Am on an island

Beautiful people everywhere. Aaargh.

I am on an island that is beautiful and so are its visitors. There are people here who are extremely good at wearing clothes, and then there’s me, and a friend of mine, though she has gone back now, who describe ourselves as The Paddington Potatoes.

We are the ones never chosen for the netball team, the ones who know exactly when to say that’s enough but take pride in exercising our constitutional right not to say it, or at least I do. My weight has fluctuated a lot this year. Perhaps I don’t know how much.

I went to a clothes shop on the beautiful island and started taking cotton shirts off the rail, soft loose summery things to keep cool in. You could put them over a swimsuit. You could wear them with shorts. I just wanted to go and hold them against the mirror, initially, to see what might happen to them when superimposed over my life. They had varying patterns and colours of Indian design and they were actually quite inexpensive. But I wasn’t necessarily going to buy anything.

“Oh but I can get you these in larger sizes,” said a sales assistant, running over with a look of genuine concern on her face.  “Rude,” muttered my daughter under her breath, giggling.  I’m just looking in the mirror, I said, trying to ignore the assistant.

“But you will need a larger size!” she continued, a sylph of a 25-year-old, not one to let a warm middle-aged woman on her holibobs rest in front of a mirror for a while, not on her watch, not while there is accuracy to be distributed like justice, not while an arse like mine is on the loose.

I looked at the shirts. One of them was flapping around, so loose, so wide. “Well this one’s very big,” I said. “It’s a medium,” she said. Yes! I said. But she seemed to be saying medium like it was a bad thing. I seemed to now be looking at her like she was a bad thing. This one doesn’t even need to go over my runaway arse, I wanted to hiss, so you won’t have to alert the Greek transport police? The roads will be safe? It’s a shirt?

“I will get you some bigger sizes,” she said, and before I knew it I was in the changing room with what she got me, and one of them, not my usual style, green, kind of boyish but somehow really nice, really worked, so I came out wearing it to show my daughter that we had actually chosen well with the green diamond one and -

“Oh yes,” said Sales Assistant, “that looks much better than the others with your skintone,” and I realised then that the other shirts I had chosen had shades of red in them, and I’ve been in the sun for several days so my face does too, and Sales Assistant just wanted to let me know that, that as well as being too fat, I’m also too rouge, as if I was a lorry driver manoeuvring around small corners with a “How’s my driving?” sign on my arse, except my sign apparently just says “How’s my arse?” and her face says, “We-e-ll,” and I think I might reverse into it.

“And with this fit there is also enough space in the back,” she said, nodding at my spine as if a lingering problem had been fixed, even though I swear I walked into that shop in a perfectly fitting top of my own that I had bought without insult or injury on the internet.

My daughter was almost hysterical by this point.

“A fat back! A whole new thing I didn’t previously know I had to give a fuck about!” I said, while my daughter turned to hysteria and the woman wandered off. They say you shouldn’t ever talk about body issues or being fat or thin in front of an adolescent girl, but have you met the world?

So I went back the next day to look at the jewellery. It seemed safer, and while I was in there, a male sales assistant, who spoke French, was addressing a French customer. “Ah mais ça c’est slimfit,” said Sales Assistant Man to the Frenchman who had committed the mortal sin of taking a shirt off the rail to vaguely, happily look at.

“Oui oui,” said the customer, still smiling, still happy, and it dawned on me that he might just be a man who speaks French, rather than a Frenchman. You certainly don’t get inattentive t-shirt grinning like that from a customer born within a hundred miles of the Île de France.

“Mais sleemfeet,” the Sales Assistant stressed, again, deeply disturbed, at which point I realised the salesman was completely right, this French dude was a fool, look at his paunch, he’s never going to get into that! At which point I looked in the mirror and saw my arse from a whole new angle. There seemed to be extra ones available!

At which point I took myself back to the hotel to put on something or other from the suitcase that isn’t entirely sweaty or covered in suncream, and now I shall slather myself in perfume, and the love of a good child, and the knowledge of a few good jokes, and some gossip about Paul Mescal if all else fails, and I shall go out to be amongst the beautiful people with a smile on my face that is truly and deeply genuine, and grateful, and I will mean it, mean it all, from the bottom of my sleemfeet arse.