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‘Do you think she might not want to intrude? Do you think she might be waiting for you to offer some information?’
‘I really don’t know what she thinks … about the lack of men in my life … I don’t think I want to know. Maybe she believes I am happier on my own, or assumes things go on that I don’t choose to share with her. She talks about the inadequacies of my sister’s latest flings as if they are all the same man, and all a disappointment at that.’
‘Do you feel inadequate compared to your sister? Do you feel that your mother doesn’t see you as enough, on your own?’
‘No, there has never been any suggestion from anybody that I am not enough on my own. I think they consider me more than enough on my own. Nobody seems to think that I might like to be taken care of. I just take care of myself. I always have.’
‘How does that make you feel?’
‘Strong.’ I run my fingers through my hair. ‘And sad.’
Some would say it was a strange sequence of events that led me to establish shewantsshegets.com. But rather, it was one rather pedestrian happening, coupled with a slightly crazier occurrence, in addition to my deep-rooted wish to quit my then job. In the first instance I just happened to catch a TV programme that I wouldn’t normally have watched. I fell upon it late one night as I lay in bed cracking my way through a family-sized bar of Galaxy and a mug of hot chocolate, after a vanilla-scented bath. There was European Championship football on BBC1, Young Musician of the Year on BBC2, a crime reconstruction show that terrified me on ITV, and a party political broadcast for the Liberal Democrats on Channel Four. So I flicked to Channel Five, and settled down with a documentary about an ex-porn star in the US who claimed to be called Elixir Lake. She had huge blonde hair that looked as if it must have been set in rollers every half an hour. She also had swollen, precarious-looking breasts, on the brink of explosion: the nipple of her left breast was constantly erect and pointing diagonally down towards the floor in rock-hard shame.
Elixir Lake had, after a particularly unpleasant attack of herpes, decided to get out of porn, but porn was all she had known since she was a girl – a common problem. It was then that Elixir had her brainwave. She decided to cherry-pick pornography that she believed would appeal to an underexploited sector of the market – women – and sell it via this strange new phenomenon called the World Wide Web. Elixir’s porn stream exploded, so much so that within eighteen months she was selling warehouse loads of soft-core videos. Elixir herself had only ever done soft core; ‘No shit, no anal, those were my rules,’ she said seriously through plumped-up frosted-pink lips and a deep red lip line. But as well as the videos she was also being asked for dildos and vibrators and all manner of toys by her female clientele. So Elixir seized upon the demand, and now she was living in a six-bedroom house with a pool shaped like a vast pair of bosoms, and a tennis court shaped like a tennis court, in the hills above Los Angeles. Selling rather than swallowing proved more profitable for Ms Lake. But then maybe if she’d done shit or anal …
A week later Mrs Browning died. Mrs Browning lived three houses along from me. But whereas I lived on the top floor of a converted house, Mrs Browning lived in a four-bedroom house alone in the heart of wealthy Kew. Her husband had died eight years ago, and she had been on her own ever since. She had nieces and nephews who she was close to, because she and Rudolph had never had children of their own. They were German Jews, who had been fortunate enough to make it out of Germany in 1934, as teenagers. Rudolph had found a job as an apprentice on Savile Row, working his way up until finally he was running the business for the last twenty years of his life. Elsa dedicated a bench in Kew Gardens to her husband after his stroke. The plaque read, ‘He loved this place, and its peace.’ It made me cry every time I saw it, when I would sit with Mrs Browning after a walk around the Gardens on alternate Thursday mornings. Rudolph’s bench was on top of a small hill, overlooking the Thames at the bottom of the gardens, and shaded by an oak tree.
Mrs Browning was the first person I spoke to when I moved to Kew three years ago. She watched me from her window for fifteen minutes, before walking slowly but precisely to my front wall, leaning on it patiently as I unpacked a large box full of books from my car, then introduced herself, and asked why my husband was letting me lift all the heavy boxes.
