Neve fingered a particularly painful spot on her chin as she listened to William’s breezy message. ‘Neve? William here. I’m back in London. Let’s meet as soon as humanly possible. I have news that won’t keep and I can’t wait to see you. Call me.’
With a hand that shook slightly, Neve returned William’s call, without giving herself time to reflect on the ramifications of such an audacious move. She needed to change, and right now having William back in her life was the only way she knew how to make that happen.
‘Ah, it’s the elusive Ms Slater,’ he said, before Neve could even spit out a hello. ‘Where have you been? I called you Sunday and it’s Thursday now. Even in LA, three days is industry standard for returning calls.’
‘I’ve had flu. Summer flu,’ Neve explained in a rusty voice.
‘Oh, poor thing. Must be why you sound so croaky. Are you better now?’
Physically she was getting there. Emotionally, she was sure that a strong gust of wind might knock her over. ‘I think I’m ready to start getting up and about now.’
‘Well, that’s why I’ve been trying to get hold of you. I’m going out of town this weekend,’ William said.
Neve looked up at the ceiling in despair. Not again. ‘Oh. So when will you be back this time?’
‘No, I absolutely have to see you before I go,’ William said firmly. ‘How about tomorrow evening?’
Neve looked down at her unshaven legs, and prodded her towelling-swathed belly. Then she traced the bumpy surface of her face, until she remembered that the last time William had seen her, she was twice the woman she was now. Anything had to be an improvement on that. ‘Tomorrow, as in Friday tomorrow?’ she clarified.
‘The very same,’ William said with a slight chuckle that warmed his clipped vowels. ‘Do you mind awfully coming south of the river? I know what you north Londoners are like.’
‘Well, the South Bank is usually as far south as I go,’ Neve admitted, already seeing her and William strolling along the Embankment hand in hand, because with William she’d hold his hand on the very first date. ‘Would that be all right for you?’
‘God, you’re so parochial, Neve,’ William sighed, then he chuckled again, as if her unwillingness to cross the Thames was absolutely adorable. ‘OK, shall we say seven at the Royal Festival Hall Members’ Bar? It’s on the sixth floor; the view is absolutely breathtaking.’
‘That sounds lovely,’ Neve agreed. ‘Well, I’ll see you then, I suppose.’
‘I can’t wait,’ William said. ‘And I have two surprises for you, so prepare to be astounded.’
He rang off and Neve sat on her lumpy red bucket chair in a daze for a few long moments as she contemplated the new direction her life was about to take. Change was good. It was just what she needed – William was just what she needed – so why did it feel as if William was less her destiny and more a way to get over Max?
Neve stood up, intending to change into her running gear and pound the paths of Finsbury Park until she cleared her head. Then she caught sight of herself in the mirror. It was all she could do not to scream out loud as she peered at her face and the pustules that seemed to have multiplied while she was talking to William. Actually, the spots were the very least of it.
She needed an extreme makeover. She needed some really intensive spot cream. She really needed a haircut and she needed Celia like she’d never needed her before.
Neve had never truly appreciated Celia’s talents. She never understood what Celia was going on about when she declared that shoulders were the new legs or justified spending four hundred pounds on a pair of over-the-knee boots because they were ‘very on-trend’.
But she’d never had a fashion and beauty emergency on the scale of the one she was having now, and Celia, God bless her, was ready and able to rise to the occasion.
She came home from work with a bulging bag of potions, unguents and creams, courtesy of the Skirt Beauty Department, and slathered Neve’s face in a paste that smelled like horse manure but was guaranteed to eradicate 98 per cent of most facial blemishes overnight.
Celia had even made appointments for Neve to have a mani-pedi, cut and blow dry, and her armpits, legs and bikini line de-Hobbited, before she met Celia in the Skirt fashion cupboard at three the next afternoon.
‘I’m going to call in some clothes for you,’ Celia said, because on Planet Fashion, the clothes came to you, rather than the other way round. ‘What were you thinking in terms of outfits?’
‘A dress,’ Neve mumbled because it was hard to move her mouth when her face was covered in blemish-eradicating cement. ‘A nice dress. What are those very long dresses called?’
