The Biggest Female in the World and other stories Read online

  THE BIGGEST FEMALE

  IN THE WORLD

  AND OTHER STORIES

  Wendy Perriam

  For Deborah Moggach—

  whose house is a paradise

  and whose heart is pure gold.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chloe

  Table For Two

  Magique

  Parents

  Venom

  Happy Ending

  Robin

  Sugar Plum

  Fall

  Kentucky Fried

  May

  Barbecue

  Wedlock

  Dandelions

  Birth-Day

  Suicide

  Saviour

  Pet

  Paradise Lost

  The Biggest Female In The World

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Chloe

  ‘Chloe! Your lady’s here.’

  Chloe, Evelyn thought? She had never heard of a Chloe. And no one had appeared in answer to Jan’s shout. Jan herself was doing a trim for a raddled-looking woman with a bandage on her leg, while sturdy, solid Kathleen had just donned her rubber gloves to apply a client’s colour-tint.

  ‘Chloe!’ Another yell from Jan. ‘Step on it! You’re needed.’

  Evelyn looked up nervously as a voluptuous girl with a cascade of bleached blonde hair sauntered out from the room at the back, her jaws moving indolently as she chewed a piece of gum. She was dressed as for a party, in a low-necked glittery top that showed half her ample breasts and left a gap of naked flesh between its sequinned hem and the top of her white jeans. The jeans themselves were skin-tight, and worn with shoes so high and spindly they surely constituted a risk to life and limb.

  ‘Hi!’ she pouted, teetering over and, with no sign of embarrassment, transferring the gum from her glossy, full-lipped mouth to the back pocket of her jeans. ‘Are you the perm?’

  ‘No,’ said Evelyn. ‘Just a shampoo and set.’ No way could she afford a perm, even at the cut-price rates they offered for the over-65s. A pity, she’d been thinking since her birthday last July, there wasn’t a still cheaper rate for the over-85s.

  ‘Mrs Andrews, isn’t it?’

  No, Miss Bellingham, she stopped herself from saying, suddenly experiencing a tiny twinge of doubt. Could she be Mrs Andrews, booked in for a perm? No, the thought was quite absurd. She hadn’t lost her wits. In fact, just this morning she had finished an extremely challenging book on the concept of atonement in Coleridge’s early poetry, before completing The Times crossword – the latter in record time. At her age, it was vital to keep her brain alert. The slightest sign of confusion and she might be whisked off to a care-home and stuck in the dementia wing. Thus, to circumvent such horrors, she had embarked on a formal programme of reading and memory-training.

  ‘Right, let me take your coat.’

  She unbuttoned it with some reluctance. It was freezing outside, and none too warm in here. Though the salon did look cheery with the Christmas decorations still in place: blue and silver streamers looped across the mirrors, and matching ribbons and rosettes tied on all the cupboard doors. She had deliberately made her appointment for this first week in January. Not only was the salon far less crowded than in the pre-Christmas rush, but she wouldn’t be expected to leave a lavish tip or buy an expensive present for the stylist. Some clients went to inordinate lengths, lugging in great bottles of champagne, or five-pound boxes of chocolates, complete with fancy bows. But she simply couldn’t run to such extravagance and, anyway, was it really wise to encourage greed in these young girls?

  As Chloe stepped towards her with the gown, Evelyn noticed the girl’s earrings: large gold hoops, with the name ‘Chloe’ spelled out in gold italic letters, dangling from a bar across each hoop. Hardly very practical wear for a hairdresser, but striking none the less.

  ‘What you starin’ at?’

  ‘Oh, I do apologize. I didn’t mean to stare. It’s just your earrings.…’

  ‘Yeah, smashin’, aren’t they? A present from my boyfriend. Right, take a seat at the basin.’

  Evelyn was still struggling with the gown, which didn’t seem to fasten and had a strange brownish stain down the front. But no point in complaining when she was paying the cut rate.

  ‘The ordinary shampoo?’

  ‘Yes, please.’ She had learned long ago not to ask for extras. It could mean a substantial addition to the bill, just for a dab of something that came in a luxurious bottle, with an ostentatious name, but was still basically detergent. She eased herself into the chair – an extraordinary contraption with a rigid metal frame, made with no concern whatever for comfort or old bones.

