In misery, they’d banded together. They weren’t like the popular girls, the pretty hair-tossing ones the boys all lusted after like Jill Patterson and her mates, or the tough ones, the tomboys who’d bloody your nose if you dared talk about them. But there was strength in numbers.

Now they trawled around Carnaby Street and tried on dresses – Nula hated trying on dresses, but the others were doing it and so she had to join in. And there it was, the awful, undeniable truth. Staring back at Nula from the dreaded changing-room mirror was the confirmation of all her fears. She was fat, and fat she would stay, because she ate too much.

One or the other, you could have. But not both. A good figure . . . or all that lovely food.

It was crucifying. Nula knew two things. One: food was her only real pleasure in life. Whenever she was laughed at, mocked, depressed, she would take refuge inside the larder, would stand there covertly eating seedy cake or apple pie, one eye on the door, her ears alert for footfall. And two: Mum wanted her to eat and moaned and fretted and threatened visits to doctors if she didn’t.

So she was fighting her mother and herself. But Nula was obstinate. Once committed to a path, she wasn’t one to deviate.

Skipping family dinners became an art form to her. She said she was playing hockey (she wasn’t) or down the chess club (not there, either) or at the youth club (all lies). She skipped breakfast, ignored her rumbling stomach and the temptation of the biscuit counter, lunched on fruit, crawled home starving and pushed the food around her plate, much to Mum’s displeasure.

It was all such an effort.

But after a few months of this – she didn’t dare weigh herself on those big high-street machines in public and face yet more scorn and humiliation, and her family had never possessed any bathroom scales – she thought that something was happening to her.

She was getting thinner.

She would stand naked in front of her bedroom mirror and force herself to look. There was a suggestion of ribs now, where before there had just been a spare tyre. Her belly didn’t bulge out the way it had. Her thighs didn’t rub together quite so painfully any more.

Nula started to feel something almost like happiness. It was hell, it was horrible, but – for fuck’s sake! – it was actually working.

So stuff Mum and her treacle sponges and massive portions. Nula stuck to her guns, kept avoiding mealtimes, and stared and stared at her new emerging body.