Straight Talking by Jane Green Page A

compliments, while the insult plays on your mind for hours, days, sometimes years.
    “Let’s go back to what happened when you were eleven, hmm?” prodded Louise, gently but firmly. “When you first became aware of your father having affairs.”

    “I think the first time I became aware that there was something wrong was in the summer. I remember it being hot and sticky. I remember playing with my friends in the park down the road from the house.”
    “What were you playing?”
    “Rounders? I don’t know, something like that.”
    “Were you a good team player?”
    “I loved playing games even though I was never particularly sporty. I used to look at the girls and boys in my class and wish I could be like them. I was always good at art, occasionally English but I was always the last to be picked for any team. But I was quite good at rounders. I had good, what do you call it, hand-eye coordination, so even though I couldn’t run very fast, I was quite good at hitting the ball.
    “I came home and went to get something to eat, as I usually did. I used to walk in and pray my mother was upstairs, or out, so I could go to the fridge and make huge sandwiches, pre-dinner snacks, although I didn’t have a name for them then.
    “I always seemed to be hungry as a child, hence my rather rotund stomach and little chubby thighs. I didn’t understand emotional hunger then of course, I just thought I must have been a pig. My parents obviously thought so too, because even then, even at ten years old my mother was putting me on diets.
    “‘
Well
done,’ she’d say, if I managed to lose a few pounds off my chubby little frame. ‘
That’s
better.’ And I’d feel so proud, that I’d been able to do it, to please my mother. But of course it wouldn’t last. I’d go to school with a lunchbox filled with Ryvita, cottage cheese, fruit and a yogurt as a special treat.
    “And I’d sit in the playground at lunchtime surrounded by schoolfriends whose mothers had packed white bread sandwiches filled with processed cheese and thinly-sliced ham. They had Coca-Cola, Wagon Wheels, Club biscuits. I’d sit there and wait for them to finish, because they never did finish, and I’d be ready and waiting with little open mouth to hoover up the leftovers.”
    “Do you know what emotion you were trying to suppress with food?”
    “I suppose I never felt good enough. My parents had it all, or so it must have seemed to anybody peering through the windows of our comfortable, mock-Tudor, middle-class home.
    “My father, Robert, was a successful lawyer. Tall, handsome, and the apple of my eye. I was a complete Daddy’s girl and in turn he adored me. Whenever I fell, hurt myself, needed a cuddle I’d go running to Daddy, who would scoop me up in his arms and smother me with love.
    “My mother, Elaine, was a housewife. Tiny, petite, immaculately dressed all the time in designer clothes. The first woman in the street to try every new fashion, and the only woman to really look good in it. I loved my mother, at least I tried, but there was always a barrier. I could see her, even at the age of eleven, look me up and down disapprovingly.
    “‘Why can’t you be more like Helen?’ she’d say. ‘Look at her lovely slim ankles, why haven’t you got ankles like that?’ And she’d grab my ankles before laughing, while I took the insult, couched in affection, and carried it with me for the rest of my life.
    “‘You’d be so pretty if you lost a bit of weight,’ she’d say, dishing out biscuits to my friends and withholding the jar from me. She never actually said, ‘You’re not good enough. You’re not the daughter I wanted,’ but I could see it in her eyes, in those silent glances she used to give me, those looks that said I wish I’d had a different daughter. I wish I’d had a daughter like Helen.
    “Helen was my best friend. She was slim, pretty, well-spoken. She had shiny blond hair hanging in a perfect veil down her back. Every