Doing nothing to control her body, she became seamless. In some places there was more than necessary. Flesh spilling over flesh, Leila’s hands fought to contain herself. But she couldn’t. There was extra instead of contours. Her hollows were hills.
As she got out of bed her feet didn’t touch the floor. All of the only thing she really knew to be her had leaked through her head and was flying around the ceiling. Empty. Soft. Muffled. “Come back,” she commanded. Get back. And then she was, or more than she had been in any case.
Looking in the mirror at her voluptuous proportions she decided she wasn’t an IT girl, but a tit girl, then giggled and decided she had spent too much time by herself today. This morning she’d left home with the intention of arriving at work. It just hadn’t turned out that way. Five minutes later at the top of Onewa Road, sitting in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, she did a uwey and went straight back home. Today the world was just too big, or was it she was too big for the world?
She’d told her boss, unconvincingly, there had been a death in the family. It was the kind of encounter that made her blush, sweat even. Uneasily they walked the knife-edge of pretence - they both knew she’s just lied, but the boss wasn’t into the confrontation.
She spent the day reading an inane romantic novel and surfing on the tele between infomercials, The Young and the Restless and Ricki Lake. The combination of which inspired her to try on too-small-clothes, sucking in her stomach, pretending she hadn’t put on any weight.
“But you have, you loser,” hissed a voice from above.
And that’s when the containers fell around her. The walls came down and she couldn’t get out. Her inadequacy welled from her feet to her nostrils and surrounded her. She was hot; her skin could even sense her failure.
The voice of Aunty Nell-who-hated-children echoed throughout the room. A swirling, multi-coloured rubber ball bouncing randomly from wall to ceiling to floor and back again with alarming speed. And when it hit, it hurt. Like one of Aunty Nell’s pincers, squeezing, saying in that warbling twang of hers: “Aren’t you a fat thing, then?” Eighteen years later there was still a sympathetic dent in her arm.
“Why’s she bloody well surfaced again, after all of these years?” Leila thought impatiently. “You’re 24 years old and you will go to this engagement party and enjoy yourself. They’re family, how hard can it be?”
Nervous energy translating into I’m-going-to-look-damn-hot-tonight intention, Leila kicked her too-small pile of clothes into the corner. In her black velvet panelled skirt and bust-enhancing (sales-girl speak) stretch top she took hold of the mascara wand, lifting it high in the air.
“Tonight let the wind clean out Aunty Nell, let her feel her inner hell. Let her spiteful intentions slap her own face. Let her stumble to find some inner grace,” she paused, a bemused smile playing at her lips.
“Let the mirror to her soul be open tonight. Let her demons be the only fight she’ll fight.” She breathed the incantation with mysterious verve whilst looking out of the window to a full moon that seemed to be smiling directly at her.
Feeling as if she’d just woken from some particularly gripping dream but couldn’t remember what it was, Leila jumped into the car. Graunching into reverse she backed down the driveway as the normal sense of the world shimmered around her to make one small adjustment.
Nellie Smith adjusted her calf-length brown tweed skirt around the waist. Breathing in, her massive bosom rose like some great ship casting out on the horizon. She stretched her chinless face higher to tighten the errant folds of her neck, then turned from the mirror, satisfied she was presentable for her daughter’s engagement party. After all he was a doctor, his people were, you know, quality.
Lifting her head up for an instant Nellie spied the moon. Suddenly a flash of white light hit her smack between the eyes. Reeling backwards she crashed to the floor. And when she got up, some minutes later, she was not quite the same as before.
At Sam and Suzy’s, Leila was just getting familiar with the chips and green onion when Nellie crashed through the door. Warbling in her highly exaggerated soprano, “Hello darlings,” she air-kissed the happy couple.
“Still watching your weight I see, Lei-la,” she cooed sweetly, all the while jealously eyeing Leila’s curves. “With that name, well, I always thought you could be a stripper, a scarlet woman…” she trailed off, not finishing the thought that had been well worn by time.
Leila said nothing, caught unawares as she was, processing a mouthfull. She just looked on in curious fascination as Aunty Nell’s face, neck and hands swept a beetroot shade of scarlet. In an instant the clothes on her aunt’s body were pasted to her with sweat. “Ahhhgrhh,’ shrieked Aunty Nell, careering around the room, bashing into furniture and people as she began tearing at her clothes. Stupefied, Suzy and Sam looked on. They tried to pull her out of the room but it was no use.
It was almost as if Nellie Smith was determined to be naked in front of them all, they said later. Throwing her clothes off in an almost, yes, the manner of a stripper. Perhaps it was that repressed childhood, that Catholic upbringing, they analyzed.
Just desserts, Leila thought with a smile, as she tucked into her chocolate mousse with double cream and cherries. “This is the life,” she said, smiling lazily like a black cat soaking in the sun. “A stripper I am not. But a witch, well…” She didn’t finish the thought. It too had been well worn by time.
This work was originally published in the YWCA booklet, Ehara i a Koe Anake - You're Not Alone, and is subject to the copyright conditions of that publication.