Girls Under Pressure Read online

  “Yeah, I reckon half of them were semi-professional anyway, which isn’t fair,” says Magda.

  They natter on about it endlessly. I listen hard when I go in the loo. Are they whispering about me? Are they raising their eyebrows and shaking their heads over poor plain plump Ellie? My eyes smart. Tears spurt down my cheeks and I have to take off my glasses and dab my face dry with loo-roll. I don’t want to come out and face them. I don’t want to face anyone ever again.

  I could be Ellie the reclusive loo-squatter. I could set up home in this tiny cubicle. It could be quite cozy if I had a sleeping bag and my sketchpad and a pile of books. In medieval times troubled young girls locked themselves away in tiny cells in churches and no one thought it strange at all. Nowadays there might be an initial flurry of media interest: THE LASS LOCKED IN THE LADIES’ . . . SCHOOLGIRL ELLIE STAYS SITTING ON THE LOO FOR THIRD DAY RUNNING! But eventually people would take it for granted that the end cubicle on the right in the Flowerfields Shopping Centre ladies’ room is permanently engaged.

  “Ellie, are you all right?”

  “What are you doing in there?”

  I have to come out. I try to chat as if I’m perfectly OK. I traipse all round the shopping center looking for Christmas presents. It’s no use. I can’t make up my mind about anything. I could buy Magda the red knickers and Nadine the black, tiny wisps of underwear, size small. They wouldn’t fit me. I am not medium. Soon I won’t even be large. I shall be outsize. Ellie the Elephant size.

  I keep catching glimpses of myself in windows and mirrors. I seem to be getting squatter by the second. Magda drags us into Stuck on You, this new ultra-hip clothes shop that’s just opened at the Flowerfields Shopping Centre. It’s agony. I’m surrounded by skimpy little garments, skirts that would barely fit round one of my thighs, halter tops I’d have to wear as bangles. The assistants are staring at us. There’s an eighty-pound girl dressed in black with short white hair and rings in her nose and navel, and a slender black guy with a diamond ear stud in a tight white T-shirt to show off his toned body.

  “Let’s go,” I beg.

  But Magda is eyeing up the boy and wants to try stuff on. Nadine is gazing enviously at the clothes and is happy to hang around too. So I have to wait for them both, feeling more and more like a guinea pig in a ferret’s cage.

  “Don’t you want to try anything on?” the white-haired girl asks.

  That’s what she says, but she’s smirking as she says it. It’s as if she’s underlining the fact that nothing in the shop would fit me anyway.

  “Hey, Nadine, Magda,” I whisper through the changing-room curtain. “I’m going home, OK?”

  “What? Oh, Ellie, don’t go all moody,” says Magda. “We’ll only be a minute. Can you ask that guy if he’s got these jeans in another size?”

  “You ask him. I really have to go.”

  “Are you feeling sick again, Ellie?” asks Nadine.

  “Yes. I want to go home.”

  “Well, wait, and we’ll take you home,” says Nadine.

  “I can’t wait,” I say, and I make a run for it.

  They’re still in their underwear so they can’t come after me. I rush through the Flowerfields Centre. Up at the top the lights are still flashing and the queue is even bigger and all around me there are girls much taller than me, much prettier than me, much much much thinner than me.

  I really do feel sick. It’s no better when I’m out in the open air. The bus going home lurches so much I have to get off several stops early. I walk through the streets yawning with nausea. I catch sight of myself in a car window. Yawning-Hippo Girl.

  Thank God there’s no one at home. Dad has taken Eggs swimming. Anna’s gone up to London to have lunch with some old school friend. I go straight upstairs to my room and throw myself on my bed. The springs groan under my great weight. I rip my glasses off and bury my head in the pillow, ready for a long howl. I’ve been fighting back tears for hours but now that I can cry in peace they won’t come. I just make silly sniveling noises that sound so stupid I shut up.

  I roll over onto my back. I feel my body with my hands. They mountaineer up each peak and descend each valley. I pinch my waist viciously to see if I can grab a whole handful of fat but my clothes get in the way. I unbutton my sweater and pull it over my head. I struggle up off the bed. I remove everything else. I can see my reflection in the wardrobe mirror but it’s just a pink blur. I put on my glasses.

