Eurovision queen

chapter 8

The music bigwigs had Simon and Maggie move into their own London flat. It was fully furnished with all the mod cons and just around the corner from the studio.
Alvin stocked the kitchen with only healthy foods. Simon was encouraged to eat the same things to encourage her.
Maggie hated Alvin with a vengeance. She hated salads. She hated smoothies and vegetable juices. She hated drinking plain water with no fizz and no flavourings. She hated running, she hated lifting weights, she hated bloody burpees and ‘the plank’. She hated ‘beep tests’, stretching and sit ups. She hated treadmills, rowing machines, spinning classes and everything else that Alvin made her do. She complained of feeling hungry all the time. She was being starved for the sake of some one else’s vanity.

Nevertheless, she hated her job in the supermarket. She wanted to sing! She knew this Eurovision thing was not going to be easy. Just to be selected to be in it was a privilege.
Whether she was in rehearsals, out and about having meetings or working out with Alvin watching over her, she did not complain. If she complained too much, she knew she had a chance of being deselected in favour of someone else.
It was only in front of Simon that she complained of her aching muscles. She found it hard to concentrate some days because she was so bloody hungry! She complained about the dry atmosphere in the studio that was not good for the voice. Sometimes she came home sounding quite hoarse after singing the same song all day.

With a month to go, she was taken for a dress fitting for the first time. When she arrived, she found they’d already selected the dress for her to wear already. It was a long pillar box red fitted dress that flared out from the knees. It had a plunging neckline, and tiny little straps and it was covered in tiny little crystals. Maggie thought it looked like it had been made up for someone to wear on ‘Strictly Come Dancing’, not Eurovision. She thought she was going to have her frock especially made, not have to wear someone else’s cast offs. She went into the changing room and saw the dress close up. It was a size ten. They were joking right? She could not possibly fit into a size ten!
She stormed out of the changing room only to be chased back in. She HAD to try it on!
Several minutes later she came out of the changing room with the zip still undone at the back. It was too tight to do up at the back. It was so tight around her thighs that she could barely walk. She had lost over 25lbs in the last couple of months, but it clearly was not enough. There was not enough support in the dress to not wear a bra, yet if she did wear a bra, it would be visible around the plunging neckline. It showed every lump and bump, the sparkles, just emphasised them all. She thought it was totally unsuitable.
But someone in the shop thought shapewear might make all the difference. Maggie spent the next ten minutes pulling and pushing herself into shapewear a size too small for her. Her flesh oozed out of the bottom of the shorts. Her boobs were pushed up out of the top. Within the constricting garment, Maggie felt like she could barely breathe, nevermind sing! She was so hot and sweaty with the effort of getting the damn garment on.
This time she was helped into the dress. It still did not do up at the back. The shapewear was visible around the arms and the neckline and although the silhouette looked better, it still did not smooth every bulge out.
There was much talk amongst themselves. Maggie suggested she wore something different. Alvin was there. He said he still had another month to work on her losing more weight and slimming down to fit the dress. He was sure he could do it.
Someone else said they should have got my measurements before forking our thousands of pounds on a dress.
The dress did not look special enough to cost £5,000. Maggie was sure she could find something much better for less than £100 in a charity shop, especially, if she went into one of the ones around Chelsea and Knightsbridge. She might find some genuine designer stuff there... in a size that fit!
They had chosen that particular dress because it complemented the set and the dancers costumes. It had been a one off dress made for a society girl someone knew. She had worn it once to a party, but sold it because it was so difficult to walk in. She had bought it for £12,000. Buying it for £5,000 was a bargain, but it did take a big chunk out of the limited budget.
All the money would go to waste if Maggie did Not get through ‘A Song for Europe’, so they did not want to be too extravagant.

Maggie came away from the meeting feeling upset and humiliated. On her way home, she called in at a fish and chip shop. She bought a large back of chips with batter scraps flavoured with plenty salt and vinegar. She almost ran into a nearby park, sat on a bench and ate the whole lot straight out of the paper with her fingers.
Oh! How she had missed the deliciousness of fried food! Healthy food simply could not taste this good. Baking a chip did not give the same crispness on the outside as frying did, it just dried it out. These chips were exceedingly crisp on the outside, but soft and fluffy on the inside. The batter scraps were even crisper than the chips (and were greasier). Maggie enjoyed every little bit of her indulgence.
On the rest of the way home, she chastised herself for cheating on Alvin’s diet. She would never fit in that frock if she kept eating chips like this. Part of her wanted to find a toilet somewhere and make herself sick. Another part of her said ‘sod the lot of them, I’m going to get some doughnuts for dessert!’
She had a month to go before the national competition. She had seen a documentary once where a woman had undergone an operation to fit a tube into her stomach. It enabled her to eat whatever she liked, as much as she liked, then afterwards, she could go to the ladies’ room and empty the contents of her stomach directly into the toilet through her tube before her body had started to digest and absorb all the nutrients. Maggie wondered if she could persuade a surgeon to perform the same operation on her in the next few days so that she could still enjoy her food and satisfy her large appetite, yet still lose weight to fit into the dress.
It would probably cost far too much to have it done privately, especially at short notice on Harley street. It was not something the NHS would offer.
She dismissed the idea as being too expensive and impractical. As much as she hated doing it, she was going to have to stick to Alvin’s strict regime.