I liked her from the start. She had some mischief in her. For the past two years she had received a gentleman caller every Tuesday afternoon for tea. I called him her boyfriend, and she would laugh and shake her head and say that boyfriends were for beautiful young women like me, and she was merely the only person left in Kew as ancient as Wilbur Hardy, who was ninety-two and walked with a cane, but walked none the less. She would smile and refer to him as a harmless rogue. And I don’t know if it was because of those words, but I always thought that he grinned like an old-time crook. His suits were either mustard yellow, or apple green, or plum purple, and all had matching waistcoats. If I happened to be there when Wilbur rapped on the door on a Tuesday afternoon, Elsa would wink and say, ‘Don’t trust them, Sunny. Only one in one thousand will be worth the wait.’ Wilbur would always kiss my hand as I squeezed past him on the doorstep, and I would get embarrassed, even by such a mannerly show of affection from a ninety-two-year-old man. Elsa would wink again and mouth, ‘Don’t trust them,’ one more time, before she let him in.
Wilbur Hardy had died on New Year’s Day. His son had paid Elsa a visit to tell her and she had smiled sadly and said merely, ‘He was ancient. It was bound to happen sooner or later.’ His son had then informed her that Mr Hardy had managed many businesses and bought many licences, working from his study, right up until that New Year’s Day. Some of these businesses were highly profitable, and had been for many years, and were administered by his sons, and nephews, and nieces. Some of these businesses were dormant, however, acquired often just for fun and what Wilbur Hardy regarded as pocket change. Wilbur had left Elsa a number of these dormant concerns in his will. He had not left her property or money, but merely things that might make her smile. He had left her the exclusive UK licence to distribute Female Belly-Dancing Garden Gnomes for the next twelve years. He had left her the exclusive licence to distribute fingerless gloves in Ethiopia for the next seven months. And he left her a newly acquired licence, bought only two months previously, to distribute two new sex toys for women, known as ‘Three-Fingered and Two-Fingered Fondlers’. They had just started to be distributed in the US, and Wilbur had read about them as a funny fanciful ‘and finally’ story in the Sunday Telegraph, and enquired about the licence. Finding that it was up for sale, and this time predicting a healthy profit margin, he had snapped it up for a little more than eight years, and a little more than fifty thousand dollars. He had changed his will yearly, his son told Elsa, on the thirty-first of December. And so Elsa got the licence for the Two-Fingered Fondler and, following Wilbur’s lead, had changed her will the following week.
Mrs Browning simply fell asleep on a Sunday night, and didn’t wake up on Monday morning. When her nephew paid her a visit on the Monday lunchtime as arranged and received no answer from repeated rings of the doorbell, he let himself in and found her comfortably in bed, peacefully passed away. Her nephew, having met me on a couple of occasions, kindly let me know that evening.
I cried for an hour, and then remembered what Elsa had said about Wilbur. She was ancient, it was bound to happen sooner or later. And with that I resolved to stop crying but make sure I put a bench next to Rudolph’s in Kew Gardens, and think of something suitably appropriate to say on its plaque that wouldn’t be too sentimental for her. A week later her nephew called me again, one evening as I sat with macaroni cheese and a jacket potato for dinner, watching Dirty Dancing on video. Elsa had left me fifteen thousand pounds and the licence to distribute something called a ‘Two-Fingered Fondler’ in the UK for the next eight years …
‘Do you think, given the nature of your business, that people around you might assume that you have a healthy attitude towards sex, and that you just aren’t telling them about your sex life?’
‘No. There were definitely raised eyebrows when I started the business, because it was sex-related and because it was me. But I suppose nobody actually said anything disparaging. My Uncle Humphrey laughed a little too long for my liking.’
‘How did that make you feel?’
‘It bothered me at the time, but I have never liked him anyway. He’s an aggressive man, and his skin flakes so badly that my Aunt Lucy makes jokes about the snowstorm that is changing their bedding. It makes me retch.’
My therapist turns in his chair and writes something down on his pad. I know what it will be. Something to do with physical imperfections. He tries to steer me on to that a lot. We’ve discussed it. I roll my eyes, but he isn’t looking. There are no photos in this room, hanging on the walls. The wallpaper is a cappuccino colour, with a brown flower swirl pattern, quite modern in comparison to everything else. Maybe they had to redecorate the walls recently. Maybe some nut job slashed an artery and graffitied the walls with his blood. The windows are big, and the curtains are well made but a depressing rust colour like dried ketchup on a cracked plate. He turns back to face me.
