My Madder Fatter Diary

  Rae Earl was born in Lincolnshire in 1971. She went to Hull University where she won the Philip Larkin prize and following a brief stint at Parcelforce moved into broadcasting. She now writes full time from her shed in Hobart, Tasmania.

  Also By Rae Earl

  My Mad Fat Diary

  OMG! Is this my actual life?

  OMG! I’m in love with a geek!

  My Madder Fatter Diary

  Rae Earl

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2014

  Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Rae Earl 2014

  The right of Rae Earl to be identified as the Author of the

  Work has been asserted by her in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 75429 2

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For

  Emma ‘Mort’ Drury – for ALWAYS being right (bar that train) and for Feint and Margin

  And

  Sharon Rooney – for your utter brilliance and total talent

  Contents

  Introduction

  Monday 1.1.90

  Friday 22.6.90

  Friday 21.12.90

  What happened next . . .

  My Mad Fat Diary

  Introduction

  This is My Madder Fatter Diary.

  It’s 1990 and I’m a morbidly obese teenager living in Stamford, Lincolnshire. I live with my mum who, in her late forties, has just divorced her homosexual second husband and is having a sexual renaissance with a Moroccan bodybuilder 20 years her junior. I know. It’s a bit Jeremy Kyle but you’re going to have to go with it.

  I have two older brothers – who are lovely but have their own lives – and a dad who is quite sweet but who I don’t see much.

  I go to an expensive private single-sex school in a felt navy hat because I passed a scholarship exam at age 11. This fact, combined with my size, doesn’t make me particularly popular on the fairly crappy council estate where our house is. All the streets are named after members of the royal family – Edinburgh Road where I live is not palatial and I get teased a lot in Mountbatten Avenue. It’s Anne Road though that’s the real killer. ‘The Anne’ and Green Lane are a hotbed of ‘Jabba’ baiting – where teams of total twats call me every fat name under the sun. I could list them here but it would take up half a page and they were not particularly creative. That said, the day 5 teenage boys started singing ‘Hey Fattie Bum Bum’ at me at least showed a good knowledge of 1970s lovers rock reggae.

  In the absence of getting the REAL thing, food is sex. Most days I down custard creams almost intravenously. Kit Kat multipacks are hoovered away in an instant. I have a full meal at school and then come home to more. I graze like a cow but eat like someone half-starved when big plates of anything are presented to me. Food is a pleasure, food is an anaesthetic, food is dependable. It would be a perfect partner if it didn’t push up my waist size to something that relegated me to middle-aged women’s clothes shops and the romantic dugout.

  This doesn’t sound very joyful does it? Thankfully the best humour often grows in the darkest places. Plus my life then is littered with lovely people, good music and great things.

  I have a social life to die for. I have a record collection that’s been in alphabetical order since I can remember. I’m madly in love with a sculpted piece of testosterone wonder called Haddock. That’s his codename because my mum refuses to enter the 20th century and get a home phone so I have to use phone boxes to ring people and I’m concerned this most secret and beautiful of true loves will be exposed to the world. I’m not ready to do that yet – despite the fact that on New Year’s Eve 1989 he seemed to be saying some odd and frankly very encouraging things that may mean that he secretly loves me and wishes to ‘do’ me senseless. I have a fantastic best friend called Mort, school is a safe haven and largely a total laugh and music saves me everyday. It says what I can’t say and heals things I can’t even express. I live for it.

  What else?

  Oh I’m crackers.

  I’m stark raving loony mad. I know it. My mum knows it. A few other people suspect it and the professionals have diagnosed it. I was in a psychiatric ward at 16 but I’d been crazy long before that. Who knows where being ‘nuts’ starts? I was always scared of something. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t think I controlled everything with the power of my thoughts. Thinking you are in charge of world peace is quite a big burden. Thinking that you can stop your mum dying in a horrible train accident by touching things many times or counting or praying takes up a lot of time. It also demands a lot of energy and a need for distraction. For most of the time there were no tablets to calm me down so I took HobNobs. It made sense. My Prozac was oaty and sublime when dunked in half a mug of Tetley. Whatever the worry, a packet of something fatty sugar-coated the mental pain.

  The thing is, anxiety is a total bastard. It shape-shifts. It finds a face and things to latch on to then it multiplies the threat. Needles, floods, poisonous plants, rabies, terrorists, nuclear war, Sinitta ruining the charts – from the deadly serious to the really stupid, I’ve thought my brain could control it all. Then it just all got too much and I totally lost it. I found myself in an adult psychiatric ward with a schizophrenic biker and a woman who kept yelling about her skirt. We did group exercises with beanbags. The walls were brown. It was noisy at night. People who are ill and distressed don’t do 9 to 5. They shout and scream at 2 in the morning. I had to get out. I told them I was better. I wasn’t but I wasn’t going to improve there and mad people still want the same things as sane people do – success, happiness, a man. None of those were going to come to me in ward 4 of the Edith Cavell Hospital, Peterborough.

