The Perfect 10

Because you’ll sleep with him anyway.

The sun is up, omelette yellow by 6 a.m. I am lucky enough to live in a suburb where the leaves are swept away by anonymous brooms before I leave my house in the morning. On holiday in Jamaica three years ago, my body clock refused to adjust to the time difference, and I woke every morning at 5.30. Stepping out on to my balcony to another postcard day, I witnessed an old muscled Rastafarian who called himself ‘The Original’, trawling our private beach for fish with handmade nets, before the tourists stumbled out of bed with cloudy heads full of last night’s rum, and the aftereffects of a ‘cigarette’ bought from a kitchen hand. Nature wasn’t allowed to hamper my holiday, didn’t mar my swimming and splashing fun, and living here is the same. You spend your money, you get your return. Nature – in this case excessive leaf droppage – doesn’t tamper with my walk to Starbucks in the morning.

I blow on a Grande Black Coffee-of-the-Day, put aside twenty-seven Two-Fingered Fondler orders that came in yesterday, comfortably cross my legs, and sit back.

At the outside table next to me is a guy, twenty-eight, thirty maybe. He wears jeans, and a T-shirt that demands in screaming yellow on grey ‘Who’s the Daddy?’ It tells me everything. There is no need to go to the effort of talking to anybody new any more. Just lower your eyes, and read the logo on their chest. It will say more about who they want to be than a month of conversation. My favourite T-shirt is pink, and says ‘Prom Queen’. Now you know everything you need to know about me: if you have to state it like a sandwich board hanging around your neck, it probably isn’t obvious.

His hair is spiky, and has been styled with care, if not expertise. He has ill-advised highlights that a cute gay boy-band member might get away with, but not your Average Joe. He fondles a Frappuccino and has just sat down, pulling up his chair with a confidence that suggests it has been reserved for him, for life. He has the look of a man waiting for somebody to arrive. But he is neither anxious nor nervous; he doesn’t glance around himself with apprehension, or casually pretend to read the discarded money pages left behind on his table. He waits with pleasure. His whole manner suggests that these are a few perfect moments to be snatched before whoever he is waiting for turns up, and ruins the image he has of himself, sitting at a coffee shop in a wealthy London suburb, on a perfect autumn morning, ruling the world.

And I know he’ll do it before he does. I see an almost natural blonde exit the newsagent’s and swing her hips past my table before she strays carelessly into his eye line; like a clay pigeon sprung from its contraption, I can hear a voice scream ‘PULL’ in this guy’s head. She carries the Sunday papers – one serious offering whose ten other sections will be discarded as soon as she finds the enclosed fashion magazine, and the obligatory news of the screws, which will be devoured first. She wears a pair of dirty low-slung jeans over a small pert peach of an arse. She has the messed-up dirty-blonde hair and clean clear skin of an early morning angel who has been forced out of bed to get Sunday’s essentials and is now, half dreaming, making her way back to her bed, and the man in it. She wears her genetic luck comfortably. She is the woman every man would like to wake up to. The Daddy inhales as he watches the Peach amble across the quiet road in front of us. And he watches her lightly jump to the kerb and the soft bounce in her peach of an arse as she does it. I hear his stomach grumble with hunger. There is nothing apologetic in his leer. As she moves round a corner, almost out of sight, his eyes remain fixed on those low-slung jeans, and his stare emits a residue that leaves a filthy film on my fresh coffee.

For a while I thought it was love that made the world go round, in my younger foolish days. Now I know it all comes down to sex in the end. It’s the constant screwing in every continent that makes the world turn. Every sexual spark that fizzes inside all of us sends out a peculiar energy into the stratosphere that spins us, like the men who ride the back of the waltzers at the fair – scream if you wanna go faster! – and the sun and the moon, gravity and all of that other stuff has nothing to do with it. It’s all about sexual sparkles. If everybody stopped thinking about sex, all at once, our little star would fall out of the sky like a yo-yo snapping off its string. Working on this theory I realise that I am actually placing mankind in jeopardy, not doing my fair share. But feeling defensive only hardens my heart.

