hell, I don’t fit!’ she whispered. She tried angling in sideways. There just wasn’t enough room. Or, to be precise, there was just too much Pixie. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have to see if they’ve got another seat at the back. This is going to be too uncomfortable.’
‘You can’t leave!’ Ellie whispered.
‘I’m not leaving, love. I’ll just find a more comfortable seat.’
‘We’ll go with you,’ Jane said.
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort, you lovely daft cow,’ Pixie smiled, shaking her head. ‘There’s no need for all of us to go. I’ll meet you in the bar at the interval, okay?’
She smiled brightly, but I wasn’t fooled. I saw the flush creeping across her cheeks before she turned away.
‘’Scuse me, love,’ she said to the man next to her. ‘I hate to disturb you again but I just got a call from George Clooney. He’s dying to take me to dinner. That man just will not take no for an answer. ’Fraid I’ve got to go. Can you maybe ask the others to scoot out again? For George’s sake?’ That raised a chuckle from the man as he passed the message down the line.
A few minutes later the lights went down and Jackson’s best-loved hits washed over us. But I kept thinking about Pixie. I wasn’t sure we would see her at the interval. If it had been me I probably would have sneaked away.
But Pixie wasn’t about to let a little thing like mortal embarrassment get her down. She was there by the bar during the break, chatting amiably with an old couple wearing matching purple jumpers that made them look Starburst.
‘Isn’t it fantastic?’ she said as we approached. ‘Though I couldn’t see if he actually looks like Michael. You lot are closer. Does he?’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Where are you sitting?’
‘Oh, just at the back. One of the box office ladies found me a chair. We just drag it out into the aisle after everyone has sat down. I’ve got VIP seating … Will you stop looking at me like that?’
‘Like what, sweetheart?’ Jane asked.
‘Like I’ve got terminal cancer and don’t know it. Like you feel sorry for me.’
‘Sorry!’ we all said at once, knowing how that look can undermine a poorly constructed façade.
‘Drink?’ I said, pulling out my purse.
By the time the bells rang for us to sit again, we’d nearly forgotten the seating difficulties. Pixie had been right – it felt wonderful to be out like normal people instead of confessing our chocolate transgressions to one another.
We were all in high spirits when the theatre doors disgorged us into the cold night. There was no question of us heading for the Tube yet. None of us wanted the evening to end.
The bar we settled on, close to the theatre, was heaving with noisy drinkers.
‘So what should we see next?’ Pixie shouted when we found a spot to huddle with our drinks near the men’s loos. Every time the door opened, our night was perfumed by the whiff of urinal cake.
‘Or do? We could do something next time,’ I said. ‘Maybe go somewhere nice like Kew Gardens? Or Windsor or Bath on a weekend?’
Ellie nodded. ‘I’d love to go to Windsor. Could we do a tour of the palace?’
‘I’m not sure in the winter, but we can check,’ Jane said. ‘As long as we don’t go back to that theatre.’ I knew that Jane would hold a grudge on Pixie’s behalf for a long time. She was a good friend like that.
‘There should be a way to know beforehand whether seats will be comfortable,’ Ellie said. ‘A nice easy rating system like they do with the food in restaurants.’
‘Maybe we should make one.’
‘No way,’ said Pixie, laughing. ‘I don’t fancy jamming my arse into seats all over London.’
‘Okay, so we don’t jam our arses into that theatre’s seats,’ I said. ‘We just need to find some that are more accommodating for the larger lady.’
‘That would be useful information to have,’ Jane said. ‘Not just for us – for lots of people.’
‘I guess we could ask when we book the tickets,’ I said. ‘Send someone down from the box office with a measuring tape. Get him to bounce on the seats, assess springiness, see if his knees hit the seat in front.’
Jane wasn’t laughing with the rest of us. ‘Jane?’
‘That’s a really good idea,’ she said. ‘Seriously, why don’t we ask these things before we book again? After all, we want to have fun, and it’s not fun when one of us has to sit on an office chair at the back.’
This reminder sobered us. ‘So we’ll ask next time,’ said Pixie. ‘Cheers, ladies. To us.’
‘Here’s to many more nights like this!’ Ellie said. ‘With comfortable seats.’ We all clinked to that.
Later we walked towards the Tube feeling very merry. I offered to find the next performance with roomy seating and I knew I’d book it as soon as possible. I hadn’t felt this good in ages. It was so much better than stepping on the scales every week.
‘Hang on,’ Ellie said, steering us towards the cash machine. ‘I need to get some money for tomorrow morning. It’s my turn to buy the office treats.’
Jane was getting her groove on while we waited, singing one of Jackson’s hits while she danced in place.
Two young men passing by glanced over. Then one of them started singing, ‘I’m fat, you’re fat, come on, you know, woo!’ They laughed as they carried on up the road.
‘Beat it!’ Pixie shouted, catching my eye.
‘You don’t wanna be starting something!’ I said.
‘That’s all right, it doesn’t matter,’ Jane said. ‘They’re out of my life anyway.’ But she slouched into her coat with her hands in her pockets and we didn’t talk much on the walk to the Tube.
I wasn’t about to lose momentum with our girls’ nights out, and spent most of the next morning between work phone calls googling theatres with roomier seats. I was quickly able to whittle down my list. To my surprise, people did take the time to gripe about their bad experiences online. Unfortunately there was no centralised whingers’ repository, which made the process a bit slow.
I kept watch for Cressida. She had a knack for popping up over the cubicle wall like a censorious jack-in-the-box whenever I faffed around. As my boss, I suppose she had the right to do this but given that most people didn’t even want to do my job, she should really have been grateful that I was there at all. Calling up strangers with money-saving offers put me just above a Jehovah’s Witness in the social acceptability stakes. Sure, I called pharmacies, nutritionists and health food shops, not people in the middle of dinner. But that still meant I got hung up on. A lot.
Even so, I liked my work, though I’d had my doubts when they first hired me. They sent us on a week-long training course to learn the science behind the nutritional supplements we were selling. Men in white lab coats explained everything in mind-numbing detail. Luckily I had a head for mind-numbing detail. It didn’t take long to start managing my own client list, but it wasn’t always easy. Oversharing clients sometimes admitted to heinous bodily irregularities before I could remind them that I wasn’t a trained professional in that sense. Then I spent weeks worrying about their health.
Eventually I got used to being tethered to my desk by the sleek headset that made us all look like Justin Bieber’s backup singers. It took some practice to learn