  So in 1990 my head was often on fire. I knew I didn’t want to go back to the ward. I knew I had to keep it together as best I could. I had to finish my A levels and get to university. My diary gave me a place to explode. It was a place where all my mental debris could splatter all over the pages privately. That said, I couldn’t always fully let go. That would have been too scary, a loss of control. So you’ll get phrases like ‘trying to appease’, ’trying to keep it together’, ‘maintain spiritual stability’ – what I’m really saying is that I don’t want to talk to anyone because I’m frightened I’ll end up in a psychiatric ward again. But as I get older you’ll see I get more honest . . .

  I’ve had to edit this diary a lot. There are pages and entries where I just write ‘God Help Me – PLEASE’. You don’t want to read that but that IS one of the problems with mental illness. On top of the pain there’s the tedium of it. The repetition. That horrible realisation that today is going to be ANOTHER day when you eat a loaf of bread to forget, when you burn yourself with matches to punish your thoughts and find the only relief is in a mangled cassette of Motown chartbusters, a water fight at school and Haddock’s arse in a tight pair of jeans.

  I’
ve had to rewrite a few things too. They made no sense at all. At times I was very poorly and one of the really evil things that does is strip you of the ability to express yourself with any coherence. No-one gets it. Not even you. Word for word just would not have worked. I’ve messed around with timings and changed people’s names but this is how it happened. This was me in 1990 & 1991.

  In 1990 the world is crawling out of communism and repression and new countries are being born, but bloody Jive Bunny are still shitting out compilation singles and I’m still hoping to crawl out of the fat body I’m stuck in and the mad brain I’m chained to. I’m sharing my diary for the reasons I shared the last one – because it makes me laugh and because I want to tell people you can be out of your tree crazy in your teens and things can work out OK. However, there are now new reasons too. Since having my first teenage diary published I know there are young people who still feel mad. There are young people who cut themselves and look in the mirror and despair. I want you to see the terrible things I thought about myself and how I longed to be a ‘real woman’ like so many of my friends. Then I want you to know that those women I thought had it all sorted wrote to me and told me they had felt EXACTLY the same way as me! Adolescence sucks. Being a teenager is utter shit FOR EVERYONE but life gets better.

  Anyway. 1990. The Berlin Wall is down, The Happy Mondays are off their magnificent trolleys, A levels are approaching and Haddock’s backside is a national treasure.

  I’ll handle your questions at the end because you’ll have some . . .

  Monday 1.1.90

  10.12 a.m.

  NEW DECADE! NEW YEAR! NEW RAE! It even starts on a Monday. It’s like the year already knows what it is doing. Perhaps just the 80s were TOTAL shit.

  I CANNOT get over Haddock last night. Seriously though, it did sound like he would proper like me as a girl if I ‘just toned up a bit’. That won’t take that long. A bit of tone. That’s just a bit of walking isn’t it? FUCK! If I think about being that man’s girlfriend I could orgasmsexplode. That’s not even a word. I don’t care. It sums it all up.

  11.22 a.m.

  Just tied a scarf round my head and pulled all my chins off my face. I look a bit Chinese in a good way but there IS something there. There is something not totally rotten and ugly and bollocks.

  1.12 p.m.

  Just thought, I don’t know where everyone disappeared off to last night. I walked from Vine Street to Fraggle’s house at 4 a.m. I saw that everyone had gone to bed and came back to Vine Street to sleep. I love Dobber’s mum but I wish she had bought a thicker carpet. My cheek looked like a potato waffle this morning. Battered Sausage took the piss then started talking about women and how they were a pain in the arse and how they couldn’t decide what they wanted. I said ‘Your ex could decide last night – she didn’t want you.’ It was a bit harsh but he can take it.

  Oh I can’t stop thinking about Haddock. In my head I’ve already had sex with him about 15 times this morning. Can men do it 15 times or do they just run out of stiffy? I WOULD LIKE TO TRY.

  Dobber says she’s heard maximum 7 times in one night and by time 5 they are getting tired.

  OK here is the plan for the year 1990.

  1) 1990 is literally fraught with looming crises: Health problems reaching a head. What IS wrong with my insides? Will my ovaries ever work? Or have I just got a terrible bloody cancer that no-one has spotted yet?

  2) Bloody A levels.

  3) Depending on what happens with those leaving Stamford

  BLOODY WORRYING

  Also . . .

  4) Crush (now 5 month crush verging on ridiculous) on Haddock is not actually getting better but steadily worsening. And now there might be some hope that he might like me. In that way.

  No Rae. He actually thinks I’m repulsive in that way.

  5) Trying to appease.

  Got BAD January blues. I went too mad over Christmas and there are bloody Brazil nut shells on the landing. I’m not going near the scales. The scales fear me. I fear the scales.

  OBJECTIVES

  1) Get A levels and get away!

  2) Have a bloody good time.

  3) Keep cool and calm.

  4) Maintain spiritual stability.

  5) Try to have some sort of a decent relationship with a real man that exists as a breathing thing.

  6) Become a bit of a sex bitch. HA HA HA! Not really. Just a bit.

  Anyway here’s to 1990. I can’t believe this diary is going to take me through A levels and Summer holidays and starting uni. Next year I’M 20!! THAT’S SICK!

