Free Tears for a Tinker by Jess Smith Page A

black number. ‘It slims one, they say,’ said the assistant—who was three times
fatter than me, cheeky imp.
    Well, summer was upon us, and off I went with my laddies to Tarlair, Johnnie toddling by my side, Stephen in his pram which was loaded with goodies to eat, buckets and spades and swimming gear.
Just in case I got stuck undressing, my Speedo was on under my clothes. Mammy came along too. Everybody from Macduff was of the same mind, and the place was heaving. ‘God,’ I thought,
‘of all days to introduce my body-filled Speedo to the Moray coast, I have picked the worst.’
    For ages I watched Johnnie paddling and splashing, running over to Mammy and me for a digestive biscuit, only to drop it into the water and cry for another one. Since his close escape with
illness I would have given him the world, and he knew it, the fly wee devil. So after handing him a few digestives I gingerly stepped out from under a rainbow-coloured beach towel (another Co-op
bargain), and while Mammy sat doing a word puzzle next to sleeping Stephen, I slid under the water at the deepest end.
    It had been a long time since I swam, and in no time I was in my element. I always was a good swimmer, and could keep up with many a powerful travelling laddie with frog arms and lizard legs.
Ever since my uncle threw me in one year at the Lunan burn pool at Gothans outside Blairgowrie, I have had the water powers of a mermaid.
    At first I swam like a butterfly down the length of the pool, until a baldy man with the body hair of an ape began doing dives under me, emerging to smile into my face. ‘What a
show-off,’ I remember thinking. Suddenly after his umpteenth dive, it dawned on me that this twit of a water zebra was having a good look at my bulk. And everybody knows we look twice as big
under water as above it. That old cliché, ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’ came to mind, so I too took to diving and soon felt a lot more comfortable. The
hairy one, obviously exhausted, left the deep end to me and one old woman. She also got out of the pool and my happiness returned when it was apparent I was the only one left in. Not so at the
shallow end, it was filled with squealing weans. As I threw everything into my swimming the crawl, diving, floating, backstroke and butterfly, I spoke to my bellies wobbling buoyantly under the
fabric of the Speedo. ‘I shall come up here everyday,’ I told each pound, ‘until every ounce is shed. Oh aye, you’re for the chop, nothing surer.’
    ‘One more length, then I’ll call it a day,’ I thought, swimming into shallower water. Suddenly the pitch of kids’ noise grew louder and louder. I stopped swimming and
stretched my head above water to see what alarmed the wee ones. My heart skipped a beat, thinking my lad was sick again, but when I saw Johnnie sitting beside Mammy my anxiety diminished. I took
one more dive, then headed towards where my mother and kids were. Even under the water the screams were deafening. As I emerged onto the grassy bank, a pool attendant approached me. ‘Thank
God,’ he said, ‘the weans thought you were a basking shark. I’d get rid o’ that black costume and wear a coloured yin, quiney!’
    Well, definitely slimming was the order of the day after that awful experience. But a wee word of warning: if you too are feeling the effects of being overweight, then seek professional help. I
didn’t, and here’s what happened.
    Round the corner from where we lived was a chemist’s shop. It had just received a batch of so-called slimming biscuits. These tasty treats had just entered the world of dieting. Women were
scoffing them like hot cakes, they were flying off the shelves. A friendly assistant said that, if I wished, she’d sell me at a big discount a box of the biscuits which had come in wrongly
coded. I bought the whole lot, and if memory serves me right it contained four months’ supply. One biscuit instead of a meal, and the weight problem