‘Maxi-dresses,’ Celia replied. ‘Um, don’t really think you’ve got the length of leg for one of them. You’d be swamped.’
‘Hardly,’ Neve snorted.
‘Don’t! You’ll crack your zit mask. That stuff costs a hundred and fifty quid a pot,’ Celia snapped. ‘And don’t start with all that “find me a burka” stuff either. What size are you now?’
Neve decided that shrugging wouldn’t move any facial muscles. ‘I was mostly a size fourteen before I started the Cleanse.’
‘It’s hard to tell what’s going on under there,’ Celia complained, pulling a face as she indicated Neve’s voluminous dressing-gown. Then she pulled a different, more conflicted face. ‘Look, Neve, you know I love you, right? Like, I love you to pieces and I want you to be happy, and if you think that Willy McWordy is your route to happiness, fine, then I’m on board …’
‘But?’ Neve prompted, because she could tell that the whole point of the speech was to get to the ‘but’.
‘But you have to promise me that you’ll stop the Cleanse, because apparently people have died from it, and you’re not you any more and I miss you,’ Celia finished with a sniff, because she was close to tears.
‘I know,’ Neve said softly, because she’d come to the same conclusion during the last stages of her Bed-In. Anyway, once she saw William tomorrow, the truth would be out. Hopefully not being a size thirty-two would make up for not being a size ten. ‘I’ve got juices for tomorrow and then I’m done.’
‘You promise?’
‘I promise!’
‘Do you promise on Mum and Dad’s life?’ Celia demanded. ‘No, hang on, do you swear on Jane Austen’s grave?’
‘Seels! I do. I promise. I’ll use up tomorrow’s juices and then I’ll start reintroducing solids,’ Neve said.
‘OK.’ Celia seemed satisfied with Neve’s sincerity but was frowning at her sister’s swathed body. ‘I still need to know your size. Why don’t you go and weigh yourself, then I’ll take your measurements.’
‘Can’t we just go on guesswork?’ Neve begged.
‘Aren’t you even a little bit curious about how much you’ve lost?’ Celia asked. ‘I mean, your face looks really thin and what I can see of your chest looks bony.’
Neve was almost dying from curiosity but there were also huge amounts of dread mixed in with it. The longer she put it off, the more she might have lost. Especially if she waited until first thing in the morning – well, first thing after she’d had a really long run. ‘I don’t know,’ she said hesitantly.
‘It should go without saying that I won’t tell a soul. Not even Ma,’ Celia declared, getting up from the sofa.
‘Especially not Ma!’ Neve gasped, and she was getting up too and following Celia out of the lounge even as she tightened the belt on her dressing-gown.
Neve was beginning to think that Celia might have been replaced by the pod people on her way home from work, because she sat on the edge of the bathtub and displayed huge amounts of patience as Neve fussed with the scales; moving them back and forth, until she’d centred them to the left of the weird little dip in her bathroom floor.
‘OK, I’m getting on them now,’ Neve said unnecessarily. She took a deep breath and shucked off her robe, then stood there in bra and knickers.
Celia kept her eyes fixed on a spot
to the right of Neve’s elbow. ‘Um, the sooner you get on them, the sooner you can get off again.’
Neve shut her eyes and stepped on the scales. They were fancy, expensive scales that gave her weight in pounds and kilograms and had nearly given her a hernia when she’d lugged them back from John Lewis. She shuffled around on them, until her weight was evenly balanced.
‘Don’t say a word,’ she ordered Celia, her eyes still tightly shut. ‘Look at the display and don’t tell me what I weigh, just tell me if it’s lower than one hundred and sixty-five pounds.’
She could hear Celia grumbling good-naturedly under her breath. ‘Yes, yes, it is.’
‘Is it lower than one hundred and sixty pounds?’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier if I just told you how much you weighed?’
‘Just answer the question, Seels.’
‘Yes, it’s lower.’
‘Is it lower than one hundred and fifty-five pounds?’
