Girls Under Pressure Read online

  He clasps his hands and pops his eyes at a painting called The Origin of the Milky Way.

  “Ooooh! Look at that lady! Isn’t she rude?” he pipes.

  I sigh. Anna shushes. Dad tells Eggs that it isn’t rude at all, not when it’s a great painter illustrating an extraordinary myth.

  “I think she’s rude,” says Eggs. “She is rude, isn’t she, Ellie?”

  I find the painting a bit embarrassing myself but I affect a lofty air.

  “You’re just too young to appreciate great art, Eggs,” I say.

  “No, I’m not. I like the art. I just think it’s rude. That lady’s got wobbly bits just like you.”

  I know he just means breasts, any shape or size. But the word wobbly still makes me want to burst into tears. I feel myself going hot. A bright pink wobbly pudding.

  “I’ll meet you lot at the entrance in half an hour, right?” I say, and I shove off quickly by myself.

  The word wobbly wiggles around my brain like a great worm. I try to absorb myself in the art now I’m on my own but it doesn’t work. I find I’m just staring desperately at every painted woman to see how fat she is. It’s hard to tell with all the virgins because their blue robes are voluminous.

  I concentrate on the nudes. The thinnest is a languid pinup Venus wearing a huge fancy hat, two strings of beads and nothing else. She poses suggestively, one arm up, one leg bent. Her beautiful long lean body makes me think of Nadine.

  There’s another rounder Venus kissing a very young Cupid while all sorts of strange creatures cavort in the background. She’s disturbingly sexy, very aware of all her charms, not really thin but well toned and taut, as if she worked out in the gym every day. She’s the spitting image of Magda.

  I look for myself. I don’t get any further than Rubens. I look at double chins, padded arms, flabby thighs, domed stomachs, enormous dimpled bottoms. Three huge hefty women are being offered a golden apple. They look as if they eat an entire orchard of apples every day.

  I am never going to eat again.

  whale girl

  So I don’t eat.

  I don’t bite. I don’t chew. I don’t swallow. Simple.

  Only of course it’s not simple at all. It’s the hardest thing ever. I think of nothing else all day long.

  Breakfast is no problem. I wake so hungry that I feel weak and queasy and the sight of Dad chomping and Eggs slurping puts me off food altogether. Anna and I sip black coffee in a smug sisterly way.

  School lunches are easily solved too. The smell steals along the corridors and invades the classroom and just at first my nose twitches, my stomach rumbles, and my mouth drools desperately. But it’s easier actually in the canteen where the smell is overwhelming and the sight is sickening if I try hard enough. It’s as if I’m wearing new lenses in my glasses. The sausages become charred penises, obscenely pink where the skins are split. The pizza looks diseased, oozing bloody tomato and pus-yellow cheese. The baked potatoes steam like horse droppings. It’s easy to back away.

  It’s far harder when Magda and Nadine offer me food. Magda presses a whole slice of her mother’s homemade pecan pie on me at break and before I can contaminate it with my thoughts I have eaten it all, the sweet moistness sliding straight down my throat in seconds. It’s so good I feel tears in my eyes. I’ve been near-starving for days and it’s so wonderful easing that gnawing need inside me—and yet as soon as it’s all gone and I’m left with sticky lips and crumbs on my fingers I’m horrified.

  How many calories? Three hundred? Four hundred? Maybe five hundred? All that syrup, all that butter, all those wickedly fattening pecans.

  I say I have to go to the cloakroom but Magda and Nadine come too, and I can’t thrust my fingers down my throat and throw up because they’d hear me.

  Nadine is forever nibbling at Kit Kats and Twixes. It’s so unfair. How can she stay so skinny? And her white skin is flawless, she doesn’t even get spots. She eats her chocolate bars absentmindedly, snapping off a couple of pieces every so often and offering them to Magda and me.

  “Nadine. I’m on a diet,” I say, brushing her hand away.

  “Yeah, yeah, you and your diets, Ellie,” says Nadine.

  So OK, in the past I’ve tried dieting, but never seriously. This time it’s different. It has to be.

  It’s even harder when I get home. I’m so used to eating tea the minute I get in from school, bread and honey, oatcakes and cheese, bunches of grapes, hot chocolate, homemade shortbread—good wholesome wonderful food. No, bad food that bloats me into a great big wobbly blob. I can’t eat it. I won’t eat it.

