Charley Barnes

Padded with shame

I don’t use chicken fillets. In my teens I stuffed toilet paper, neatly folded. I remember trying socks, once, until I found out that was boys’ padding.

Now, I stuff the lace-cut bra with shame: at their size; at skin stretched and shrunk; at the plush pink pucker of nipple.

They’re one of the few things meant to be bigger, but even in that my body falls short; two paracetamols on an ironing board I’ve been told, bee-stings.

But I paid extra for this: a wedge of padding so firm that if someone were to bump me they’d bounce back from my breasts and bruise.

Aesthetically, though, they’re pleasing –a good shape, and the middle-ground between strangers shouting my how big you are, and narrating that I’m not quite enough.