‘Yes, and Christ Almighty, we’re going to be here all night at this rate,’ Celia said in an exasperated voice. ‘You weigh one hundred and fifty-one pounds. What’s that in English?’
‘Ten stone and eleven pounds,’ Neve said, her eyes snapping open as she stared down at the number. She jumped off the scales, then got on them again, pressing down with the soles of her feet as hard as she could. The number wavered and for one delicious moment it went down to one hundred and forty-nine pounds, before settling back to where it had been. ‘I’ve only lost a stone in three weeks.’ She sighed. ‘If I hadn’t spent five days in bed with my muscles atrophying, I’d probably have lost even more.’
‘I love you and I’m not judging you but I am so close to stabbing you through the heart with your tweezers right now,’ Celia growled. ‘You’ve lost fourteen pounds, which is fantastic though I’m not in any way condoning that stupid Cleanse – and don’t think this means you can back out of your promise, because you can’t.’
‘I’m not going to, but I should have lost more than that. I had three colonics!’ Neve stared down at her thighs, which looked as solid as ever. ‘I don’t know where this so-called stone has gone but it definitely wasn’t from my bottom half.’
Celia was already scooping up the tape measure that Neve kept on her bathroom shelf. She slipped it around Neve’s chest, and before they could go through the same rigmarole all over again, she called out numbers. ‘Thirty-six!’ She moved down to Neve’s waist. ‘Thirty!’ And then she was wrapping it around the widest part of Neve’s body where belly bulge became hips became bottom. ‘Forty!’
If she’d lost three inches off her hips, then why did they still look like she could birth quadruplets? Neve quickly slipped back into her dressing-gown and once it was securely fastened, she felt better. ‘Well, this is all good news,’ she said, and tried to sound as if she meant it. She should mean it, but from where she was standing, directly opposite the huge mirror that took up most of one wall, she didn’t look any different.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Neve had never been in the Skirt office before, preferring to wait downstairs in Reception whenever she met Celia from work. But that afternoon she was escorted to the seventh floor of the Magnum Media building by Celia’s latest intern, a doe-eyed, elfin-cropped boy called Seth, and led through a large open-plan office, which she’d expected to be populated by willowy, model-y fashion-magazine types. Reassuringly, there were lots of normal-sized bodies wearing normal clothes and even the remains of a birthday cake on a table as Neve walked to the back of the office where the Fashion Department held court.
Here, there were very thin women wearing the kind of clothes that Neve could never fathom but which Celia always described as ‘directional’.
Neve had had vague introductions to all the members of the Fashion Department on numerous occasions but she was never entirely convinced that they remembered her. She was also deeply ashamed of her baggy boot-cut jeans and tunic top, which were completely undirectional, so she was relieved to see Celia standing in the doorway of the fashion cupboard, all ready to usher her within its hallowed portals.
That wasn’t the only reason. ‘He’s not here, is he? Max, I mean,’ Neve said in a furtive whisper, as soon as Celia closed the door.
‘He never comes in on Friday afternoons,’ Celia said. ‘In fact, another half-hour and this place will be a ghost town.’
‘But it’s only three o’clock!’
‘And your point is?’ Celia folded her arms. ‘Let’s have a look at you.’
Neve stood there awkwardly, hands hanging limply by her sides. She felt entirely frazzled after a day of back-to-back beauty appointments, which weren’t so much fun without a gaggle of WAGs there to hold your hand or keep your champagne glass topped up. The bikini wax had been particularly harrowing, and as for the hairdresser …
‘He was very bossy,’ Neve told Celia, who was scrutinising her tousled but shiny waves of hair. Neve hadn’t even known her hair had the ability to wave. ‘He absolutely refused to give me that bouffant ponytail I like. He said it was so last year.’
‘Well, it kinda is,’ Celia said, without much sympathy. ‘Your hair looks great. You look great!’ She seized Neve’s hand and waggled it about as if she could inject some perkiness into her through the power of touch.