  I need to take this year seriously and concentrate on the things that really matter.

  4.24 p.m.

  The Smash Hits Yearbook is ‘frame that bastard’ EPIC CLASSIC this year. They ask Jon Bon Jovi if he’s ever been sick in his cowboy boots. HA HA HA! Soft rock furry toss ball!

  Tuesday 2.1.90

  11.46 p.m.

  I’ve just been down the pub. The lads were discussing whether or not you should spray deodorant on your cock to be hygienic when you are with ‘a bird’. Haddock was laughing. Haddock does not need Right Guard on his knob. I just know he doesn’t. It’s not a question I would ever ask his girlfriend anyway to be fair.

  Haddock was lovely to me but I think he’s forgotten what he did on New Year’s Eve. He only stroked my hair but it wasn’t like me stroking White the cat. It was like . . . a bit sexual. A bit.

  Oh perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps he was just being kind. That’s the trouble with Snakebite – it gives you balls but it makes you talk bollocks.

  If it does all come to nothing I will just break in two I think. Oh Rae, that’s melodramatic crap. Just masturbate and fuck off. The thing is, it’s not just the shagging with Haddock it’s the mind connection. He just gets it.

  It is lots about the sex though as I’m TOTAL HORN.

  Wednesday 3.1.90

  9.38 p.m.

  I’m listening to my Sixties Mania compilation. The Mamas and the Papas are singing something about the worst bit being just before dawn breaks. As if you don’t know if the day is going to dawn at all. IT’S BLOODY DARK let me tell you.

  Mum has just been up. Apparently Mama Cass from the Mamas and the Papas choked on a ham sandwich and died in bed. Thanks for that. It felt like she was giving me a ‘Rachel is too fat’ lecture disguised as pop trivia so I said ‘Why don’t you make a public information film about the dangers of eating filled rolls in bed?!’ Mum got really cross and said ‘There’s no need for sarcasm’ and the usual ‘I’m your mother – give me some respect’ shit. I don’t care. She hardly says two words to me these days unless it’s to have a go. It’s ALL about Adnan – the Morrocan bodybuilding boyfriend. It’s ‘Addy – would you like a beef sausage.’ That’s another thing, pork is now banned from this house and beef sausages taste shit. And NO I don’t know what direction Mecca is either!

  Thursday 4.1.90

  11.22 p.m.

  Got pissed tonight and did the following:

  1) Told Chelsea Dunn I was totally in love with Haddock. Swore her to secrecy.

  2) Told Dobber tonight that I was totally in love with Haddock. Swore her to secrecy.

  3) Hid the beef sausages and the bloody couscous. Sick of them.

  Now THAT was stupid. Not the sausages or the couscous (hidden behind shitloads of yoghurts) or Dobber (she will take it to the grave) BUT Chelsea is a bit of a shit-stirrer and good mates with Haddock’s girlfriend. I have to remember if this gets out too early, 1) My body won’t be ready and primed for action 2) Haddock’s girlfriend – I can’t even imagine. She will go ballistic. She’s told me EVERYTHING about him. I know stuff that no-one on earth knows. I have a basic blueprint for a completely successful Haddock relationship. I just can’t use it yet. It’s like Churchill sitting on the plans for D-Day. I’ve got to wait for the right conditions.

  No. Haddock’s girlfriend is not Hitler. I repeat, she’s gorgeous and sweet and funny. And I feel bad BUT all is fair in love, war a
nd HADDOCK!

  I am currently wishing facial hair on someone. That’s not good. Hormones send you mad.

  Friday 5.1.90

  11.34 p.m.

  I have decided Adnan is the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street. For a start, he is incapable of using the word ‘I’. He says ‘Me hungry!’ and ‘Me thirsty!’ And he eats like the Cookie Monster too. He shoves it in. YET if I make even a tiny noise when I’m eating Mum calls me ‘cement mixer’. They are so loved up. I hate living here. I’m so sick of being the only person on earth without someone who loves them and I am SO SICK of being in a house that smells permanently of spicy lamb.

  Saturday 6.1.90

  Late. I don’t care what the time is anyway. What does it matter?!

  I know I always get so pissed off in early January and this year is no exception. I feel like a total gooseberry at home. I also feel like a TOTAL liability with my friends as well, like an ugly dog that follows them around. Oh that’s not fair. I am an ungrateful bitch and I’ve got some brilliant mates. What have I actually got to moan about?!

  I had a chat with Haddock’s girlfriend tonight. I feel so immensely guilty because she is so lovely. Haddock wanted to talk to me tonight after I got upset in the pub. It was just about the usual stuff. I HATE ME BASICALLY. He said he wanted to make me feel better. Oh bloody hell – it’s so dangerous writing this. I bloody love him but it’s absolutely blatantly obvious that we could never properly get on. His girlfriend says he’s insecure too and is probably ‘insurance salesman material’. Who gives a fuck? He’s FUCKING LOVELY AND GORGEOUS. I don’t want him to be a stuntman or anything dangerous. I just want him to be IN MY LIFE . . . SOMEWHERE.