of the hospital too. I like the way it’s all white and quiet, the nurses and doctors walking round in their long clean coats and squeaky shoes, carrying clipboards or wheeling machines.
Ever since Dad was ill and Marion came to the house to look after him, I thought I’d like to be a nurse. You get to be kind to people, or firm with them if they won’t do what you tell them to, like taking their pills or eating their meals. I think I’d like looking after old people the most because they’re nicer and easier to talk to – especially if they’re lonely. And I’d listen to them. I wouldn’t be like those people that just pretend to listen, by nodding and saying ‘Yeah’ or ‘Oh dear’, when it’s obvious they’re really thinking about how they can escape. I’d listen for real.
Marion was nice. She chatted a lot, but at the same time she got on with all the things she had to do. She used to unpin her nurse’s watch from her pocket and let me take Dad’s pulse. She showed me how to put the inflatable thing round his arm and read his blood pressure too. Then, if I was at home, she’d call, ‘Time for stats, Nurse Yasmin’, and I’d rush from wherever I was to do all the checks and write down the numbers on Dad’s chart. I asked her once if she wished she was a doctor. She said ‘Never’. She said she’d always wanted to be just what she was. Marion went away as well when Dad died. I know it’s obvious she would, but I hadn’t thought about that. I thought I’d only lose Dad.
Dr Bhatt didn’t react as he watched the numbers on the scales settle on 219 lbs 12.472 oz, but when he wrote it on the chart in my ring-binder, I saw his eyebrows go down and his teeth pull on his top lip. I thought he was probably thinking what he could say to me this time, because he’d tried saying a lot of different things already which obviously hadn’t worked because basically I was failing the programme, as in FAILING the programme.
‘OK, Yasmin, take a seat,’ he said in his Indian accent. I sat down next to Mum and he sat down the other side of his desk. He looked at her, then at me and said, ‘Well, you have put on some weight. Almost four pounds, in fact, which means your BMI will also have risen by around point 5.’
I tried not to notice Mum wilt in her seat as he flicked through my file. At least she didn’t say anything or demand to know how it was possible when she was mostly giving me less to eat.
‘Perhaps we should have another look at your motivators,’ he said, unhooking the list from the rings. He put it on the table, turning it so it was the right way round for me to read, ‘Because clearly I think this is where the problem is lying.’
I looked at the list.
‘Take a look and think about whether each one is still relevant to you, because it may be they are not the right ones.’
‘But Yasmin made the list,’ Mum said.
He licked his lips, making them pinker than they already are. ‘Well, the things which motivate us can change,’ he said, ‘especially when we are so young.’
‘Right,’ Mum said, like she still didn’t really get it.
‘Let’s go through,’ Dr Bhatt said, smiling at Mum and tapping his finger on the paper. ‘So . . .’
‘Number one,’ I read out, ‘having friends.’
‘OK,’ Dr Bhatt said, ‘well, we all like to have friends and certainly that isn’t all about how we are looking. But do you still feel that making new friends would be easier if you were slimmer?’
I looked at him. ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘OK then!’ he said, beaming as if just saying it solved everything. ‘But are you thinking about making new friends when you get the urge to eat outside of your regular mealtimes?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘And that is the problem,’ he said.
We went through the rest of the list like that and then he asked me if there were any new motivators I’d thought of that I’d like to add to it, and like always I told him I’d forgotten to think of any and he told Mum to remind me to try.
Then he went over my diet plan, which was awkward because with Mum there I had to keep lying about not eating any sugary foods like biscuits and chocolate. He knew I was lying too, but he didn’t say anything. He just looked down at his hands. Then, without getting up, he walked his chair round the desk, wheeling it across the shiny floor, and when he got to me, he leant forward, his elbows on his knees, and licked his lips again. ‘If you stick to the plan,’ he said, his Indian accent even stronger up close, ‘you will lose the weight.’ Then he put his hands together and for a second I thought he was actually going to pray for me. ‘Try to take each moment as it comes,’ he said. ‘Think only of your goal. It will take courage, but once the weight begins to come away, I promise you this: it will feel like the sun is coming out.’
On the way home in the car it was raining. I could feel Mum wanting to ask me about exactly when and what I’d been eating without her knowing, but also that she didn’t want to ask me. Maybe because she was feeling guilty about the Maltesers and about saying that it’s what’s on the inside that counts when it isn’t really true.
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it would feel like physically to be thin: to have thin arms, thin legs, a flat stomach. But even though I haven’t always been fat, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t remember. Instead, my body just felt even bigger than it is, then started swelling till it was taking up the whole car and pressing against the windows which were going to explode any second if I didn’t stop . . .
So instead I imagined what it’d be like to go into school thin. I imagined Alice coming out of the English room at the other end of the corridor, chatting to the girls around her and walking towards me. She loops her bag over her head and that’s when she spots me. She stops – stops dead in her tracks, peering in disbelief at me. Then, breaking free from the others, she comes running up, smiling in amazement, her mouth open in shock and saying Yasmin, is that really you? and then everyone else crowds round saying that too.
I went up to my room when we got home. I wanted to be on my own. I sat on my bed and thought about really trying to make an effort to lose weight this time. I thought about getting the chocolate and Hobnobs out of my suitcase and bedside table and throwing them all away. I thought about giving up on the idea that you were going to take Alice and me being a hero and all of that as well, because it was pretty much all I’d been thinking about and Dr Bhatt said I should focus only on losing weight.
My file says I tend towards obsessive thoughts, which is how I got fat in the first place, so I knew I’d been obsessing about you. And I didn’t really know anything about you anyway. I’d only seen you once. I thought about how you could just’ve been a completely normal person that was staring at Alice for some innocent reason, like because she reminded you of your granddaughter who’d died in a horrific car accident, or something like that – and not at all because you were going to do something very bad.
I thought how you taking Alice was just a stupid fantasy, the same as all the other stupid fantasies I’d had – like Alice getting ill and me researching her symptoms online for weeks and weeks till suddenly I figure out what it is that’s wrong with her just as she’s about to die . . . That one never happened for real either. I thought about Miss Ward telling me last year how it was high time I realised that this life was the only one I was going to get and that I should start living it that way before it was too late. I remembered thinking what a load of horse crap – ‘before it’s too late’ – but even though I knew it was the kind of dramatic rubbish
