Big Girls Don't Cry

by Francesca Clementis

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Marina has spent most of her adult life on a diet. And although big girls aren't supposed to cry, in Marina's experience, they don't have much fun either. But when scientist David Sandhurst invites her to enrol in a test for a miracle weight-loss drug, Marina thinks her prayers have been answered.

Soon enough, Marina discovers that she's losing those excess pounds and gaining confidence. She's waving goodbye to her hips and hello to an exciting social life - and a whole new set of problems . . .

Release date: September 6, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 288

Sample

The need had been growing since lunchtime. Marina Riesenthal had played the Fat Woman’s game of not overeating in front of others, toying with grilled fish and a salad in the hope that her new client, Paul Jerome, would interpret her fifteen-stone bulk as the result of a rare glandular condition.

‘Fancy a liqueur, Marina?’ Paul had asked. ‘I will if you will.’

Marina succumbed and the conversation got vaguely dirty over the third Cointreau as Paul talked to her about the women in his life as if she were another man instead of just the sexless companion that she usually represented.

Marina recognised that this was a man only worthy of a thin woman’s fantasy. She had learned as a fat teenager that all men who were neither social outcasts, congenitally ugly nor of psychopathic tendencies were permanently out of her league. She lived with it. As the waiter took their glasses away, Marina looked at Paul appraisingly. Everything in the right place. Dark brown eyes that matched his hair and not an ounce of fat on him. Clearly very fit. Christ, what must he think of her great wobbling mass? She hid her genuine attraction towards him by rearranging her piggy features into a grotesque parody of sexuality that made Paul laugh out loud.

‘Fancy a cigar, Paul?’ she asked. ‘I will if you will.’

And they did.

Paul exhaled his cigar smoke in perfect rings. ‘That was a great lunch, Marina. The first of many, I hope.’

Marina widened her eyes in mock-coyness. ‘You’re the client, Mr Jerome. If you absolutely insist I accompany you to fabulously expensive restaurants then I must comply. After all, there are plenty of other account directors at TNSW willing to suffer like this if I’m not.’

Paul laughed. ‘Yes, but they’re all boys, aren’t they? I’ve always preferred female company myself.’

Marina thrilled at being acknowledged as a woman. She drew deeply on her cigar, a recent habit that she’d acquired in an attempt to bring her perceived personality into line with her actual physical size. A few moments of companionable silence passed. The intimacy almost made her weep.

A while later, Paul caught her in a daydream. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

Marina delivered her best conspiratorial smile. ‘What are you thinking?’ (I doubt very much that you even noticed those two portions of Death by Chocolate that the waiter has just carried to the next table. And it’s unlikely that you were wondering if you could smuggle a portion into the ladies’ room and flush the toilet constantly so that nobody will hear you eating. That’s what I was thinking.)

Paul looked around him. ‘I was thinking about how lucky we are to be able to make a living like this.’ He looked at Marina curiously. ‘Do you know what I like about you?’

Marina cringed inwardly. She knew that it wasn’t going to be her beautiful eyes despite the ten minutes she’d spent applying kohl pencil around the lids to make them look bigger. She knew that it wasn’t going to be her dress sense despite having spent over £100 on an expanse of glorious silk fashioned into an allegedly ‘hip skimming, figure-flattering, bosom-camouflaging’ tent. She knew that it wasn’t going to be her five feet ten inch height that, on a less bovine woman, would have been the perfect complement to Paul’s own six feet two inch elevation. ‘Surprise me,’ she said dryly.

‘I can really talk to you. Not just about business although you certainly know as much about Sparkleeze and the kitchen cleaning liquid market as I do. No, I can talk about anything. Like with a friend. Or a sister.’

It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t realise how hurtful the friend/sister comparison can be to a woman who longs to be regarded as a sultry siren, a brainless bimbo, a sex object, anything but a friend or a sister.

Still, Marina was satisfied that lunch had been a success from a business point of view. And you could never have too many friends. And Paul hadn’t looked at her enormous stomach once. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed? Ha ha.

