The Perfect 10 (2 page)

I brush the crumbs of my Skinny Blueberry Muffin from my running trousers and note childish screams and the noisy padding of developing feet running somewhere behind me. I turn to face the commotion: three children, one barely out of nappies, one roughly three years old with a shock of red hair completely dissimilar to his brothers, one older, maybe six, and precocious. Their mother is mousy but elegant, tall and exhausted, and has wild tired eyes that dart from the pavement to the shop to the road, her long slim fingers desperately hanging on to little hands that don’t want to be held.

I turn back to my coffee and take an apprehensive gulp, but this time it doesn’t burn my tongue. I sit under the umbrella that shields me from the early Sunday morning sun, and try to regain some semblance of peace. I hear chairs being pushed back and open one eye to see the Daddy and his ignorance-is-bliss girlfriend hastily moving off down the road, away from the fresh childish din. I daydream that I might spring to my feet and shout, ‘Don’t be a fool, Wide Hips Foundation Line! He can’t be trusted!’ But of course I don’t. I don’t draw attention to myself like that.

It’s becoming harder, being seen. I notice people looking, men looking, and although these should be tiny triumphs, glances that spell sexual desire from the opposite sex, they unnerve me. I don’t want men looking at me uninvited, thinking things about me that I can’t control. I don’t want them picturing me late at night with one hand on the remote and the other in their pants, the way that men do with women they’ve seen during the day. And yet here I am drinking my low-calorie drink, about to go to the gym, to burn and bruise off this week’s two pounds of fat, on a quest ultimately to prove to the man that didn’t want me that he was wrong, that he should have had some imagination, should have guessed what I could be.

It is frightening to go unnoticed for so long and then suddenly pop into everybody’s sight with a magician’s puff of smoke and screaming ‘Ta-da!’. Some women have dealt with it all of their lives and either enjoy it or ignore it or have at least learnt to live with it. I was invisible before, which is ironic considering I took up twice the space. Nothing suddenly gets simple, no matter what the WeightWatchers Slimmer of the Year might tell the
Sunday Mirror
. When you win a bit, you always lose a bit too.

The three brothers grim descend on to the table next to me, landing themselves on metal chairs that scrape the pavement, squabbling. The red-haired horror shrieks as his older brother snatches away the piece of wood he has been playing with, and begins banging it on his legs and the table. And this is no musical child prodigy; I can’t even make out a rhythm, never mind a tune.

‘Charlie, give it back to Dougal,’ their tall and exhausted mother demands.

I smirk at the name Dougal, although I don’t know why. You hear much worse these days. I can’t think of a soap star called Dougal at least. Strangers sometimes smirk at my name when they hear it for the first time, but I am proud of it. I think that anybody who fails to see something positive in Sunny must have their own issues to deal with.

‘Sit there and be quiet. No, actually, come with me.’

All the children shriek in unison, and the youngest tugs at his mother’s hand to drag her into Starbucks. I pray she will usher them inside, but she accosts a stray waitress who has, in a moment of craziness, decided to come and clean tables. The mother asks for three fruit juices and a Skinny Mocha, and tries to settle the boys at the table again. I stare off into the distance until the oldest brother begins to run round and round my table, and little shrieking Dougal follows his lead. Short stumpy slightly unsure legs make a
dash for a tree ten yards away. I glance over my shoulder to see what their mother is doing while they run amok – she is negotiating a straw into the youngest one’s mouth while furtively glancing towards her other two sons. I don’t know what I expect parents to do with their children, I just don’t think they should be allowed to shriek. If I ever have children of my own they will be impeccably behaved in public. They will have character, and be witty and charming, but they will not bang things, and they will not scream. They will only be allowed to do those things at home.

‘Dougal, come back here! Charlie, for God’s sake put it away!’ Their mother’s voice raises at her eldest son, who has decided to urinate up against the tree. Both children momentarily freeze, and Charlie pops his little penis back into his shorts. They start running round my table again – children burn off so many calories without even realising it. The older boy, Charlie, nudges my chair every time he passes, and I hastily put my coffee cup back down on the table rather than risk a stain on my white Lycra vest top with built-in cooling something or other. I check my watch – the gym will be open in twenty minutes. It is an 8 a.m. start on a Sunday, as if God won’t allow exercise before morning has truly broken on his day. Only ten more minutes of the shrieking before I can go.

