Nula’s hair was growing out. Getting longer, getting – thanks to her latest stylist – stronger, too. When the last of the blonde was chopped off, there she was again: mouse-coloured Nula Perkins with her hair cropped close to her fat head.
Well, the hair would grow. And she’d try again with the colour, that could be solvable. But . . . her fat head.
The truth was, Nula loved food. It was her consolation for all that the uncaring world threw at her. Comforting Sunday dinners, sausages and mash, Sunday teatime treats of cream and tinned peaches. Salty crisps and big chocolate bars and ice cream. Her parents were fat. Her brother was fat. Even her grandparents had been fat. But she kept reading things like Vogue and Harpers, wherein beautiful young things with glossy rich-girl hair and skinny figures pranced and danced and lunched out on steak and salad. No roast potatoes. No treats.
She still went up Carnaby Street with her mates, who had been – like her – the school losers, the quiet unpopular ones; she was Nula the fat arse, then came Stella with the stutter, Hilda with the limp, Joanie with the cleft palate that made her talk funny, and Sylvia with the ears that stuck straight out from underneath her thin brown hair like radar scanners.
In misery, they’d banded together. They weren’t like the popular girls, the pretty hair-tossing ones the boys all lusted after like Jill Patterson and her mates, or the tough ones, the tomboys who’d bloody your nose if you dared talk about them. But there was strength in numbers.
Now they trawled around Carnaby Street and tried on dresses – Nula hated trying on dresses, but the others were doing it and so she had to join in. And there it was, the awful, undeniable truth. Staring back at Nula from the dreaded changing-room mirror was the confirmation of all her fears. She was fat, and fat she would stay, because she ate too much.
One or the other, you could have. But not both. A good figure . . . or all that lovely food.
It was crucifying. Nula knew two things. One: food was her only real pleasure in life. Whenever she was laughed at, mocked, depressed, she would take refuge inside the larder, would stand there covertly eating seedy cake or apple pie, one eye on the door, her ears alert for footfall. And two: Mum wanted her to eat and moaned and fretted and threatened visits to doctors if she didn’t.
So she was fighting her mother and herself. But Nula was obstinate. Once committed to a path, she wasn’t one to deviate.
Skipping family dinners became an art form to her. She said she was playing hockey (she wasn’t) or down the chess club (not there, either) or at the youth club (all lies). She skipped breakfast, ignored her rumbling stomach and the temptation of the biscuit counter, lunched on fruit, crawled home starving and pushed the food around her plate, much to Mum’s displeasure.
It was all such an effort.
But after a few months of this – she didn’t dare weigh herself on those big high-street machines in public and face yet more scorn and humiliation, and her family had never possessed any bathroom scales – she thought that something was happening to her.
She was getting thinner.
She would stand naked in front of her bedroom mirror and force herself to look. There was a suggestion of ribs now, where before there had just been a spare tyre. Her belly didn’t bulge out the way it had. Her thighs didn’t rub together quite so painfully any more.
Nula started to feel something almost like happiness. It was hell, it was horrible, but – for fuck’s sake! – it was actually working.
So stuff Mum and her treacle sponges and massive portions. Nula stuck to her guns, kept avoiding mealtimes, and stared and stared at her new emerging body.
Her clothes started to hang on her. Which was OK, she hated her clothes. Then came the glorious day when she went and bought something. It was in a size she’d never even attempted before so she hadn’t dared try it on for fear it would be so tight on her she’d look like an overstuffed sausage.
She came back home with the minidress in a bright red bag. It was a multi-striped (vertical, not horizontal, she wasn’t that full of herself yet) simply cut mini with no sleeves and a zipper on the front.
It was a size fourteen.
Nervously she took it out of the bag, stroked a hand over the velvety material. Before, she’d squeezed into an eighteen, really squeezed. She unzipped it, slipped it over her head, refastened the long zipper, ruffled up her hair then dared to look in the mirror.
A stranger was looking back at her. A stranger with a good figure, wearing a mini dress, with a fuzz of soft head-hugging mouse-coloured hair making a frame around her features.
Nula turned back and forth, examining her reflection. She’d had hardly any tits before and now she had none. But she was thin. She looked at her face. Her eyes were well-shaped and hazel coloured. Her mouth was fine. But her nose was a monster. It reminded her of Schnozzle Durante. It was the Perkins family nose, they all had it. But as for the rest of it . . .
She looked OK. Her legs were nice. Long and shapely. Her arms were fine. She had cheekbones now, that was new. She stared again at her face and she frowned. She felt tears prick her eyes but she blinked, gulped, forced them back. She wouldn’t cry.
Now, she had to save up some more.
She had to save up a lot.