part0006

But it had the desired effect; on Monday morning at nine o’clock sharp I’m to report to the Moppers office where I will be inducted and ‘buddied’ with another cleaner who will show me the ropes. Veronica made it very clear to me that I will be on probation, if I don’t ‘cut the mustard’ as she put it, I’ll be out on my ear.

I feel exhilarated; daring . And I don’t even know where it came from, all that Frogham Herald nonsense; I just opened my mouth and out it came, as if I’d planned it all in advance.

I knew exactly what Veronica was thinking: I’m fat, lazy, and my enormous hips will knock things over and they’ll be breakages and complaints and hiring me would just be a complete nightmare. I could see it in her eyes because I see it every day; in so many eyes.

It’s true, your average person equates being fat with being lazy. And thick. Being as fat as me means that I must spend all day lying around eating from morning until night to get to this size and I’m obviously too stupid to go on a diet and lose some weight. And because I’m so fat and lazy I don’t even have a job because, obviously, that would interfere with my constant eating and I’m too thick to hold down a job anyway. I do eat too much and that’s a fact, but I’m not stuffing my face twenty-four-seven. I want to tell the people that look at me in disgust be careful, this could be you if you don’t watch yourself but they wouldn’t believe me, no one believes that you can get to this size without setting out with that very goal in mind.

I didn’t balloon to this size overnight and I don’t stuff my face every minute of every day. A few years of eating a bit too much every day and you’re several stones overweight. Then the motivation to go on a diet disappears because it’ll take so long and before you know it you’ve given up even thinking about dieting and that’s it; you’ve turned into a whopper.

Yes, I could see it all and I thought; no, you’re not going to spoil my dream, I can do a crappy cleaning job as well as the next person and actually, Veronica, I’m probably better educated than you.

I’m quite liking this new me, this daring new me. Perhaps this is the person I would have been if Mother hadn’t taken ill. When I’m thin I’m going to have a new personality to go with my new body; no more I’m so sorry I’m fat, I don’t deserve anything Alison.

The beep of a horn disturbs my thoughts; Dolph from number three is waving at me as he zooms past in his car. I smile and put a hand up and wave in response as he drives by. He cut my hair for me once, long ago, just after I’d finished my A levels and still had hopes of going to uni. I bump into him occasionally at Foodco with his partner, Brian, but I avoid him if I see him first. Not because I don’t like him; I don’t like me, I don’t like people seeing me like this, I’m ashamed of how I am. He’s offered several times to come and do Mother’s hair for her, cheer her up. He’d do it for free, he says, trying to be kind. I told him that she’s a bit nervous of people, doesn’t like strangers in the house. Put him off.

She doesn’t like strangers in the house, that’s true, but she’d be more than happy to have a free hairdo and then slag him off afterwards; she’s horrifically homophobic. I know what it would be like – she’d embarrass me in front of him by referring to my weight and lack of friends in her mock concerned way and I’d just want to shrivel up and die. And, I’m pretty sure Dolph would be sympathetic and not nasty because he seems like a nice guy but that would be even worse; pity. There’s definitely no point in having my hair done, I’d just feel even more ridiculous with a nice new haircut over my blimp body.

So no. That won’t be happening.

We live out of the way here. Semi-rural, I suppose you’d call it, right on the outskirts of Frogham. Away from the busy streets and we don’t have very many neighbours either. We’re at the end of a lane with open fields on one side and a double garage sized gap on the other side and then there’s a short terrace of five cottages. We’re number six Duck Pond Lane but there’s not a duck pond, or duck, in sight. Maybe there was a long time ago.

Mother has never had much to do with the neighbours – she thinks she’s better than them as our house is quite large and detached and the rest of the street is terraced so she thinks she’s lord of the manor. We have an enormous garden which could easily accommodate two more houses. We can’t possibly hope to maintain it and I’ve more or less given up with it and the grass is so long it’s gone to seed. Mother’s too tight to pay for a gardener and is under the illusion that I cut the grass and keep it tidy.

Another reason why she absolutely cannot have a stair lift put in; I feel quite anxious imagining what she would say if she saw the state of it. I push the thought firmly away; pointless to worry about things that will never happen.

I’m not exactly friends with any of the neighbours but I always wave and try to appear approachable when I see any of them, which isn’t very often as if I see them first I make sure that they don’t see me. For a big ‘un I can move pretty quickly when it suits.

Number five are newish arrivals; a young couple who zoom off to work every morning, her in her Fiat 500 and him in his Audi. They’re both slim and attractive, always bobbing about in trendy gym wear or helmeted up, furiously cycling off on their shiny mountain bikes. Their house stands out from the others as they have gleaming new windows and a new glossy black front door. Before they moved in the front garden was a riot of colourful flowers from the previous owners but they soon ripped them out, knocked down the wall and had it all concreted over so they could park their cars on it. They never notice me; I don’t even warrant a second glance from them, invisible in my cloak of fatness. I did have an uneasy moment when they moved in, they looked to be about my age and I thought; what if I know them? What if I was at school with one of them? How humiliating would that be?

Then I realised that it doesn’t matter, I’m not even on their radar.

Number four are renters and the tenants change every couple of years, this time around it’s a middle aged man on his own so I’m guessing he’s a divorcee. He scurries in and out of the front door, head down, never making eye contact. Occasionally he has a gangly, sulky looking teenage boy with him who I guess is his son. I see them coming back with McDonalds brown paper bags or white plastic carriers from Bang Thai Dee Takeaway so I presume they live on fast food whenever the son visits.

They’re not fat though, even though they live on takeaways.

Numbers one and two’s inhabitants are two ancient couples who must be around a hundred years old and have been here forever. Mother remembers them from when she was a child so they must be really old. The old chap at number one is always pottering around in the front garden and spends most of his time out there but I can’t say the garden looks any different, I can never see that he’s actually done anything. Maybe he just stays outside to keep away from his wife. There’s a lot of too-ing and fro-ing at number two, lots of women in pale pink nurse type uniforms dashing in and out, early in the morning and late in the afternoon, carers, I’m guessing. They never stay for very long; twenty minutes at the most, and they always look harassed and in a hurry.

Except they get paid.

Like I said, I don’t interact with the neighbours if I can possibly help it, but it’s amazing what you can pick up just by watching. I do a lot of watching.

I do a quick scan of the street to make sure no one is around and then haul myself out of the car.

Time to tell Mother the good news.

‘Hmm, that’s not much. Thought it would be more than that.’ She frowns and the helmet of grey curls tightens.

‘Minimum wage,’ I say with a martyred sigh. A blatant lie, it’s actually nine pounds an hour but she doesn’t need to know that.

When I told her that I’d got the job – minus the blackmail details of course – she didn’t seem surprised or pleased, or anything, really. What did I expect? Did I think she’d congratulate me? Say well done?

Of course not, I knew she wouldn’t; but maybe a small part of me hoped . Hoped, that for once, I’d done something right, I’d done something on my own that she didn’t feel the need to correct, belittle or condemn. I keep telling myself that I’ve lost all hope but I haven’t; that tiny glimmer is still there and really there’s nothing I can do about it because hope is involuntary, I have no control over it.

‘It’s because I’ve no experience, you know, not ever having had a job. It’s not really worth it, is it Mother?’ I put on a sad face as if I really don’t want the job; this will ensure that she insists on me doing it. Reverse psychology, I think they call it. Mother thinks she’s so clever and I’m so dim. I’m not Einstein but I’m sure I wouldn’t fall for it, but she does, every single time. Luckily. She really thinks I’m too thick to be deceitful or manipulative.

‘Of course it’s worth it! What a ridiculous thing to say. Even if you only do two hours a day that’s still £75 a week, which means I can stop paying you pocket money.’

‘Okay.’ I was expecting her to say this because she’s so tight she almost squeaks.

‘And,’ she goes on, ‘as you’ll be so much better off you can start paying keep. Twenty pounds a week sounds fair to me, what do you think? It’s about time you started contributing towards the bills. Money doesn’t grow on trees you know.’

What can I say? I’ll still have to look after her and do everything for her but as far as she’s concerned I should do it for nothing and be grateful that I can live here so cheaply. And at the end of it all I’ll only be a bit better off but I’ll have to go out and work as well.

‘Sounds fine, Mother.’

‘Good. That’s settled then.’ She picks her discarded newspaper back up from the bedspread. ‘I was going to have to stop your pocket money soon anyway, because I just can’t afford it anymore, what with everything going up so much.’

I gawp at her and try to keep the disbelief from showing on my face; I know how much money she has.

‘And as for the twenty pounds keep, we’ll have to see how it goes. If the bills keep on going up we may have to review that, put it up a bit.’ She shakes the paper to straighten out the creases then frowns at me over the top of her glasses, ‘Now, are you getting me that cup of tea or not?’

‘I’ll get it now.’ I come out of her room, down the stairs and into the kitchen before I let go of the deep breath that I’m holding. Holding my breath is one of my coping mechanisms; if I’m holding my breath I can’t speak, can I? That’s how I stop myself shouting at Mother. Another of my coping mechanisms is digging my toes into the floor (as long as I have shoes or slippers on). I used to clench my fists but that’s too visible, she can see me doing it. So now it’s the toes and the breath holding. No one can see that. The other thing with clenching my fists was fighting the urge to punch Mother, what with my hands already being in the right position.

I know that Mother won’t be happy until she has every penny of my wages off me. In a few weeks’ time I’ll be going to work and handing every penny over to her. I think I knew this anyway but there’s always that little sprig of hope that I can’t control. No matter how well I know Mother there’s always that little part of me that hopes that one day she’ll do something nice for me, even though I know she won’t. I try not to hope, but it’s difficult, it’s like trying to tell yourself that you’re not hungry when you know you are.

Maybe if my father had stuck around things would be different; I would be different. Was it me that drove him away? That’s what Mother says; as soon as he knew I was on the way he left, she says.

I don’t even have a photograph of him. Only a name. And a common name at that. Even so, I could find him, I suppose, I could track him down and I have thought about it, many times. I’ve even got as far as typing his name into Google but then I’ve stopped myself; why bother? He obviously has no interest in me or else he’d have made contact with me. I find it hard to believe that Mother even had a man and she was forty-five when I was born, so she was hardly young and pretty. I’ve seen the photograph album; there are some photos of her when she was younger than me and she looked middle aged and miserable then. For a while I decided that she must have been raped and that’s why she dislikes me so much but then I realised that she’d tell me if she had – and enjoy telling me too.

My father must have been desperate; why else would he have been with Mother? Maybe he was jumbo sized like me and she was all he could get. Mother’s such a liar too; on the rare occasions when she does answer my questions about him the story changes all of the time. On various occasions she’s told me that he was a doctor, a teacher and an insurance salesman.

She has an old fashioned, heavy oak dressing table in her room and the top drawer is kept locked. I’m sure there must be something in there about my father but I’ve never been able to get hold of the key and I’ve tried, believe me.

A feeling of hopelessness washes over me.

I pick up the kettle and shove it under the tap and fill it up, then plug it onto boil. I take her china teacup and saucer out of the cupboard and put it on the tray along with two digestives on a matching plate. I’m cramming a biscuit into my mouth before I realise what I’m doing .