The Peach disappears, and the Daddy sits back, crossing his legs, glazed and freshly raised, like his morning muffin. Moments later a reasonably attractive brunette with wide hips and a foundation line that skims her jaw appears behind him, and taps him on the shoulder. I see all the faults first these days, passing instant judgements. I’m not proud of it, but it happens automatically, and is almost impossible to stop. My therapist finds it ‘concerning’. I tell him I find his collection of snow globes concerning, but he ignores that.

The Daddy turns towards Wide Hips Foundation Line, and though the glint in his eye disappears, he shamelessly kisses her with a lust she didn’t earn. When I see his tongue flick into her mouth I look away embarrassed. She smiles, pleased and flattered by this unusual passion, then hurries inside to buy a coffee to avert any embarrassment when he makes no offer to buy it for her. She obviously doesn’t like confrontations. She doesn’t have the confidence to say, ‘Couldn’t have bought my coffee while you were buying yours? Couldn’t think that far ahead? Couldn’t be bothered? Or am I just not special enough to warrant a bagel?’ The Daddy and I wouldn’t last five minutes. He turns back and stares at the corner where the Peach disappeared moments earlier. Wide hips returns, juggling change, a cheese-covered bagel and a cappuccino, and pulls up a chair. I silently do the calorie sums. That’s too many for breakfast. She is comfort eating. I blame him, in my head. She begins to chat, and I notice that she has a habit of flicking her ring finger as she talks, stroking a band of gold with an embedded diamond, and I know what she will never know. She will never realise that in those brief moments before she arrived, her fiancé just traded up for the Peach. I can’t watch them any more.

I sip my coffee, which is still so hot that it burns my tongue. I take it strong and black, like my dustbin liners – that’s the only comparison I can truthfully make. There is no room for calorific drinks in my diet, I just need the caffeine. I look up at still trees, and yellow-brown leaves that cling to their branches, knowing their days are numbered. I glance around at a litter-free street; even the teenagers consider it rude to drop their wrappers here. A rare saloon car passes noiselessly as I wait for something important to occur to me in the way that it should when you are just watching the world go by. I have always felt that time spent on my own, in a public place like this, should be full of magnificent thoughts. It makes sitting on my own less self-conscious. But mostly it’s just shopping lists, credit card bills, errant vibrator orders, and late birthday cards. Then I generally read Vogue. But today a thought does occur to me: there may be nothing at the end of this long hungry road, and I’d be a fool to disregard it. There may be no emotional pot of gold, I may still be alone, and I’d be immature – no naïve, no breathtakingly stupid – to ignore it.

But I still ignore it.

It will be a lighter kind of lonely at least. I close my eyes and quickly dream a little dream of being emotionally dependent on somebody else, somebody bigger than me. I could maybe be a little weak, possibly a trifle pointless, just for a while. I could let somebody else make the decisions, just for once. I also decide to ignore the fact that, traditionally, arm’s length has always seemed like the perfect length to me. It’s what I’m used to, at least.

As a child, while my sister and the other girls on my street were playing kiss chase with the boys down the road, I was searching my parents’ newspapers and scouring pre-watershed television for a fat role model: a woman who was big and really beautiful. But I grew up in the eighties, when aerobics grabbed the attention of the Western world, and Olivia Newton-John sang about getting physical, and leg warmers even became fashionable outside the swing doors of the local gym. My favourite film as a child was Grease, and I would spring out of bed early on Saturday mornings and watch it on our video player before my parents woke up. ‘You’re the One that I Want’ was their weekend alarm clock for many years. I must have seen it hundreds of times, maybe even thousands, and I can still recite every character’s dialogue when it comes on at Christmas, or over Easter weekend. At the end of Grease Sandy, in hooker mode to snag her man, wore black satin trousers that were so tight they had to sew her into them.

Try as I might, I couldn’t find my fat femme fatale. In magazines or on TV fat women existed only as the big old butt of the joke, and in films fat women never made the romantic lead. But instead of just biting the bullet instead of the cake and going on a diet, I decided to be my own role model, to be big and beautiful myself. Then maybe as I grew older, little fat girls might pass me in the street and know that everything might turn out OK in the end, in the same way that I desperately scoured streets with my eight-year-old eyes to find a reason to be hopeful, even then.

