She has more diet books than the town library. Mum has been on a diet ever since I can remember. If she wanted me to be tall and skinny she should have given me a different name. You'll always have to watch your weight."Īt fourteen I already know this much about my own destiny. "You'll end up with a Mediterranean figure, like your nan. Me up and down, assessing my already plump chest, my thick hips, my freckles. "You're unlucky," she says to me sometimes, looking That and the fact that I bawled my eyes out, "like some bloody opera singer," for six months after I was born. My name is Carmen because Mum likes to imagine that she's got Spanish blood in her. She watches me as I spread Gold Ultra Lite on my toast. I look at her, I can see her bones through her clothes. "You'd tell me, wouldn't you? If I got that big?"
On her new diet she's allowed two slices at breakfast, along with 1 ounce of Special K with skim milk. Lo-salt Danish bread that toasts really quickly, the kind that has more air in it than flour. I'm sitting at the kitchen table waiting for my toast to brown. "If I was as big as her I'd kill myself," Mum says, pointing at a picture of Marilyn Monroe in her magazine.
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