2. ‘STONE’ WORK
TWO
‘STONE’ WORK
Later that day Tess googled slimming clubs in Milbury and discovered that the nearest, Slim Chance, met every Tuesday morning in the Women’s Institute hall. She decided that she and Orla should join up at the very next session.
It was a grey, damp morning and Orla moaned the entire way there about what a waste of time all this was. She’d been to a slimming club before and, guess what, she’d only lost one stone in the whole damned year! ‘It’ll be a waste of money,’ she informed Tess.
There were times when Tess was sorely tried by her friend. ‘So why are you coming then?’
‘Well, I suppose this one might be miraculous. But I shan’t be sticking around for a year to only lose a stone. Anyway, I thought you’d like my company.’
Tess wasn’t at all sure that she did. Orla could be very negative if she didn’t particularly want to do something, and this was a typical example. They’d left early because Tess wasn’t too sure of the location, and she wanted to get there first to avoid the embarrassment of being weighed in front of a load of people she didn’t know .
‘And we’re far too early,’ Orla moaned. ‘We’ll have to sit around for hours now.’
Tess pulled into the car park of the Women’s Institute hall a mere fifteen minutes early.
‘The door will still be locked,’ said Orla, plainly looking for an escape.
It wasn’t, of course. Tess led the way cautiously inside. It was a long, dark, narrow building, the windows along one wall facing straight onto the brickwork of the storage depot next door. It had a wooden floor with a platform at one end, on which was positioned a desk and, alongside it, the dreaded weighing machine. There was a smell of stale bodies in the air, and a middle-aged woman was busy opening up the windows.
‘Hello!’ she said. ‘You’re nice and early! I’m Judy.’
Tess and Orla introduced themselves and listened with interest as Judy explained that she had to arrive early to cover over any Women’s Institute material referring to jam-making or cake-baking with her large posters of ‘before and after’ slimming successes. Judy was stockily built but not fat, probably in her forties, Tess reckoned. She had blonde hair tied back in a ponytail and a lot of mascara, and wore black leggings with a vivid orange tunic proclaiming, across her ample chest, ‘Slim is Sexy!’ She also had a very loud voice, with a strong Geordie accent.
‘I’ll be with you in a minute. I’ve still got to cover up this poster about the cake-baking competition. And you need to be filling out these forms,’ she said, as she handed out the paperwork to them both. As she spoke, the hall was beginning to fill up with an assortment of women .
‘Right, everyone!’ she bellowed, picking up her clipboard and motioning them all to plonk their overweight bottoms on the plastic chairs arranged in a large semicircle. ‘We’ve got some flesh to move here, have we not!’ Tess looked round at the owners of the aforementioned flesh. There must be at least forty of us women, she thought, and only two men. She’d felt distinctly podgy when she arrived but, as she looked around, she began to feel positively svelte.
‘Judy’s really good,’ the woman beside her said. ‘She cares , you see.’
‘Have you been coming long?’ Tess asked.
‘Oh, just a year. But I’ve managed to lose a stone. Do you know, she’s got some of these people reduced to half their original size! I think it’s her mission in life.’
Orla, on Tess’s other side, snorted and gave Tess an ‘I told you so’ look. ‘A bloody year !’ she muttered.
‘But,’ the woman continued, ‘I feel so much better and I’ve got myself out and about again. My partner had gone off with another woman, you see, and I blamed myself. I was fat and tired all the time, so I suppose I couldn’t blame him. But I’ve met someone else now and it’s given me the incentive to get some more weight off.’
‘Good for you,’ said Tess, wondering where she’d met the ‘someone else’.
The woman sitting directly opposite her, whose name was Mabel, was seriously overlapping her plastic chair with both buttocks.
‘It’s good for the morale to come here,’ Orla muttered, ‘if nothing else.’ She’d taken the opportunity to leave a heap of their business cards on the central table: CURVACEOUS – the best bespoke boutique for larger ladies .
‘I’m not sure you should have done that,’ Tess said. ‘These women are trying to lose weight, not cover it up.’
‘Well, if it’s going to take them a year to lose a stone they’re going to need something to wear in the meantime, aren’t they?’
Judy was scrupulously fair. Anyone who’d lost any weight at all was praised to the skies, and even those who’d gained were encouraged to do better with phrases like: ‘Don’t let this put you off’ and ‘We all get weeks like this, don’t we, girls?’ The ‘girls’ nodded enthusiastically. Recipes were exchanged, sympathy was extended to all those with selfish husbands who continued to demand fry-ups and takeaways, and stars were distributed to everyone who’d hit their target weight. Mabel with the buttocks had lost four whole pounds! Wow! Wild applause all round.
‘There are only two blokes here,’ Orla observed.
‘You’re only looking for one.’
‘Well, neither of these two would fit the bill.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Tess sighed, ‘that you only came here in the hope of finding a man?’
‘It’s the only place I haven’t tried already,’ Orla replied, grinning.
‘Shh! Shh!’ Everyone was ordered to quieten down so that Judy could commence her lengthy diatribe, the gist of which was that, if you did as Judy told you, by next week everyone should have lost at least two pounds and possibly more.
‘Some of you,’ she added, looking directly at Orla, ‘have more to lose than others. Would you believe that when I started here I weighed twenty stone !’ Everyone gasped. Judy did a little twirl. ‘And just look at me now ! ’
As they walked away from Slim Chance, Tess said, ‘We are not going to Boulters tomorrow.’
