You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me by Manning Sarra

Author:Manning, Sarra [Manning, Sarra]
Language: nld
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780552163293
Publisher: Corgi Books
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-three

Neve knew that she’d lost almost thirteen and a half stone. That her hips had gone down from sixty-one inches to forty-three inches. Her bras were now a 34DD and not a 52GG. Objectively, she knew that.

But subjectively, when she went shopping and was trying on clothes in a harshly lit changing room and could see all her flabby white flesh on display, she still felt like a Death Fat – was sure she looked like one too.

Even worse, clothes shopping with her mother was giving Neve a terrible sense of déjà ew back to those horrific August afternoons when they’d gone shopping for a new school uniform. By the time she was fourteen, Neve was too big to get into Marks & Spencer’s largest school skirt and had to make do with a navy one from their plus-size collection instead. Then there was the year that she’d busted out of the regulation school blazer and her mother had got special permission to have her friend Agnes run one up in a cheap poly blend that hadn’t looked even remotely like everyone else’s blazers. Charlotte had just about exploded with spite when Neve had turned up for school wearing Agnes’s best effort which didn’t do up over her chest, had puckered seams and gave her electric shocks in the Physics lab.

Neve perched on the bench in the fitting room and tried to avert her gaze from her reflection because, really, did anyone look good under fluorescent striplight when they were wearing the sturdiest bra and knickers that money could buy? And what was taking Celia so long?

Neve had thought that Celia and their mother were on the same page as her – the page that had a picture of a nice black dress on it. But Celia had decided she was going to bully Neve into buying a black trouser suit ‘with a fitted tuxedo-style jacket. You’ll look just like Marlene Dietrich.’

As Neve had stared at her in disbelief because the only thing that would make her look like that lady was radical plastic surgery, liposuction and a different set of genetics, her mother had added her two-penn’orth.

‘You can never go wrong with a smart pair of black slacks,’ she’d informed Neve. ‘And they’ll come in useful for job interviews and court appearances. Oh, and funerals too.’

‘Here you go,’ said Celia’s voice from behind the cubicle curtain, because Neve had trained her well enough to know she wasn’t allowed into the hallowed space without express permission. ‘Try these on.’

Two black trouser suits were thrust through the gap in the curtain, but because this was an upmarket high street chain that had delusions of grandeur, the curtains were billowy, swagged chintz.

‘Celia, can you please get me some black dresses?’ Neve called, but there was silence.

Without much enthusiasm, Neve hung up the suits. Why Celia had brought her a size fourteen, she didn’t know, but she’d try on the size sixteen first just to show willing, and when the trousers got stuck on her child-bearing hips, she’d firmly insist that they moved on to black dresses.

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