Free Crappily Ever After by Louise Burness Page A

it can be snatched away, but I’m not sure. I start by quitting smoking. I give away my last fourteen cigarettes in a pack to Bessie, along with my ashtray and lighters. I also stop drinking for a few weeks as my resolve to stop smoking weakens terribly when I add alcohol. I walk the forty minutes to work and back, more for something to take my mind off cigarettes than anything else, and find I am quickly shedding the pounds too. I have no appetite. There are good days, when my intention is to live my life as fully as I can, and others when I’m angry and flop into bed pulling the covers over my head, not wanting to talk to anybody.
    Everything reminds me of Harry.
    After a few weeks of feeling really low and grumpy due to nicotine withdrawal (OK, I admit it, borderline psychotic) things start to look up again. I spend my time seeing movies and going to the gym with friends. I’m beginning to feel more positive than I’ve been in a long time. Like a tiny stream of light has appeared from behind a dark cloud after days of storms.
     
    After a couple of months hiding out like a recluse, seeing only non-smoking friends and allowing myself a maximum of two wines total on a weekend night, I decide it’s time for the re-launch. I’ve gone from a size fourteen to a ten, so Jess and I hit the town for some power shopping. For the first time since I was a teenager, I enjoy buying clothes. Instead of being bright red in the face, struggling to button up a fourteen whilst grunting like a stuck pig, I slide easily into a size ten jeans and they sit snugly on my hips. I want to cartwheel through the changing rooms. The last time I had gone shopping I had, to my shame, got stuck in a slinky satin top. Mortified, I struggled for ten minutes with my arms over my head, stuck from the chest up, before I gave in and shouted on the pre-pubescent stick insect assistant to help me. Chewing her gum loudly in my ear as she attempted to release me, she eventually ripped the seam and pulled the top free. Just in time for me to notice three of her colleagues disappear, giggling, around the corner. Of course I had to pay for it even though, technically, she had ripped it.
    Why do they allow these foetuses to work in clothes shops? It doesn’t make me want to go in there. Flaunting around in their size six clothes with ridiculously trendy names as they shout across a crowded store.
    ‘Jaz, can you check if we have this in a size fourteen – or maybe a sixteen, actually – for this customer?’ While looking disdainfully at me through a too-long fringe.
    I want to be served by women whose arses are bigger than mine and who have shared the experience and humiliation of being stuck in a garment. I want them to say in hushed tones that they have the same trouble as me finding trousers to fit. I mean, the average UK size is a sixteen. I’m not alone here in being a real woman.
    I do not want to hear the size six brigade tittering behind their hands and saying in mock awe: ‘It really suits you.’
    Wait ‘til you hit real womanhood, sweetie, with your boobs swinging round your knees. So now I want to walk back in the manner of Julia Roberts in that scene from Pretty Woman :
    ‘Big mistake. Huge!’ I want to smirk as I flaunt my new look at them. I figure they won’t know the relevance of my statement. Probably haven’t ever watched a movie that wasn’t Disney. So I stick to getting my own back by dangling my arm out of the changing room curtain, shouting: ‘Service please, would you happen to have this in an eight?’ It’s fairly lost on them, sadly. In their minds anything over an eight is obese.
     
    Laden with shopping bags, I head for the final part of my re-launch preparation – a new haircut. I exit an hour later with glossed, long choppy layers. It’s just what I needed. Twirling around in the street, Jess and I squeal at my reflection in a shop window. Much to the annoyance of people attempting to pass by. Serving staff in the