  ‘Could you put your head back, please. I can’t get at you like that.’

  Evelyn did her best to oblige, though her stiff arthritic neck permitted little movement. She hoped Chloe might say more about the earrings, or even about the boyfriend. After ten days on her own, she felt starved of conversation. She had even planned an answer if Jan or Kathleen were to enquire about her Christmas. ‘Yes, very quiet, but I prefer it that way.’ Best to give the impression that she’d turned down invitations by the score, rather than been stuck indoors alone. ‘You’re new here, aren’t you?’ she asked, deciding to make the overtures herself.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And where were you working before?’

  Chloe shrugged. ‘I wasn’t.’

  Well, they weren’t exactly getting very far. Perhaps she’d try a different tack. ‘Did you have a lovely time on New Year’s—Goodness gracious!’ she broke off, jumping in alarm. ‘The water’s frightfully hot.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘I am saying.’

  ‘Is it OK now?’

  ‘Not really. It feels as if it’s burning my scalp.’

  Another shrug. ‘There’s probably somethin’ wrong with the mixer-tap.’

  ‘I see.’ Evelyn gritted her teeth and put up with it – and also with the stream of water now trickling down her neck, seeping under her blouse and wetting half her back. Perhaps Chloe was so new, she hadn’t mastered the art of shampooing. And it was an art – no doubt about that. Kathleen did it beautifully – and she was kind, and chatty – but she’d recently been promoted, so she no longer did the pensioners’ hair. And Jan cost almost double, because she owned the salon; had set it up ten years ago, after her divorce.

  Her head was hurting from Chloe’s assault. The girl was even using her nails: long, lethal, scarlet talons digging into her scalp. Still, she was extremely lucky to have her hair shampooed at all. Doing it herself, at home, was now well nigh impossible.

  ‘Conditioner?’ Chloe asked, pausing for a moment in the drubbing.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Your hair could do with it. It’s very dry, you know.’

  ‘No, I prefer it without.’

  ‘Please yourself.’

  As if in punishment, the ferocity continued, although now the water was freezing cold rather than scalding hot. Evelyn hoped she wouldn’t go down with pneumonia, as she’d done this time last year. Already, her blouse was soaking wet, along with her so-called Chilprufe vest.

  At last, the ordeal was over. Chloe wrapped her head in a towel and escorted her to another chair, equally uncomfortable. Evelyn kept her gaze on the blue and silver streamers, to avoid having to face her reflection in the mirror. The age-spots on her skin were definitely getting worse, so best simply to ignore them. Nor did she wish to be confronted, when Chloe removed the towel, with the drab colour of her hair: a dirty cinder-grey, yellowing at
the ends, as if stained with nicotine. Kathleen had once suggested a special salon treatment to transform it into lustrous white, but the price was astronomical.

  ‘What style did you have in mind, Mrs Andrews?’

  Miss Bellingham, she corrected silently, still harbouring a prickle of doubt. One of the books on her reading programme was a scientific study of the brain. Apparently, delusion was frighteningly common, especially in the elderly, and even a conviction about one’s sanity could actually be an illusion in itself. Yet if she were truly Mrs Andrews, she must have been married at some point, and she was hardly likely to have forgotten her own wedding. She allowed herself to fantasize a moment, picturing the distinguished priest, robed in white and gold, the thunder of the organ as she sauntered down the aisle towards her bridegroom. ‘I will’, she heard him say, her mind tingling at the prospect of someone committing to her utterly – loving and protecting her, as long as they both should live. What devotion it would prove, what total trust, total dedication – qualities so magical they surely belonged in the realm of dream.

  ‘Did you hear me, Mrs Andrews? I asked what style you want.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Evelyn forced herself out of the church, still hearing that miraculous ‘I will’. ‘Well, Kathleen always said that looser curls looked better on me than those little sausagey ones.’

  ‘Yes, but that means using bigger rollers and, frankly, your hair’s too sparse to take them.’

