Tania Looks in the Mirror

Chapter 1: At the Crossroads

Mirrors? She tried to avoid them, on bad days at least: days when she saw little reason to get out of bed, when her self-esteem crawled along the bottom of the scale and she felt like something you'd want to scrape off the sole of your shoe. If she looked into a mirror then, she would only feel worse about herself: she would see those sharp features, those cheekbones, that aquiline nose, so unattractive she thought, or the little signs of age creeping round her eyes and forehead. She was all of 31: old enough to be firmly established in work, love, and happiness. None of this had come about.

Some days it was difficult enough to face the bathroom mirror for the brief time it took to drag a comb across the top of her head, or to check that washing and drying her dark, bouncy hair had produced no unruly strand curling out like a question mark. But she forced herself. She knew she needed to look approximately presentable for her part-time jobs, serving at the counter every Friday and Saturday at the picture framers Frame of Mind, or sitting blankly two afternoons a week as a custodian at the Estorick Collection, the little art gallery in north London devoted to Italian art. For a former art student with dreams of creative fulfilment these were scarcely dream jobs. But they earned her some money. They filled in the hours.

What else had she to do? The gym, of course. There was always the gym. She avoided the mirrors there too, though her body was among the trimmest and tightest on display. She had worked at that. She had walked her five feet eight inches up and down the Stairmaster. She had rowed and swam distances stretching half way across the Atlantic. Along the way surplus fat, a painful feature of her adolescence, had been rigorously banished.

Lard Tub, the other girls at school had called her. She could still hear them from fifteen or more years before, taunting her in the playground. And she could still hear herself trying to fight back. "My name's Tania," she used to say, tears in her eyes. "Sticky Bun Tania!" her tormentors would cry. She couldn't win then; she felt she couldn't win now, even when she was in her early 30s and had sculpted herself long ago to 125 pounds. She still saw herself as the oddball, the failure, the woman at whom fingers pointed and words were said behind her back.

Boyfriends? There had been a stream. None of them lasted. It was their fault. It was her fault. It was both their faults. Some could not take her moods. She was demanding, capricious, and for all the brightness of her mind not always fun to be with. Most of her catches, on prolonged acquaintance, had proved insensitive boors. It was very discouraging.

So far this year two of them had taken up brief residence in her flat. There had been Dermot, God forbid, first met in a pub; full of surface Irish charm but with nothing solid to back it up. "He's like wilting celery," she'd told her colleagues when they grilled her at Frame of Mind.

"In bed?" they had asked, grinning broadly.

"Everywhere. He wilts everywhere". She sent him packing pretty quickly. Then there was Edmund, a City stockbroker, friend of a friend of another gallery custodian, met on a blind date. Better prospects here, Tania had thought; but he was loud, often tactless, and grew fed up of her doleful days. "Oh snap out of it," he would snarl in the mornings when she told him, factually, not begging for sympathy, that she looked and felt like a pile of soiled clothes. In the event, it was he who had snapped, storming out after a flaming row, leaving part of her hurt and another part relieved.

Now there was no-one, and she was not on the prowl. She kept her head down at the gallery, reading her magazines or staring at her feet. At the framers, she did her job like a machine, taking the measurements, grudgingly helping to select the frame, dealing with payment, all the while keeping the person on the other side of the counter at arm's length.

Here she was, a qualified art student with creative ambitions, servicing other people's art: a child's daubs being framed for granny, a calming Monet reproduction, bound for a dull hallway or a dentist's surgery. Galling. Some came in with old photos, of parents and grandparents, of school groups clamped into uniforms, staring ahead while the cameraman said "Smile!". These were galling too. These customers had family lives and a past fit to celebrate. What did she have? A broken home, two bickering parents, one of them now dead, who had barely offered any encouragement when she did well at school. Classmates who had made her life miserable whenever she wasn't making things gloomy herself. Nothing to hang on a wall there. She did not begrudge her customers' happier lives; she just did not wish to interact with them.