But I didn’t even manage to convince myself. I didn’t think that you could be both big and beautiful in anything other than an advertising slogan, and yet I tried to live it, clung to it as a philosophy that justified my choice not to diet. As I got older, as long as I’d take in front of the mirror meticulously applying make-up each morning, concentrating solely on the face and hair and never looking down at the body beneath, I knew the body was there, bulging and bruised, and I hated it. I just wouldn’t admit it to myself.

I brush the crumbs of my Skinny Blueberry Muffin from my running trousers and note childish screams and the noisy padding of developing feet running somewhere behind me. I turn to face the commotion: three children, one barely out of nappies, one roughly three years old with a shock of red hair completely dissimilar to his brothers, one older, maybe six, and precocious. Their mother is mousy but elegant, tall and exhausted, and has wild tired eyes that dart from the pavement to the shop to the road, her long slim fingers desperately hanging on to little hands that don’t want to be held.

I turn back to my coffee and take an apprehensive gulp, but this time it doesn’t burn my tongue. I sit under the umbrella that shields me from the early Sunday morning sun, and try to regain some semblance of peace. I hear chairs being pushed back and open one eye to see the Daddy and his ignorance-is-bliss girlfriend hastily moving off down the road, away from the fresh childish din. I daydream that I might spring to my feet and shout, ‘Don’t be a fool, Wide Hips Foundation Line! He can’t be trusted!’ But of course I don’t. I don’t draw attention to myself like that.

It’s becoming harder, being seen. I notice people looking, men looking, and although these should be tiny triumphs, glances that spell sexual desire from the opposite sex, they unnerve me. I don’t want men looking at me uninvited, thinking things about me that I can’t control. I don’t want them picturing me late at night with one hand on the remote and the other in their pants, the way that men do with women they’ve seen during the day. And yet here I am drinking my low-calorie drink, about to go to the gym, to burn and bruise off this week’s two pounds of fat, on a quest ultimately to prove to the man that didn’t want me that he was wrong, that he should have had some imagination, should have guessed what I could be.

It is frightening to go unnoticed for so long and then suddenly pop into everybody’s sight with a magician’s puff of smoke and screaming ‘Ta-da!’. Some women have dealt with it all of their lives and either enjoy it or ignore it or have at least learnt to live with it. I was invisible before, which is ironic considering I took up twice the space. Nothing suddenly gets simple, no matter what the WeightWatchers Slimmer of the Year might tell the Sunday Mirror. When you win a bit, you always lose a bit too.

The three brothers grim descend on to the table next to me, landing themselves on metal chairs that scrape the pavement, squabbling. The red-haired horror shrieks as his older brother snatches away the piece of wood he has been playing with, and begins banging it on his legs and the table. And this is no musical child prodigy; I can’t even make out a rhythm, never mind a tune.

‘Charlie, give it back to Dougal,’ their tall and exhausted mother demands.

I smirk at the name Dougal, although I don’t know why. You hear much worse these days. I can’t think of a soap star called Dougal at least. Strangers sometimes smirk at my name when they hear it for the first time, but I am proud of it. I think that anybody who fails to see something positive in Sunny must have their own issues to deal with.

‘Sit there and be quiet. No, actually, come with me.’

All the children shriek in unison, and the youngest tugs at his mother’s hand to drag her into Starbucks. I pray she will usher them inside, but she accosts a stray waitress who has, in a moment of craziness, decided to come and clean tables. The mother asks for three fruit juices and a Skinny Mocha, and tries to settle the boys at the table again. I stare off into the distance until the oldest brother begins to run round and round my table, and little shrieking Dougal follows his lead. Short stumpy slightly unsure legs make a dash for a tree ten yards away. I glance over my shoulder to see what their mother is doing while they run amok – she is negotiating a straw into the youngest one’s mouth while furtively glancing towards her other two sons. I don’t know what I expect parents to do with their children, I just don’t think they should be allowed to shriek. If I ever have children of my own they will be impeccably behaved in public. They will have character, and be witty and charming, but they will not bang things, and they will not scream. They will only be allowed to do those things at home.