Ofcourse he had noticed. He’d noticed everything about her. He liked her. She made him laugh, made him feel warm. She sparked off in him the sort of feeling that preceded or implied physical attraction. And yet … Surely not … No, this woman was very, very much not his type. What he meant by this was that she wasn’t anyone’s type, so she couldn’t possibly be his. Now that he had that definition clear in his mind, he could restore Marina to the correct place in his mental classifications as ‘chum’.

Except she refused to stay in her place.

She resisted the lure of sweet shops on the way home that night. She was still buzzing from her achievement at bringing in a £3 million account and establishing a good personal relationship with the client.

The Friday night torment began the moment she placed her low-calorie cardboard food substitute in the microwave. She heard the voice whispering above the annoying hum of the oven as it irradiated her dinner to a deserved death. ‘Why are you eating that? You don’t want it, it won’t taste good and you’ll still feel hungry afterwards. What’s the point?’

Marina tried to ignore the words nagging her from within. She put into practice all the tricks she’d been taught at Slim-4-Good years earlier: she ate a carrot, she ate another pound of carrots; she drank a pint of water; she stared at a photograph of an anorexic lingerie model in a magazine; she visualised herself in a bikini that didn’t require industrial joists to support her mammoth chest; she chewed every mouthful of her Lite Veggie Risotto twenty-five times; she manicured her nails; she took a bubble shower (terrified of getting stuck in the bath, she only ever took showers now); she conditioned her magnificent corkscrewed hennaed hair and gave herself a face pack; she stood in front of the mirror and announced to her reflection as seriously as she could: ‘I am a beautiful woman.’

It wasn’t working. The need was escalating into a desperate craving. She found herself rummaging through the kitchen cupboards wondering what she could make with a box of Bran Flakes, a sachet of slimming hot chocolate flavour drink and a tin of powdered low-fat milk. She gathered them all up in her arms, grabbed a jug of water and the washing-up bowl and carried them through to the living room.

Marina tipped the cereal into the bowl, emptied the powdered milk and fake chocolate powder on top of it and splashed over the water. She plunged her hand in and squished the mixture into a crunchy mud. It felt like dead leaves crackling between her fingers as the dark slime oozed into speckled clots that stuck to her nails.

She snatched up a handful and crammed it into her mouth. Her eyes closed in a fake-chocolate ecstasy. Handful followed handful until Marina’s face was streaked with greasy stripes. She didn’t care. She knew what she looked like, with or without dirty marks. Her face was an anonymous round thing with too many chins, too much fat cheek, too heavy eyelids. All the pre-Raphaelite hair in the world could not make her look anything other than middle-aged.

She was thirty-one.

By 8.30, the bowl was empty, licked clean, the last mouthfuls leaving behind a soapy aftertaste of washing-up liquid. Marina didn’t notice. She was already beginning to panic. No more food in the house. No more food in the house. She was breathing more heavily now and pacing the floor trying to talk herself out of the next inevitable step.

The inevitable won. Marina snatched a coat and ran out. The icy December snap made no impression on her well-insulated frame. She half-ran along the street, carefully avoiding her reflection in the dark shop windows. Focused on the distant beacon of the twenty-four-hour supermarket, she mentally planned her itinerary around the aisles.

She breathed in as the automatic double doors opened and admitted her to paradise. She enjoyed a moment of relief that she didn’t get stuck in the superfluous turnstile that the shop had recently installed, no doubt just to humiliate her.

It would have contravened her own bizarre but consistent standards to fill a trolley with indulgences so she took a basket instead. She headed straight for the ice cream so that it could begin its sensuous melting process as soon as possible. She glanced over the cabinets sampling every flavour with damp eyes before her shaking hand settled on Double Chocolate Cream Caramel Crunch. And Toffee Cookie Fudge. And Belgian Choc Chip Cappuccino.

On to snacks and biscuits where Marina meticulously chose family-sized bags of salt and vinegar crisps, tortilla chips and cheese puffs. She was gaining momentum as she hit her favourite section. Cakes. She whispered a silent prayer (or was it a curse?) to God for sending the world Mr Kipling. One by one, she selected a coffee gateau, a chocolate fudge brownie dessert, a treacle tart, a box of fondant fancies, another box of fondant fancies, a cherry cake, a walnut cake …

‘Moo Cow?’