  It’s like I’m looking at my own body for the first time. I look at my round face with its big baby cheeks and double chin, I look at my balloon breasts, I look at my flabby waist, I look at my saggy soft stomach, I look at my vast wobbly bum, I look at my massive thighs, I look at my round arms and blunt elbows, I look at my dimpled knees and thick ankles, I look at my plump padded feet.

  I stand there, feeling like I’ve stepped into a science fiction movie. An alien has invaded my body and blown it up out of all recognition.

  I can’t believe I’m so fat. I’ve always known I’m a bit chubby. Plump. Biggish. But not fat.

  I whisper the word. I think of greasy swamps of chip fat stagnating in the pan. I look at my body and see the lard beneath the skin. I start clawing at myself, as if I’m trying to rip the flesh right off me.

  The girl in the mirror now looks crazy as well as fat. I turn away quickly and pull my clothes back on. My jeans feel so tight I can barely do up the zip. My sweater strains obscenely over my breasts. I brush my hair to try to cover my great moon face. I keep having one more look at myself to see if I might have changed in the last two seconds. I look worse each time.

  I’ve never exactly liked the way I look. I suppose it was different when I was a little kid. I can remember my mum brushing my wild curls into two big bunches and tying them with bright ribbons, scarlet one day, emerald green the next. “You look so cute, Ellie,” she’d say, and I felt cute. Maybe I even was cute in my dungarees and stripy T-shirts and bright boots to match the ribbons. I was cuddly, that was all. I was definitely cute, with my happy hairstyle and big dark eyes and dimples.

  But then my mum died. Everything changed. I changed too. I felt empty all the time so I couldn’t stop eating: doughnuts and sticky buns and chocolate and toffees. The sourer I felt inside the more I had to stuff myself with sweets. So I got much fatter, and then Dad noticed I frowned whenever I read and I had to wear glasses and Anna my new stepmother tried to dress me in conventional little-girly outfits that made me look like a piglet in a party frock.

  I knew this but somehow I still stayed me inside. I could still act cute. People still liked me at school. They thought me funny. They wanted to be my friend. Even at Anderson High School I still fitted in. I wasn’t the most popular girl in the class, I wasn’t the cleverest, I wasn’t the most stylish or streetwise, I didn’t come top in anything apart from art. But I was still one of the OK Girls. I wasn’t a swot, I wasn’t a slag, I wasn’t a baby, I wasn’t covered in spots, I wasn’t fat. Not really fat, like poor Alison Smith in our year, at least two hundred pounds, waddling slowly up and down the corridors as if she were wading through water, her eyes little glints inside the huge padded cage of her head.

  I give a little gasp. Another stare in the mirror. I know it’s mad but I’m suddenly starting to wonder if I’m actually as fat as Alison. Fatter??

  If I don’t watch out I could become an Alison. I’m going on a diet. I’m going on a diet right this minute.

  It’s lunchtime. Magda and Nadine will be sitting in the ice cream parlor sharing a chicken club sandwich with crisps and little gherkins, and sipping huge frothy strawberry sodas.

  My tummy rumbles.

  “Shut up,” I say. I punch myself hard in my own stomach. “You’re not getting fed today, do you hear, you great big ugly gut?”

  It hears but it doesn’t understand. It gurgles and complains and aches. I try not to pay it any attention. I get out my sketch pad and draw myself in elephantine guise and then I pin the picture above my bed.

&
nbsp; Then I draw myself the way I really want to be. Well, I want to be five foot eight with long straight blond hair and big blue eyes, only there’s no way this could ever happen. No, I draw myself the way I could be if I only stuck to a proper diet. Still small. Still frizzy-haired. Still bespectacled. But thin.

  I wonder how long it will take. I’d like to lose twenty-five pounds at least. I went on this diet once before. It was all Magda’s idea. The aim was to lose a couple of pounds a week. It’s not going to be quick enough. I can’t stand being so fat. I want to change now. If only I could unzip myself from chin to crotch and step out of my old self, sparklingly slim.

  I wonder if Magda will go on a diet with me again? She was useless last time, she only managed a couple of days. So I gave up too. But then Magda doesn’t really need to lose much weight at all. A few pounds and she’d be perfect. And as for Nadine . . .