  ‘Sparse’ was blunt (and hurtful), although true, in fact, not only of her hair but of her present way of life. ‘Whatever you think best,’ she said, having long since learned that submission prevented discord. She winced in anticipation as Chloe picked up a large, sharp-toothed comb, more suitable for a shaggy-coated dog. ‘So where did your boyfriend get them?’ she asked.

  ‘Get what?’

  ‘Your earrings.’

  ‘Oh, I see. He had them made special. You can order any name you want. It costs, though. These are real eighteen-carat gold.’

  Evelyn studied them with increased respect, her eyes lingering on the fancy italic letters. Such a poetic name, and so rich in connotations! She remembered studying Daphnis and Chloe long, long ago, at Cambridge, and thrilling to the story of the goatherd and the shepherdess falling ecstatically in love. As far as she could recall, Chloe had been barely more than a child – younger even than this Chloe, who looked about seventeen, although her dress and her demeanour made her seem much older and extremely worldly-wise. When she was seventeen, she had been a shrinking violet: bashful, tongue-tied and distinctly apprehensive in the company of men. Even after Cambridge, and right on through her years and years of working for the Civil Service, sex for her had remained safely within the confines of Art. Books, paintings, opera, ballet, could all express her own deep longing for passion and romance, without the risks of real entanglements. And, according to her mother, those risks were truly frightening: pregnancy, dishonour, making oneself cheap. Yet now, at eighty-five, some small and secret part of her wished she hadn’t been so strict and chaste, so dutifully subservient.

  ‘I’ll use these smaller rollers, OK?’

  ‘Yes, fine.’ Evelyn flinched as a strand of her hair was tugged out at an angle from the scalp and wound tightly round a bristly purple contraption. Daphnis’s Chloe would have had long, flowing, golden tresses, crowned with a circlet of wild flowers. Even after all these decades, she remembered much of the tale – one part in particular, when, on a sweltering summer’s day, a grasshopper, fleeing from a hungry bird, found sanctuary in Chloe’s bosom, hopping down between her breasts, and chirping in relief from this strange but sensuous haven. Daphnis, also hungry, though for passion rather than food, could not forbear to reach down his hand and pluck the creature out.

  When she’d read that passage in her tutor’s panelled room, she had experienced the sensations in her own breast: the tickle of the insect’s legs and wings, followed by the pressure of Daphnis’s warm, deft fingers, lingering on her skin. And she had felt the heat of summer kindling her whole body, as if she herself were Chloe, burning with desire. ‘Who chose your name?’ she asked, a shaming flush seeping into her cheeks once more, from the memory alone.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Your name – Chloe. Did it have some special meaning for your mother or …?’

  ‘No idea. All I know is it’s bloody murder to spell! I sometimes wish I was just plain Jane or Jill.’

  ‘But Chloe’s a beautiful name. It comes from a Greek word meaning “green shoot”, so it’s associated with youth and spring. And it’s immortalized in a wonderful Greek romance called Daphnis and—’

  ‘Look, could you keep still, Mrs Andrews. You keep movin’ your head around.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ That must be the third time she’d apologized. Her mind still on the poem, she began thinking about another wedding: that of Daphnis and Chloe themselves. It had taken place outdoors, as befitted a pastoral tale, under arbours of green boughs and clusters of ripe purple grapes. All the villagers assembled on that perfect autumn day, along with nymphs and shepherds, to join in the celebrations: singing, dancing, feasting, until the sun itself grew sated and was replaced by moon and stars. Even the goats were awarded special rations, fed to them by Daphnis’s own fair hand.

  ‘And on their wedding night,’ the poet added in the closing lines, ‘the two lovers slept as little as owls.’ That phrase had always struck her as exquisitely erotic: so little said; so much suggested. Did this Chloe ‘sleep as little as an owl’ when spending the night with her boyfriend? And had he ever plucked a grasshopper from her all too prominent bosom?

  She examined the girl in the mirror, riveted by the expanse of naked flesh – pale creamy flesh, repeated further down around her midriff. Her navel was on public display and, still more remarkable, pierced with a tiny gold ring. Another present from the boyfriend, perhaps. She tried to picture herself with a ring in her navel, but the imaginative leap was too great. When she was young, clothes had been designed for modesty and warmth – the exact opposite of present trends. She had actually developed very early, much to her embarrassment, but far from flaunting her pubescent breasts, she had done her best to disguise them. Borrowing her younger sister’s liberty bodice, she had buttoned it as tightly as she could, hoping to flatten her new shameful curves. A strange name, ‘liberty’, for something that constricted.

