The real me is thin. Of course she is. The real me does not need a size 16 (sometimes even a 18) to accommodate her mammoth arse (not my real one, obviously) when buying trousers. Properly fat women wear sizes 16 and 18, not me. I am not fat. I can’t be. I don’t feel like a fat woman. Well, not all the time. Obviously, I feel like a fat woman a lot of the time. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t think there was another ‘me’ out there, another, thin me available somewhere. The fat woman I feel like a lot of the time is my go-to person, the one I feel like when I feel bad about myself, which is how I feel when I eat, more often than not. But that can’t be who I really am. Admittedly, I find myself temporarily housed in a slightly-larger-than-planned-for body but, you see, that’s OK because it’s not my real one. In my real life – the one I’m supposed to be having, the one I had planned on having, the one I’m going to have – I’ll be wearing slinky party dresses with micro spaghetti straps, lovely bikinis and city shorts, of course I will… just as soon as I shake off this fat woman’s body, which, as we’ve established, isn’t mine anyway. I’ve no idea who put me into it. I certainly didn’t. How could the odd handful of chocolate-covered peanuts, sporadic slices of butter-laden malt loaf, and the occasional bottle of wine in one sitting possibly be responsible for getting me into this body? This overweight body I did not plan for and don’t recognise?
Right from the beginning – well, my beginning anyway, when I was little – the real me wasn’t supposed to be fat. My parents made it clear they did not want a Fat Arabella. They wanted, expected, demanded, even, eventually, a Thin Arabella. The indisputable fact that Thin Arabella had never made an appearance (my birth weight was close to 11 pounds) didn’t seem to factor into my parents’ expectations. They seemed to think that Thin Arabella must be in there somewhere and that I, Fat Arabella, was deliberately hiding her to annoy them. As I grew up it became clear from their confused, slightly irritated reactions whenever I said I was hungry that they didn’t know who this girl was. My mum and dad couldn’t possibly have been meant to have a Fat Daughter. They’d both got degrees from Oxford, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, played musical instruments – good God, they went to museums for pleasure. People like that don’t get fat kids. Other people get fat children, not people who drink real coffee and look down on people who wear driving gloves, go on package tours, and disguise loo rolls under knitted dolls wearing crinolines. My mum and dad were cut out to be winners, and winners’ kids aren’t fat.
The real me must surely be the one my parents were expecting, the one they had in mind when they longed for a daughter to follow their two boys. When a couple long for a girl they do not long for a fat one. They dream of a sweet, adorable, and, above all else, pretty girl. They must have been mystified. ‘Hey, Genepool, we didn’t ask for fat! Who ordered the fat one?! Not us!’ Who actually wants fat? No one. They certainly didn’t dream about having just
