Ten Steps to Happiness

‘It’s not perfect. Yet. But it will be!’

‘Yes. It will be. As soon as the money starts coming in.’

‘That’s just what I was going to say.’

‘Anyway I like it,’ she said. ‘I think it’s better than perfect. In its own way. It’s got character…’ They both smiled half-heartedly. ‘And if people don’t like it they can fuck off – I mean—No. I don’t mean that, obviously. I mean—’ Jo wasn’t sure what she meant. But the reality of sharing their home with a lot of grumbling, dissatisfied strangers suddenly seemed rather more real and a great deal less enticing than it had this morning. ‘…Anyway,’ she finished lamely, ‘they’re all going to be very happy here. I’m sure.’

‘Dead bloody right, they will be! And if they aren’t, I quite agree, they can just fuck right off again.’

‘It’s exactly what they would do, I suppose,’ she said glumly.

‘Right. And see if we care!’ They both started laughing. ‘Now then. I’ve got exactly…’ He emptied his trouser pockets. ‘…£11.87…Altogether…Oh. How much have you got?’

‘I’ve got £25. But it’s meant to last us until Friday. They won’t let us get any more out until the end of the week.’

‘Fine. Excellent. I think we should drive out to Lamsbury and buy ourselves a bottle of champagne.’

‘Charlie, we can’t.’

‘Of course we can. We’ve got to celebrate. With or without the bloody licences. Fiddleford Manor Retreat is now officially open for guests. So let’s hope they come soon or we shan’t be able to buy the greedy little sods any breakfast.’

It was Messy Monroe, though she didn’t realise it yet, who was destined to be Fiddleford’s first illegal guest. Which is strange because until a fortnight or so before she arrived most of the country had forgotten she ever existed. One of a stream of wide-eyed girls with nice bellybuttons who flit across our television screens, she’d had a stint presenting Top of the Pops about seven years ago. In December 1995 she was voted TV’s Hottest Totty by one of the men’s magazines and she spent the following eighteen months or so capitalising on it, endorsing all sorts of things from Breast Awareness Week to easi-grip toothbrushes. She was given a holiday show to present, which meant everyone got to see her in her bathers, and then five years ago, just when life couldn’t have been looking any better, she made the mistake of falling in love with a pretentious and impoverished novelist.

This one, who was small and softly spoken and who used unnecessarily long words to hide the fact that he was never actually saying anything, made her head spin with an irresistible mixture of lust and mental confusion. He could have chosen to ruin any number of beautiful women’s lives, and in fact he had (and continues to do so). That winter, the winter of 1996, he just happened to pick on Messy.

At the time Messy was a young twenty-five, and in a funny way slightly frightened by her easy success. She had emerged onto the scene three years earlier, from a life of dreary and impoverished oblivion, the daughter of a father she had never met, and a mother who worked in personnel at a shirt factory in Middlesbrough. She’d been surviving in an idea-free zone ever since, surrounded by the sort of spoilt and happening crew who find it embarrassing to use long words at all, let alone use them to say anything confusing, and she hadn’t realised it until the writer came along, but she was bored. She was wilting with boredom – and guilt and bewilderment. Because she was living, after all, the very life that a lot of women have been encouraged to fantasise about.

Enter the little writer, putting on an excellent show of being interested in her mind. They spent almost a year together, just long enough for him to destroy what there ever really was of her confidence. In a series of desperate bids to impress him, she applied to read a degree course in Philosophy (and was rejected). She resigned from the holiday show, refused to cooperate with a Hello! magazine TV Totty special, and sacked her agent. But the little novelist remained unimpressed. Nothing she did, or didn’t do, could escape his soft-voiced disdain. In September 1997, just six weeks before he was due to desert her, Messy produced the only decent thing that ever came out of the relationship, a daughter called Chloe.

She and Chloe went to live in a small cottage in Oxfordshire, where the British public very quickly forgot about her. She looked after her daughter, educated herself to a level where she would never again find herself intimidated by chippy little novelists, and ate. She was fifteen stone, lonely, broke, and Chloe had just turned three when she finally felt desperate enough to start rebuilding her life again.

Messy did the only thing she could think of doing under her restricted circumstances. While her daughter was away at nursery school she wrote a book about being fat, and about what she claimed to have identified as the ‘fat/thin hate divide’. And because she was quite clever and because the book, however silly, was often funny and very frank, and of course because she herself had once been so famous and thin, Messy’s book caught people’s attention. The Secret Revolution: Fatties Fight Back was given an undue amount of publicity, almost all of it negative.