Marina dropped the walnut cake into her basket and tried to remember whether she’d washed the chocolate stains from her face before coming out. She found a smile somewhere deep in her memory and presented it to her friend.

‘Susie! What are you doing in this neck of the woods?’ She quickly took in Susie’s fitted red suit, her twenty-five-inch waist, her perfect blonde bob. She looked like the PR executive that she claimed to be despite actually being a secretary. Gorgeous. If she hadn’t been her oldest friend, Marina would have hated her.

The smooth image was tweaked only by the heap of carrier bags crawling up Susie’s arms. Susie never went out without a list of requirements for her family who seemed to have insatiable material needs. Whether these needs were determined by the family or by Susie herself, Marina had never managed to educe. Susie never went anywhere with just one purpose, one destination. Unless at least four tasks were achieved, then an outing was deemed a waste of time. When working, the lunch hour was earmarked for strategic shopping. Merely spending the hour eating lunch would be an unforgivable indulgence.

‘I was on my way home and realised I was out of bread so I stopped off here.’ She looked into Marina’s basket curiously. ‘Where’s the party, Moo Cow?’

Marina heard herself laugh too loudly, too animatedly. ‘It’s not a party exactly. No, what it is, funnily enough, is that, well you know I mentioned I had those friends with all the children … no? Well it must have been someone else I was telling, well anyway, they’re popping round tomorrow afternoon to pick up some Christmas presents and you know what kids are like, so fussy, but you can’t go wrong with cakes and crisps and the like, but then I didn’t know what sorts they would all prefer, kids being kids, so I thought the best thing would be to get lots of different things, just to be on the safe side.’ She came up for air.

Susie raised her eyebrows. ‘I hope they’re hungry. My God, you must be expecting the entire von Trapp family. Their parents must be more tolerant than I am. I won’t let Alice and Frederick near all that junk food. God, Moo, I remember how miserable you were as a fat child, I couldn’t see my kids go through that.’

Marina knew that it wouldn’t be long before the precocious twins rebelled against Quorn burgers and ‘fun’ packs of raisins to become accomplished secret bingers just as she had done at their age. She didn’t voice this certainty. ‘So, everything all right, Susie?’

‘Well, had a flare up of the old IBS yesterday. Had to go to the doctor. Got a prescription though God knows what good it’ll do. And did I tell you that I’ve been getting these pains in my head? That’s how brain tumours start, you know. And haemorrhages. The doctor said they were probably migraines. Told me to take paracetamol. I think he’s just too mean to send me for a brain scan now that he’s gone fundholding.’

Marina tried to regard Susie’s hypochondria for what it clearly was – the cry for attention of a woman who didn’t get enough attention elsewhere. The sobbing of a mother who devoted twenty-five hours a day to pleasing everyone else and wouldn’t pause for reflection unless a genuine pain (of imaginary source) brought her up short. Unfortunately, Marina just felt irritated. Hypochondria was yet another door closed to her.

She wished that she had the confidence to have irritable bowel syndrome and brain tumours instead of tummy aches and headaches. There was no point in a fat person going to the doctor. Whatever the symptoms, her weight would be blamed. ‘Sprained ankle? Must be all that extra weight putting you off balance. Chest infection? What do you expect when you put all that strain on your lungs? Nasty rash? Must be your body reacting to all the greasy food you eat. Broken arm? Shouldn’t try to load so much lard on to your fork, Fatty.’

Susie looked at her watch that didn’t have any numbers on the face and consequently made telling the time difficult. ‘Is that the time? Must dash. I’ve got to sew labels on the twin’s games kit. Oh and they’re supposed to take something in for “Show And Tell”. They’ll expect me to think of something different for each of them. They’ll ask Ken but he’ll get it wrong. It’s always up to me. And Ken’ll be pacing the floor. You know Ken. He’s like a hunter-gatherer, waiting to be fed the minute he gets through the door. If his food isn’t on the table when he gets in, he becomes positively Neanderthal.’

