‘We don’t actively hate each other any more.’ Though Neve wasn’t sure that she exactly liked Charlotte, she no longer thought of her as evil incarnate either. ‘Sound good?’
Charlotte nodded. ‘Yeah, I mean, I can’t see us hanging out at Nando’s or nothing but we’re cool.’
‘Great.’ Neve stood up. ‘I’m going upstairs and I’m not going to tiptoe around any more, just so you know.’
‘Like you even could with your toenail hanging off,’ Charlotte scoffed.
‘You never said it was hanging off! You said it had just come away at the sides!’ Neve peered down at the gauze, which was streaked with pink, and felt every single one of her internal organs judder in revulsion. ‘God, I think I’m going to be sick.’
She started hobbling towards the door. Charlotte had disappeared into her bedroom, but just as Neve stepped on to the landing, she reappeared. ‘I want you to have this,’ she said, handing Neve a neatly folded pile of velour. ‘Just to say I’m sorry and all that.’
Neve looked down at the sherbet-pink fabric. ‘Is this …?’ She couldn’t finish the question, because, really, there were no adequate words.
Charlotte nodded. ‘It’s one of my Juicy Couture tracksuits.’ She looked a bit misty-eyed at the thought of parting with it.
‘I can’t accept this,’ Neve said firmly, because tracksuits were solely for the gym and anyway, it was pink.
‘I’ll be dead offended if you don’t.’ As threats went, it was a winner as Neve knew only too well what an offended Charlotte was capable of.
‘It won’t even fit me,’ Neve protested. ‘You’re much smaller than I am.’
‘Don’t start all that again,’ Charlotte snapped. ‘I only said you were fat ’cause I knew it wound you up. You’re not, OK? You know that, right?’
‘Well, of course I know that, but I’ve been on this detox Cleanse which is the only reason that I’m this, well not slim, but unfat at the moment.’
Charlotte’s face was contorting into familiar, scornful lines. ‘What are you talking about, you silly cow?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve been a size fourteen since I was fourteen and you’ve been the same size as me for months. Maybe even smaller.’
Neve looked Charlotte up and down. Charlotte was curvy but it was slim and compact curvy. Not jiggly, wiggly curvy. ‘But you look much smaller than I do.’ She shook her head. ‘Honestly, I don’t know any more. I can’t tell if I’m fat, if I’m slim or I’m somewhere in the middle.’
‘You know what your problem is? You think too much about stuff,’ Charlotte summed up. ‘I try not to think about stuff at all. Now just take the bloody tracksuit.’
Neve took it because their ceasefire appeared to hang in the balance. Besides, she couldn’t wait to see Celia’s face when she modelled it for her.
Back in her own flat, Neve walked into the bathroom and started the shower as she stripped off the DVF dress, took off her borrowed bra and unrolled her Spanx.
Showering was a tricky business standing on one leg with her injured foot poking out of the shower curtain so she didn’t get the dressing wet. The hot water rained down on her, washing all the product out of her hair and the natural look off her face.
Neve stepped out of the shower and after she’d wrapped her hair in a towel, she tucked another around her and began to slap on body lotion in a half-hearted fashion. Combed out her hair. Brushed her teeth. Scrutinised what was left of her zits in the mirror. Dabbed some cream around her eyes because Celia was absolutely adamant that it was never too soon to stave off the appearance of fine lines.
She turned away from her reflection and was just about to scurry from the bathroom, when she stopped, turned and faced the mirror again. She stood there for a long time, her apprehensive face staring back at her, then unfastened the towel and let it fall to the floor.
Oh my God, you look awful!
It was her first thought – an automatic reaction to looking at herself naked. Though when she thought about it, Neve couldn’t remember ever looking at herself naked. She tended to get out of the shower with her back to the mirror and would only turn around when she was enveloped in a bath sheet. If by some accident she did look in the mirror while she was naked, she quickly averted her eyes so all she had was a vague impression of acres of wobbly, dimpled flesh.
