The Curvy Girls Club

‘Unlimited free doughnuts? We’d have a stampede on our hands. Or maybe a concert?’

‘We don’t have any money,’ I said. ‘We could serve day-old doughnuts or maybe get some Morris dancers for free.’ I shook my head. ‘But we need to think big.’

‘With no money.’

‘Right.’

We stared at each other, willing inspiration to come.

‘We might need to spend some money,’ he said eventually. ‘You’ve got the chance to grow the club into something huge. The website had nearly seven hundred unique visitors this week.’

‘You’re talking IT again. I don’t speak that language.’

He laughed. ‘It’s the number of actual people that went on your site. Seven hundred, all looking at the events. Do you want me to send you weekly stats?’

‘Only if you translate them first.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t blind you with science. I can text you the number of unique visitors and the number of people who’ve signed up for events each week.’

‘How many people signed up this week?’

He held up his finger, took out his phone and started texting.

My phone pinged.

196 signups, 700 unique views. Next update in a week. Rob

‘You couldn’t just tell me?’

‘If this is a business, we should follow protocol.’

‘What does protocol say about more coffee?’

‘I’d need to check the handbook but I think it says we should have lunch if we’re going to go to the wine tasting at three. I’m pretty sure that section was amended after what you told me about last time.’

I knew I shouldn’t have told him the details about the club’s first wine tasting last month, when I’d made the mistake of not eating beforehand. The hotel’s sommelier, a dapper Frenchman with handlebar moustaches, had poured me a glass of bubbly when I arrived. I’d felt very Continental, swanning around the grand rooms to check on the arrangements. But planning events for the club was a little trickier than doing it for ladies-who-lunched. London socialites demanded low-GI food or a certain brand of bottled water. Our clients needed wide doorways (for the occasional mobility scooter) and sturdy chairs. We didn’t want anyone crashing to the ground amidst the splinters of Louis XVI furniture.

The hotel had followed our instructions to the letter – sturdy banqueting chairs surrounded the enormous polished wood table. Armless and indestructible, they were the overweight person’s friend.

So there hadn’t been much to do in the hour before the guests arrived except flirt with the sommelier, whose accent was pant-strippingly sexy. By the time everyone turned up we’d finished most of the first bottle.

I fell off my chair some time around the Loire Valley Chenin Blancs. I’d hardly felt the bump on my head when I hit the table. One minute I was eye-to-eye with thirty people. The next I was giggling on the floor. It hadn’t been my finest hour.

Rob and I made our way to the wine tasting after a stomach-lining lunch. It felt like a typically dreary January morning. Which would be fine except that it was mid-May. The dank, stained arches and industrial rubbish bins blocking the narrow pavement felt better suited to Dickensian London than East London.

Rob and I saw the problem as soon as he held the restaurant door open for me.

‘We’re all ready for you,’ said the manager, gesturing to the long table in the middle of the narrow restaurant.

‘Thank you,’ I said, preparing my diplomatic approach. ‘There’s just one thing. There’ll be eighteen of us.’

He looked at the table, bobbing his fingers as he counted. ‘Yes, eighteen, that’s right. We’ve arranged enough chairs.’

Well done on being able to count to eighteen. ‘It’s just that they’re a little close together. Could you add a couple more tables to the end?’

‘I don’t see how I could.’ He looked around the room as if he couldn’t imagine where he might find another table in a restaurant full of them. ‘It’s a very small restaurant.’

‘Yes, but we’re not very small people. I’m sure you can see the issue.’

‘There should be enough room.’ His manner turned chilly. For someone whose restaurant wasn’t usually open between lunch and dinner, who didn’t even have to pay any chefs or waiters, and who was pocketing our wine tasting fees as pure profit, he could have toned down the attitude.

‘Fine, then I’ll show you what I mean,’ I said. ‘Rob, please sit here.’ He did as he was told. I sat beside him, scootching my chair close to his. ‘Now,’ I said to the manager. ‘Why don’t you sit beside us?’

Being no mere slip of a man himself, his position at the table put him halfway between two place settings. ‘Do you see our problem? We’re the curvy girls … and boys club. We need a bit more room. I’m really sorry about that. We did mention it in our emails.’

He reluctantly hauled over two more tables, clearly put out that we really did live up to our name.

Everyone arrived within half an hour. A few were Slimming Zone regulars, and felt like old friends. A few others, like Arthur, were regulars and felt like pains in the neck.

‘Katie! This should be a fun afternoon. Although it would have been better perhaps to concentrate on the lesser known French regions. But never mind. You did the best you could. Shall I sit here next to you?’

This was Arthur’s idea of a compliment. He could make me cry when he wanted to be mean.

‘Thanks, Arthur. And I’d love for you to be next to me, really, but I thought you might like to sit next to, erm,’ I looked quickly at my list, ‘Jade. You remember her from the book club meeting?’ I felt bad (momentarily) about inflicting him on a perfectly nice woman like Jade, but I’d put a lovely man on her other side. One hand giveth, the other taketh away.

