students from the art college stayed on and acted as DJs, and we all danced, including Mrs Ambrose. Even though she was old she could still move! It made me realise that when she was young she must have been really good. It made me think about being old, and how horrid it must be; but I only thought about it for a few seconds as Gareth asked me to dance. He danced with me and with Zoë, but not with anyone else. I didn’t dance with anyone else, either. It was Gareth or nobody! I knew that Ben would have liked to dance with me. I could see him, out of the corner of my eye, hovering and quivering, but I kept pretending not to notice. If he wanted someone to dance with, he could dance with Saffy. Not me!

It was really difficult to avoid picking at the nibbles as everyone kept getting into little huddles round the table and people would have noticed if I hadn’t eaten anything. Plus I didn’t want to give that spiteful Saffy any chance to start up. So I picked and nibbled along with everyone else, thinking to myself that I would do my usual thing. Stick my fingers down my throat before I went to bed. I couldn’t afford to start putting on weight again!

Mum came at eight o’clock to pick me up.

“How did it go?” she said. “Where’s Saffy?”

We usually gave Saffy a lift, because although she lives in the same road it is quite a long walk.

“Where is she?” said Mum. “Isn’t she coming with us?”

“I think she’s going with someone else,” I said.

“Oh. Well! All right.” Mum sounded a bit surprised. She is used to me and Saffy going round like we are stuck together with Super Glue. “You’re sure you don’t want to wait for her?”

“No,” I said. “Let’s go! Oh, I must just say goodbye to Gareth.”

He was standing with Zoë on the front steps. I sidled over and said, “Byee!” Gareth said, “Bye, Jen,” and flapped a hand. Zoë looked at me as if I were dog dirt. She said, “See ya, Granny!” Jealous cow. She was as bad as Saffy.

As always on a Saturday, me and Mum, and Pip and Petal, went up to Giorgio’s for dinner. I said that I had already eaten hugely at the party, but then Dad came out with a big plate of something creamy and gluggy that he had just invented.

“Pumpkin Pavlova!”

He said that he had made it specially for me, and he sat himself down at the table and insisted that I try some.

“Just a mouthful!”

Dad’s mouthfuls are like elephant bites. Eeeenormous!

“Come on,” he said. “Open up!”

Everyone in the restaurant was looking, and laughing, and I just didn’t know how I could get out of it. I couldn’t create a scene in the restaurant! Plus Dad had made it specially. So I reluctantly opened my mouth and let him spoon in the lovely disgusting gooey concoction, and oh, it was so scrummy! Before I knew it I’d let him feed me the whole plateful. Well, Mum tried a bit, but Petal and Pip turned their noses up and Dad knew better than to push them. I was the foodie!

The minute I’d eaten it, the very
minute
I’d eaten it, I felt myself balloon. I actually felt myself getting fat. I could have wept! How could I be so lacking in self-control? So
stupid?
All my hard work, ruined, in one mad moment of gluttony. I wanted to go running off to the loo right there and then, and stick my fingers down my throat, but it is too horrid in Giorgio’s loo. I mean, it is quite clean – I
think.
But it is tiny and dark, like a cell. The floor is concrete and the walls are whitewashed, and the thought of kneeling down with my head in a toilet bowl where strangers had done things – ugh! I couldn’t. I would have to wait, in my fatness, until I got home.

But then we stayed late at the restaurant because some people came in that Mum knew and they sat down at the table next to us and Mum started talking, and then Giorgio came over and
he
started talking, and by the time we arrived home I was just so tired!

Once I could have stayed up all night, practically, but these days I was almost never awake when Dad got back from work. I even, sometimes, felt myself falling asleep at school. And not just in maths classes! I’d even nodded off in the middle of English, while we were reading
Jane Eyre.
There are those who might say that
Jane Eyre
is quite a boring book, being so long and so old-fashioned, but I don’t think so. I was enjoying it! I hadn’t wanted to go to sleep; it was just this thing that happened. It kept happening. It happened that night, when we got back from Giorgio’s.

I thought, I’ll just get undressed and lie down for a bit, and wait till Mum’s watching telly, then I would go to the loo and offload all the foul fattening food that I had shovelled into myself. Instead, I fell asleep! When I woke up next morning, it was too late. The foul fattening food had all been digested and gone into my system. I heaved and heaved, but nothing came. And then Petal banged on the door and yelled, “What are you doing in there? I’m bursting!” and I had to give up.

I managed not to eat any breakfast, because Mum and Dad were having their Sunday morning lie-in, and Petal was getting ready to go somewhere, and I thought that Pip wouldn’t notice if I shrank to a shadow. He probably wouldn’t notice if we all shrank to shadows. The only thing he would notice would be if his computer blew up.

After not eating breakfast I scooted upstairs to the bathroom to weigh myself.
Disaster! Of cosmic proportions.
I had put on half a kilo! It depressed me so much I nearly went straight back downstairs to raid the fridge. I just managed to stop myself in time. I made this vow that I would starve for the whole of the rest of the week. I had to be strong-minded!

It is actually very boring, starving yourself. It is all right while you are obsessed, as every meal you don’t eat is like a big victory. You feel all the fat dropping off and it gives you a tremendous sense of achievement. But you only need one little setback, like eating nibbles at the party, all those crisps and sausage rolls, and then gorging on Dad’s new creation, and instead of being obsessed and triumphant you are simply struggling, every minute of the day, to resist the temptation of FOOD. All the joy goes out of life. Instead of looking forward (like normal people) to meal times and wondering what goodies you will eat, or gloating (like obsessive dieting people) over all the goodies you are
not
going to eat, you are just left with this grey boredom and mental torment. It is no fun at all. It is miserable!

To make matters worse, Saffy and me didn’t seem to be on speaking terms. It was the last week of term, so school was quite relaxed. Normally, we would have enjoyed ourselves, but we were just too busy trying never to be in the same space. If Saffy sat at the back of the class, I would sit at the front. If she went out at breaktime, I would stay in. All week long we managed to avoid each other, but then on Friday we had this terrific bust-up. We were going out through the school gates.

I was on my own: Saffy was on her own. We had to walk up the same bit of road to the same bus stop and catch the same bus. Before I could stop myself I had blurted out, “Look, what exactly is your problem?”

Saffy tossed her head and said, “I don’t have any problem! You’re the one with the problem. Going round starving yourself!”

“I happen to be on a
diet,”
I said.

“Call that a diet?” said Saffy. “More like a death wish!”

I told her that she was obviously jealous, because of me being one of the stars of
Sob Story
and her going and forgetting her lines. Not that I actually said the word “star”; that would have been too vulgar. Too like Zoë. I think what I probably said was “one of the leads”. I can’t be sure, because at the time I was just so monstrously angry. Saffy was angry, too. She told me that I had become totally self-obsessed.

“All you ever think about is
you.”
And then she said that I had made a complete idiot of myself at the party on Saturday. “Smooching up to Gareth like that! Going all goo-goo eyed. It was pathetic!”

I said, “I knew you were jealous!”