Tonight she was going to stand naked in front of the mirror for as long as it took for all the self-doubt, self-loathing and self-delusion to dissipate so she could see what other people saw when they looked at her.
It took a while for her shadow self, the Neve of three years ago, to fade away. It took even longer to stop focusing on one specific area of her body and take it all in.
Actually, you don’t look that awful.
She looked like a woman who was something less than who she used to be and she could see the war it had waged on her body. She was never going to have taut, toned, smooth flesh. Never going to happen. The loose skin on her thighs, stomach and arms was mottled like salami. Her breasts looked like balloons that were beginning to deflate and there were silvery pink stretchmarks cobwebbed all over her body.
The longer she looked, the more Neve could see. When she turned round and peered over her shoulder, there were her shoulderblades, the line of her spine, two buttocks instead of the four she used to have, and when she tensed her legs, there were muscles in her thighs, in her calves. She had a tiny waist, wrists and ankles, and when she raised her arms above her head, the flesh pulled and tightened.
It wasn’t a perfect body but it was the body she deserved. Not just from every bar of chocolate or bag of crisps or laden plate of food that she’d eaten. This body was also testament to all the hours in the gym, and cycling up hills on her bike and glugging down two litres of water a day and learning to love vegetables and fruit that didn’t come as an optional extra with a pastry crust. She’d earned this body.
This body could do a faultless Downward Dog and run for the bus and fit into a cinema seat. She could cross her legs and squeeze between tables in a crowded café. She could go into any woman’s clothes shop on the high street and buy something to wear, without being banished to the plus-size section at the back of the store.
This was her body and she had to stop giving it such a hard time.
But even as she took stock, Neve knew she wasn’t always going to look like this. Being a size twelve was an illusion. As soon as she started eating and drinking regularly again, she’d gain back most of the weight she’d lost on the Hardcore Cleanse. She waited for the wave of panic to drag her under, but it didn’t. She just stood there on her white bath mat staring at herself, and the longer she stared, the more ordinary her body became. Familiarity was robbing her flesh of its power to paralyse her.
So she’d start eating again and put some weight back on until she was a size fourteen, or even a size sixteen – she’d let her body make that decision for her. Then she’d stalk Gustav until he agreed to take her back and they’d get her down to a size twelve again safely and responsibly before they began to work on a new maintenance programme. Neve had no doubt in her mind that Gustav would take her back, though she’d probably have to sign a sworn affidavit that she would never knowingly drink another cleansing juice as long as she lived.
Neve said one last silent sorry to her body, then wrapped the towel around her and padded into the bedroom. She was finally beginning to understand that her fixation on being a size ten had been another excuse to spend her life in preparation, instead of living it and taking risks and maybe getting hurt in the process.
The outside stuff was easy really. Neve knew what she had to do: three meals a day, two light snacks and at least an hour of rigorous exercise five or six days a week. What she needed to start working on now was the inside stuff because, obviously, she wasn’t right in the head.
She wasn’t going to let the urgent need to have her brains descrambled become another excuse for living a half-life. In the morning, or later in the morning at any rate, she was going to walk up
the hill to Crouch End to see Max.
Neve knew he’d be a much harder sell than Gustav. She’d start by apologising profusely, upgrading to grovelling and genuflection if Max remained unconvinced. And if that didn’t work, then she’d put her arms around him and kiss him over and over until she’d persuaded him that he belonged to her and she belonged to him and pancake relationships were so very last season and they were both ready for the real thing.
That was why she got into bed naked, because it was the kind of thing that a girl who was relationship-ready did. Neve lay there in the darkness trying to sleep but mostly tossing and turning and thumping her pillow.
Now that she’d made all these big, important decisions about what her life was going to be like, Neve wanted to start right away. Even the thought of facing Gustav’s Teutonic wrath was as exciting as it was nervy, and the prospect of tracking Max down in a few short hours was terrifying – but just to see his face again would be like all the birthday and Christmas presents she’d ever had combined and tied with a big red bow.