‘Do you think you might think about love and sex a disproportionate amount, given the nature of your business? And the fact that you work alone and from home? Did you dwell on these things when you worked at the office, for instance?’
‘Not as much, no. But working from home is a positive thing, I am sure of that. It has changed my life dramatically, for the better. Office work didn’t suit me; I was too sensitive to the politics. I’m much happier now. I can’t bitch at myself – not consciously, anyway – and I can’t stab myself in the back. I don’t berate myself for being ten minutes late to my computer in the morning and then ignore the extra hour and a half I put in every night. The office environment almost made me lose my faith in mankind. The petty bitterness at the core of so many people, men and women, depressed me to the point of tears, daily. My business is – ironically – much more wholesome than that.’
‘Tell me again, how long have you been working from home?’
‘I resigned a year and three months ago today.’
‘You told me that was because of Adrian.’
‘Yes. About that – I feel like I may have painted him in a harsh light, to you. I was thinking about it yesterday. He is perfectly nice, you know. He just subscribed to a female aesthetic that wasn’t me. All he really did was show a complete disinterest in me, sexually. He wasn’t cruel or unusual, in finding me unattractive. I just wasn’t his kind of eye candy … then.’
‘And you resent him for that?’
‘Not at all. It’s the way of the world.’
‘Did you ever think that he might change his mind, that he might fall in love with you anyway?’
‘When I was still fat? I imagined it, a couple of times. But when does that ever happen? The preference for personality only exists in the movies, or soap operas, where ugly ducklings manage to bewitch the heart of some local stud, but then suddenly transform, courtesy of some decent hair straighteners and daily contact lenses, into models. Personality is only important when differentiating among the beautiful women. Beautiful and boring is so less appealing than beautiful and interesting. But interesting on its own, without the arse to go with it, wasn’t ringing Adrian’s bells.’
My therapist turns to write something down, but then changes his mind.
‘Do you think you might be harbouring a subconscious grudge against him for this? Do you think you might subconsciously believe that men are only interested in sex?’
‘There is nothing subconscious about it. I do believe it. Men are only interested in sex.’
‘And yet your business, which is based on sex, is mostly funded by women?’
‘It’s true, ninety per cent of my sales are to women. Where are you going with this?’
‘So do you think everybody is obsessed with sex?’
‘No, not everybody. Maybe most people. Most people are obsessed with sex, yes. But not all. Most.’
‘Where does the belief come from? Because your business is doing well?’
‘Maybe, but I think my business is doing well because women in particular find it easier to buy sex-related items over the internet, because it reduces their embarrassment. It means they can avoid the humiliation of eye contact with an Ann Summers sales assistant in a too-tight T-shirt knotted under her breasts and a mouth full of sexually liberated attitude and chewing gum. You can’t walk into a sex shop, peruse the vibrator wall, pretend not to look shocked at the gimp masks, pick the least intimidating-looking vibrator – to prove you aren’t taking it too seriously – carry it to the counter, pay for it, walk out of the shop without making eye contact with any passers-by, and get all the way home on the District line with a “discreet” bag that everybody knows came from a sex shop, without confronting certain truths. That is a torturous amount of time to be carrying a mechanical penis in public. And do you know that the traditional vibrator – penis shaped, I mean – isn’t even my biggest seller, in any shape or size? A vibrating hand is my biggest seller – the two-fingered version with a pulsing thumb. There is a three-fingered version, but the words “vulvic bruising” are used twice in the small print, and it puts people off. The Two-Fingered Fondler has a “hot breath” function as well: if you hit a certain button a puff of air emits from the knuckle of the second finger, which should be positioned as per diagram G on the box for maximum impact on the necessary biology.’
‘Am I missing a point?’
‘My point being that women don’t even want a penis. They just want a hand and a puff of air. I think that means something.’
‘What do you think it means?’
‘I don’t know. But it means something. Do you know what I always wonder? I always wonder who draws those diagrams on the boxes, the Fondler boxes, and whether somebody had to “sit” for them? But I suppose it wasn’t an easel and beret moment, some old French artist, holding his thumb up in front of him. Plus the diagrams aren’t in oil or watercolour or even charcoal – it’s a 2B pencil at best. Some expense was obviously spared. Did you know that the knuckles can rotate? If the fingers are in rotate position themselves, and not “thrust” or “tickle”? But it’s the puff of air that does it, apparently. I get a lot of positive feedback about it, via the website, as if I am in some way responsible. Apparently it’s inspired.’
