One thing I love about Mum is that she never makes things into massive dramas like most people. She usually just shrugs and sighs or says ‘Ah well’ or ‘Never mind’. I suppose it’s because of losing Dad. Once you’ve been through something like that, it puts things into perspective – things like your teenage daughter possibly smoking a cigarette on a tree stump when she should be fifty metres away listening to someone so old he can only mumble in monotone.
I typed How to spot a paedophile into Google on my laptop. About a billion sites came up. I took a quiz on one. It showed pictures of people (men mostly) and you had to click Yes for paedophile or No for not a paedophile. I only got half of them right, which technically means there was a 50 per cent chance I was wrong about you. Except I knew I wasn’t. Anyway, I thought, you weren’t just a photo, you were real. You are real, and I deduced therefore that it’s a lot easier to tell a paedophile in the flesh than from a picture. It’s the same with telly or pop stars, isn’t it? They seem super-duper lovely on screen but then you hear they’re really vile and treat the people who work for them like crap. Hanna Latham at school said her friend’s cousin was a runner on this TV show and that there was a really horrible presenter who’d tip packets of mixed nuts all over his desk, then make her pick out the cashews because they were the only ones he liked. Hanna said you’d never know he was like that from watching him, all smiles and jokes and floppy fun-guy hair. I bet if you met him in real life, though, you could tell straight away he was mean.
This other site said to pay particular attention to the mouth, to look out for the paedo-smile: apparently paedophiles usually have thin lips and are often smiling – especially if you’re a child doing the looking. Obviously, you weren’t smiling when I saw you because you were on your own and too busy, I expect, imagining what you’d do with Alice when you got her.
The website said to look out for props too, meaning things that would interest kids and make them trust a person, like bikes or scooters or kittens. It didn’t mention dogs, but obviously dogs – especially one as scruffy and cute as yours.
The one thing all the sites did say was that predators like you are almost always known to their victims. I thought that bit didn’t really fit unless you did know Alice – which is possible, I suppose, but you didn’t look like you knew her. I mean, you weren’t exactly ready to wave at her if she happened to notice you. You were holding your dog’s lead with one hand and the other one was stuffed deep in the pocket of your jeans.
Mum brought me a tea at 9 o’clock the next morning. She said, ‘You awake, love?’ even though it was obvious I wasn’t, or at least hadn’t been, and sat on the bed. Because I was officially in trouble, I couldn’t tell her to pee off, so I pushed myself up, took the mug from her and had a couple of slurps.
She believed me about not smoking, but I had to come up with a reason for being on the path. Watching squirrels obviously wasn’t good enough (even though it ending up being the truth) and I couldn’t tell her about you, so I told her I was just feeling a bit down.
‘Oh love,’ she said. She leant forward and tucked my hair behind my ear. ‘You’ve not had an easy time of it, have you?’
I was thinking, stop tucking my hair behind my ear, Mum, but I said it was no big deal and that everything was fine really, I just had my period coming. But the way she was looking at me all sympathetically made it impossible not to think about Dad, which made me get tearful.
She patted my leg through the duvet. ‘Hey, c’mon,’ she said, ‘let’s go to the shop and get something nice.’
I reminded her I had to see Dr Bhatt in the afternoon, but she said she was sure he was going to be pleased with me. She didn’t know about the family-size Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Turkish Delight in my bedside table drawer or the other three in my suitcase on top of the wardrobe, or about the packet of chocolate Hobnobs I buy in the corner shop near school every day.
She said, ‘One treat won’t hurt.’ She said it was a treat for her too because she’d got the day off. She’d given the work to one of the other mystery shoppers.
She came out the Co-op with a box of Maltesers. ‘Look,’ she said, making me hold it when she got back in the car, ‘they’re so light they won’t even show up on the scales.’ We ate them there, sitting outside the shop. She told me she’d go on a diet too, but that Gary likes his ladies large. ‘Something to grab hold of,’ she chuckled, popping several Maltesers into her mouth at once with a naughty look in her eyes.
‘Mu-um,’ I said, because I really didn’t need to be hearing what Gary does or doesn’t like.
Then she said sorry, because she knew she wasn’t being very helpful, but that the point she wanted to make was that it’s what’s on the inside that counts.
She looked really happy inside and out.
Dr Bhatt wasn’t pleased with me. He never is because every time I go I’m heavier than the time before (and I’m not getting any taller), but even so I like going to see him. He’s calm and patient and talks to me like he understands how it’s really hard to lose weight. But I like going because of the hospital too. I like the way it’s all white and quiet, the nurses and doctors walking round in their long clean coats and squeaky shoes, carrying clipboards or wheeling machines.
Ever since Dad was ill and Marion came to the house to look after him, I thought I’d like to be a nurse. You get to be kind to people, or firm with them if they won’t do what you tell them to, like taking their pills or eating their meals. I think I’d like looking after old people the most because they’re nicer and easier to talk to – especially if they’re lonely. And I’d listen to them. I wouldn’t be like those people that just pretend to listen, by nodding and saying ‘Yeah’ or ‘Oh dear’, when it’s obvious they’re really thinking about how they can escape. I’d listen for real.
Marion was nice. She chatted a lot, but at the same time she got on with all the things she had to do. She used to unpin her nurse’s watch from her pocket and let me take Dad’s pulse. She showed me how to put the inflatable thing round his arm and read his blood pressure too. Then, if I was at home, she’d call, ‘Time for stats, Nurse Yasmin’, and I’d rush from wherever I was to do all the checks and write down the numbers on Dad’s chart. I asked her once if she wished she was a doctor. She said ‘Never’. She said she’d always wanted to be just what she was. Marion went away as well when Dad died. I know it’s obvious she would, but I hadn’t thought about that. I thought I’d only lose Dad.
Dr Bhatt didn’t react as he watched the numbers on the scales settle on 219 lbs 12.472 oz, but when he wrote it on the chart in my ring-binder, I saw his eyebrows go down and his teeth pull on his top lip. I thought he was probably thinking what he could say to me this time, because he’d tried saying a lot of different things already which obviously hadn’t worked because basically I was failing the programme, as in FAILING the programme.
‘OK, Yasmin, take a seat,’ he said in his Indian accent. I sat down next to Mum and he sat down the other side of his desk. He looked at her, then at me and said, ‘Well, you have put on some weight. Almost four pounds, in fact, which means your BMI will also have risen by around point 5.’
I tried not to notice Mum wilt in her seat as he flicked through my file. At least she didn’t say anything or demand to know how it was possible when she was mostly giving me less to eat.
‘Perhaps we should have another look at your motivators,’ he said, unhooking the list from the rings. He put it on the table, turning it so it was the right way round for me to read, ‘Because clearly I think this is where the problem is lying.’
I looked at the list.
‘Take a look and think about whether each one is still relevant to you, because