Big Bones Read online

  ‘Mum, it is possible, it’s totally legit. I have to get an apprenticeship … I can just do extra hours at Planet Coffee AND if I can get Alicia to fill out this application for a Barista apprenticeship scheme thing I could potentially get paid for working and learning at the same time …’

  ‘So what is it you’re telling me? That your ambition is to be a barista?’

  ‘Well … No, I don’t know, not yet and even if it is, so what? I just know that there is absolutely nothing for me at that stupid school and it can at least buy me some time until I figure out what it is I want to do.’

  ‘You’re just worrying about your exam results, Bluebelle. They’re done now. I’m sure you did fine. You need to stop worrying about them.’

  ‘This is not about GCSE results.’ Secretly I am worried about my results. I fell asleep in my English exam because the poem was so dry; I don’t know why they don’t show us any good poems. And I thought I did OK in geography until I sat next to Diane at lunch and all of her answers were VERY different to mine and she knows everything. The nurse really cosies down in her squeaky chair now.

  Mum adds, ‘And if the worst comes to the worst we know you will have done well in your art exam.’ I should have done, yeah, but art was actually the ultimate worst though. Basically I had so much time left after drawing my fruit-bowl still-life composition that I filled the whole background in with black charcoal. I don’t know what came over me. My creative mind betrayed me. My piece looked like it was hijacked by a goth. The image will haunt me for the rest of my waking life.

  And THAT was when I had the stupid asthma attack. In art. The one exam I actually thought I’d be OK in. And everybody stood over me on the splattered grey lino floor, watching me struggle like a slug with salt poured on my back, whispering in their stupid girly whispers, not knowing what to do. MORE reasons for the stupid school to continue the rumours that I’ve been fatally impacted by my parents’ split. ‘SHE WAS SCRIBBLING OVER EVERYTHNG IN BLACK CHARCOAL, MISS, AND NOW SHE’S HAVING A PANIC ATTACK AND DYING! SHE’S HAVING A MELTDOWN!’

  I can’t go back to that place. I just can’t.

  SARDINES

  ‘Mum. Just hear me out.’ The nurse doesn’t care – this is far more entertaining for her than dishing out hay fever tablets and sticking her finger up old people’s bums to check for piles.

  ‘Not now. We will talk about this later,’ she says to the nurse, not even looking at me.

  ‘You said you would hear me out if I sat down with Julian from Careers.’

  ‘That was just to pacify you. Come on, let’s not do this now.’

  ‘Pacify me? You’re quite happy to sit here and talk about my body – that’s not private, no? Or you and Dad breaking up, again, but you don’t want to talk about my life. It’s my future. Not yours. And I’m happy to talk about it in front of this nurse. I don’t want to go to college. I don’t want to go to university. I want to work at Planet Coffee. I’ll do my normal hours plus the apprenticeship and take my time and think about what I want to do next.’

  ‘It’s called a gap year,’ Mum says as if she’s trying to show the nurse that she’s all read up on this.

  ‘No, Mum, because a gap is a gap between two of the same thing. School and then more school. I don’t want a gap. I want a severe cut. Finished. Over. Done.’

  ‘Bluebelle, school think you’re going back in September; you can’t just –’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Can you not just listen to the nurse and keep the food diary?’

  ‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t keep the diary.’

  ‘Thank you, take the diary; now can we go, please?’ Mum gathers up her handbag; I halt her like a traffic warden.

  ‘I’ll keep the diary, so long as you’re OK about me leaving school.’

  ‘I’m not talking about this now.’ She tries to push past me like we’ve reversed roles.

  ‘You didn’t go to college, Mum.’

  The nurse glances at Mum. I didn’t want to have to use that poisonous dart to be honest but she’s driven me to it. Trump. Card.

  ‘It was different then.’ Mum looks apologetically to the nurse for solidarity. Almost hoping the nurse might’ve also not done school.

  ‘It’s always going to be different, Mum. I wish you would remember that when it comes to this stupid BMI scale too. It was different then, that’s why I’m being treated like a heifer when I’m actually not; it’s just that times have changed and EVERYONE’S bigger. Course they are. Half the girls at school eat a box of fried chicken on their walk home. You should see the size of their boobs. But look at me, here I am just a hundred per cent embracing it – that things are different. Everything’s different. That’s what makes life so exciting. Once upon a time, Mum, we were monkeys. As in actual real-life monkeys. We change. Now do we have a deal?’

