are. ‘Well, the things which motivate us can change,’ he said, ‘especially when we are so young.’
‘Right,’ Mum said, like she still didn’t really get it.
‘Let’s go through,’ Dr Bhatt said, smiling at Mum and tapping his finger on the paper. ‘So . . .’
‘Number one,’ I read out, ‘having friends.’
‘OK,’ Dr Bhatt said, ‘well, we all like to have friends and certainly that isn’t all about how we are looking. But do you still feel that making new friends would be easier if you were slimmer?’
I looked at him. ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘OK then!’ he said, beaming as if just saying it solved everything. ‘But are you thinking about making new friends when you get the urge to eat outside of your regular mealtimes?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘And that is the problem,’ he said.
We went through the rest of the list like that and then he asked me if there were any new motivators I’d thought of that I’d like to add to it, and like always I told him I’d forgotten to think of any and he told Mum to remind me to try.
Then he went over my diet plan, which was awkward because with Mum there I had to keep lying about not eating any sugary foods like biscuits and chocolate. He knew I was lying too, but he didn’t say anything. He just looked down at his hands. Then, without getting up, he walked his chair round the desk, wheeling it across the shiny floor, and when he got to me, he leant forward, his elbows on his knees, and licked his lips again. ‘If you stick to the plan,’ he said, his Indian accent even stronger up close, ‘you will lose the weight.’ Then he put his hands together and for a second I thought he was actually going to pray for me. ‘Try to take each moment as it comes,’ he said. ‘Think only of your goal. It will take courage, but once the weight begins to come away, I promise you this: it will feel like the sun is coming out.’
On the way home in the car it was raining. I could feel Mum wanting to ask me about exactly when and what I’d been eating without her knowing, but also that she didn’t want to ask me. Maybe because she was feeling guilty about the Maltesers and about saying that it’s what’s on the inside that counts when it isn’t really true.
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it would feel like physically to be thin: to have thin arms, thin legs, a flat stomach. But even though I haven’t always been fat, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t remember. Instead, my body just felt even bigger than it is, then started swelling till it was taking up the whole car and pressing against the windows which were going to explode any second if I didn’t stop . . .
So instead I imagined what it’d be like to go into school thin. I imagined Alice coming out of the English room at the other end of the corridor, chatting to the girls around her and walking towards me. She loops her bag over her head and that’s when she spots me. She stops – stops dead in her tracks, peering in disbelief at me. Then, breaking free from the others, she comes running up, smiling in amazement, her mouth open in shock and saying Yasmin, is that really you? and then everyone else crowds round saying that too.
I went up to my room when we got home. I wanted to be on my own. I sat on my bed and thought about really trying to make an effort to lose weight this time. I thought about getting the chocolate and Hobnobs out of my suitcase and bedside table and throwing them all away. I thought about giving up on the idea that you were going to take Alice and me being a hero and all of that as well, because it was pretty much all I’d been thinking about and Dr Bhatt said I should focus only on losing weight.
My file says I tend towards obsessive thoughts, which is how I got fat in the first place, so I knew I’d been obsessing about you. And I didn’t really know anything about you anyway. I’d only seen you once. I thought about how you could just’ve been a completely normal person that was staring at Alice for some innocent reason, like because she reminded you of your granddaughter who’d died in a horrific car accident, or something like that – and not at all because you were going to do something very bad.
I thought how you taking Alice was just a stupid fantasy, the same as all the other stupid fantasies I’d had – like Alice getting ill and me researching her symptoms online for weeks and weeks till suddenly I figure out what it is that’s wrong with her just as she’s about to die . . . That one never happened for real either. I thought about Miss Ward telling me last year how it was high time I realised that this life was the only one I was going to get and that I should start living it that way before it was too late. I remembered thinking what a load of horse crap – ‘before it’s too late’ – but even though I knew it was the kind of dramatic rubbish that teachers come out with that sounds like it means something when it doesn’t really mean anything at all, and even though I walked out of her office telling myself that joke that isn’t really a joke because it’s true: Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach – what she’d said got into my head. I’d remembered it, anyway.
I thought about Dr Bhatt’s hands pressed together and his worried eyes looking into mine and I thought, I’m going to do it. I’m going to forget about you and I’m going to live in the real world and not let myself imagine stuff anymore. I’m going to lose weight and become so gorgeous that no one’ll even believe it’s me. So gorgeous that even I don’t believe it’s me. Because more than anything, I wanted to feel like the sun was coming out.
The next day was Saturday and I decided to walk into town, even though the insides of my thighs were still sore with angry red spots on them from going up and down the wooded path looking for you. My plan was to get a Diet Coke in McDonald’s, then look in some shops and walk home again. I put loads of talcum powder on my legs but they were already stinging by the time I got to Deacons Hill.
It’s a lot further into town than it seems on the bus and by the time I got there my feet were killing me and my stomach was like a cave. I stood in the queue in McDonald’s feeling the coins in my pocket and staring at the menu board. I was thinking I should’ve only brought the exact money for a Diet Coke and that I definitely was not going to get a vanilla milkshake and a McChicken Sandwich with large fries, even though I had enough, when I got the feeling I was being watched.
Sophie reacted with a shriek when I looked over, then ‘hid’ behind the collar of her denim jacket. She was with Alice, Katy and two boys that aren’t from our school. She’d been telling them what a legend I am, I expect.
I took my Diet Coke into Gap across the road and went upstairs to the little kids’ section. I stood by the window between the rails of doll-like dresses, chewing the end of the straw and sucking tiny amounts through it, waiting for them to come out.
I’d never seen Alice out of school. She was wearing faded skinny jeans, flat pumps and a long, pale blue cardigan. Her hair was in a loose plait over one shoulder. She looked effortless – that’s the best word I can think of – like that, even though all the world was hers, she’d chosen to set it free.
She was laughing, her arm draped over one of the boy’s shoulders. He was black – really black – and doing all the talking. He kept covering her hand with his, then taking it off again to gesture round, like it was no big deal that she was touching him. It’s only because she’s so nice that she didn’t mind. I thought it was pretty rude, though. I thought, who does he think he is?
They headed down the High Street then, so I went back downstairs. They were standing outside Waterstones, looking in at the display. Alice was telling them something, about a book, I suppose. I imagined it was The Poems of Robert Browning, even though I knew his book wouldn’t be in the window because he’s really old – dead, even. I hate English, but the poem of his we did in class was brilliant. It’s about a man who’s Porphyria’s lover (they had funny names then). He knows he can’t have her, even though they’re in love, because she’s upper class and rich, so to make sure she’ll always be his, he kills her. He says:
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly