Losing It

I felt quite frustrated to be leaving the store with my crusade to evoke a response in my fat checkout girl no further advanced than when I had gone in, and was, again, almost reluctant to go. I pictured myself grabbing her by those huge, rounded shoulders in a desperate attempt to get through, to make her look me straight in the eye, as I shouted: ‘Is there anyone in there?’ or some such. What was she feeling, this apparently indifferent human being with whom I had briefly shared the same small place on the planet? Perhaps she, too, was shy: perhaps the total lack of interest in her surroundings was merely a cover. I had, after all, seen it crack a little at the approach of the manager.

I would describe all this to Judy when I got home, perhaps make her laugh at my description of the girl’s words and expressions, and of her semi-awakening in the presence of Warren thingy.

Warren. Yes, now there was a challenge. Surely, he couldn’t be the only person capable of provoking a reaction. I felt – not jealousy, surely? – more a small challenge to my male pride. No, I thought, it can’t be just you, young man, who can make that tiny light come on in her eyes.

I smiled to myself as I fantasised briefly about how one might go about searching for the switch.

Stacey

My dad always said it was my fault. My size, I mean. But he didn’t understand – you only got to look at my mum to know I can’t help it. She’s big too – not as big as what I am, but she’s big. No one understands what it’s like: even my mum tells me not to moan about it. But it’s the aching – I ache so much all the time. That’s the worst bit – the aching. It’s the weight on my joints, the doctor says. They just ain’t meant to carry that much around. He says I’ve got arthritis now, too. Well, thanks, great. That’s all I need. And the last time I saw him he said I was lucky not to have diabetes. Lucky? What does he know? I asked him about them new patches I’ve read about that you stick on your arm and sniff and then you don’t wanna eat. He just had this kind of smirk on his face and said I’m being stupid again. No – not stupid. What was it he said? Gullible. He said I was being gullible again. And he says the arthritis won’t go unless I lose some weight – and there’s only one way to do that, he says, and just hands me out another diet sheet.

I’ve been overweight my entire life. There ain’t never been a time when I wasn’t fat. I can prove that, too. My mum says I’m remembering it wrong, but if I show her the pictures she can see I’m right. She doesn’t like to know that, see, because I think she overfed me, because it made her feel good when I ate so much. But when I show her the pictures now I can see in her eyes they shock her. There ain’t that many of course. Dad never bothered much with pictures. But that one of us on the beach at Bognor: I’m next to my mum and we’ve both got swimsuits on and you can just see how fat I am. I look more like her sister than a daughter. I’m as big as she is but half her height. It’s horrible. Why am I so fat? I don’t know.

I don’t behave like other fat people, I know that. I watch them and I see the way they move and the way they look. I’m not like that. It’s different for me. I think it’s an illness I have – I know I shouldn’t eat as much as I do, but it’s not just that. I’m trying some herbal supplement that I read about in the paper, and it said that some people react different to food than normal people; we don’t burn it off and our metabolisms don’t work right. These herbal things are going to regulate it. They cost a bit but I put in overtime last month at work and I got a bit saved so it’s OK. I didn’t tell the doctor because he’d just say I was being stupid again.

It may be genetics. That’s the other thing. They’re finding all these genes now, and my friend says they’ve found the fat gene and if they can take it out you won’t get fat any more, she read it in the paper. But I asked the doctor and he just laughed. He said I need to exercise more, but how can I exercise when it aches so much? Fucking useless he is.

Mum says I was a normal baby but then what does she mean by normal? I know I wasn’t normal when I was going to school, because I can remember going to buy school clothes. I must’ve been about seven or so and we had to get the clothes that was meant for twelve-year-olds. Mum didn’t know how much I minded the way the assistant looked at me. It’s only a tiny memory but I know how ashamed I felt.

And another memory is splitting my jeans. I was playing with my friends in the playground by the church and I was always ever so careful not to move about too quickly because I didn’t want to fall and rip my trousers. We was playing ‘it’ and I tried to touch one of the boys and I fell and, sure enough, I heard that horrible noise of the fabric ripping. Just giving up under the strain. I went home and found another pair but when I went to put them on they didn’t fit so I squeezed myself into them as best I could but my thighs was so large the crotch only came about halfway past my knees.

That old guy came to my checkout again today. That’s the fifth or sixth time running in about a week. Tried to chat to me – I knew he was but I pretended not to notice. I hope he ain’t one of those weird ones.

‘Hello, Stacey,’ he says, ‘how’s it going?’

‘S’all right,’ I says, trying not to look him in the eye. I didn’t want to encourage him, see, and also I could see Mr Chipstead hovering round Sheila’s till and I wanted to keep an eye on them. I just hoped the old bloke wasn’t going to bring up the bogof thing again. That’s four times he’s done it now. If I let on I know exactly what he’s talking about it’ll only encourage him, but if I go on pretending I don’t know what he means then he’s gonna go on saying it every time. Can’t win. Stupid, that’s what he must think I am.

‘S’cuse me,’ I says, before he could say no more, ‘Mr Chipstead!’

The old guy smiled a bit and turned round to look the way I was shouting. God, Mr C looked gorgeous: his arse looks so good in them navy trousers he wears for work, and you don’t often see it because it’s hidden under that long jacket of his, but he was leaning over Sheila’s till and you could see it under the suiting, all round and lovely. Two apples. Braeburns? No – more Pink Lady, although that don’t sound quite right for Mr C. Not that I can see the colour, of course, although, God knows, I imagine it often enough, but Pink Lady’s much too poofy for Mr C. All man, he is. Gala, maybe – that sounds good. A Gala arse, that’s what he’s got. I’ll write Crystal that in my next letter: she’ll enjoy that – she’s always on about great arses. Muscly, she likes them – what does she call it? Sinewy or something. I like them a bit rounder, myself

Anyway, he come over at last and the old guy was just stood looking at him.

‘Yes, Stacey?’ He’s got a gorgeous voice, too.

‘Can I go for lunch now, Mr Chipstead? Only I’m doing late shift and –’

‘Stacey, you don’t have to call me over for that, you know you don’t. Check it with Mrs Peters.’

‘Yes, but I never had my lunch break Tuesday and Mrs Peters said I should ask you about taking extra time today to make up.’

‘All right, Stacey. If Mrs Peters said so then that’s fine – go for lunch when you’ve finished this customer and I’ll send Janet over. Now get on with your work, this gentleman’s having to wait. You’ve got to get your speeds up, Stacey – I’ve told you this before.’

It’s funny but I don’t mind when he tells me off. I just mind when he don’t talk to me. Or when he talks to Sheila. I can’t stand that.

‘So, Stacey,’ the old guy says to me, ‘you’ve got your lunch break then. That’s good. Your manager – Mr Chipstead, isn’t it? – seems like a nice sort of chap.’

‘You said that last week.’

‘Did I?’

He looked pleased when he said that. I wondered for a moment if he was gay, but I don’t reckon he’s the type. Just happy that someone’s remembered something he’s said, if you ask me.

‘He’s all right.’

There was a bit of a pause while I checked the vegetable on the belt. Funny-looking thing it was, and I couldn’t find it in the idents for a bit. While I was looking he was watching me again, but I never let on I knew.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ he said.

‘Well, you can tell me what it is.’

‘No, I didn’t mean that. I meant – well, is there anything I can do for you – sort of – generally. You just looked a bit upset. When Mr Chipstead was here.’

‘Sweet potato,’ I said. ‘Found it.’

What a weird guy. One of those that fancies big women, as they call it. Really creepy. I wondered if I could call Mr C back to get rid of him, but there wasn’t really nothing I could put in words, just a feeling that he wasn’t coming to my till every time by chance. I was coming to dread it, really, when I saw him approaching with his little basket with four or five things in it. Why don’t he do a big weekly shop in a trolley? It wasn’t like he was short of the cash or nothing, you could tell that just by looking at him.

‘No, I meant – is there anything I can do to help, Stacey? I mean, if Mr Chipstead is worrying you about your speed. Perhaps I’ve been a bit slow in unpacking my basket or something. I always find you very efficient – would you like me to put in a word?’

I felt like telling him to mind his own fucking business, but I knew he was just the sort to complain about things and get me into trouble so I kept quiet. I finished off his basket and waited for him to pay.

‘Here you are, Stacey,’ he said. ‘Sorry to interfere – I was only trying to help, you know.’

I took a quick look up at him as he give me the money and I have to say I felt a bit mean then for not answering and all that. He was watching me with ever such a worried expression, and it didn’t seem so creepy after all – more like my mum looks when she knows I’m hurting and stuff. Maybe he really was just a friendly old guy who was a bit lonely.

‘S’all right,’ I said, and I smiled at him. Not so’s I was encouraging him or nothing – I wasn’t gonna thank him ’cos I never asked for his help, did I? – but the least he deserved was to be let off the hook. In any case, I thought I’d better keep on the right side of him – I didn’t want him going home and plotting something nasty. You never know with customers – they can be a dodgy lot if you ain’t careful.

Ben

Sometimes I can see life in the simplest possible terms, and I feel as if I’ve discovered the answer to everything, and then at other times I’m completely at sea and out of control. It’s scary, and I’m not sure which is true. It started with all the stuff we had at school about the uncertainty principle – at first I didn’t bother to take it in much, just wrote it all down so I could learn it for the exams, but when I really started thinking about it I could see that it made life impossible. If nothing really exists – or at least not in a decided form, kind of thing – until you observe it, then surely nothing exists at all? Or at least it’s as good as if it didn’t. And if things change just through you looking at them, then nothing I see, hear or feel has any reality, because it’s reacting to me observing it. So what I see is unreal, and what I don’t see doesn’t exist. It makes me feel quite frightened at times, and it’s not easy for me to talk to anyone about it, because when I’m in the really bad moods then I have to be by myself so that I don’t change anything by communicating with it.

Even on a mundane level it affects the way I look at things. It’s like Mum and Dad getting so brittle with each other: I’m never sure how much of that is due to my watching them. Were they easier with each other when Sally and I were little, or was it just that I wasn’t consciously judging them then? A while ago I’d have talked to Mum about feeling so strange, but she always seems so busy with her work now, and when she isn’t she’s either lying down in her bedroom or rushing about the house being tense. Or she gets into those weird moods when she’s really hyper. Does things like hovering about downstairs for the post in the mornings as if she’s waiting for something. She always says it’s just a magazine or a catalogue she’s expecting, but she goes all girly and happy for a bit and buys us things and gives us treats. Sally and I used to wonder if she was having an affair, but it doesn’t seem like that, somehow. Anyway, I can’t see it.

Trouble is, thinking about what objectively exists makes me want to stop working, because in a way everything I’m doing is a waste of time. When I’m sitting there at school it all feels really pointless because I’m observing it and changing it. And all the books and theories and mathematical formulae and religions and portents are worthless. I’m not sure if it makes me want to commit suicide or live for ever. Who was it said there was only one real philosophical question – whether to kill yourself or not?

It’s not that I’m always gloomy – more confused. Sometimes it’s like I’ve discovered the key to everything and it feels really good, because if nothing has any true reality then nothing matters, so there’s no need to get upset about anything or to hurt about the way things are. But I still don’t know what I’m going to do about these thoughts. I feel rather like I’ve been given a very important message to deliver but they’ve forgotten to address the envelope.

I started to talk to Holly about it today in the dining hall, but I didn’t get very far. I thought it might help if I could explain it to someone else and get it out of my head for a bit, but I could see she didn’t understand how important all this was. She was looking really cute, with her hair up in one of those grippy things – and she kept smiling back at me as I tried to explain.

‘When you measure something,’ I said, having decided I should start from basics – Holly’s doing languages for her A-levels, and science has never been one of her strong points – ‘you’re never sure if your answer is right. Never. That’s why it’s called the uncertainty principle.’

‘Well, obviously you can never predict things,’ she said, dipping her head to look down at her hot chocolate. She tipped a sachet of sugar into the plastic cup and stirred it. ‘It doesn’t take a scientist to tell me that.’

‘No, it’s not exactly that,’ I went on. ‘It’s more that – oh, Holly, for God’s sake, that stuffs already sweetened: it’ll be disgusting – no, it’s not so much that we don’t know how atoms and particles and things are going to behave when we look at them, it’s more that we don’t even know the rules. I mean, even if we could measure things without affecting them, we’re probably judging them by all the wrong rules. Common sense doesn’t really work any more, at least not once you try to look at both quantum and macroscopic physics at once. They just don’t gel, you see. And it makes my life – all of our lives – pointless.’

She had that sweet, patient smile on her face again, and the weird thing was that it made her look as if she understood far more about all this stuff than I did, while at the same time I knew perfectly well that she hadn’t got a clue what I was on about. Holly always does that to me – whatever I’m trying to tell her she always seems to be one jump ahead, even though she doesn’t really know a thing about quantum mechanics.

She put one elbow on the table and rested her chin on her hand. ‘I don’t see that at all,’ she said, still smiling and pretending to be interested. ‘Of course your life isn’t pointless, Ben. Try and explain.’

‘I’m trying to tell you something really important here, and you’ve got that “let’s humour Ben” look on your face. Forget it, Hol.’

‘No, go on. Don’t be so touchy. I will try to understand, I promise.’

‘It’s really simple – but it frightens me. I just feel sometimes that everything round me is unreal because I can’t look at it without changing it. I suppose that’s what I’m trying to say.’

‘How’s your dad, by the way?’

‘My dad?’

‘Yes. You haven’t talked about him much, lately. You used to all the time. I just wondered if he was OK?’

It really made me think, when she said that. It was true – I did used to tell her about Dad’s cases and things. They were always pretty interesting when he was dealing with divorces and stuff: he was cool about telling me some of the really strange things people get up to and how he had to question them about all the intimate bedroom things that went on. But he hadn’t been telling me much recently, and I hadn’t realised until Holly asked.

‘I think he’s OK,’ I said, ‘but he is a bit quiet, now you mention it. Just working hard, I suppose.’

Judy

Charlie’s been a bit strange lately. All this volunteering to do the shopping is most out of character: I know he says he’s interested in the fat checkout girl and seeing if he can cheer her up, but I find it very hard to believe that’s really what he’s up to. It must be six or seven times he’s gone back there now, over the last couple of weeks. Maybe he feels guilty about me: I know I’ve been working too hard and it worries him. Rather sweet really, the way he’s trying to take the pressure off me. But I do wish he’d go back to Sainsbury’s or Waitrose, even if it would spoil his experiment with the girl. I think we’re all getting rather tired of the small selection he finds at SavaMart. I’ll have to put my foot down and insist I do the shopping again for a while.

Meanwhile, I think it’s time I did something about the way I look: I caught sight of myself in a mirror on the wall of the gym at the school I’m inspecting and I was quite shocked. I thought I knew exactly how I looked – after all, I stare into that mirror in the bathroom every morning and evening. But there was something about the way I was standing or – I don’t know; I looked more like sixty than forty-eight. And yet, when I’m at the school, I feel far more in tune with the children than I do with the staff, almost as if I’m pretending to be grown-up when I’m discussing things with the head. She’s probably feeling exactly the same. I know when I was teaching I felt utterly different from the way I used to think teachers felt when I was a girl; they looked so secure and smug and certain about everything they said or did. How I longed to be like them. They didn’t look as if they could ever feel frightened of going to the dentist, or being late with giving work in or wearing the wrong thing. All the things I was so scared of. I could see it would all be fine once I was past the age of twenty or so.

Now I know you feel exactly the same, of course, but you pretend that you don’t. So why should I go round looking like a mature woman of sixty-something when I feel the same as I did at fourteen? There has to be a happy compromise, surely. I know I can’t go round in a short, tight skirt and strappy top like Sally does, for heaven’s sake, but there has to be something in between that and these sensible suits I seem to have crept into wearing. And there must be a way of doing my hair and make-up that’s a bit more – well, a bit prettier. My figure’s not too bad, and although my hair’s thinner than it was, it’s still –

Oh, for God’s sake – listen to me! I sound like something off the pages of a women’s magazine. Is this it? Am I going through a mid-life crisis, just when I thought I was skimming over the surface of the menopause so successfully? A confident, modern, professional woman, that’s what I am – how bizarre to find myself worrying about all this stuff, like a teenager. I haven’t got time for all this.