Orla grimaced. ‘Could we not have just one teeny-weeny plateful?’
‘No, we couldn’t. We either do this diet properly or we don’t do it at all.’
‘Oh, all right, all right! But tell me this: how are you going to get through EastEnders without a packet of crisps or something?’
‘I’ll just think about how damned fantastic I’m going to look at Amber’s wedding and the slinky outfit I’m going to be wearing. And, since it’s more than likely you’ll be invited too, you should bear that in mind.’
Tess had thought it would be so much easier if Amber and Peter would just pop into the local registry office and get the deed done in a matter of minutes. Particularly after all the time they’d been living together. But Amber was determined to have a stage-set wedding and Tess had no intention of being the frumpy character in the scene.
But she was cheered after her visit to Slim Chance; there was hope on the horizon. Perhaps she might widen these horizons , get out of her comfortable rut, and perhaps she too might meet somebody else – but where? He certainly wouldn’t come knocking at her door.
As she rounded the corner into Temple Terrace there was someone at her door, but not exactly the someone she had in mind. There, for no accountable reason, stood Lisa and Ellie .
When her son, Matt, had married six years previously, Tess had been somewhat in awe of her new daughter-in-law, and still was for that matter. Lisa was one of those small wiry women, always immaculate, always frantically busy, always in control. She was the polar opposite to tall, scruffy Matt, but she’d succeeded in tidying him up along with everything else in her path. She then decided she’d like her first child to be born in April the next year, because she needed to be at a very important sales conference in Zurich at the end of May in connection with her job as a hotel manager. So, naturally, Ellie duly arrived in April. And now Lisa had discovered she was pregnant again, which was planned, of course, and just fine with the baby due in mid-July, so as not to interfere with her frenetic autumn work schedule. You did not argue with Lisa or her hormones.
However, she had not been best pleased when Amber announced her wedding was to be at the end of July, just days after Lisa was due to give birth. Amber had landed herself the prestigious job of chief make-up artist for a high-budget film that was due to begin shooting in the middle of August. Amber’s refusal to alter the wedding date had resulted in a certain froideur between the two sisters-in-law.
So Tess was mildly surprised to find Lisa and Ellie on her doorstep, because her daughter-in-law rarely did anything without an appointment.
‘Really sorry to bother you, Tess,’ Lisa said, clutching her jaw. ‘But I’ve got the most hellish toothache. I’ve managed to get an emergency appointment with that guy on Milbury High Street and I don’t really want to drag Ellie in there with me.’ She sighed. ‘It’s Freya’s day off, wouldn’t you know?’ Freya was their latest au pair. ‘I’ll only be an hour or so. I was sure you’d be home on a Tuesday morning.’ She looked at Tess with a hint of annoyance. ‘I was just about to go .’
Tess had to stop herself from apologising for having been out.
‘That’s fine, Lisa,’ she said. ‘Toothache’s awful. Off you go. Leave Ellie with me.’
As Lisa set off with a brisk wave and Tess opened the front door, Ellie was already delving into her pink bag. ‘I’ve brought my mouse family for you to see, Nana.’
‘A mouse family?’
‘Yes.’ Ellie withdrew a collection of tiny furry mice, all conventionally clad: Mum in a pink apron (what would the women’s libbers make of that ?), Dad in blue trousers, and two even tinier mice, one in pink, one in blue. All so politically incorrect. Never mind, Tess thought in amusement, if anyone cared you could always swap them all around.
‘There’s a mummy and a daddy and two babies,’ Ellie explained. ‘That’s a family .’
‘Yes, of course it is,’ Tess said absently, heading into the kitchen and filling the kettle for a much-needed cup of tea. Sans sugar, of course; she must remember to buy some sweeteners.
‘If Mummy has another baby, we’ll be a family too,’ Ellie continued.
Tess wasn’t altogether sure if she’d been told of the pregnancy yet, so decided to say nothing on the subject. ‘But you’re a family now ,’ she said. ‘You’d just be a bigger family.’
Ellie looked confused.
‘You can have really tiny families,’ Tess went on. ‘One mummy and one baby, for instance. ’
‘What about the daddy?’
‘Well, sometimes the daddy goes away.’ Tess wondered how far she should go with this conversation. ‘Not all families have a daddy and a mummy, Ellie. Now, shall we have a cup of tea?’
‘Are you a mummy?’ Ellie persisted.
‘Yes, I’m your daddy’s mummy and Auntie Amber’s mummy.’
‘So where’s the daddy?’
‘Well, Grandpa Gerry’s the daddy, but he’s a daddy who went away.’ Tess racked her brains for a way to change the subject; how could she explain Ursula?
‘When I’m a mummy I shan’t let the daddy go away,’ Ellie said firmly, making Tess feel she’d been somewhat careless.
‘Good luck then,’ Tess said with feeling as she sipped her sugarless tea, trying not to think about the daddies she’d let slip through her fingers. Not that David had been a daddy, and he had, of course, brought about his own departure. Ellie, fortunately, was too young to remember him, thus avoiding the need for further explanations. Thank goodness the subject of Ursula hadn’t come up.
As Ellie fussed about with her mice and her mug of tea, Tess wondered if she’d ever regain the confidence Ursula had drained from her. David had helped, but that feeling of inadequacy still lingered. Then she wondered if she’d ever again be able to attract anyone at all of the opposite sex and, if she did, where she could possibly meet him.
All of a sudden she felt desperately lonely.