Which brings us pretty much up to date. Fatties had been out for just one week and it was infuriating everyone. Thin people, obviously, because for the first time ever they were under open attack, and fat people because – well, for a myriad of reasons. After all the subject isn’t an easy one, and Messy should never have used the word FATTIES in the title if she wasn’t prepared for a rough ride.

Messy Monroe may be finding it hard, now she’s just like every other female, worrying ‘does my bum look big in this?’ read one of a hundred readers’ letters running in publications around the country that week, but maybe it’s just a problem she has, adjusting to not being a ‘star’ anymore. I’m ‘fat’, as she calls it, and believe me I KNOW I’m fabulous, and I’ve got lots of skinny friends who accept me as I am. So Messy, all I can say to you is, try looking out and seeing the love in this world next time, instead of harping on about fat versus thin!!!

Messy, having hidden away for four years, was now suddenly giving interviews galore, and she hated it. She hated being on show, but the wretched Fatty theme had spiralled into the unofficial Light Relief Topic of the Week, and it was out of her control – or so she felt. The whole thing culminated in an invitation to appear alongside three Very Important Men on the panel of Question Time.

In fact she acquitted herself quite well at first. She came up with something suitably anodyne when they asked her about the effect of September 11th on other terrorist groups, and again when they asked her (as if she knew) about the likelihood of biological warfare on Britain. It was only towards the end, when the questions turned from world war to people’s weight, that she ran into trouble.

‘I for one am very slender,’ announced a sensible-looking woman about three rows from the front, ‘but I have many, many dear friends who are on the larger side—’

‘They’re fat,’ snapped Messy. ‘If you mean they’re fat, then for Heaven’s sake say so.’

‘Rubbish!’ somebody shouted back. Messy rolled her eyes impatiently.

‘Doesn’t the panel think,’ the very slender woman continued, ‘that we have enough hate divisions in this world already, without people like Messy Monroe falsely inventing any more?’

The entire audience, fat and thin, broke into hearty applause. They were angry and frightened, after so long discussing a possible World War Three, and they needed to vent their frustration on an easy target. Messy, with all the adrenaline that was pumping through her, was only fuzzily aware of the audience mood. She was more acutely aware of her own terror, and of the possibility that at any moment she could simply lose her nerve. So she over-compensated and answered the question without any of the conciliatory ramble which served her more experienced panellists so well: ‘Firstly, and most obviously,’ she said, much too aggressively, ‘these divisions are not “invented”. You and your friends may not want to acknowledge them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. My fat friends and I could refuse to acknowledge the WTC attacks. A fat lot of use that would be!’ She paused. It was meant to be a joke. Not an especially funny one, obviously, but not necessarily deserving of the cruel ‘Ver-y Funn-y’ yelled out from the back of the auditorium, which made everyone laugh. She pressed on. ‘You can’t heal a rift—You can’t heal any sort of rift without first identifying the causes. And that’s what my book is doing. Trying to point out that fat and thin people, and especially women, have a deep and very understandable mistrust of one another—’

‘RUBBISH!’ somebody shouted again.

Messy ignored it, and the burst of applause which followed. ‘Which is why,’ she continued, ‘there has been such a strong reaction to my use of the word FATTIES in the title. If people weren’t so jittery about us they wouldn’t take such exception to the word that describes us. Obviously. It’s the same reason we can’t say “coloured” or “negro” or “spastic” or “dwarf”…’

She hesitated, waiting for the jeers to die down. ‘And to illustrate that—’ she said, and faltered. ‘…To illustrate that,’ she began again. Messy had been facing hostility on radio phone-in shows all week, but this was different. Looking around at the angry faces in front of her, and the smug unhelpful expressions of her Very Important fellow guests, she realised she had forgotten what she was going to say. Completely. She tried another tack: ‘For example, I would like to know how many fatties here tonight…How many fatties in the audience—’ What was she meant to say next? She had no idea. ‘How many fatties…’ She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember any words at all. All she could do was repeat herself. And every time she repeated herself, she repeated the word ‘fatty’, and every time she said ‘fatty’ the audience grew more enraged.

It reached a point where one of her Very Important fellow panellists decided to step in.