Even this early, even for a Sunday, the road is peculiarly quiet. It’s getting late in the year for the tourists, despite the heat. Because of it nobody managed a good night’s sleep last night. Maybe now they are tossing and turning and kicking off sheets, trying to rescue another hour’s rest.

Charlie stops running, and stands in front of me, staring.

‘Yes?’ I ask him flatly, unimpressed.

‘Who is going to look after your dog when you die?’ He motions his little head towards an old sleeping Labrador chained to a railing five feet in front of me.

‘It’s not my dog,’ I say, and Charlie shakes his head at me and ‘tut’s.

I ‘tut’ back. Charlie raises his six-year-old eyes at me and starts running towards the tree again.

I guess the dog belongs to either an old man, practically knocking on heaven’s door at the Garden Café a little further down the street, or an elderly lady at one of the other Starbucks tables, resting from the heat. The weathermen have predicted that today will be one of the hottest days of the year, despite it being 27 September, and yet she wears a heavy charcoal-grey overcoat that looks as if it was standard issue in 1940, and a claret woolly hat with a fraying bobble. I look away quickly, gulping back tears. Her vulnerability is almost poetic. If she tried to sell me a poppy I’d be hysterical. Of course, now, as she wipes some lazy dribble from the side of her eighty-year-old collapsing mouth with a handkerchief, I am repulsed. It’s old people with all their facilities intact that I appreciate the most.

The kids are still running and screaming, and I thank merciful God that I have never had enough sex to get pregnant. Obesity was a great contraceptive at least.

A man walks past my table. He is average, forty-ish. I see his back, his jacket, his jogging bottoms, a balding head covered by thinning hair that is too long.

Before us all, an audience paying little attention, he walks calmly towards the tree ten yards in front of our tables, and with one jerky movement scoops up Dougal, and carries on walking south, away from us. I don’t see his face. Admittedly I am appreciative of the drop in noise levels, but I am also confused, and I straighten my back, turning to face his mother, to somehow check that this is OK, that he must be the child’s father, or uncle, or a family friend. Because things like this just don’t happen right in front of you. She isn’t
looking up, but instead tries to wipe fruit juice from the edges of her youngest son’s mouth.

I say, ‘Excuse me,’ nervously but loudly, and she glances at me and then automatically in the direction of her elder sons. Her naturally concerned expression falls, as if all the muscles have just been sucked out of her face by a Dyson, and her eyes widen. She pushes herself to her feet as she sees Dougal’s red hair over the shoulder of the man quickly walking away. Her mouth opens and a scream leaps out as if it’s been waiting in her throat for the last ten years.

She darts forward two paces, but she hasn’t let go of her toddler’s arm and he screams. I jump up. She tries to move forwards, hoisting her youngest child in the air by his little arm as he cries out in pain, and Charlie, who has resumed urinating against the tree, turns around in confusion as he hears his mother’s cry.

‘He’s got my child! He’s got my child!’

I can’t quite believe this is happening, but I kick back my chair and start to run.

Ahead of me I can see the Stranger has his hand clamped over Dougal’s mouth, and as they turn the corner at the end of the street he breaks into a jog. They were always called Strangers when I was a child, and they were a constant threat. There were washed-out adverts tinted a dirty orange or a grubby yellow, warning us not to get into their brown Datsuns, or go and look at their puppies, or accept their sweets. Now they have longer medical-sounding names that I’m sure children don’t understand. The idea of a Stranger still scares me, and I am nearly thirty. These new words just can’t put the same fear of God into a child.

My trainers bounce off the pavement and the sudden rush of adrenalin through my muscles is sickening. My calves and thighs expand and contract as I round the corner and see the Stranger holding a struggling Dougal, but he is sprinting
now towards the alleyway across the road. I have only been down that alleyway once and it scared the hell out of me: I kept expecting to see a corpse. It is full of gates to gardens and nooks and hiding places.