But mostly Neve couldn’t sleep because she was hungry. She was so hungry that it felt as if her stomach was about to start eating itself, which it probably was because it had been twelve hours since her lunch-time juice and there was nothing to eat in her kitchen apart from two lemons and a jar of horseradish.
There was no reason why she couldn’t go back to sensible eating right now, Neve reasoned, as she flung back her summerweight duvet. There was a shop on Seven Sisters Road which stayed open all night and she could buy a loaf of granary bread and a box of eggs. They might even have some tomatoes and she could make an omelette.
Neve pulled on underwear, then grabbed her new pink Juicy Couture tracksuit. It was nearly three in the morning so she wasn’t going to bump into anyone she knew. As she pulled up the zipper on the hoodie she had to take a moment to appreciate how soft and plush it was. Comfy too. No wonder Charlotte liked them so much she had one in every colour.
She carefully threaded her injured toe into a flip-flop, grabbed purse and keys and tiptoed down the stairs. Stomping down them in the wee small hours would definitely violate the truce.
As she crept along the hall, there was nothing on her mind but the tomato omelette and two pieces of toast she was going to eat in thirty minutes’ time. Twenty minutes if she really hurried.
But when she opened the street door and saw a hunched figure sitting on the steps, Neve knew the omelette could wait.
PART FIVE
I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten
Chapter Forty-two
Max turned around as Neve stepped through the door.
‘Hey,’ he said, his arm tight round a frantically squirming, yelping bundle of dog.
What are you doing here? How long have you been sitting outside? It’s the oddest thing but I was going to hunt you down in a few hours. There were a thousand things Neve wanted to say but she just sat down on the step next to him and replied, ‘Hey.’
Keith’s joy was too great to be contained. He struggled free of Max’s grip so he could bound up and down the garden a few times, before launching himself at Neve, front paws on her shoulders so he could give her face a thorough tongue bath.
‘Who’s my special boy?’ Neve cooed, once he’d settled with his head on her knee so he could gaze up at her adoringly. ‘You are, aren’t you?’
She didn’t know why Max was there and why he wasn’t saying a word, but then again, she was sitting there feeling tongue-tied and absurdly shy. All she did know was that even though neither of them had changed position in the last five minutes, their thighs were pressed against each other.
Summoning up every last ounce of courage she possessed, Neve glanced at Max; even the sight of his wonky nose in profile made her want to catch her breath. Instead of lying in bed listening to her stomach roar, she should have been composing a ‘For the love of God, will you have me back?’ speech in her head so that …
‘What happened to your toe?’ Max asked eventually.
‘My bike fell on to my foot. I’m hoping if I keep it tightly dressed then my nail might reattach itself. It had lifted right up off the nailbed when—’
‘Jesus! Stop! Don’t say another word,’ Max begged, his body one huge spasm of horror. ‘That’s just gross.’
‘I know,’ Neve agreed happily – happy because they were talking, even if it was about her necrotic toenail.
‘And what happened to your lip?’ Max asked, because he was looking at her face now, which was illuminated by the lamp-post across the road. ‘Where did you get that scratch on your cheek? Did your bike fall on you from a great height?’
‘You think I look bad, then you should see Charlotte,’ Neve told him as Max’s eyes widened. ‘We had a fight. A proper, full-on deathmatch. She’s got a black eye and a sprained wrist, but I’m not sure that was my fault. I think she skidded on some of the melted ice cream.’
‘Are you all right?’ They both watched his hand lift towards her face and then stop in mid-air, before he dropped it again.
‘I’m fine,’ Neve said. And she’d thought that she was and that everything was going to be OK, but he wouldn’t even allow himself to touch her and now she wasn’t so sure.
She was just wondering if she should move up her schedule to the part where she threw her arms around him and kissed him into compliance when Max cleared his throat. ‘So, anyway, I broke up with my therapist.’
‘You did?’
‘I did,’ Max said grimly.