  The nurse tries not to laugh and holds her hands up and shrugs. ‘Don’t ask me.’

  ‘Have you spoken to your dad about this?’ Mum asks.

  ‘Really?’ We both know Dad’s opinion does not count.

  ‘OK. Rules are … you keep the diary for six weeks and you need to talk to Alicia from Planet Coffee, you go to work without missing any shifts and –’

  ‘There’s more?’

  ‘You sign up to the gym.’

  ‘MUM! NO!’ Don’t laugh at me, idiot nurse.

  ‘You heard the nurse: move more. Exercise is good for you.’

  ‘But, Mum! I have asthma! You know this. I’m not allowed to do exercise; it makes me die. Even school don’t make me exercise!’

  ‘No, actually, exercise is good for everybody. If you have your Ventolin and you listen to your body, you should be fine,’ the nurse offers,

  ‘See?’ Mum raises an eyebrow at me. ‘And the only reason school don’t make you do it is because you deliberately throw the ball into the boys’ field behind so the girls can’t fetch it back. You think I’m an idiot. You’re doing it.’ She points at me. ‘Gym. Membership.’ She says it like it’s a poem, like they are two words that rhyme, but they clearly don’t. She wants to threaten me. It doesn’t work. It’s a crap poem.

  ‘MUM!’ I feel so betrayed. ‘Well, you’re paying for it.’

  ‘Bluebelle, I don’t have that kind of money. You work, don’t you? You’re the one that wants independence; if you want to act like a grown woman then you can pay for yourself too. And that includes taking care of your body.’ She puts her hands in the back pockets of her jeans that fit her too well. Mum always looks good in jeans, like a Gap model. An older one, obviously, but a hot one still. ‘Some mums make their kids pay rent!’ She makes the word rent sound all hard and sharp like a swear word. Then she looks at the nurse for approval, like she wants a gold star put on her jumper. She’s showing off in front of her new friend. ‘We’d all love a gym membership!’

  ‘I think I’m too young to join a gym.’

  ‘No you’re not, you can be a member from sixteen, and some gyms even do a discount for under eighteens.’ Mum’s BFF, the nosy nurse, intervenes again, almost as if she’s giving good news. I hate these two bad cops.

  ‘Do we have a deal?’ Mum pouts.

  CAN I really see myself doing this? Big Bones keeping a food diary like some sad celebrity in rehab AND going to the gym? Except without the cool paid bit where some magazine prints it.

  ‘This isn’t a diet, you know. I’m not dieting.’ The only people I know who have ever dieted are ones I don’t really like. And my dog. And he doesn’t count because he’s got four legs. Mum looks at the nurse.

  ‘Deal,’ I grunt.

  ‘Take the diary.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘This diary is going to be a good read! See you in six weeks.’ The nurse celebrates with a smile so hard I see her fillings. They are the colour of sardines.

  And I absolutely HATE sardines.

  BONES

  Hi, nurse. Or doctor. Or whatever you are. Weirdo with too much time on their hands … Welc
ome to this scraggy notebook all about what I eat.

  What you are reading is a promise. Between my mum and me. It’s my food diary. So before you go around prodding the big judgemental finger, remember you’re the one reading this. I know you’re probs used to people sucking up to you, pretending they don’t smoke half the cigarettes they actually do but to be honest I’m kind of livid that I even have to write this stupid thing. I know this is your job to go probing around into people’s private lives but I guess I just sort of, SILLY ME, thought that doctors and nurses were far too busy saving people’s lives and stuff to have the time to read something like this. Unless you actually ARE the complete weirdo that gets off on this kind of stuff.

  Yes, before you ask, I am fat.

  Yes. I just called myself fat and that’s allowed.

  And …

  I’m not greedy.

  I just love food.

  AND I’m not unhappy.

  I just love food.

  NO BIG DEAL.

  BIG

  I like being big.