  Anna doesn’t argue. She makes Eggs his own tea and we have ours: celery and carrot sticks and apple wedges. We snap and crunch briskly. Eggs wonders if he is missing out on anything. He demands a stick of celery too.

  “It doesn’t taste of anything,” he says, astonished. “I don’t like it.”

  “We don’t like it either.”

  “Then you’re silly to eat it,” says Eggs.

  Dad thinks we’re even sillier. He watches Anna and me cut our one slice of ham and quarter our one tomato and eat our way through endless lettuce leaves for supper.

  “You’re both nuts,” he says. “What are you doing, going on this crazy diet? You’re still matchstick thin, Anna—and I don’t know what’s got into you, Ellie. You’ve always been a girl who loves her food.”

  “Meaning I’ve always been a fat pig so why don’t I stay one?” I say, choking on my forkful of lettuce. It stays in my throat, rank moist vegetation. What am I doing trying to eat it? I spit it out into a paper hankie, shuddering.

  “Yuck! Ellie spat! I’m not allowed to spit, am I, Mum?”

  “Just be quiet, Eggs.”

  “Don’t do that, Ellie! I didn’t say you were fat, for God’s sake.”

  “That’s what you meant.”

  “No, I didn’t. You’re not fat, you’re . . .”

  “Yes? What am I?”

  “You’re just . . . ordinary nice girl-size,” Dad says desperately.

  “Nadine and Magda are ordinary nice girls but I’m much fatter than them, aren’t I?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you know! Magda’s got a lovely figure. You certainly should know that, Dad, you can’t keep your eyes off her when she calls round.”

  “Ellie!” says Anna sharply.

  “And Nadine is so thin and gorgeous she’s going to be a model for Spicy magazine,” I shout, leaving the table.

  I charge up to my room, crying. I stare at myself in my mirror, hoping I might look tragic with tears coursing down my face, but I just look blotchy. My nose is running. I have slimy green lettuce stuck to my teeth. And I’m still fat. Fat fat fat. I’ve hardly eaten for days and I’ve only lost four pounds. I stand on the scales stark naked every morning—and I strip off when I come home from school, and try again last thing at night. Four pounds sounds a lot when you look at two bags of sugar, but I don’t know where it’s come off me. My cheeks are still puffed out like a frog, my body still bulges, my bum wobbles, my hips spread. I feel myself swelling up all over so that the mirror can barely contain me.

  It turns out it’s true about Nadine. She comes waltzing into school waving a letter.

  “Ellie! Magda! You’ll never ever guess what!”

  I guess. We guess. The whole class guesses, circling Nadine in awe.

  “Are you really going to be a model, Nadine?”

  “Well, it’s just the first heat, on the nineteenth of December up in London, but they say there were heaps of girls, thousands, who didn’t make it through to this stage.”

  “Thanks, Nadine! I know my place. Bottom of the heap,” says Magda. “Here, maybe I left home before the post came. Maybe I’m through to the first heat too.”

  “What’s going on, girls?” says Mrs. Henderson, coming into the classroom. “You’re all buzzing like a hive of bees.”

  “Well, we’re just the drones. Nadine’s the Queen Bee,” I say.


  It comes out a little too sharply. I smile at Nadine to show her I’m just joking. She’s so out of her head with excitement she doesn’t even notice. Oh, God, she looks so beautiful. Of course she’ll end up the winner.

  “A cover girl on Spicy magazine?” says Mrs. Henderson, eyebrows raised.

  “Isn’t Nadine lucky?” the class chorus.

  “I’m only in the first heat,” Nadine says modestly. “I don’t think I’ll ever make it. I’ll be so nervous on the nineteenth.”

  “What’s happening then?” says Mrs. Henderson, her hands on her hips.

  “That’s when I have to go to this studio in London. We all have to wear these special clothes and pose.”

  “Oh, Nadine! You’ll actually be modeling.”