‘Dougal, come back here! Charlie, for God’s sake put it away!’ Their mother’s voice raises at her eldest son, who has decided to urinate up against the tree. Both children momentarily freeze, and Charlie pops his little penis back into his shorts. They start running round my table again – children burn off so many calories without even realising it. The older boy, Charlie, nudges my chair every time he passes, and I hastily put my coffee cup back down on the table rather than risk a stain on my white Lycra vest top with built-in cooling something or other. I check my watch – the gym will be open in twenty minutes. It is an 8 a.m. start on a Sunday, as if God won’t allow exercise before morning has truly broken on his day. Only ten more minutes of the shrieking before I can go.

Even this early, even for a Sunday, the road is peculiarly quiet. It’s getting late in the year for the tourists, despite the heat. Because of it nobody managed a good night’s sleep last night. Maybe now they are tossing and turning and kicking off sheets, trying to rescue another hour’s rest.

Charlie stops running, and stands in front of me, staring.

‘Yes?’ I ask him flatly, unimpressed.

‘Who is going to look after your dog when you die?’ He motions his little head towards an old sleeping Labrador chained to a railing five feet in front of me.

‘It’s not my dog,’ I say, and Charlie shakes his head at me and ‘tut’s.

I ‘tut’ back. Charlie raises his six-year-old eyes at me and starts running towards the tree again.

I guess the dog belongs to either an old man, practically knocking on heaven’s door at the Garden Café a little further down the street, or an elderly lady at one of the other Starbucks tables, resting from the heat. The weathermen have predicted that today will be one of the hottest days of the year, despite it being 27 September, and yet she wears a heavy charcoal-grey overcoat that looks as if it was standard issue in 1940, and a claret woolly hat with a fraying bobble. I look away quickly, gulping back tears. Her vulnerability is almost poetic. If she tried to sell me a poppy I’d be hysterical. Of course, now, as she wipes some lazy dribble from the side of her eighty-year-old collapsing mouth with a handkerchief, I am repulsed. It’s old people with all their facilities intact that I appreciate the most.

The kids are still running and screaming, and I thank merciful God that I have never had enough sex to get pregnant. Obesity was a great contraceptive at least.

A man walks past my table. He is average, forty-ish. I see his back, his jacket, his jogging bottoms, a balding head covered by thinning hair that is too long.

Before us all, an audience paying little attention, he walks calmly towards the tree ten yards in front of our tables, and with one jerky movement scoops up Dougal, and carries on walking south, away from us. I don’t see his face. Admittedly I am appreciative of the drop in noise levels, but I am also confused, and I straighten my back, turning to face his mother, to somehow check that this is OK, that he must be the child’s father, or uncle, or a family friend. Because things like this just don’t happen right in front of you. She isn’t looking up, but instead tries to wipe fruit juice from the edges of her youngest son’s mouth.

I say, ‘Excuse me,’ nervously but loudly, and she glances at me and then automatically in the direction of her elder sons. Her naturally concerned expression falls, as if all the muscles have just been sucked out of her face by a Dyson, and her eyes widen. She pushes herself to her feet as she sees Dougal’s red hair over the shoulder of the man quickly walking away. Her mouth opens and a scream leaps out as if it’s been waiting in her throat for the last ten years.

She darts forward two paces, but she hasn’t let go of her toddler’s arm and he screams. I jump up. She tries to move forwards, hoisting her youngest child in the air by his little arm as he cries out in pain, and Charlie, who has resumed urinating against the tree, turns around in confusion as he hears his mother’s cry.

‘He’s got my child! He’s got my child!’

I can’t quite believe this is happening, but I kick back my chair and start to run.