Not even with Gary, a hospital nurse, also in his early 30s, handsome in a nonchalant way. When his budget afforded it, he collected old prints of London, and in they would come, one by one, to Frame of Mind. Tania had caught his eye: the striking profile, the bright burning eyes, the lithe physique in tight jeans and t-shirt, the dark hair with a mind of its own. He soon realised she always worked the counter on Saturdays, and came with pleasantries to prolong their conversation. It was hard work opening up Tania, but Gary persisted. He talked about his weekend activities and going on holiday; he delicately asked about her interests.

She saw his attractions, but hesitated. She didn't want to get her fingers burned. Yet he seemed unthreatening, gentle. Her stock of friends had dwindled: some had moved away, or buried themselves in married bliss. Some she had lost through fierce arguments, like most of her boyfriends, or her former flatmate Beth, who shared too many of her own problems with mood swings, food, and self-esteem to be the best companion. There was a hole in her life. Maybe Gary could fill a tiny part of it.

"You don't need to keep bringing in things for framing if you just want to see me," she said one Saturday, with a smile. She'd awoken that day in an unusually good mood.

Gary looked bashful, but relieved. This courtship, if that's what it was, was getting expensive. "Do you have a lunch break?"

"I don't really eat lunch. We could have a quick drink if you'd like." "What am I saying?" her inner voice piped up. "I don't want this. I don't need this." But the words were out, and Gary was saying yes, yes, yes.

The pub, the Old Goat's Head, was starting to fill. They found a small table in a corner. "Oh God," Tania thought, "here we go, this awful business of making polite conversation. Nothing will come of this." But she surprised herself. The pint of lager helped, lubricating her mind and easing fears. "What do you do for a living?" she found herself asking. Awful question, but she wanted to know.

After talk about medical school and being squeamish, they moved on to parents, childhood, and what they once thought they'd be when they grew up.

"I'm not sure I'm grown up even yet," Tania said. She kept guarded about her past, and her hopes. Gary, wanting to encourage her, offered a few intimacies. A loving mother. A distant father. And he'd wanted to be a brain surgeon.

"That would have been good. You could have operated on me. I could do with a new brain."

Was she joking or serious? Gary was unsure. He searched for ways to make her more comfortable, and asked if she wanted a snack. From the way her head shook, it was as though he suggested taking poison.

"No, no. I'll eat later."

Gary thought to himself, "Two sprouts and a bean, I bet." Sitting opposite, he noticed how little spare fat she had on her body. She was skin, bone, some light upholstery, nothing more. In his job he saw enough of emaciated figures: patients too sick to hold food down, sustained only through intravenous drips. His own preference was for women with a few curves and something to grasp. This had first dawned on him at medical school when several female students, no money in their pockets, no time for anything else, had gone all out for fast food and steadily fattened up. They looked so much more attractive, he'd realised, with little bulges round their waists.

One of them, Moira, had become his first serious girlfriend; though not serious enough to stop her taking a nursing job in the States as soon as it was offered. She sent him a photo later: grown gorgeously plump, hair cascading towards opulent breasts. Paradise lost. Tania, he knew, was not his type. Yet he still was transfixed. He was drawn to her like a magnet: drawn by the things he saw, and the things she kept hidden. He was aching to see her again.

Back home, Tania kicked off her shoes, got a quick meal – there were some beans to heat up – and looked at the four walls of her living room, empty and sad. Bowl of beans balanced on her lap, she became painfully aware of the space beside her on the sofa. No company. No boyfriend. 31 years old. Saturday night. She was sharing her evening with a cushion.

She thought about Gary. Did she truly wish a relationship to develop? There were so many hoops to jump through, and she did not feel very athletic. She was also bemused. She wasn't a dolt, she knew that; she had things to say, points of view. But inside, she felt she was such a mess, and the mess had a habit of spewing out over anyone in the vicinity – friends, lovers, colleagues at work.

"What does he see in me?" she sighed as she caught herself in the bathroom mirror, cleaning her teeth. She noticed the signs of a spot developing on her cheek. "Typical. Just what I deserve." Then it was off to another piece of sad, empty furniture: her bed.