‘Oh? So, does that mean that she might have space for a new client, because I think I need some help from a trained mental-health professional,’ Neve said. She had to keep talking and sooner or later, she’d get round to saying what she wanted to say. ‘I broke up with Gustav too but I’m going to make him take me back because I—’
‘Look, Neevy, I don’t care if you’re a size ten,’ Max cut right through her babble and gently pushed Keith’s head on to her other leg so he could curl his hand over her knee. ‘If Mr California only appreciates you if you’re skinny, then he doesn’t really appreciate you at all.’
‘I saw him today,’ Neve said, and when Max stiffened and tried to move away from her, she grabbed his wrists and held on for dear life. ‘He wants me to move to Warwickshire with him.’
It was interesting watching Max’s face collapse in on itself. Interesting, encouraging, but also hard to look at because within seconds, Max had got his features under control, set his face into a hard, harsh mask.
‘Congratulations,’ he said stiffly. ‘Can you let go of me?’
Neve shook her head. ‘No, I can’t.’ She tightened her fingers hard enough to leave bruises and Max didn’t make a word of protest, just sat there with a face full of barely restrained fury. ‘See, he had it all worked out. I was going to chuck in my job, enrol into the doctorate programme at the University of Warwick so I could also be his research assistant for some dreary book he wants to write. This was before I even found out that his fiancée was coming too. I—’
‘He’s engaged?’ Max interrupted. Neve hadn’t thought it possible, but his face became even tighter, more closed off. ‘That really must have fucked up your masterplan.’
‘You’re not listening! You keep interrupting before I get to the important bits,’ Neve complained. ‘Will you just shut up and let me say this?’
‘Say what? You wasted weeks on a starvation diet because you didn’t know that Mr California was otherwise engaged?’
‘Shut up!’ It was verging on a scream. ‘I mean it, Max. Promise to keep your mouth buttoned tight.’
‘OK, I promise,’ he sighed, but with a lot of eye-rolling, and Neve would have preferred to have him in a more conciliatory mood when she handed him her heart to do whatever he wanted with it.
‘Now, where was I?’ She hoped that Max couldn’t feel her fingers trembling around his wrists as she tried to retrace the threads of her conversation. ‘Before his fiancée arrived, before he implied that
I’d given up on being smart for being slimmer instead, as if the two things were mutually exclusive, I sat there listening to him talk and talk and I realised something really important.’
‘What?’ Max asked sulkily, before he remembered he was under strict instructions not to make a sound. His mouth snapped shut.
Neve decided to let it go. ‘I realised I didn’t want to be naked with him – and not because of my legion of body hang-ups, it was because I didn’t fancy him. Then I wondered why I didn’t fancy him because William … well, he’s handsome and super-intelligent and I thought I was in love with him for all those years but it turned out I was in love with the idea of William. The actual reality was a bit of an anti-climax.’
She finally released Max’s wrists so she could run her hands through her damp hair. Max must have sensed that she wasn’t done, because he sat quietly, his eyes trained on her face.
‘I thought, well, William would never shove the word WAG into pop songs to make me laugh and he wouldn’t bite the chocolate off chocolate-covered strawberries for me and he’d never, ever watch a film with Sandra Bullock in it, unless it was a Shakespeare adaptation and then he’d spend the entire film listing all the historical inaccuracies and he’d never go down on me for half an hour because he’d lost a game of Scrabble. Point of fact, I can’t imagine William doing anything that would mess up his hair, and he’s started popping the collars of his shirts and have I mentioned that he’s not you? He’s not you, Max, and that’s why I’m actually really pleased that he’s engaged and he’s moving to Warwickshire so I don’t have a constant reminder of what an idiot I’ve been.’
Neve had run out of steam and breath by now, so she leaned back on her elbows and glanced anxiously over at Max, who didn’t seem to realise that she was done and he had permission to speak again.
He was staring down at the ground, lost in thought, and she wanted to touch him, even more than she’d wanted him to touch her and tell her that everything was going to be OK. That they were going to be OK.