Marina couldn’t imagine Ken grunting or beating his chest. She thought he was more the muted sighing and silent suffering type, weary after a hard day’s statistical research. Nevertheless she allowed Susie to continue in her fantasy that she was married to Conan the Barbarian.

Susie was prattling on, oblivious to Marina’s distraction. ‘So, you’re still OK for tomorrow night, then?’

Saturday night. What about Saturday night? Marina quickly remembered an invitation to dinner that she’d accepted in a moment of weakness. She assumed her enthusiastic voice. ‘Oh, dinner. Yes absolutely. Can’t wait.’

‘That’s good. And you’re not on any of your silly diets at the moment, are you? Because I’ve got this fabulous recipe I want to try for lemon sorbet. A zillion calories, ofcourse. I’ll have to diet myself after a slice of that.’ She patted her non-existent stomach in mock shame. ‘That’ll be all right, won’t it?’

Marina smiled painfully. ‘Sounds great.’

Susie looked at Marina properly for the first time. ‘What’s wrong?’

Marina tried to pull her gurgling terrors into a coherent line of thought. Just as she was about to speak, she noticed Susie glance at her watch. It was a discreet glance, not meant to offend but the effect was the same. It reminded Marina brutally that Susie had commitments, had other people who needed her, had purpose. It hurt.

She smiled tightly. ‘Nothing’s wrong. Just a bit tired. I mustn’t keep you.’

Susie looked guilty. She looked guilty but she felt envious. She envied Marina her freedom; no commitments, no needy others making demands on her precious time. Her only worry was what cakes to buy for some visiting kids – kids that she could send home as soon as they became difficult.

She smiled equally tightly. ‘We’ll talk on Saturday. Sorry if I upset you by mentioning diets. I know you don’t like talking about… things like that. Anyway, I thought you were happy the way you are. You are, aren’t you?’

Ecstatic, Marina thought. ‘I’m fine Susie, honestly.’

‘Great! Well I’ll leave you to your shopping then. You take care. See you Saturday, Moo.’

Susie leaned across to kiss Marina, her thin lips drowning in a rice pudding cheek. As she walked away, Marina silently answered all the questions that her friend hadn’t thought to ask. Yes, business is going great. Yes I did win that new client I told you about last week. No of course I’m not seeing anyone at the moment. Yes I am earning more than you and Ken put together now. Yes I do look rather like Demis Roussos in this designer tablecloth I’m wearing. Yes, I do still stay at home and read third-rate romances most Saturday nights. Yes I do sometimes feel that my life is an utter failure. And yes, I do mind being called Moo Cow. It hurt when we were eleven and it hurts even more twenty years on.

She knew she was being unfair. Susie didn’t mean to appear selfish. She was just saturated with other things. When they met up for their nights out, Susie was the most attentive listener and the most sensitive of advisers. She just couldn’t function outside of her rigid compartments. Right now, she was in family providing/mother/housekeeper function. She couldn’t offer supportive friendship in this mode. It required a leap of concentration for which Susie did not have the energy.

Marina watched Susie picking up bread, eggs and cornflakes on her way to the checkout. She marvelled at Susie’s total indifference to the chocolate display in front of the till. In fact, she envied anyone who could shop without fear, who could look at a food counter without being consumed with sweaty desire. Finally, Susie left and Marina could return to her shopping.

She’d finished with the cakes section and was now moving up and down the other aisles, scanning labels with an expert eye, looking for new delights and old favourites to tempt her. She found her arm reaching out, of its own accord, towards tins of syrup sponge, baked beans with pork sausages, ravioli, fruit cocktail in heavy syrup, packets of trifle mix, savoury rice and pasta, a large frozen lasagne, a box of muesli. When she could get nothing more in her basket she struggled towards the till, where she added six or seven bars of chocolate. She felt obliged to explain to the uninterested check-out girl about the non-existent party she was planning. ‘I mean, personally, I don’t like all this sweet stuff, but if that’s what the kids want, what can you do?’

The girl looked bored. ‘That’ll be forty-two pounds seventeen.’

