weak, possibly a trifle pointless, just for a while. I could let somebody else make the decisions, just for once. I also decide to ignore the fact that, traditionally, arm’s length has always seemed like the perfect length to me. It’s what I’m used to, at least.
As a child, while my sister and the other girls on my street were playing kiss chase with the boys down the road, I was searching my parents’ newspapers and scouring pre-watershed television for a fat role model: a woman who was big and really beautiful. But I grew up in the eighties, when aerobics grabbed the attention of the Western world, and Olivia Newton-John sang about getting physical, and leg warmers even became fashionable outside the swing doors of the local gym. My favourite film as a child was Grease, and I would spring out of bed early on Saturday mornings and watch it on our video player before my parents woke up. ‘You’re the One that I Want’ was their weekend alarm clock for many years. I must have seen it hundreds of times, maybe even thousands, and I can still recite every character’s dialogue when it comes on at Christmas, or over Easter weekend. At the end of Grease Sandy, in hooker mode to snag her man, wore black satin trousers that were so tight they had to sew her into them.
Try as I might, I couldn’t find my fat femme fatale. In magazines or on TV fat women existed only as the big old butt of the joke, and in films fat women never made the romantic lead. But instead of just biting the bullet instead of the cake and going on a diet, I decided to be my own role model, to be big and beautiful myself. Then maybe as I grew older, little fat girls might pass me in the street and know that everything might turn out OK in the end, in the same way that I desperately scoured streets with my eight-year-old eyes to find a reason to be hopeful, even then.
But I didn’t even manage to convince myself. I didn’t think that you could be both big and beautiful in anything other than an advertising slogan, and yet I tried to live it, clung to it as a philosophy that justified my choice not to diet. As I got older, as long as I’d take in front of the mirror meticulously applying make-up each morning, concentrating solely on the face and hair and never looking down at the body beneath, I knew the body was there, bulging and bruised, and I hated it. I just wouldn’t admit it to myself.
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,