  I think of her standing there at the Spicy magazine competition, effortlessly, elegantly skinny. I don’t know what I think about it. I’m pleased because Nadine’s my oldest friend. I’m envious because I’d love to be that thin. And I’m angry because it’s so unfair. Nadine often eats more than me. I’ve seen her eat two Mars bars on the trot. OK, she often skips meals too, but it’s not deliberate, she just forgets because she isn’t always hungry.

  Not like me. I am ravenous. I hear Dad and Eggs come back from swimming. There’s a lot of chatter down in the kitchen. And then this smell. It wafts under my bedroom door, over to my bed, up into each nostril. Oh my God, Dad’s frying bacon, they’re having bacon sandwiches. I love bacon sandwiches. Dad’s not that great at cooking but he does wonderful bacon sandwiches, toasting the bread and spreading it with great puddles of golden butter and crisping the bacon until there are no slimy fatty bits . . .

  “Hey, can I have a bacon sandwich?” my mouth shouts before I can stop it.

  I hurtle downstairs. Dad looks surprised to see me.

  “I thought you were out somewhere with Nadine and Magda.”

  I don’t have to conjure up some convincing explanation because Eggs starts talking nonstop.

  “I dived in, Ellie, a real dive, well, the first time was a sort of fall, I didn’t really mean to do it, but then Dad said go for it, Eggs, that wasn’t a fall it was a dive, so I dived again, I dived lots, guess what, I can dive. . . .”

  “Big deal,” I say, breathing in the bacon smell.

  I can scarcely wait. I want to snatch it direct from the frying pan.

  “You can’t dive, Ellie, not like me. I can dive. I’m a good diver, aren’t I, Dad?”

  “Sure, little Eggs, the best. Though Ellie can dive too.”

  “No, she can’t!” Eggs insists, outraged.

  “Can can can,” I say childishly.

  “You can’t, because you don’t ever go swimming,” says Eggs, with six-year-old logic.

  “She used to be a cracking little swimmer once,” says Dad, surprisingly. “Remember when we used to go, Ellie? Hey, why don’t you come one Saturday with Eggs and me?”

  “Yes, then I can show you how I can dive. I bet you can’t dive, well, not the way I can. I want the first bacon sandwich, Dad! Dad! I want the first one!”

  “Pipe down, Mr. Bossy,” says Dad, and he hands the sandwich over to me.

  It’s not often I get put before Eggs. I smile at Dad, and then wonder if he’s just feeling sorry for me. Maybe all that sniveling has left my eyes puffy. In my great big piggy face.

  I look at my bacon sandwich sizzling in splendor on the blue willow pattern plate. I pick it up, and it’s still so hot I can hardly hold it. I raise it to my lips. There’s a little fold of bacon poking out of the toast, glistening with goodness.

  No, not goodness. Badness. Fat. To make me fat. How many calories are there in a bacon sandwich? I don’t know, but it must be heaps. If I eat pig I’ll turn into a pig, a great big swollen-bellied porker. I imagine myself a vast sow wallowing in muck—and I put the sandwich back on the plate.

  “Here, Eggs, you have it if it means so much to you.”

  “Really?” says Eggs, astonished. He takes a big bite immediately in case I change my mind.

  “Well, you have this one, Ellie,” says Dad.

  “I’m not really hungry, actually,” I say. “In fact I feel a bit sick. Maybe it’s the smell of the bacon. I think I’ll go up to my room.”

  “Ellie? I thought you looked a bit odd. I hope you haven’t got some dreaded bug,” says Dad.

  I go upstairs, my tummy feeling like a huge cavern, my mouth slavering like a waterfall with that glorious smell.

  I want a bacon sandwich so much. Just one won’t hurt.

  No. Think pig. Big big big pig.

  I draw an Ellie pig upstairs. I start on an entire menagerie of Outsize Ellie Animals. Ellie warty warthog. Ellie snaggle-tooth rhino. Ellie blubbery seal. Ellie humpback whale.

  I hear the phone downstairs and then Dad calling. It’s Nadine.

  I don’t want to talk to Nadine just now.

  “Tell her I’m not feeling very well. I’ll call her back.”

  I hear Dad muttering. Then he calls again. “She wants to come round to see you, OK?”

  “No!”

  I jump up, hurtle downstairs, and snatch the phone from Dad as he’s about to put it down.

  “Nadine?”

  “Oh, Ellie. What is it? You just ran off!” There’s a buzz behind her. She’s obviously still out.

