Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [135]
In uncomfortable silence Tara was measured about forty different times – each arm alone was done no less than four times. With creeping dread she realized that if she lost a fifth of an inch from each measuring place, the promised eight inches wouldn’t be too hard to accumulate, but wouldn’t make much difference to her overall appearance. Oh dear.
When all the measurements were written down – this took some time – Adrienne approached Tara with a plastic bottle, the type that people like Katherine sprayed plants with, and squirted her with water. Tara jumped and yelped. She continued to wobble long after she’d stopped moving.
‘The hot water’s broken,’ Adrienne said, with bad grace, watching Tara shiver. My God, she thought in disgust, even when a goose-pimple popped on to the surface of this woman’s skin, it caused her flesh to sway like Stevie Wonder’s head!
‘Now for the mud.’
In every fantasy she’d ever had about mud wraps, Tara thought she’d be smothered in an unctuous, glistening cream and left to wallow in it like a happy hippo. Instead, as she stood shivering, Adrienne approached her with a mixing-bowl and a wooden spoon.
‘Making a cake?’ Tara joked.
Adrienne gave her a look of contemptuous pity, and scooped some warm, foul-smelling mix out of the bowl, then splatted it on to Tara’s thigh and used the wooden spoon to even it out. Daubing randomly, a stripe of smelly muck here, a stripe of smelly muck there, she emptied the bowl.
Tara looked down at herself, her white body criss-crossed with occasional brown stripes. I look like I’m on a dirty protest, she thought.
‘Now for the wrap,’ Adrienne said.
‘But I’m not all covered with the mud,’ Tara squeaked.
‘You don’t need to be.’
The ‘wrap’ turned out to be six tatty old salmon-pink bandages, the type that Tara’s mother used to practise her Order of Malta routine with. They were wound around Tara’s midriff, thighs and arms, then each one was secured with a big nappy-pin. Tara couldn’t bear to visualize what she looked like.
‘Next,’ Adrienne declared, ‘we put you into the special rubber suit, which heats up the mud, increasing toxin loss.’ Tara’s heart leapt with a fierce hope because this sounded scientific and viable. A lot more so than plastic plant-spraying bottles and Order of Malta bandages. But, to her great disappointment, the special rubber suit wasn’t a special rubber suit at all. It was just a cheap plastic tracksuit that a twelve-year-old girl might wear on a shoplifting expedition into town. She could have wept.
According to Adrienne, the de-larding process took about an hour to kick in. She left, leaving Tara lying on a table in the bleak little room, listening through the cardboard walls to the rhythmic rip of other people having their legs waxed, without even a copy of OK to take her mind off her ignominy. At one stage she dozed off, only to wake herself up with her own terrible stench.
Things got worse. After a while the bandages cooled and felt damp and cold under the tracksuit. The horrible feeling of soaked, clammy underclothes reminded her of days at school as a four-year-old when she’d wet her knickers and woollen tights but was carrying on as if everything was normal.
After an hour Adrienne came back, reclaimed the tracksuit, unpeeled the bandages and measured Tara again, this time pulling the tape-measure tourniquet-tight. ‘Oh, yes,’ she kept saying, as she squeezed Tara’s circulation to a standstill. ‘Much smaller.’ After she’d added it all up, she announced, ‘Eleven inches, you’ve lost eleven inches.’
‘Sure,’ Tara whispered. She might be fat, but she wasn’t stupid. ‘Where are the showers?’
‘No shower,’ Adrienne said quickly.
‘But I’m filthy!’ The gloopy mixture had dried and hardened on her skin and was flaking away with every movement.
‘Er… the mud will continue to detoxify you for another twenty-four hours,’ Adrienne insisted.
Oh, yeah? Tara’s face said. And this has nothing to do with the hot water being broken?
But after paying forty quid for the experience,