Size Matters by Judy Astley

Author:Judy Astley [Judy Astley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2007-07-27T04:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Weight Watchers

Jay woke abruptly, sat upright in bed and opened her eyes. It was still dark and for a second or so she had the sensation that she had gone suddenly blind. It used to happen a lot when she was a child – Audrey was a great believer in total darkness for sleeping and had lined all the house’s curtains with blackout fabric. You took your life in your hands, negotiating strewn-about hazards like shoes and books, heading for the loo in the night.

What had woken her? Her heart was racing and she knew something had given her a bad fright. She rubbed her eyes and waited a while for them to get used to the dark, focusing on the window beyond which a foggy sodium glow overlaid west London’s night sky with a grubby shade of brownish orange.

‘Whassup?’ Greg whispered. He put his hand on her back. The warmth and gentle pressure made her feel safer.

‘Not sure; nothing probably. I think I was dreaming.’

She had been, she realized now. She’d been dreaming about a doll, a big one, so fat as to be almost globular and the height of an average four-year-old child. She wore an outfit like Alice in Wonderland: sky blue dress and white frilled pinafore, white tights and black patent shoes with rhinestones across the front. Her hair was waist-length, luminously golden blonde and . . . Jay lay down again and stared at the ceiling. That’s what had woken her, it was the hair and the flash and the bang and the terrible thing she’d done to the face. She’d been curling up the doll’s hair with Delphine’s Carmen rollers which seemed mysteriously to be connected to the mains, so her head looked as if it was attached to an execution gadget of the type that rednecks in America’s southern states might invent. After the flash she’d slowly turned the small figure to face her. The doll’s chubby pink cheeks had gone black, the blue eyes that had had a vacant, slightly startled gaze had vanished, blown away, leaving bloodied caverns leaking trails of gore and sinew down the rigid porcelain face.

‘Bad dream or a good dream?’ Greg was waking up properly now. In the morning he’d be impossible to shift, sleeping late and feeling groggy and out of sync. Not good on a Monday, she recognized, it could throw his whole week out. He’d drink too much coffee then wonder why he got stomach cramps.

‘Bad dream. I killed Delphine with her own Carmens.’

‘Eh?’

‘Heated hair curlers. I managed to electrocute her or something. Not that you can, only in dreamworld. She was a fat dolly in Delphine’s dance shoes.’

Greg sighed and put his hands over his eyes. ‘You’ve lost me now.’

‘Well you did ask. You should never ask people to tell you their dreams, you know that. They’re always either incredibly boring or completely barking mad.’ Was it mad? Or bad? Only a jury could decide. Herself, Jay would plump for mad – she wouldn’t really wish this fate on a dolly, let alone a real human.

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