The Perfect 10 by Louise Kean Read Free Book Online

slight fluffy hair halo, because she doesn’t use any product on her hair. She never has. Natural is Lisa’s defining characteristic. Her broad face is clean and shiny. I can see a couple of tiny red veins on otherwise smooth cheeks, and she has the finest of lines playing with the corners of her eyes. She does, however, have a large angry swollen spot on her chin that glares at me menacingly as she gets closer. Lisa has never worn make-up during the day, and even on a big night out she will apply one lick of mascara to each set of eyelashes, and a hastily slicked streak of lipstick to each lip. I always admired how she looked so healthy and clean, but now I wonder whether a dab of Touche Éclat here and there would be such a sin.
    Lisa ran everything, from the 100 metres to cross country when we were at school, and she is still super fit, of course – naturally fitter than I am. But that would only show in a half-marathon, not in a class like today’s, with just over an hour’s worth of fitness needed. You wouldn’t be able to tell, if you glanced through the window to the fitness studio on a tour of the gym, that she had been in training her whole life, and I had been in training for just over a year. Lisa’s husband, Gregory Nathan, is a very slim man who was the 5,000 metre steeplechase champion at her university. When he laughs I think he looks like a dog. He works in the City now. He is some kind of underwriter, big in insurance, apparently. Big enough that Lisa was able to give up her job in publishing eight months ago, to really think about what she wanted to do, and hasn’t decided yet. She keeps threatening to open a boutique of ‘lovely knick-knacks, candles, and linen, and cushions, and beautiful glass vases’, but hasn’t quite managed to bother just yet. Thankfully for the lovely knick-knack market, one hundred other shops selling exactly that have opened in that time in and around West London.Lisa and Gregory live in Richmond, and they run by the river, together, every Saturday and Sunday morning.
    Lisa was the first person to realise I was losing weight, when I had officially shed one stone and four pounds, and she was the first person to notice that I had changed my eating habits. We met for brunch one Saturday, to have a girls’ catch-up, and I ordered a tuna salad with red onions and walnuts, instead of a burger and chips with coleslaw. Anna hadn’t realised, but Lisa came right out with it.
    ‘Are you having salad, Sunny?’
    ‘I just fancied something green,’ I said with an innocent smile. I wasn’t ready to get into it with them, and at that point was unsure whether I would even be able to see it through. One stone down but eight more to go didn’t feel like something to shout about. Plus the first stone had fallen off, but now the reduction was slowing up. I realised that I was going to have to do something drastic, and join a gym, and the thought scared me. Not because I wasn’t any good at sport, but because I thought I would look like the worst kind of deluded fool, in my billowing T-shirt and tracksuit trousers, walking on a running machine, red-faced and out of puff. Now, if I see anybody even close to my old size in the gym I try and give them a big smile, if they will meet my eye, but invariably they don’t.
    ‘But you look like you’ve lost weight, in your face.’ Lisa eyed me with a smile, trying to get me to admit it.
    ‘Diet?’ Anna asked, picking up a piece of bread and soaking it in olive oil.
    ‘Kind of,’ I said with a small grin, admitting that maybe I was a little pleased with myself. ‘But more of a health kick, than a diet. I’m just trying to think about what I’m eating,’ I said, adjusting the napkin in my lap.
    ‘God, who can be bothered? I never thought it worried you!’ Anna said, staring at me intently, trying to get me toadmit a lifetime’s worth of bad feeling to her soberly and over a casual lunch.
    ‘Of course it bothers me, a little bit.