  “Modeling,” Mrs. Henderson repeats, but she puts an entirely different spin on the word. She makes it sound as if it’s the last thing in the world she’d want to do. I feel a shameful stab of relief. Then I look at Mrs. Henderson properly. Fat chance she’d ever have of being a model. Fat being the operative word. Well, she’s not fat fat, but she’s stockily built, with big muscles, and her gray sweatsuit fits a little too snugly.

  “When are you intending to go to this studio, Nadine? In the evening? You will make sure this is a properly supervised modeling session, won’t you? Take your mother with you,” says Mrs. Henderson.

  “I’m not going with my mum!” says Nadine. “But it’s OK, Mrs. Henderson, it’s totally respectable. There’ll be heaps of other girls there—and it’s in the daytime.”

  “The daytime,” says Mrs. Henderson. She pauses. “Then you’ll be at school.”

  “It’s on Saturday, Mrs Henderson.”

  “Ah! Just as well.”

  “But you’d have let me have a day off school anyway, wouldn’t you, Mrs. Henderson?”

  “Dream on, Nadine,” says Mrs. Henderson briskly. “I shall expect you to volunteer for extra PE lessons to keep you in beautifully toned condition.”

  “Dream on, Mrs. Henderson,” says Nadine, a little too cheekily.

  Nadine ends up tidying the sports equipment cupboard in her lunch hour. Magda and I help her out. They eat crisps and swig Coke as we coil ropes and assemble hoops and herd netballs into neat piles. I sip mineral water, first one can, then another.

  “Have you turned into a camel, Ellie?” says Magda.

  “What do you mean?” I say defensively, looking down at my bulging body. “Are you saying I look like I’ve got humps?”

  “No! I’m saying you’ve got a thirst like a camel. That’s your second can, isn’t it?”

  “So?”

  “So sorry I asked,” says Magda, pulling a face at Nadine.

  “You’re drinking and drinking and yet you’re not eating anything,” says Nadine, thrusting her bag of crisps under my nose. “Eat, Ellie. A few measly little crisps aren’t going to make you fat. I scoff them all the time.”

  “Meaning you’re the one with the thin-as-a-pin model looks and yet you can still eat crisps,” I say.

  “Meaning nothing. What’s the matter with you, Ellie? Don’t be such a grump.”

  “Sorry, sorry.”

  I am sorry too. I know I’m being paranoid. I know Magda and Nadine aren’t getting at me. I’m the one who keeps griping at them.

  I grit my teeth and try hard to act normally but it’s so hard when I want to snatch handfuls of their salty golden crisps and cram them into my mouth, bagful after bagful. . . . I raise my second can to my lips and drain it.

  I hiccup. I feel totally waterlogged, a great bloated balloon—but I still don’t feel full. I haven’t eaten since yesterday’s supper, and that was only salad.

  I’ve decided now that I’m going to stick to one meal a day until I’ve lost at least fifteen pounds. Six more hours to go.

  I start stacking quoits energetically to divert myself. I bend and stretch . . . and then the store cupboard lurches sideways and I grab at Nadine.

  “Ellie?”

  “She’s fainting,” says Magda.

  “No, I’m not,” I mumble.

  The cupboard whirls round and round, the walls closing in on me.

  “Put her head between her legs,” says Magda.

  “You what?” says Nadine.

  “It’s a recovery position, nutcase. Here, Ellie, sit down. Put your head right down too. You’ll be better in a minute.”

  “I’m better now,” I say.

  The cupboard is still spinning, but slowly.

  “Shall I go and get Mrs. Henderson?” asks Nadine.

  “No!”

  “You’re still ever so pale, Ellie.”

  “I’m always pale. I just went dizzy for a minute, that’s all. No big deal.”

  “Well, no wonder you’re going dizzy if you won’t eat,” says Nadine. “You and this stupid diet.”

  “Don’t start that again.”

  “You know the best way to lose weight?” says Magda, taking a discus in either hand and trying to flex her muscles. “Exercise. That’s what you should do, Ellie.”

  “Ellie, exercise?” Nadine laughs.

  We are famous for being the least sporty girls ever. But I’ve been privately experimenting recently. I tried doing sit-ups in my bedroom to firm up my horrible wobbly tummy, but I’m so useless at it I can only sit up at all if I wedge my toes under the chest of drawers. I practically pulled my toes right off—they’ve still got painful mauve grooves across them now.