‘I just keep hoping that William will ring and cancel on me. Then I wonder if I should ring and cancel on him,’ Neve confessed, sinking down on to a stool and gazing around her. The cupboard was actually a huge room lined with clothing rails, which were crammed with garments in every colour and every fabric imaginable, from leopardprint chiffon gowns to red wool coats. There were shoes paired in neat rows under the rails and a series of cubbyhole cupboards and shelves loaded with bags and crates of accessories. It was like being in Celia’s box room, which she grandly referred to as her ‘walk-in wardrobe’ but to the power of a thousand. ‘I don’t know whether to throw up or burst into tears, quite frankly.’
‘It’s been a rough few weeks,’ Celia murmured tactfully. ‘And well, this is huge, isn’t it? Three years of prep work to get you to this moment. You are a little bit excited, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah, well, I’m trying to be. I suppose there’s a thin line between nervous hysteria and excitement.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ Celia told her dryly, as she started to rifle through a rack of dresses. ‘I called some stuff in for you, but more importantly, grab that plastic crate. Second shelf to the left, third crate along. Didn’t like to say anything last night, but your bra is too big. I reckon you should be about a thirty-two DD now.’
Celia reckoned right and then after double-checking that the door to the cupboard was locked, Neve gingerly approached the rail of clothes.
She rejected 90 per cent of them without even trying them on. She wasn’t wearing anything sleeveless, anything with a hem that finished above the knee and certainly not anything with a garish floral print. That left three dresses hanging there.
Neve tried on a multi-coloured patchwork dress with a square neck, but its drop waist bunched at her hips. Then there was a vertically striped frock, which she thought would be slimming, but it made her look like the inmate of a prison camp. As she approached the last dress, both she and Celia were holding their breath.
It was a wrap dress, made of a chocolate-brown silk jersey. Compared to some of Celia’s more outrageous outfit options, it felt like an old friend. Neve slipped it on and fussed with the bell sleeves until her upper arms were adequately covered, then tied the waist sash in a bow. Only then did she deign to look at herself in the mirror that was propped against the only available piece of wall.
She looked … all right. More than all right. In fact, more all right than she’d ever looked, apart from the evening in Manchester when she was adorned in sequins and had big hair and a glow that had nothing to do with the huge amounts of make-up she had on. The dress skimmed over belly and bottom and made Neve’s waist look positively minuscule, and if it weren’t for her bar
e feet and her bare face and the way she was gnawing on her bottom lip, she’d look elegant and sophisticated.
‘I think this works, don’t you?’ she said at last.
‘Just so you know, that’s a size eight, Diane von Fursternberg dress that you’re looking absolutely gorgeous in,’ Celia squeaked, then she actually tried to pick Neve up and swing her round, but thankfully she came to her senses as Neve fended her off. ‘You did it, Neevy! You bloody well did it!’
‘Well, that’s an American size eight, which is really a twelve and it’s a wrap dress so it doesn’t count.’
‘A size eight designer dress,’ Celia said again, with heavy emphasis. ‘How does it feel?’
Neve did a slow 360 degrees. ‘I didn’t think that size twelve would feel this flabby,’ she said at last, pinching her tummy rolls. ‘And I’m not a proper size twelve, I cheated my way into a size twelve.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Neve! Can’t you be happy and just take a moment to bask in that happiness?’
Neve tried with all her might – and just as she felt the first flicker of euphoria, she heard the echo of his voice.
You’ll always be a fat girl. You don’t know how to be anything else.
‘I’m trying, Celia,’ she said imploringly. ‘I was fat my entire life, I’ve been a size twelve for all of five minutes. It takes some adjustment.’
‘You know, there was about a month when you were all loved up with Max and you never talked about your weight, or complained about what you looked like, or went on and on about how much better your life would be if you were a size ten,’ Celia informed her sister savagely. ‘God, I think that was the happiest month of my life.’
‘Seels, that’s not fair!’
‘What’s not fair is that I’ve gone to all this trouble blagging beauty appointments and calling in clothes for you, even though I’m meant to be sorting out three fashion shoots, and you haven’t even said thank you.’
Neve hung her head. ‘You’re right. I’m so sorry.’ As well as the fat girl jibe, hadn’t Max also said that she was the most self-involved person he’d ever met? ‘I swear I’ll make this up to you.’