Free Size Matters by Judy Astley

comfort ourselves some more with a bit of retail therapy?’
    â€˜I can manage an hour or two – let’s not do clothes though, let’s go and do cosmetics. We could get mad-witch eyeshadow colours to scare Mrs C. next time she hauls us over the coals.’
    The two of them wandered through the town centre and into the luscious scent-soaked cosmetics department of the biggest store. ‘Mmm,’ Jay said, closing her eyes and inhaling. ‘The smell of lots of purchase possibilities. I need, and that’s
need
, not merely want, some new lipgloss.’
    She tried several, covering the back of her hand with smears of colour till she resembled the paint chart she’d used when decorating Ellie’s bedroom the year before. It seemed, she thought as she paid for her choice, a ludicrous amount of money to hand over for such a titchy pot of bronzy-pink goo. No wonder women bought so much – at that price you just had to hurl all your faith into it.
    Barbara declared herself well pleased with a newperfume and some smudgy purple-grey eyeliner. ‘Makes a change from browns for me,’ she said, ‘I keep buying all these taupe shades. I get them home and realize I’ve been influenced by the colours of my cats. Ridiculous.’
    â€˜What’s so wonderful,’ Jay mused as they walked towards the car park, ‘is that make-up can’t make you fat, drunk, pregnant or ill. It’s a near sin with no punishment and no side effects. Perfect.’
    â€˜If you go . . . and I’m not meaning you, this is rhetorical, you’re nowhere near a candidate,’ Barbara said, ‘If you,
one
, went to a sort of Overeaters Anonymous, do you think you have to rely on a Higher Power, like they do at the Alcoholics one? What do you think?’
    â€˜I hadn’t thought,’ Jay told her. ‘Hadn’t given it a moment’s consideration. I suppose you’d have to. I just know I haven’t got the right sort. My Higher Power, the one in my head that I listen to, is a jolly live-and-let-live soul who likes a drink and a good social nosh-up. It likes chocolate and doesn’t even try to tell me not to have it. It says, go on, eat that doughnut, a bit of what you fancy can’t hurt. He or she isn’t on my side about the diet at all.’
    Barbara stopped by the window of a new shop. There were all sorts of vitamin potions piled up in the window display along with diet remedies, powders and pills and drinks all claiming to be essential for toxic cleansing and inner purity. Photos of slender, bikini-clad women playing beach volleyball tempted body-envy. She and Jay wandered into the shop where soft persuasive music was playing and looked at a huge toy-like selection of primary-coloured tummy toners, exercise wheels, hand weights and elastic straps, every gadget promising to change your body shape, to tone, stretch and lengthen muscles till, presumably, they had to be folded double to fit inside your skin.
    â€˜You could waste your whole life playing with this lot,’ Barbara said, picking up a broad elastic band, putting one end under her foot and hauling hard on the other end. It escaped from beneath her shoe and snapped back at her viciously, sending her flying into an artistically arranged stack of cartons that clattered to the floor.
    Jay, overcome with laughter, started picking them up. ‘Hell’s teeth, look at this! Cellulite patches!’
    â€˜You can buy it in
patches
?’ Barbara said, misunderstanding and grabbing one of the boxes. ‘Oh I see, you stick them on and it gets
rid
of it.’
    â€˜I shall get some. I must try it.’
    â€˜You’re mad, Jay, you know it can’t work! It couldn’t possibly!’
    â€˜Hey, it’s just like the make-up, isn’t it? You’ve got to believe in the magic. Of course I’m going to try it. What can it hurt?’
    â€˜About twenty-five quid, it says here.