‘Is it?’
‘Is it what?’
‘Is it inspired? The puff of air … ?’
‘I don’t know. The customers seem to think so.’
‘Haven’t you tried it yourself?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say a little too defensively. ‘There was this one time, I did get one out of its box, and not just, you know, “inspecting it for delivery damage”.’
‘And?’
‘And I got distracted …’
‘Distracted?’
‘I tried to make it play chopsticks on my keyboard.’
My therapist gives me a strange look. He doesn’t usually register any kind of emotion, or surprise, or anything. But that was definitely a ‘look’.
‘Sunny.’ He says my name as if he has reached some kind of conclusion, and my back straightens for a life-changing insight that has so far, in eight months of therapy, eluded me. ‘Do you think you might put too much emphasis on sex?’
I’ve heard that one before. This is nothing new.
‘You feel relatively sexually inexperienced and instead of seeing sex as merely just one of any number of natural human instincts, you are building it up into something that it is not? You are putting it, and in fact your lack of it, at the core of your life, when it deserves no more importance than say talking, or laughing, or eating?’
‘Eating?’
‘Not just eating. Talking, or laughing, or any number of human instincts.’
‘But you said eating last. With emphasis.’
‘There was no emphasis, Sunny.’
‘Are you suggesting that I’ve replaced one obsession with another? I still eat, you know.’
‘Of course you eat.’
‘I’ve had a coffee, and a yoghurt drink, and a Skinny Blueberry Muffin already today. I’m not starving myself. I was in Starbucks for an hour before I came here.’
‘Starbucks? Are you going there now? You were so against it when it first opened! It wasn’t local, or atmospheric enough for Kew – weren’t those your words?’
‘I know. But then I tried it. Now I’m addicted to their Skinny Blueberry Muffins. It is a tasty yet low-fat snack.’
‘How does that make you feel?’
‘Well, it doesn’t exactly fill me up, but it’s breakfast.’
‘No, I mean how does it feel to sacrifice your principles for your diet?’
‘Look, I have a healthy relationship with food now. My diet is not the enemy, and food is not the enemy, necessarily. I know that you think that there is something unhealthy, emotionally, with the diet thing, but truly I am just focused. I had a lot of weight to lose. You could never understand.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’ve never been fat.’ I state it with force, like a dare. I challenge him to disagree, because I have a thousand arguments up my old fat sleeve on this one and he will never win.
It still feels strange to say the ‘f’ word out loud, and not cringe, or whisper. Just the word still manages to hurt me a little.
‘We all want to lose a few pounds at some point,’ he says, and it’s like a starting pistol in my head.
‘But a few pounds is not fat! Not properly self-conscious afraid-to-go-swimming-for-being-laughed-at unloved fat!’
‘But, Sunny, it is this perception – that you were unlovable because you were overweight – that interests me. Many overweight people are very much in love, and are loved in return. A person’s weight is by no means their defining characteristic.’
‘Maybe before it wasn’t, in “the olden days”, but not today. Nobody loves fat any more. That’s the last century speaking. I know, I live it. Complete strangers whispered “fat bitch” to me as I walked past them in the street. They didn’t know me, but they wanted to hurt me, because of it. Tell me that is not a defining characteristic – a person you’ve never even seen before hates you, and that’s not “unlovable”?’
‘But is it possible you lost the weight without addressing your own issues, not those of the strangers in the street, but your own?’
‘No, I just woke up. I was unhappy and I confronted that. That was healthy, I think.’
‘Not if the only answer you have found is losing another pound. When will you stop? If you still feel unloved in two months’ time, or whenever it is that you hit your “target weight”, will losing more weight be the only answer? This is what concerns me, Sunny. There are bigger issues than just “fat” involved.’
‘OK, now I want to talk about the emotional impact of the incident.’
‘Anything other than the diet, right?’ my therapist smiles. He has the measure of me now.