  “Yeah. I’m sorry. I’ve just got this bug or something. I feel sick.”

  “You’re sure that’s what it is? It’s not that we’ve done something to upset you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Magda thought it might be the modeling thing. She said you seemed fine before that.”

  “Well, Magda’s talking rubbish,” I snap. “Let me speak to her.”

  “No, she’s gone off too,” says Nadine. “We went to the Soda Fountain, right, and there were these boys and they were all going on somewhere else and they asked us too and I didn’t want to go but Magda did.”

  “I get the picture.”

  “So can I come round to your place, Ellie? I know you don’t feel very well but you can just loll on your bed and take it easy if you want.”

  “Well,” I say, weakening.

  “And I need your advice. You see this photographer guy, you know, the Spicy one, he told me he reckoned I was really in with a chance, and he said they’d be getting in touch with all the possibles quite soon and we’d have to go to this new photo session in a proper studio, and I don’t know what clothes to wear, whether to go dead casual in jeans or whether they expect you to dress up in all sorts of fashion stuff. And then there’s makeup. Do you think Magda would do it for me because she’s much better at that sort of thing? And what about my hair? Do you think the ends need cutting, Ellie? Ellie? Are you still there?”

  “Mmm. Nadine, I really do feel sick. Don’t come round, eh? I’ll phone you tomorrow. Bye.”

  I can’t stand to listen to Nadine another second. She’s obviously getting in a twitch about nothing. This photographer probably says that to all the girls. And there were so many pretty ones there today. Lots of them were heaps prettier than Nadine. She won’t get chosen. She won’t get to be a Spicy cover girl.

  Oh, God, what’s the matter with me? Nadine’s my best friend. I want her to get chosen.

  No, I don’t.

  I do. And I don’t.

  I can’t stand feeling like this. Jade-green with jealousy.

  I creep back to my room, feeling like I’m covered in shameful green slime. I don’t feel like drawing anymore. I try to find something to read. Mrs. Madley, our English teacher, said we’ve all got to read Jane Eyre over the Christmas holidays. Everyone’s outraged and says how can they possibly plow through such a huge long boring book. I moaned too, of course. Catch me letting on that I’ve already read it for fun. I liked the video of it so I thought I’d see what the book was like. Anna’s got an old Penguin copy.r />
  Maybe I’ll get stuck into Jane Eyre again. Perhaps I’d better try to be as highbrow as possible seeing as I’m so hideous. And it’s a good story. Jane’s OK. At least she’s not pretty.

  I read and read and read. It’s fine at first. I like all the little-girl-Jane bits because she’s so fierce and then when she’s sent away to school and starving all the time I identify totally. My tummy’s rumbling so crazily I’d wolf down Jane’s bowl of burnt porridge, no problem. Though porridge is ever so fattening, isn’t it?

  That’s the trouble. Jane might be plain but she’s this skinny little thing. People go on about it all the time. I start to get irritated. What’s she got to grouch about if she’s tiny? And Mr. Rochester loves her. Why can’t they both shut up about the first mad wife up in the attic? I skip forward to find the bit where mad Bertha growls and bites. My heart starts thumping as I read the description. She’s not just hairy and purple. She’s got bloated features. It says she’s corpulent, as big as her husband. Rochester says is it any wonder that he wants Jane. He asks them to compare Jane’s form with Bertha’s bulk.

  He doesn’t want Bertha because she’s fat. And mad. But maybe she only went mad because Rochester didn’t fancy her anymore when she started getting fat.

  Maybe Dan won’t fancy me.

  Well, I don’t fancy him. I mean, he’s OK, he’s funny, he’s my friend, we sometimes fool around together—but he’s just too odd and geeky and immature to be a real boyfriend.

  He’s never seen things that way. He’s been nuts on me ever since we met in the summer. He’s traveled down from Manchester to stay with me and he writes heaps of letters and he phones every now and then just to say hello.

  I suddenly run downstairs and start dialing.

  “You OK now, Ellie?” Dad calls. He’s sprawling on the sofa with a can of beer. Eggs is sitting on Dad’s stomach, sipping Coke. They’re both dipping into a big bowl of crisps, watching football on the telly.

  I think of a salty golden crisp cracking inside my mouth. Water oozes over my tongue. I’m so hungry.