Feeling sick, I run faster. The man is by the road and he almost runs into a car, dodging it only at the last moment, but he isn’t as fast as I am. I push myself on, not aware of my breathing, not looking at anything but Dougal’s shock of ginger hair, which was so unfortunate five minutes ago, but is now vital. I can run five kilometres in twenty-seven minutes now. This time last year I couldn’t run to the bus stop without throwing up. Thankfully for me, for Dougal, I’ve streamlined since then. Far behind me, back by the Garden Café, I can hear his mother screaming his name, but I just run.

I hear the Stranger breathing now, wheezing and coughing hard, ten feet in front of me, making for the alleyway. My strides are long and elegant, I run on my toes, my arms pumping at my sides, my chest open, and I feel sick as my biceps and quadriceps push me on. There are no rolls of flab bouncing or ripping at my stomach now.

Three feet from the entrance to the alleyway I am almost within touching distance of the Stranger but he stops sharply and spins around to face me: he looks scared and sick as well. I see a bead of sweat streak down the centre of his nose. I slam on my own brakes as he removes the hand that is covering Dougal’s mouth, and swings it, arm outstretched, clenched fist towards my face. Uncorked, Dougal starts to scream, his face as red as his hair, his eyes wide and watery and desperate. We are all scared. I try to lurch out of the way, but the man’s punch strikes the side of my head. I stumble like a speeding car hitting a boulder in the road. I have never been punched before. I am on the pavement and cry out at an awful evil feeling that shoots behind my eyes,
and I am momentarily blinded. I blink back tears, but my calves and my thighs spring me up off the floor.

I turn into the alley twenty steps behind the Stranger, who has shifted Dougal and jammed his tiny head into his shoulder to muffle his screams.

Overgrown bushes swipe at my face as I run along the dirt track alley. All of our actions seem loud, louder than usual. Every twig that snaps, my breathing, the Stranger’s breathing, the pounding of our feet hitting the dirt track. He keeps running, but he’s slowing down and tripping, and I’m getting faster, but wincing at the aching knife of pain that has been forced through my temples where his dirty hand smashed at my forehead. I open my mouth to shout at him to stop, but a feeling of dread silences me, a need not to call attention to the fact that I am a woman, chasing a man down a lonely passage.

The alley is three hundred metres long and narrow like a bicycle lane. The bushes are overgrown and make it dark, but the morning sun is so hot and bright that I can see him ahead of me. He hasn’t ducked out of sight into any openings in the shrubs, and he can hear me closing in on him in my trainers and running trousers, as if I got up this morning and chose my best ‘chasing a child snatcher’ outfit. Sweat is pouring off us all and I focus on the damp patches spreading across the back of his dirty beige polyester jacket. He is wearing his best ‘child snatcher’ outfit himself. The air is filled with flies, and smells rotten, and even though it cannot possibly be this man who smells so bad, I can’t help but believe that it is.

I am almost at his side, and I throw a hopeful arm out for Dougal as I launch myself into the Stranger’s back, terrified.

We fall messily.

Dougal is on to all fours in front of us, scraping his little
hands and knees on dirt and leaves. The Stranger slams face-first into the wall and I stumble down behind him, onto him, and the dirt. Instantly we are both scrambling to get up. I hear him mutter ‘shit’ as he crawls forward to get to his feet, and I am surprised that he speaks English. He looks English, but still I am shocked.

I can hear my heart and my head pounding, and another man’s voice maybe fifty feet behind us, shouting, but I can’t tell what. The Stranger lurches to his feet, as I am on all fours, and I scream, ‘Dougal, get behind me!’

The terrified mop of red hair and tears and bloody knees, and a bruised face with the Stranger’s fingerprints embedded in his cheeks, runs as fast as his ridiculous small legs will allow, behind me, before the Stranger is fully upright.

I can hear the cries of a man getting closer behind us, shouting, ‘You sick bastard, you sick bastard …’ and the pounding of his feet on the dirt. I look up and notice that the Stranger’s glasses have smashed, and his face, an average forty-five-year-old face, is red and stained with dirt and sweat. He looks down at me, with either confusion or fear or disgust, and then his eyes dart upwards and behind me at the menacing sound of larger feet than mine running towards us all, and I can clearly hear the chasing man’s voice now, shouting, ‘You sick fuck! You sick bastard!’