Adrian joined the Feel Good Company, specialists in vitamins, minerals and homeopathic painkillers, seven months after I did. I was the office manager, and spent most of my days hanging around the reception area, listening to Seema from accounts complaining about the photocopier. Our offices were furnished like a bad living room, with large vases of deteriorating dried flowers and burnt-amber sofas that had seen better days. Posters advertising Calcium and Fibre hung on the walls with a pride of place usually reserved for photos of grandchildren. The carpet was thinning in front of the reception desk, and the daily papers were spread across a glass coffee table, alongside Pharmaceuticals Monthly and Scientific Nutrition Quarterly, which nobody ever read. I dished out the better parking spaces to my favourites. Jean from distribution was a lovely lady, the same age as my mother, and prone to wonderful endearing ridiculous statements. As the year 2000 approached, she asked me seriously if the Millennium Bug might affect her Carmen rollers.
My boss was the head of human resources, a terribly serious Canadian woman who could only laugh at pain. Her assistant, Mariella, was a jumped-up brunette in secretary’s spectacles, who wore short skirts and tight T-shirts, and who hung the phone up on me daily. She had a way of walking that accentuated both her breasts and her arse, and all the men agreed that she was vacuous and pompous and a fool, but they still wanted to sleep with her. It took me a while to get my head around that, and it can still confuse me on my less lucid days. A man doesn’t have to like a woman, or respect a woman, or enjoy her company, to want to have sex with her. She just needs big breasts or long legs. Her face really isn’t important either, as long as she’s not buck-toothed or cross-eyed. I suppose what confuses me is that I am attracted to potential husbands, whereas Greg from Royalties, a tall handsome boy with blond hair and blue eyes that Hitler would have endorsed, was enticed by the possibility of a quick vigorous shag. He had plenty of time to find a wife, or she would find him, and for now at least he just wanted to have fun. I didn’t have that luxury. I was looking for somebody to see past my big old trousers and my big old belly and take me on wholesale, for life. I was sure time was running out for me, at twenty-four. Young and fat had to be more attractive than old and fat I chided myself; snag somebody quick!
Adrian came for his first interview on a Wednesday, and he was eight minutes late, because of the trains. He ran in, adjusting his suit jacket nervously.
His second interview was on a Friday, which I took to be a good sign. He was twenty minutes early, and sat in reception nursing a strong tea made for him by our post boy, Simon, at my suggestion. I didn’t speak to Adrian that day because I was too busy. Mariella arrived, breasts high and out, and bobbed hair swinging, and greeted him with a smile as big as Julia Roberts’, and a wriggle of her arse. Adrian didn’t seem to notice. That was the day I fell for him.
Adrian started working for the Feel Good Company five weeks later, in IT support. His predecessor had been sacked after returning to the office one night drunk to phone for a cab home from his desk, logging on to a porn site, and then promptly falling asleep. Six hours and five hundred pounds later, he woke up.
Adrian was twenty-six, and didn’t like IT at all. It paid the bills, he said. Simon who wore his jeans so low I was familiar with every pair of underpants he owned, observed that I ‘flustered’ when Adrian was around. I would make excuses about having to be somewhere else, or pretend to be busy with building contracts, or reprimand Simon for some minor misdemeanour. Anything to avoid looking Adrian in the eye. Because when I did, I laughed. My attraction for him overwhelmed me so much it actually made me laugh out loud.
He was tall, six foot one. He had longish shaggy dark brown hair that hung around his ears and in his eyes. He had a large nose, and a complexion that suggested he could get away with factor ten in mid-summer Rhodes, although he was prone to the odd freckle. For his first week he wore pale shirts, blues and greys, with his suits. When he realised that he could get away with wearing jeans he switched to dark denim – not baggy like Simon’s, but not tight and high like an old man’s. They fitted him well. He wore a battered old leather belt, and sweatshirts with small logos, in bottle green, and navy, and claret, and grey. He wore expensive fashionable trainers. He carried a record bag, in which he kept his Walkman and a copy of the Sun. He supported Liverpool, although he had never been to Anfield. I knew all of this without ever having spoken to him for more than thirty seconds. A minute was the absolute limit for me, and then I’d make my excuses and walk off, to laugh elsewhere, rather than laugh in front of him like a crazy woman. He made my hands shake. He made me bite my lower lip. He didn’t have a girlfriend.