I wish I hadn’t gone off sex. Not just for all the obvious reasons – that I enjoyed it and it kept Charlie and me close and made me feel wanted and all that – but also because it spoils so many other things. I was Christmas shopping today, for example, in Oxford Street, and it struck me how many aspects of life are geared to the business of physical attraction. When I buy clothes and the odd bit of make-up now it’s just like stocking up on anything else, and I know it’s since sex has gone out of it that it’s stopped being fun. Well, it was – terrific fun, to sit in front of the mirror and dress and paint my body to make it attractive. Now I dress simply to look neat and tidy for its own sake, not to be actively attractive to the opposite sex. Clothes, make-up, shoes, hair and all the other nonsense become far less interesting when they don’t give you that little frisson of feeling potentially desirable – it may be unfashionable to admit to thinking that, but I do.

Charlie has never minded that I’m less proactive in our love-making – it’s not as if I can’t get any pleasure out of it. I can – it’s just that if I were honest I’d probably rather be reading a good book. I miss so much that wonderfully desperate need that I had in my youth: it was so energising and animal to be dominated by my physical urges. Probably the only time in my life I’ve really enjoyed being out of control.

I remember how Charlie used to stay at my parents’ house when we were going out together. We lived in one of those tall Victorian houses in Highgate, and he’d just got himself attached to chambers as a junior of some sort. He had rooms, of course, but half the time he’d come and live with us. For my mother’s food, he used to say, and she’d beam with pride and my father would shake his head in mock despair and mutter about being eaten out of house and home. They loved it really, not having had a boy of their own, and it suited Charlie and me very well to have him treated as a surrogate son. Made him my surrogate brother, I suppose, but – my God, he certainly didn’t treat me as any self-respecting brother would. It wasn’t the food he was hungry for in those days – and he wasn’t the only one who was starving either.

We had a very simple system. His bedroom was on the top floor, in what would have been the servants’ rooms when the house was first built, I suppose, and my room was on the floor below, just above where my parents slept. There was no bathroom at the very top and Charlie used to have to come down to use the one next to my bedroom. It would have been far too risky to creep into my room, so he used to leave a little note or drawing in the bathroom when he felt like a bit of hanky-panky, as my father would have put it. The notes were never rude, naturally: in fact they were devised to be as innocuous as possible and if discovered would simply have looked like scraps of paper dropped accidentally and inscribed with odd jottings about law books or train times. But when I went to brush my teeth the sight of one of those bits of paper would set me on fire and I’d be up those stairs in a flash – or, at least, in as near to a flash as I could manage while avoiding the creakier stair treads. It wasn’t only one way, either – there were many times I’d make sure I got to the bathroom first, and left notes of my own, signalling my impending visits.

The habit continued as a silly part of our foreplay for several years after we got married. A note inscribed with something like ‘Gaston’s Matrimonial Property Law Book IV’ or ‘6.40 Waterloo to Haslemere’ left on my pillow would send me into smug swoons of delight and straight into his arms. What fun I had choosing nighties or underwear that I knew he would enjoy, dressing myself up like a present for him to unwrap slowly in the soft light of our bedroom. How I miss it.

Ben shut himself in his room after school today, and when I knocked he said not to come in because he was working. That’s not like him – I hope he’s OK. I always used to think he was the tough one when they were little, but – it’s funny – he’s grown up to be the one I worry about the most. I just wish he didn’t have to pretend to be all right, all the time – I’m sure it’s the mixture of trying to look cool and in charge with being so unsure underneath that’s getting to him. I’ve never felt that with Sally. Maybe Holly can talk to him about it – perhaps I’ll ask her.

I hate it though. Having to give my little boy over to the care of another woman when it really counts. It’s not the empty-nest syndrome they should warn us all about – it’s the empty heart. Sounds ridiculously soppy but it’s true: it’s so hard to have Ben still here in his physical presence, but gone from me in so many other ways. I felt like screaming outside his door today: ‘Don’t you realise I wiped your bottom and fed you at the breast and washed your snot and vomit and tears off the shoulders of all my clothes for years? I was the centre of your universe, the most perfect, necessary being; now I’m an embarrassment.’ But of course I just said, ‘Oh, OK, darling’ or something feeble like that and went back downstairs.