Ahead of me I can see the Stranger has his hand clamped over Dougal’s mouth, and as they turn the corner at the end of the street he breaks into a jog. They were always called Strangers when I was a child, and they were a constant threat. There were washed-out adverts tinted a dirty orange or a grubby yellow, warning us not to get into their brown Datsuns, or go and look at their puppies, or accept their sweets. Now they have longer medical-sounding names that I’m sure children don’t understand. The idea of a Stranger still scares me, and I am nearly thirty. These new words just can’t put the same fear of God into a child.

My trainers bounce off the pavement and the sudden rush of adrenalin through my muscles is sickening. My calves and thighs expand and contract as I round the corner and see the Stranger holding a struggling Dougal, but he is sprinting now towards the alleyway across the road. I have only been down that alleyway once and it scared the hell out of me: I kept expecting to see a corpse. It is full of gates to gardens and nooks and hiding places.

Feeling sick, I run faster. The man is by the road and he almost runs into a car, dodging it only at the last moment, but he isn’t as fast as I am. I push myself on, not aware of my breathing, not looking at anything but Dougal’s shock of ginger hair, which was so unfortunate five minutes ago, but is now vital. I can run five kilometres in twenty-seven minutes now. This time last year I couldn’t run to the bus stop without throwing up. Thankfully for me, for Dougal, I’ve streamlined since then. Far behind me, back by the Garden Café, I can hear his mother screaming his name, but I just run.

I hear the Stranger breathing now, wheezing and coughing hard, ten feet in front of me, making for the alleyway. My strides are long and elegant, I run on my toes, my arms pumping at my sides, my chest open, and I feel sick as my biceps and quadriceps push me on. There are no rolls of flab bouncing or ripping at my stomach now.

Three feet from the entrance to the alleyway I am almost within touching distance of the Stranger but he stops sharply and spins around to face me: he looks scared and sick as well. I see a bead of sweat streak down the centre of his nose. I slam on my own brakes as he removes the hand that is covering Dougal’s mouth, and swings it, arm outstretched, clenched fist towards my face. Uncorked, Dougal starts to scream, his face as red as his hair, his eyes wide and watery and desperate. We are all scared. I try to lurch out of the way, but the man’s punch strikes the side of my head. I stumble like a speeding car hitting a boulder in the road. I have never been punched before. I am on the pavement and cry out at an awful evil feeling that shoots behind my eyes, and I am momentarily blinded. I blink back tears, but my calves and my thighs spring me up off the floor.

I turn into the alley twenty steps behind the Stranger, who has shifted Dougal and jammed his tiny head into his shoulder to muffle his screams.

Overgrown bushes swipe at my face as I run along the dirt track alley. All of our actions seem loud, louder than usual. Every twig that snaps, my breathing, the Stranger’s breathing, the pounding of our feet hitting the dirt track. He keeps running, but he’s slowing down and tripping, and I’m getting faster, but wincing at the aching knife of pain that has been forced through my temples where his dirty hand smashed at my forehead. I open my mouth to shout at him to stop, but a feeling of dread silences me, a need not to call attention to the fact that I am a woman, chasing a man down a lonely passage.

The alley is three hundred metres long and narrow like a bicycle lane. The bushes are overgrown and make it dark, but the morning sun is so hot and bright that I can see him ahead of me. He hasn’t ducked out of sight into any openings in the shrubs, and he can hear me closing in on him in my trainers and running trousers, as if I got up this morning and chose my best ‘chasing a child snatcher’ outfit. Sweat is pouring off us all and I focus on the damp patches spreading across the back of his dirty beige polyester jacket. He is wearing his best ‘child snatcher’ outfit himself. The air is filled with flies, and smells rotten, and even though it cannot possibly be this man who smells so bad, I can’t help but believe that it is.

I am almost at his side, and I throw a hopeful arm out for Dougal as I launch myself into the Stranger’s back, terrified.

We fall messily.

Dougal is on to all fours in front of us, scraping his little hands and knees on dirt and leaves. The Stranger slams face-first into the wall and I stumble down behind him, onto him, and the dirt. Instantly we are both scrambling to get up. I hear him mutter ‘shit’ as he crawls forward to get to his feet, and I am surprised that he speaks English. He looks English, but still I am shocked.