  ‘Are you going out tonight?’

  ‘Er, no,’ said Evelyn, roused from her reflections.

  ‘I was asking Debra, actually.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Apology number four. She turned her head to look at Debra, who had just appeared from the private room at the back: another shapely little madam, her pouting lips emphasized by peculiar blackish lipstick.

  ‘Yeah, we’re goin’ clubbin’.’

  ‘We? You mean, with Gary?’

  ‘Yeah. And you?’

  As the girls continued to discuss the evening’s pleasures, Evelyn studied Chloe with increasing fascination. Her jeans were so low-slung, she must be wearing the very briefest of pants – the sort of thing one saw in all the shops now, which contained less fabric than a handkerchief. In her mind, she garbed Chloe in the capacious bloomers she had worn at that age: elasticated drawers that came right up over the waist and down almost to the knees. She couldn’t recall a time in her girlhood when she hadn’t been swathed in layers of restricting undergarments, including prickly petticoats that rustled as she moved. Even today, in addition to the Chilprufe vest, she was wearing interlock knickers, a panty-girdle attached to thick lisle stockings and a full-length thermal under-slip.

  Chloe fastened the last roller with a pin, then covered her head in a garish purple hairnet. ‘Right, that’s you done. Come over to the drier, will you?’

  As Evelyn tried to manoeuvre herself into a third uncomfortable chair, while inserting her head into the deep hood of the drier, she wished she were made of India rubber instead of stiff arthritic bone.

  ‘I�
�ll put it on “high”, to start. Just give me a shout if you want it turned down, OK?’

  She nodded, tensing herself in readiness for the roaring in her ears, the blast of hot air, the feeling of confinement.

  ‘Cup o’ tea?’

  ‘No thank you.’ The tea cost £1.50, and that wasn’t for a proper pot, but just a doll-sized cup. Though it did come with a chocolate biscuit, wrapped in scarlet foil – a cut above the plain digestives she allowed herself at home. If she cancelled her standing order to UNICEF’s Emergency Fund (which siphoned off her entire Civil Service pension), there would be money enough for a ton of chocolate biscuits. But she couldn’t live with such a mean, uncaring self. Compared with those poor souls – starving children, earthquake victims, lepers, orphans, amputees – her life was one long luxury.

  ‘Want a book to read?’ Chloe mouthed, stooping down to Evelyn’s level and putting her face up close.

  ‘No, thank you,’ she repeated. Here, ‘books’ meant magazines, mostly tatty and always meretricious. She should have brought her Coleridge, but it was impossible to concentrate with all the distractions of the salon. Besides, Samuel Taylor might strongly disapprove of these frivolous surroundings. The wall opposite was enough to make him blush: posters of pouting models displaying not just their hairstyles, but much of their anatomy as well. One little minx was naked from the waist up, save for a black leather jacket, blatantly unbuttoned, which she was trying (vainly) to pull across her bosom. Another had bare shoulders and was gazing up suggestively at a tall, foreign-looking man, who also appeared to be unclothed, though his lower half was conveniently lost in shadow. She kept looking at that shadow, wondering what it hid, ashamed of her own innocence, yet somehow still alarmed.

  Everything around her only served to emphasize how little she had lived herself. Even the magazines, as she knew from past experience, would be full of yet more pictures of scantily clad girls, and contain extraordinarily detailed articles on sexual techniques that left her literally shaking with envy, amazement and disgust. Yet too easy to blame the modern world. When Daphnis and Chloe was written, way back in the second century, the two lovers had seemed inordinately keen to experience fleshly delights. Admittedly they were naïve in the extreme, ignorant of the mechanics of actually making love, but that hadn’t stopped them trying. In fact, as far as she could recall, they had been kissing and embracing more or less continuously throughout the tingling, budding spring and on into sultry, shameless summer. Her season had been perpetual winter: cold, closed, bleak and barren.