‘Dead bloody right, they will be! And if they aren’t, I quite agree, they can just fuck right off again.’
‘It’s exactly what they would do, I suppose,’ she said glumly.
‘Right. And see if we care!’ They both started laughing. ‘Now then. I’ve got exactly…’ He emptied his trouser pockets. ‘…£11.87…Altogether…Oh. How much have you got?’
‘I’ve got £25. But it’s meant to last us until Friday. They won’t let us get any more out until the end of the week.’
‘Fine. Excellent. I think we should drive out to Lamsbury and buy ourselves a bottle of champagne.’
‘Charlie, we can’t.’
‘Of course we can. We’ve got to celebrate. With or without the bloody licences. Fiddleford Manor Retreat is now officially open for guests. So let’s hope they come soon or we shan’t be able to buy the greedy little sods any breakfast.’
It was Messy Monroe, though she didn’t realise it yet, who was destined to be Fiddleford’s first illegal guest. Which is strange because until a fortnight or so before she arrived most of the country had forgotten she ever existed. One of a stream of wide-eyed girls with nice bellybuttons who flit across our television screens, she’d had a stint presenting Top of the Pops about seven years ago. In December 1995 she was voted TV’s Hottest Totty by one of the men’s magazines and she spent the following eighteen months or so capitalising on it, endorsing all sorts of things from Breast Awareness Week to easi-grip toothbrushes. She was given a holiday show to present, which meant everyone got to see her in her bathers, and then five years ago, just when life couldn’t have been looking any better, she made the mistake of falling in love with a pretentious and impoverished novelist.
This one, who was small and softly spoken and who used unnecessarily long words to hide the fact that he was never actually saying anything, made her head spin with an irresistible mixture of lust and mental confusion. He could have chosen to ruin any number of beautiful women’s lives, and in fact he had (and continues to do so). That winter, the winter of 1996, he just happened to pick on Messy.
At the time Messy was a young twenty-five, and in a funny way slightly frightened by her easy success. She had emerged onto the scene three years earlier, from a life of dreary and impoverished oblivion, the daughter of a father she had never met, and a mother who worked in personnel at a shirt factory in Middlesbrough. She’d been surviving in an idea-free zone ever since, surrounded by the sort of spoilt and happening crew who find it embarrassing to use long words at all, let alone use them to say anything confusing, and she hadn’t realised it until the writer came along, but she was bored. She was wilting with boredom – and guilt and bewilderment. Because she was living, after all, the very life that a lot of women have been encouraged to fantasise about.
Enter the little writer, putting on an excellent show of being interested in her mind. They spent almost a year together, just long enough for him to destroy what there ever really was of her confidence. In a series of desperate bids to impress him, she applied to read a degree course in Philosophy (and was rejected). She resigned from the holiday show, refused to cooperate with a Hello! magazine TV Totty special, and sacked her agent. But the little novelist remained unimpressed. Nothing she did, or didn’t do, could escape his soft-voiced disdain. In September 1997, just six weeks before he was due to desert her, Messy produced the only decent thing that ever came out of the relationship, a daughter called Chloe.
She and Chloe went to live in a small cottage in Oxfordshire, where the British public very quickly forgot about her. She looked after her daughter, educated herself to a level where she would never again find herself intimidated by chippy little novelists, and ate. She was fifteen stone, lonely, broke, and Chloe had just turned three when she finally felt desperate enough to start rebuilding her life again.
Messy did the only thing she could think of doing under her restricted circumstances. While her daughter was away at nursery school she wrote a book about being fat, and about what she claimed to have identified as the ‘fat/thin hate divide’. And because she was quite clever and because the book, however silly, was often funny and very frank, and of course because she herself had once been so famous and thin, Messy’s book caught people’s attention. The Secret Revolution: Fatties Fight Back was given an undue amount of publicity, almost all of it negative.
Which brings us pretty much up to date. Fatties had been out for just one week and it was infuriating everyone. Thin people, obviously, because for the first time ever they were under open attack, and fat people because – well, for a myriad of reasons. After all the subject isn’t an easy one, and Messy should never have used the word FATTIES in the title if she wasn’t prepared for a rough ride.
Messy Monroe may be finding it hard, now she’s just like every other female, worrying ‘does my bum look big in this?’ read one of a hundred readers’ letters running in publications around the country that week, but maybe it’s just a problem she has, adjusting to not being a ‘star’ anymore. I’m ‘fat’, as she calls it, and believe me I KNOW I’m fabulous, and I’ve got lots of skinny friends who accept me as I am. So Messy, all I can say to you is, try looking out and seeing the love in this world next time, instead of harping on about fat versus thin!!!
Messy, having hidden away for four years, was now suddenly giving interviews galore, and she hated it. She hated being on show, but the wretched Fatty theme had spiralled into the unofficial Light Relief Topic of the Week, and it was out of her control – or so she felt. The whole thing culminated in an invitation to appear alongside three Very Important Men on the panel of Question Time.
In fact she acquitted herself quite well at first. She came up with something suitably anodyne when they asked her about the effect of September 11th on other terrorist groups, and again when they asked her (as if she knew) about the likelihood of biological warfare on Britain. It was only towards the end, when the questions turned from world war to people’s weight, that she ran into trouble.
‘I for one am very slender,’ announced a sensible-looking woman about three rows from the front, ‘but I have many, many dear friends who are on the larger side—’
‘They’re fat,’ snapped Messy. ‘If you mean they’re fat, then for Heaven’s sake say so.’
‘Rubbish!’ somebody shouted back. Messy rolled her eyes impatiently.
‘Doesn’t the panel think,’ the very slender woman continued, ‘that we have enough hate divisions in this world already, without people like Messy Monroe falsely inventing any more?’
The entire audience, fat and thin, broke into hearty applause. They were angry and frightened, after so long discussing a possible World War Three, and they needed to vent their frustration on an easy target. Messy, with all the adrenaline that was pumping through her, was only fuzzily aware of the audience mood. She was more acutely aware of her own terror, and of the possibility that at any moment she could simply lose her nerve. So she over-compensated and answered the question without any of the conciliatory ramble which served her more experienced panellists so well: ‘Firstly, and most obviously,’ she said, much too aggressively, ‘these divisions are not “invented”. You and your friends may not want to acknowledge them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. My fat friends and I could refuse to acknowledge the WTC attacks. A fat lot of use that would be!’ She paused. It was meant to be a joke. Not an especially funny one, obviously, but not necessarily deserving of the cruel ‘Ver-y Funn-y’ yelled out from the back of the auditorium, which made everyone laugh. She pressed on. ‘You can’t heal a rift—You can’t heal any sort of rift without first identifying the causes. And that’s what my book is doing. Trying to point out that fat and thin people, and especially women, have a deep and very understandable mistrust of one another—’
‘RUBBISH!’ somebody shouted again.