Marina handed over the cash and picked up her shopping bags with an anticipatory smile. She walked home quickly, resisting the temptation to take a chunk out of the walnut cake right there in the street. It was only the possibility of being caught in yet another illicit situation by Susie that stopped her.

She rushed through her front door and emptied the bags on to the living room floor. Her breathing was fast now and she was having difficulty tearing her way into the packets. She ripped open a bag of crisps with her teeth and pressed a fistful into her mouth. Her bulky body folded awkwardly on to the floor and she finished the rest of the crisps in a more relaxed state, licking off the salt and vinegar powder before letting the soggy potato residue dissolve on her tongue.

In an attempt to add a semblance of civilised order to her feeding frenzy, she liked to alternate sweet and savoury ‘courses’. She decided on the fondant fancies next.

When she was sixteen her mother, always effortlessly thin, had caught her eating a whole box of fondant fancies in her bedroom. The look of disgust on her mother’s face had stayed with her. She had vowed then that, when she left home, she would eat whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. Ever since, the fondant fancies always entered the stage early during a typical binge for Marina.

Delicately nibbling away at the soft pink icing, her little finger probed for the small knob of white cream. She mashed it against the roof of her mouth, luxuriating in its evocative synthetic tang. She dropped the small square of sponge back in the box and moved on to a yellow fancy. Then the chocolate. Ending up with eight pieces of naked cake, she quickly sprayed oven cleaner over them and threw them into the bin so that she wouldn’t return to them in the middle of the night. It almost made her feel in control. In her opinion, plain cake was a sheer waste of calories.

She went into the kitchen where she placed the frozen lasagne in the microwave and put on two saucepans of water, one for the steamed sponge pudding, one for the savoury rice. No longer caring about her sweet/savoury intentions, Marina started on the chocolate fudge dessert. Using her finger, she spooned the rich sugary topping into her mouth, barely tasting one scoop before shovelling in the next. The microwave pinged, signalling that the lasagne was cooked. She decided to pretend that she was a normal person so she served it out on to a plate and ate it with a fork and spoon.

She scraped the melted cheese and bland white sauce on to the spoon and slurped it noisily while oily puddles gathered at the corners of her lips. Rolling up the top layer of lasagne into a thick white sausage, she abandoned the cutlery and forced the whole doughy clump into her mouth. She mixed the next two layers of meat sauce and white sauce into a mottled gravy and dredged it in. She repeated the ritual until the plate was licked clean.

Next the muesli, one of her favourite eating moments. She poured a small quantity into a dish and delicately picked out all the nuts and pieces of coconut, the apricots and other fruits and seeds. Piece by piece she chewed the healthy morsels. She then discarded the oats and grains into the rubbish before pouring out a second helping. It killed almost ten minutes before she reached the bottom of the box. And it was fun.

Now she was ready to attack one of the tubs of ice cream which was melting satisfactorily. She dunked chunks of walnut cake into the creamy liquid, savouring the clash of sensations as the ice cream curdled with the cake’s buttercream filling. Her flat was now a tip of discarded wrappings and contaminated sponge remnants. Marina was eating more and more quickly, anxious to cram as much in as possible before nausea and stomach cramps prevented her from finishing the feast.

The savoury rice had boiled into into a clump of goo, studded with pieces of indeterminate vegetable in primary colours. Its blend of E numbers and dubious-sounding additives gave it a unique school dinner flavour that helped to eradicate all memory of her £50 lunchtime fish salad. She ate the beans and fruit cocktail straight from the tins.

Time was running out. The steamed syrup sponge was ready and the thought of it was making Marina feel queasy. Gamely she opened the tin and heaped a few dense spoonfuls into her crisp-and buttercream-ringed mouth. She couldn’t finish the pudding. She looked frantically at the untouched chocolate bars. It was against her rules to leave any comfort food unopened in her flat overnight so she simply had to get through it all.

She tried to concentrate on her breathing to stop herself from being sick. Filled with self-loathing, she ripped the paper from the chocolate and forced the brown opiate towards her bloated face. After the third bar, she began to gag. She lay flat out on the floor, her stomach stretched with pain. She pulled herself up with some final deepset vestige of motivation and reached for the magazine she had been reading the previous day. The pages opened at the article on dieting and Marina skipped to the relevant section.

