The Perfect 10 by Louise Kean Page B

although he has a pad and a pen on the desk behind him in case of emergencies. He doesn’t have a deep or soothing voice. It’s quite bland. Some days I find it annoying. He sounds like a bank clerk, or a travel agent, or any of those faceless voices at the end of a phone line who just want to put you on hold. He crosses his legs. He always sits in the same position, and rubs his left elbow with his right hand every few minutes. He is divorced, but has a long-term girlfriend now, although they don’t live together. I have been seeing him for eight months. It costs me eighty pounds a session, and I come once a week, on a Monday afternoon, for an hour and a half. The ‘incident’, as I am now referring to it, was yesterday, but I’m feeling fine about it already.
    I talk with my hands. I grab my knees and pull them up close to my chest. I do that a lot now that I can. I always sit in the big low chair, although there is a sofa. I scrape my fingers from the front to the back of my head when I am really thinking. Not hard, just to feel my hair. Today I am wearing jeans that fit, with a feint line that runs vertically down the middle of each leg, which is slimming. My black shirt is soft but has a large stiff collar that sits slightly away from my neck, avoiding foundation smears. I wear clear lip-gloss. I apply my mascara heavily at the roots of my eyelashes to give a lengthening effect without clogging the tips. When I see photos of myself I never look the way I think I might. My nose is slightly longer than I imagine it to be, my cheekbones slightly higher. I think of myself with a big round face, but it is actually quite angular now. I havethe ‘first signs of grey’ in dark brown hair, but I colour them out so you wouldn’t know, but then the world is turning grey these days. I look anywhere between twenty-six and thirty-two, depending on who you ask. I am actually twenty-eight. Everybody says I look younger now I’ve lost the weight, but in my head at least, I look exactly the same.
    I don’t think I have ever been in love, which is the reason I started seeing my therapist. He doesn’t seem to think it’s a problem, but at twenty-eight I beg to differ. Of course, previously, when I hadn’t taken control of the fat situation, I couldn’t have seen him, for fear of the criticism. But now that I can say, no matter what he throws at me, I’m not hiding any more, I’m working hard, I’m being a good girl and I’m on a diet, we can talk about the possibility of fat being the problem. Now I am winning this battle I can consider dropping those walls of defence. He thinks I have bigger issues to confront, but he won’t tell me what they are exactly. We have to ‘find them’ together. I enjoy our time, though. It’s nice just to blurt it all out – things that you can’t say to the people in your life, who would be upset, or concerned, by the rubbish in your head.
    ‘Do you feel under pressure to fall in love, Sunny?’
    My therapist is trying a new tack today, it would seem. Good for him. He must be so bored with me by now.
    ‘No. It’s completely the opposite. I have never had any pressure, from anybody, to date or to marry. Nobody. Which is a relief, of course. I think they are all just too embarrassed to say anything. My mother doesn’t even meddle – how are you, still single? Why aren’t you seeing anybody? Your standards are too high! None of that. No pressure at all.’
    ‘Do you see her often?’
    ‘My mother? She comes to visit every couple of weeks, and vents about my father, and his obsession with the carparking spaces in Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose … I think all men of that generation eventually become obsessed with supermarket car parks. Are you?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Well, you’ve got a couple of years yet.’
    ‘We were talking about your mother.’
    ‘Yes. She comes to see me, on the train because my dad doesn’t like her driving the car – she mounts kerbs like a crazy woman –