  Because there’s something of me. I feel wholesome, there, alive, 3D. I bolster myself; I look after me.

  I’m not just fat either. I’m big all over. Tall. Chunky. Big. Strong. Like a Range Rover. It’s how I was designed.

  I don’t even know what the obsession is with being small anyway, do you? It’s all the girls at my school go on about: how to get thinner as quick and as ferocious as possible. Honestly, they’ll stoop to the wormiest, shallowest, ugliest pits of lowdom to get there and will stop at nothing. And once they’ve done all the starving one can do, overdosed on paracetamol and cranky coffee and nail biting – and their breath stinks like an old fish tank – they’ll binge on 1,000 donuts, cry themselves into a frenzy and do it all over again. It’s so tiresome and dull. Not one of the girls at my school sits down and says, Right, great news, girls, I’ve found this amazing reel of wool, let’s go and knit ourselves some sick cardigans or Hey, girls, this lunchtime let’s climb a tree or Hey, girls, I think my next-door neighbour is an undercover spy … let’s stalk him and find out. Not the ones I’ve met, anyway.

  Is it a girl thing? Boys seem to want to be big. Full of bravado and banter and big and loud and it seems the world want us girls to be tiny and petite and taken care of. What’s all that about? You know, in some parts of the animal kingdom the female is the bigger beast. Woman spiders eat the boy spider after they’ve mated – that’s how REAL it is in the animal kingdom. They know how to do it. Don’t you just think that’s cool?

  So before we become friends or whatever you need to know that I embrace my body. It’s mine. And I live inside it. And I take care of it. Don’t read this because you want to perv on my size, indulge in my indulgence and think how fat are we talking here? I’m being honest with you so please just accept that.

  What I see in the mirror is a BEAUTIFUL, HEALTHY young woman with a positive attitude towards food. Sorry about me knowing how to speak like an actual expert but it’s true. And that, to me, is no real reason why I should be writing some food diary … get the people with eating disorders to do it, not me.

  My real name is Bluebelle. But most people call me BB. I wasn’t enormously thrilled with the nickname initially because it makes me sound like one of those posh blonde girls that expects a flat white after school instead of a Coke like the rest of us. And wears a pashmina. Nobody puts BB in the corner.

  Once, somebody asked me what BB stood for. And before I could answer them back, they answered for me.

  ‘Is it cos you’ve got big bones?’ they suggested. ‘I mean, I’m not being rude but does the BB stand for Big Bones?’

  And before you ask, yes, they were being rude. Because ‘big-boned’ is the kind of term they give people like me. To try to reassure people like me that they don’t believe it’s our fault that we’re fat. Like being fat’s a bad thing. Truth is, ‘people like me’ – meaning, oh yeah, hi, me – don’t actually need your reassurance.

  But the name sort of stuck. Because I like to own my fat. So that’s who I am.

  There are two Bs in Bluebelle and two Bs in Big Bones, which seems to make sense as I am double in everything.

  So call me BB.

  BB for Bluebelle.

  BB for Big Bones.

  CROISSANTS

  I meet Dad at the Pelican Cafe near him, although I reckon he’d rather go to the pub because he’s obsessed with Guinness, which is basically freezing-cold beef stock. It tastes like blood. I’d prefer to go to Planet Coffee actually because the cakes are better there but the staff always forget I’m not working and make me do work stuff so I’d rather not.

  Apparently you could live off Guinness, fish and chips and oranges for the rest of your life and get all the vitamins you needed. Cos Guinness has so much iron in it.

  I’m not really sure why Dad is so weedy then.

  There’s a quite big thing I need to tell him.

  That I’m not doing school any more.

  But I’m not stupid. I know I need to tug on those daddy heartstrings first, which I should tell you are very easily tugged. My dad is a failed actor/drama teacher so he’s very sensitive and always has lots of time for sob stories. And his constantly watering eyes are always ready for a good cry. Although that could be because he’s quite old for a person-my-age dad. He had me ‘later in life’, you see, and old people’s eyes tend to water quite a lot.