Despite what Arthur said, the wine tasting proved almost incidental to the afternoon. I’d noticed this over the past months and at first it bothered me. I lost sleep over the plans I concocted. They bloody well should appreciate them. It took some time for me to realise that they did appreciate them, very much.

Sometimes being fat was isolating and sometimes isolated people got fat. It didn’t matter which was chicken and which was egg. The end result was that for some of our members, these outings were their social life. They were just as happy to taste wine in the company of others as they were to watch a film or listen to music in the company of others. People naturally focused on the curvy part of our name, but it was a social club at the end of the day.

I sneaked a glimpse at Jade. She didn’t look too angry about Arthur. In fact, she looked …

‘Rob. Are you noticing what I’m noticing?’

Rob was staring down the table. He smiled, then quietly started a passable Barry White rendition.

Everyone was talking to, nay, flirting with their neighbour. ‘Is it the wine? What have we started?’

‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘But this might be the highest-rated event yet. Did you have a method in your seating plan?’

‘Of course not. I threw it together on the Tube ride over to you this morning based on who I knew.’

I had noticed that more than the usual number of men had signed up for today. Maybe the high male quotient was making everyone randy. Even Arthur was talking to the woman opposite him, and she seemed to be answering of her own free will.

While it was nice to see everyone getting along, it reminded me of an uncomfortable development. ‘Pixie thinks we should start a dating business,’ I told Rob as the wine guy poured us another red.

‘Remember,’ said the wine guy, who looked about eleven. ‘Swirl, swish, spit!’ He demonstrated. Everyone at the table defiantly swallowed. He didn’t know his audience at all.

‘She’s mentioned it a few times,’ I said quietly. ‘And again last week.’

He nodded. ‘I can see the sense in it. We’ve got men, we’ve got women. They might like that kind of thing. Well, just look around. Maybe we should think about launching that for the anniversary.’

‘No way. She wants to call it Fat Friends.’ I whispered, rolling my eyes. A couple of specialist dating websites had popped up in the past few years. I wasn’t one to judge if someone got off on fireman uniforms or wearing nappies. But my gut told me that running a dating business for our clientele risked stigmatising them further. That’s the last thing they needed. ‘We’ve got to come up with a better idea than that. There must be something better we can do for the anniversary.’

‘What’s this?’ Amanda asked, overhearing us.

‘Oh, we’re trying to think of ideas for our anniversary,’ I said.

‘You and Rob are together? I had no idea, congratulations!’

‘Oh no, we’re not—’

‘We’re not a couple,’ Rob said smoothly.

‘What a shame. You’d make a lovely couple.’

‘I think so, but Katie won’t hear of it,’ he said as I reddened further. He grinned to let me know he wasn’t being serious. ‘We’ve got too many cultural differences. She’s a McVitie’s fan and I’m loyal to the Garibaldi. It would never work. We’ve managed to bridge the biscuit divide in friendship though. No, we were talking about an event to officially launch the Curvy Girls Club. Any thoughts?’

Luckily the conversation turned to the launch and my face slowly returned to its normal colour. It wasn’t strictly true that I didn’t want to go out with Rob. He was such a lovely man. Who wouldn’t want to? I’d definitely had fantasies about us strolling together hand in hand along the South Bank, or being wrapped up in his big arms in front of the telly on a Friday night. But things weren’t that simple. We were working together for one thing. We were mates for another. And I couldn’t stop thinking about Alex. Nail in the coffin. Not exactly a recipe for happily ever after.

‘You should plaster yourselves on billboards across the country,’ the man next to Amanda said, eying her appreciatively. We didn’t need a dating website. We should just run more wine tastings.

‘Nah,’ said the man to my right. ‘Nobody pays attention to billboards unless there’s something really eye-catching on it.’ Eyebrows all along the table shot into the air as he realised what he’d just said. ‘I don’t mean you’re not eye-catching! You’re lovely, really! I just meant that people would stop and stare if they saw something out of the ordinary. Though you wouldn’t want them stopping and staring on the M4. Imagine. Pileups across the country from staring at four naked women!’

‘Who said anything about naked?’ Rob asked as the man reddened again. He was on a foot-in-mouth hot streak.

‘Well, that would certainly be eye-catching,’ I said, showing I had no hard feelings about the man picturing my arse above the motorway.

‘Like that programme on Channel 4, How to Look Good Naked. I love that one,’ said Amanda as she glanced at the wine bottle a bit further down the table. Her afternoon suitor obliged, topping up her glass. This was less of a wine tasting than an approved drinkathon. ‘Though those women don’t have anything to worry about. A few extra pounds around their middle and they think it’s the end of the world. They should feature us instead. We’d give Gok Wan a run for his money!’

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