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.