He would rove the building, retrieving lost files and restarting crashed computers, and when he wasn’t busy he would come down to reception and chat to Simon, and flick through the paper. He started taking sugar in his tea, and put on half a stone, so he began running in the mornings before work, and lost it. I heard him talking to Simon one day, about a year after he had joined, gossiping about who had shagged who in the office, who they hated, whose computer he would deliberately take an age to fix. I was using the franking machine in the post room when I heard him refer to me as a ‘lovely girl’; I thought I was going to throw up.
I made an effort after that. He could have been one of those men who just disliked fat women, made jokes about them behind their backs, easy fodder. But I was a ‘lovely girl’. There was no mention of ‘but you wouldn’t, would you,’ or, ‘shame about her arse’.
After that I cracked jokes in his presence, and made him tea.
It was a dark day when he told me he thought he was falling in love. With somebody else, of course. She was a trainee PE teacher, and he had met her in his local pub. I thought I hated her. I didn’t know her, hadn’t even seen her face, but I hated her. Of course, when I pictured her she was effortlessly slim. Her hair and her eyes and her clothes changed in my mind daily, but she remained a size ten. I was morbidly jealous. I was sure that she didn’t even have an issue with food, that she could eat two biscuits and leave the rest, that she could have a couple of spoonfuls of ice cream and proclaim herself ‘stuffed’ and return the carton to the freezer for another day. She could buy a bag of chips and feel sick after eating a third of them. She wouldn’t have to force herself to stop eating them, she just could, without thinking, throw them away. She felt ‘full’. I never felt full. If you tried to take a chip from my bag you’d get my teeth in your finger. And that was the only difference between Adrian’s girlfriend and me, in my head. But she got lucky, because she got Adrian. Eleanor Roosevelt said that nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent, and it is absolutely true. I didn’t really hate Adrian’s girlfriend for being thin. I didn’t hate Adrian for not picking me. I hated myself for being fat. And what did I do when I felt bad? I comfort-ate. During the years I worked with Adrian I was a size twenty-four. On the outside I was big and jolly and made-up and polished and laughing. Everybody passed comment that I was, of course, ‘happy with myself, didn’t have a problem with my size’ and they loved me for it, in a Platonic sense, at least. Of course, while I thumped around the office being big and happy and proud I still went home at night alone. Everybody else, the ones who did ‘care’ about their appearance, started getting engaged, and married, and pregnant. I just got their compliments, about how ‘great’ I was, what a wonderful role model, to be fat and happy. ‘Sunny by name, Sunny by nature,’ they’d say …
It was a happy day that Adrian announced he had split up with the now qualified PE teacher, two years later. She just wasn’t the one, he told me. He wasn’t in love with her. Then he put his arm around my shoulders and said we should run off together. I said, ‘I don’t run anywhere,’ and laughed, and he squeezed my shoulder, and answered his phone.
A Monday was the blackest day of my life. Adrian was still single, a year after breaking up with the teacher. We had worked together for three years. I trundled into work in high-heeled boots that I convinced myself were comfortable. I bought them from the plus size shop, where the heels are wider and therefore give your legs more support. Plus the legs themselves are wider, so you can actually zip them up. It was a small victory when I was finally able, three months ago, to buy my boots from ‘normal’ shoe shops, without the zips jamming around the ankle. My legs are toned now, and those boots fit comfortably, but of course I still look down and see fat that shouldn’t be there. My legs don’t look any different to me, but they must be thinner. I wear size twelve jeans now, that magical Perfect Ten still eluding me. Logic dictates that my legs have changed, but my eyes refuse to see it.
On that Monday, in my fat girl boots, and a pair of long grey trousers and a black shirt, with my hair freshly straightened and my make-up impeccable, I walked into the post room to chat with Peter, our new assistant. Simon had left to join the police force six months earlier. Peter was just as amiable, and just as young, but a little more forthcoming with office gossip.
‘Morning, Peter,’ I announced in my usual ‘bubbly’ tone.
‘I have gossip,’ he declared with a sly smile on his face.
I looked at him through narrowed eyes. ‘Is it any good?’