The eternally marvellous Maurice Morrison, twice married and divorced and also, as it happened, a furtive (but busy) preferrer of teenage boys; multi-millionaire entrepreneur, ex-Marlborough pupil and the government’s brand new Minister for Kindness; slim, attractive, concerned, with a full head of salty blond hair and an Armani-clad well-exercised torso, held up his suntanned, elegantly masculine hand and called calmly for hush.

‘OK, look, come on, guys,’ he said, ‘I think we should appreciate that Messy is entitled to her opinion, and since she’s come on the show to tell us about it, we should at least have the courtesy to listen, yeah? Even if we don’t agree. Becuz, basically—For me, that’s one of the beautiful things about this country. It’s one of the things we’re fighting for right now, over in Kabul! Becuz – here in Britain, OK – we can stand up and say “Listen, guys. You may not agree with me, but this is actually an issue I believe in!”’

By God, it brought the house down.

Messy glowered at him as he peeped across, smiling with encouragement and warmth and a lovely little smattering of diffidence. She didn’t need Maurice Morrison – the last thing she needed was patronising, good-looking Maurice Morrison trawling for admirers off the back of her humiliation. She was furious. Gradually the cheers faded to silence and everyone waited to hear how she would respond.

She could have said so many things. If she’d been even an eighth as efficient at crowd control as Mr Morrison was, she could have turned the whole situation to her advantage. But she wasn’t. She had barely emerged from four years in hiding, she was still battered by a broken heart and the cruel transformation in her looks and general fortune, and the lights were beaming down on her and making her very hot. The whole world, or so it felt, was looking on. She said: ‘Get lost, you phony little creep.’

And that was the end of Messy. Really, she was lucky she wasn’t lynched.

The performance boosted her book sales, but it also set her up as a national target for mockery and general abuse. Over the next two days a lot of inane and cruel things were written about her. One paper found a nutritionist to express revulsion at a picture of sweet, chubby little Chloe sucking on a lollipop. Another paper dedicated a whole page to what they imagined Messy Monroe needed to eat each day in order to maintain her great bulk. Several papers ran Before and After photographs, alongside pseudo serious articles about the stresses of early fame/sex appeal/faded stardom/single motherhood…It was pretty standard stuff, the usual newspaper fodder. It certainly wasn’t an enormous story, what with everything else that was going on.

But it was big enough to catch the eyes of the tabloid scanners at Fiddleford Manor.

‘There’s a bloody great cow here,’ said Grey McShane, slowly lifting his large feet off the kitchen table and laying his paper down in front of him, ‘who lost her rag on the telly a couple o’ nights ago. Have you seen the size of her?’

‘Yes, I noticed her,’ mumbled the General, without looking up. Dressed smartly, as always, in a tweed jacket and old regiment tie, he was sitting in his preferred position for this time in the mid-morning, bolt upright in the worn leather armchair beside the Aga, and surrounded by a sea of downmarket newspapers and magazines. ‘I thought she was rather comely.’

‘No!’ Grey examined the photograph more closely, this time trying to overlook her most obvious weakness. And it was true, she had beautiful long dark shiny hair…and an attractive mouth which curled up slightly at the edges…and round, intelligent, bright blue eyes… ‘But she’s a bloody whale!’

‘Modern girls are too thin, McShane. I thought we’d agreed on that.’

‘Well I know…But there’s a limit.’

Just then Jo came in, waddling efficiently as she tended to these days, now that she was tense and working again, with her large but very neat seven-and-a-half-month bump in front of her and her notorious contacts book resting open in her hands. ‘Oh good,’ she said. ‘Are you discussing Messy Monroe? That’s just who I wanted to talk about.’

‘Aye. Apparently she really hates thin people.’

‘She actually did a couple of P.A.s for us a few years ago. Ha! When she was thin herself. And she was great. Very professional…Because there was that phase when an M.M. P.A. pretty much guaranteed a show in the red tops, wasn’t there? She could charge whatever she liked…Do you remember?’ Grey and the General looked at each other in weary incomprehension, as they often did when Jo started talking shop. ‘Anyway it doesn’t matter,’ she continued blithely. ‘The point is somehow or other I’ve got her number. And that’s what counts. I think we should invite her to come down.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ bellowed Grey. ‘Have you seen the size of her? She won’t fit through the front door!’

‘Well. Short of inviting Osama Bin Laden to stay with us—’

‘Don’t be disgusting,’ snapped the General.

‘…she’s about the only person left anybody can be bothered to hate anymore.’