Monday 18 October 2010

Monday 18 October | margy and the cake shop

Last week I had 30 minutes before heading off to meet Hils - so I started to write with no real idea of where to. This half a story popped out - and I quite like it. It may be the first I go back and rework. I'll go for the second half this week... or you could finish it and we'll put the alternative endings up. I doubt you'll have time, but it's a cool idea huh? xxx

The idea came to margy a few weeks ago on her way past the cake shop on Gloucester Road. From the moment the shop opened it had struck her that the owner would struggle to sell her dainty doll like cakes, sandwhiched as she was between a seedy comic shop with graffitti decorated walls and security grilles and a pointless independent supermarket that sold only things in tins. If it comes in a tin - Parminder sells it. Fray Bentos pies, channa dahl, grapefruit segments in syrop- all available in tins, all sold in the weirdly shaped little inconvenience store.

"Eating tinned things makes you fat" margy reminds herself regularly when she passes the shop.
The cake shop arrived overnight with pink and brown frosting and delicate decals of pastelly coloured flowers growing up the windows leaving little vistas of cakey goodness peeping through the faux, candied, foliage. There were towers of sugar drenched cupcakes, layers of creamy glued sponge cakes and acres of glazed patisserie and oh oh oh, the smell was sticky sweet heaven too.

Wafting little pink tendrils of sugered glee out through the vents into the dirty street. The cake shop was a gift.

Every day margy passed by and took a deep breath and mentally ticked off one point from her weight-watchers calculations - convinced there was enough sugar in that inhalation to warrant an extra 13 minutes on the cross trainer at the gym, yet unable to resist the temptation for just one deep, glorious sniff.

"Points mean prizes" she chants to herself glumly. The prizes she's after come wrapped in the shapes of dwindling numbers on the scales every week at her local Weightwatchers club weigh-in. Last week - disaster struck and as she stared in disbelief as the digital numbers shot past the week before's recorded , she felt a familiar creep of desperation crawl into her tummy and eat up all the carefully weighed and calorie controlled contents, leaving her ravenous. Hungry, hungry, hungry margy.

Hungry margy was difficult to control, hungry margy opened the fridge and started scoffing from the top left, working her way through cheap jam, hard butter, cold bought soup, chilli olives and strawberry flavoured actimels, all 12 of them - before dipping into the cold meat, left over potato and 3 calorie controlled micro-meals fore one - uncooked. Hungry margy had once forced her to eat raw sausages too - that was a bad week for margy.

Hungry margy got the chair from the dining room and climbed onto the kitchen counter to reach the biscuits at the top of the highest cupboard. Four packets of digestives that hungry margy kept and margy pretended not to know about,  are now posted into her mouth one after the other while she, still perched on top of the counter, glazes over to block out the shouting in her head.

"Hungry margy, weak fatty, fatso margy! Hey why don't you get some mayo to have with those biscuits?"

Margy comes too long enough to climb down from the counter so that hungry margy can take up the idea of the mayo - hungry margy dollops mayo onto hunks of cheese and stuffs them into her gob, wiping grease and crumbs onto the floor with the back of her hand. Leaning into the fridge to grab the milk carton to wash it all down.

Hungry margy does open mouth burps and hungry margy never ever puts anything back into the fridge.

The next day margy feels bloated and ill. Too much sugar and waaay too many carbs. She forces herself to go back to the kitchen and stoically tots up every single weight-watcher point hungry margy ate. To have any hope of balancing out last night's binge, margy will need to starve herself for 3 weeks as well as strap herself to the cross trainer for 4 hours a day - more on weekends. It's not as if she has anything else to do.

Margy has set herself back a whole month, she has no hope of making her target weight by the weekend of her sister's wedding.

Margy sets off for work and on her way past the cake shop - she has an idea, not the idea, but an idea. The solution. She realises what she lacks is motivation, the cake shop provides the answer. She will recalculate her time on the cross trainer and reward herself with a beautiful, delicate, cake shop, cake for every day she completes her calorie burning sessions to undo the work of bad, hungry margy.

On the last day of her weight-loss cake-o-thon she will enter the cake shop, sit down and eat the biggest cake she can order from the display. She knows she will have to deal with this later, but she will give herself permission to taste the cake and eat a whole one without spitting it out into her hand, or rushing to the loo immediately. This is a reward cake and she will eat it properly.

She will be thin, and she will have eaten cake. She will be happy and she will be ready. She will also, of course have plan (b) up her sleave.

You may have spotted the flaw in margy's plan as quickly as I did, or perhaps you'd like to believe that the impossible is possible if only you give it a red hot go. After all inside every fat girl is a thin girl waiting to shop at Whistles. Except inside margy is fat margy - who couldn't (or more accurately wouldn't) give an 8 pack of cadbury's mini rolls for nice things and shopping.

Margy will not be able to contain hungry margy with the promise of one little holding cake a day, or a pretty dress at the end of the month and hungry marg lives inside margy along with lazy margy who will never agree to hours of exercise each day either.

It's because of hungry margy and lazy margy that margy is fat margy in the first place. No this is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact margy knows this is a terrible plan and deep down she knows it isn't her real plan at all. It's a fake plan to fox all the margys into believing there is a plan.

Margy decides to put her the real plan, the anti-plan -  into action that very day ...

1 comment:

  1. I'm not managing to write every day - but I am arriving at the page most days and I am fairly happy with my progress - for now I am happy to trust that If I keep at it, the stories will come and when they do - I'll be ready for them.

    I am publishing them as they are scribbled, without any reworking or editing - unless I can't read a particular word when I am transcribing. My writing is really, really awful.

    Eventually I will push a couple out that might turn out good if I polish them. I quite like the way this one is going - it hasn't gotten dark yet, but it will...

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