Underneath a photograph of some smiling big women was the text that had attracted her attention: ‘5F – Fat Feminists Fighting the Flab Fascists. The new anti-dieting group are currently challenging media stereotypes of female beauty. 5F have already scored some notable successes with women who could barely remember a life not dominated by food and weight issues. With 5F’s counselling and group sessions they were transformed into confident people, who could eat without feeling guilty and who were happy, yes happy, with their size twenty lives …’

Marina didn’t believe that this was possible but she dialled the helpline number anyway. As she waited for her call to go through, she surveyed the fallout of her binge. Crisp and cake crumbs formed psychedelic patterns in the ice cream splodges on the carpet. Flecks of rice and meat competed with the loud floral print of her dress. She tentatively moved her hand to her face where she recoiled from the dried icing that had settled into the chasms between her chins.

Suddenly sensing something wet trickling over her lips, she had a horrifying suspicion that she was dribbling. Tracing the moisture back to her eyes, she was surprised to recognise her own unfamiliar tears.

Just as she was about to give up holding on, her call was connected. A strong, reassuring female voice answered.

‘This is the 5F helpline. My name is Gail. How can I help you?’

Marina heard a strange voice that she eventually identified as her own shouting down the phone in despair.

‘Just help me! Please, somebody help me!’

Marina fondled her glass of champagne and tried to ignore the fact that she looked remarkably like an expensively upholstered armchair in her £190 drop-waist Paisley-print dress. In an attempt to prevent anyone trying to sit on her accidentally, she waved her arms around a lot, giving the impression that she was drunk or suffering from one of those fashionable nervous diseases known by their initials.

She laboured to keep up a superficial conversation with the other two people in the room. One was a big Sindy doll. She was a PR executive working for the same company as Susie (another glorified secretary, thought Marina) and her husband was in construction marketing (a brick salesman, she decided bitchily). Sindy Doll could have been Susie. Same blonde bob, same smudge-free make-up accentuating the utterly regular features on the same bony face, same eyes unencumbered with telling laughter lines, same body constructed entirely of angles without a single curve. Brick Salesman could have been Ken. Same weak features, same mouth dragged down by apathy, same rounded shoulders, same flat hair with incipient bald patch. They were all thin, the lot of them.

Susie flitted into the room in a tiny black sheath with cap sleeves that made her look like a bat. Marina scrutinised the line of the dress looking for evidence that two hideous children had once sought sanctuary behind that narrow, taut abdomen. Not a bulge could be seen. If anything, Susie’s stomach bordered on the concave. And whatever structure held up that perfect bust at the perfect angle, it certainly wasn’t cantilevered the way Marina’s bras had to be just to stop her bust from sweeping the floor. Susie smelt of perfume, hairspray and new clothes. She smelt of physical confidence and sexual self-awareness. She smelt like the prettiest girl in the class.

‘Moo Cow, come and meet someone.’ Susie dragged Marina from the depths of the sofa until they were both standing, both a little puffed from the exertion. Marina followed her friend into the kitchen where Susie’s hunter-gatherer Ken and another man were locked in work-talk.

Marina wanted to faint or die or disappear. She was about to be partnered for the evening with someone who looked like a film star. She could hardly bear to wait for that moment when the stranger acknowledged her, that unpreventable look of horror and embarrassment on his face when he realised that he was being paired with the fat lady. Why did Susie keep doing this to her?

‘David, this is my friend that I was telling you about. Moo Cow, this is David Sandhurst. He’s a research scientist at Perrico where Ken works. You won’t believe this but you two have a lot in common.’

I believe it, thought Marina wryly. We probably both go to the same gym and share a fondness for morning jogs and All-Bran for breakfast. I can tell these things.

She smiled bravely, in the sure knowledge that God was not going to be kind to her and send her a stroke or heart attack to save her from total mortification. She adopted her professional persona and held out her hand to the poor man as he turne. . .