Pumping Up Napoleon Read Free Page A

understand. I wasn’t in a hurry to grow up; it was Carole. I just didn’t want to be left behind. Eventually my mother gave in and bought me something. It was beige, as usual, not much better than a cut-off vest. I was glad to have it, but found it surprisingly chilly to wear. I was cold on my belly and back where the rest of the vest was missing.
    Carole showed me the red marks where her bra straps cut into her shoulders. It was a bit like breaking in new shoes, she said: all that rubbing in unaccustomed places.
    My mother said, ‘See? See how we women suffer?’
    Not long after that I had my first period and found out what she meant. It wasn’t just the pain and the mess and the turning white and the headaches. It was the whole business of sanitary towels. My mother wouldn’t hear of me using tampons: I was too young. So, in the very moment of becoming a woman, I felt like I was being put back into nappies. In those days ‘pads’ were square-edged, thick and about as comfortable as having a brick in your knickers. They had a thin strip of adhesive down the middle. A great innovation, far better than belts and pins, apparently. But they didn’t stick where they were put, did they? A good idea, yes, but underdeveloped. The system worked OK as long as you stayed still. As soon as you started walking the pad was on the move too, climbing upwards over your behind to poke out through the waistband of your skirt. Running to the loo was a race against disaster. Better to walk, carefully, with your hands behind your back pressing on the thing to keep it in place. That’s why some girls had days off school; they didn’t dare go out.
    I consoled myself with the thought that at least now I’d catch up with Carole. I started looking at myself sideways in the mirror, pulling my T-shirt tight. Now, I too had nipples. But change was slow. I wasn’t swelling as fast as I should. You’d think that sharing a gene pool with Carole would have given us some characteristics in common. Well, by the time we reached the third form it was clear that we were, physically as well as intellectually, quite different. Our academic achievements matched our cup sizes: As for me; Cs for Carole.
    Yet Carole was always complaining. ‘My neck aches,’ she’d say, ‘and my back. You don’t know how lucky you are.’ Then we’d go off to our separate lessons. We were in different streams by then: in the same form but not in the same class. I was heading towards the rock of university, Carole was navigating a course between hairdressing college and a degree in marketing.
    When I felt bad about the way I looked I tried to be rational. I’d lie in the bath and look at my body as it lay under the water. I wasn’t fat: but then I had no curves at all. Straight up and down and far too skinny according to my aunt. But what teenage girl, since the history of teenage girls began, has ever felt happy with her body? ‘At least you know boys like you for who you are and not the way you look,’ said Carole.
    Daniel Stanton was one year and about a million miles above me. He had gorgeous hair and his eyes were brown. I had always thought about him, but now I began to think about him regularly and with some dedication. Whereas in the past I had found him easy to talk to, now I didn’t know what to say when he spoke to me, my best effort in a six-week period being a mean-sounding, ‘What do you want, Stanton?’
    I usually tried not to think about him when I was in the bathroom (especially not when I was on the loo). But he was always around on the edge of my mind and it was easy enough to conjure his image in the steam above the bath.
    The windows were dark and dripping on the inside. I wondered what it would be like to see a face outside the window: its nose, mouth and eyes blurred by the dimpled glass. Our bathroom was on the second floor, but there were such things as