‘If I’m honest, Leah, this is not exactly what I was expecting us to be talking about today. I’d found an equestrian centre close to your house. I was going to suggest we go horse riding together. You said you stopped riding when you got married. I think it was LSD 88?’
‘It was 87.’
‘OK, number 87, but it was on the list. I thought we could go hacking. That’s what people do on horses, isn’t it? They hack? Computer hackers hack too, obviously, but they do it in a more let’s bring the government to its knees kind of way, which wasn’t really what I had in mind. I was thinking more in terms of a slow trot, through woodland. But if you want to get back love-stolen dreams from the past—I mean from the past past, that’s very cool. And thorough. Adds a whole new dimension. I like.’ I totally didn’t get it. ‘Well done!’ Phew.
‘Thank God, Kate! Because I was sure you were going to say no. Federico said you wouldn’t do it—’
‘What?’
‘I said I wanted you to do a past life regression and he said you absolutely wouldn’t do it. He said, “Past life regression? Walking, talking fashion regression, more like,” then he went on about some cardigan you bought from Deptford Market last week and how he’s had a metaphorical allergic reaction to it. Short version of this story is that he said you’d say no. He thinks he knows you so well, that Federico Cagassi.’ She typed a message into her constantly beeping iPhone while Henry fell asleep face first in his brownie. And just for the record that Federico Cagassi does know me quite well. He knows me well enough to know I’d rather put hot coals on my bare-naked tippy-toes than regress myself into the past, which is why I whispered,
‘I don’t want to do a past life regression,’ into my hair before bursting into a fit of fake coughing. Which is when things got a bit awkward …
You see I’d never given much thought to what I’d be asked to do for Love-Stolen Dreams. I hadn’t set any guidelines or parameters. I just saw myself as a champion of others, dashing about, problem-solving, drinking protein shakes and facilitating the journeys of others. But jumping through the windows of time, to right love’s past-life wrongs, well, it was like Quantum bloody Leap but for real and I suspect without the help of that middle-aged man who smoked cigars and had communication devices wired up to the present.
‘Oh …’ Leah looked at me with disc-sized brown eyes. ‘Oh, sure, of course.’ She looked at the floor and started fiddling with her hands. ‘I just thought that you wanted to help women reconnect with themselves. I thought this was a selfless quest to take back what love had stolen, not you picking and choosing a few things that you really fancy doing, like learning to trot on a bloody great horse.’ She was getting a bit shouty. Henry woke up and crawled under the table. He knew the signs. ‘Remind me again of your new mantra, Kate.’
‘I’m not here to judge,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘I am here to take back what love stole.’
‘That’s a great mantra,’ she said, draining her coffee mug and starting to pack up her things. I knew what she was going to do. She was going to leave. She was going to leave, without getting properly mad, and I’d feel like a rubbish, disappointing friend and it would be awkward and uncomfortable but she’d never mention it again and I’d never forget. It would become like a humungous white elephant who sat between us everywhere we went, an elephant called Awkward Stan, and Awkward Stan would always be there, an accessory to our friendship for the rest of my entire elephant-infested life. Good God, she was manipulative!!!
‘It was just a little past life regression,’ she muttered as she wiped Henry’s face with a wet wipe. ‘We could have found out what love stole from us in the past to find out why it keeps stealing stuff in the present. The answers are in the past. I just know it.’
‘I thought the answers were on this list!’ I said, shaking the heavy paper document in her face. She blinked violently as I did it and I knew I’d gone too far. There’s never any need to shake paper.
‘Kate, all I want is that if you put that iPhone in your mouth one more time I will make you eat the thing, do you hear me, Henry? I will put tomato ketchup on it, put it in a burger bun and I won’t feed you another morsel until you have eaten it. Your choice, you are in control of your own destiny. So, Kate,’ she said, turning back to me. ‘A little regression? Making sense of the future by unlocking the love-stolen secrets of our past—speaking of the past, did I tell you I bumped into Peter Parker the other day? When did he get back?’
‘What do you mean you bumped into Peter Parker? Where was he? What was he doing? Did you speak to him? What was he wearing? Did he speak to you? Did he smell nice? How did he seem?’
‘He seemed fine. To be honest he spent the entire time explaining to Henry how his juice box would eventually end up as a biodegradable roof tile, which neither of us really understood, well, especially not Henry as he can’t count past five. Think about the regression, Kate,’ she said as she headed to the door, Henry under one arm, twelve bags under the other and quite a large piece of Henry’s chocolate brownie stuck to her bum, which, in retrospect, I probably should have mentioned…
request | regress myself into the past
let’s chew the fat of love
‘What did I lose as a result of love? My thinness.’ (Susan, 58)
‘The effect of love is that there is a whole section of my wardrobe filled with clothes that no longer fit. I am keeping them in case we ever split up.’ (Jane, 33)
‘I’ve put on weight.’ (Miriam, 23)
‘It’s like I didn’t value myself any more. I fell in love, we got engaged and leading up to the wedding I had this goal: come hell or high water I was going to be skinny on the day. But after that I sort of gave in to it and the weight started slowly piling on.’ (Clarissa, 38)
‘I got really fat. I am really fat. I stayed fat. Thanks, Love.’ (Rosanne, 47)
‘For me it was hardest after the kids arrived. I just couldn’t shift the weight I’d gained. And it seemed selfish to insist that I needed time out a few times a week to go to the gym or for a run; my husband didn’t have time to do these things so why should I? And I wasn’t really sure what my motivation was. To say it was just about feeling good about myself, feeling sexy and enjoying my body seemed inappropriate. I was a wife and a mother, not a hormone-filled teenager. So maybe love stole my focus? It was certainly that lack of focus that ultimately played a massive part in the destruction of my marriage. I didn’t feel sexy. I started to dislike myself and my body. Eventually he felt the same way.’ (Hina, 42)
the birth of fat camp
the boardroom | true love
They sat there nervous. They sat there scared. Some of them sat there defensively as if they had already changed their minds in the lift on the way up and now, faced with a hyperactive Federico, who had changed into a white T-shirt that said ‘skinny people are happy’, were going to do everything possible to stay the size they were. One had her hand in a bowl of red Haribo, a second was munching her way through a bag of Kettle Chips, a lady in the far corner was nibbling on one of those chocolate diet bars that tells you it’s fat free, which of course it is, it’s totally fat free and 100% sugar-coated and will make you balloon faster than a hydraulic tyre inflator. In fact the only person in the boardroom