  I’ve also tried jogging to school, though I felt ultra-stupid and hoped everyone would think I was running for a bus. I only managed to go the length of two streets before collapsing. I was so sweaty I was terrified I’d overwhelmed the efficiency of my Mum roll-on and I had to keep my distance from everyone all day long.

  “I know exercise is a good idea,” I say. “It’s not that I don’t want to do it. I can’t. You know how useless I am, Magda.”

  “It’s only because you’re not fit,” Magda persists. “How about going to a gym?”

  “Please!” says Nadine, shaking her long locks in horror.

  “Go on, Ellie, you might find it fun. There’s a special early gym session down the leisure center. We could meet up before school,” says Magda.

  “What?”

  “Stop it!” says Nadine. “You two are going completely bananas. It’s like something out of The X-Files. My two best friends have been taken over by crazed zombies. First Ellie gets this thing about being fat and gives up eating altogether—Ellie, the girl who once ate three Mars bars on the trot!—and now Magda’s saying she wants to get up at the crack of dawn and go and work out in a gym. Why?”

  I wonder if Magda’s desperately envious about Nadine’s modeling chance too. Then my brain starts working properly.

  “This guy you met in the Soda Fountain—he doesn’t happen to have an early-morning gym session, does he?” I say.

  “Aah!” says Nadine.

  “No, Jamie doesn’t,” says Magda. “He’s not into anything physical. Apart from sex. He can’t keep his hands to himself. He’s like an octopus. I’m not going out with him again.”

  “No, but Jamie wasn’t the one you really fancied. It was the dark dishy one. Mike?”

  “Mick. Oooh, he is so gorgeous! He was round at Jamie’s place the other day. He sat next to me on the sofa and OK, we weren’t even touching, but it was like these electrical currents were going sizzle sizzle sizzle between him and me. I felt my hair was practically standing on end. I tried so hard with him and I just know he’s interested, but he’s Jamie’s best friend and he obviously doesn’t want to cause trouble. He and Jamie are ever so close.”

  “Maybe they’re too close,” I say. “Are you sure Mick isn’t gay, Magda?”

  “No, of course he’s not gay! Look, OK, he did just happen to let slip that he works out at the Sunrisers Club down the leisure center—”

  “Then I should think he is gay. Straight guys don’t bother about their bodies half so much,” says Nadine, flexing
her own arms. “Hey, what do you think of my muscle definition? Do you think I ought to try to develop it?”

  “Try developing your bust, darling,” says Magda, sticking out her own Wonder Bra bosom.

  “It’s OK to be small. Lots of models are. And anyway, I could always go for a breast enhancement later,” says Nadine.

  “Sounds like you’re more in need of a brain enhancement,” I say sourly. “And you, Magda. I’m not going to a sweaty old gym just so you can make out with this Mick.”

  “OK, OK, not the gym. Maybe it would be almost too obvious. Anyway, it costs a fortune. No, I thought we could go swimming. The pool opens at seven same as the gym. How about going just once? Ellie? Nadine? Then we could fetch up in the cafeteria for breakfast afterward and surprise surprise, there’s Mick. Hopefully. Please! I don’t want to go on my own. I’ll stand you both breakfast afterward. They do super raspberry Danish pastries.”

  “I’m on a diet,” I snap.

  “Looks like your little ploy’s not working, Magda. You can certainly count me out. I need my beauty sleep,” says Nadine.

  “Ellie? Listen, I was reading this article about swimming, how it’s the best exercise you can take because you’re using every single muscle in your body, right—and if you go early in the morning, before you’ve eaten anything, it speeds up your metabolism so that whatever you eat after gets burnt up in double-quick time. So you could eat up that raspberry Danish and not put on an ounce in weight.”

  I know she’s just shooting me a line. Yet maybe there’s some truth in what she’s saying. It sounds logical. Well, not the raspberry Danish bit, sadly. But if I could really kick-start my metabolism into superdrive every morning it might make a real difference.

  “Yes, Ellie!” says Magda, seeing my face. “I’ll meet you outside the leisure center at seven tomorrow morning, right?”

  “Wrong,” I say. How can I go swimming and show off my great white whale body to everyone? And yet . . . half an hour’s strong swimming would burn up so many calories . . .