  ‘That’s a nice … errrr … what is it … a shirt … type thing, shows off your curves.’ OH PLEASE. CURVES. You mean thick chub rolls. Thank you very much. Then again, Dad’s most overused phrase when he used to take me clothes shopping was, ‘It does nothing for you.’ Which he probably thought was a nice, quiet, polite way of saying, My God, kid, you are seriously fat.

  I sniff my top lip – it’s a habit I’m going through, don’t worry, I don’t like it either – and say, ‘I had an asthma attack.’

  ‘What?’ he shrieks. ‘Oh God, BB, when, where?’

  ‘At school.’

  ‘Nobody called, do school have my number? Did Mum come and get you?’

  ‘No, she was at work.’ Mum is a community programmer at a theatre. She has to involve the ‘locals’ with ‘outreach’ work and make all these plays up about knife crime and politics.

  ‘For f— Course she bloody was.’ He’s trying to SOMEHOW pass the blame on to her. If she was at home he would have said ‘Course she bloody was, why wasn’t she at work?’ My parents take turns to be positive and negative magnets to try and attract one another, but they never seem to be the right + or – at the right time. Always repelling, taking turns to point the finger. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘Errr. Maybe because I was in the middle of having an asthma attack?’ God, thanks for asking if I’m all right.

  ‘Your mum never said.’

  ‘I’m fine. Don’t worry about it.’

  I don’t know why he even suggested calling him. His phone is from the 1970s and has a battery life of nineteen years and could survive an apocalypse but he never has it on him. He doesn’t even know how to use it.

  ‘What do you fancy?’ Dad asks. I look though the glass counter; it’s like looking through a pet-shop window stuffed full of miserable-looking road-kill rabbits. I just reach for a packet of waffles by the till, knowing they can’t be contaminated by this cafe’s crappy efforts. ‘I think I’ll get myself a croissant,’ says Dad.

  The croissants here are pretty dry. In fact, appalling to be honest. OK, they aren’t as terrible as the ones that come in little cellophane bags on aeroplanes that may as well be sweetened cheap bread rolls but they are pretty bad. No flakiness, no butteriness, no layers. The almond ones aren’t even dusted and there’re about two untoasted almond flakes on each. It’s actually quite rude to even call them croissants. I think food only really works if people show they care with the detail. It would’ve taken somebody thirty seconds to toast those nuts. Almond croissants are meant to have all those white crusty guts pouri
ng out of them like an overstuffed bean bag made of pastry, but oh no. The chocolate ones look like flattened sloths. I adore croissants; they get me out of many a hunger crisis. I mean, complete nightmare to eat in public because they stick to your lipstick and fall all down your clothes and the flakes love to cling to fabric. Truth be told, my ideal boyfriend would be a proper buttery, warm, well-put-together croissant: you could almost imagine the folds of the croissant opening up and closing around you, tucking you in for a great bit puffy hug.

  We sit back at his table, which he’s already managed to make look like his poor little poet’s desk. His glasses case and weird little scrawly notes in his scratchy little notebook all left out, some tarnished coins piled up into towers.

  ‘I think my ideal boyfriend would be a croissant,’ I say to Dad.

  ‘Oh no …’ Dad shakes his head, taking my comment deadly seriously. ‘They’d cancel on you last minute, too flaky.’ He winks and takes a bite. ‘That’s what I think of your boyfriends!’ He laughs.

  ‘You’d eat them?’

  He clears his throat. ‘So … errr … w … what about you and … you don’t have to tell me … but any … do you have any … I mean, it’s not my business really but I just want you to know you can tell me if you … I suppose what I’m trying to say is … do you have a, have you got a boyfriend?’

  ‘No.’ I feel sorry for him. He’s so embarrassed; it’s like Dad is trying to ask me out on a date.

  ‘Oh, that’s good. Not good, obviously, but not bad. Neutral, neutral.’ He backs his coffee. ‘Or girlfriend? I didn’t ask that, do you have a girlfriend?’ His eyes light up. Dad would love that. It would give him something to show off about at his drama classes, an extra political angle to tear someone down about during a debate at one of his wine and cheese nights with his friends, Well, MY daughter’s gay so I’m the only one here fit to speak on this particular subject …

  ‘No, Dad.’

  ‘You’re dating yourself then, are you?’