A Man Melting

by Craig Cliff

‘Nope.’

  ‘Camp Future.’

  ‘Not unless we get the teleporter working, which — stop me if I’m wrong — runs contrary to the whole exercise thing.’

  ‘I mean, like, “Your future starts here.”’

  ‘Next.’

  ‘Camp Lightweight.’

  Danny raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I was going for a Native American … Um.’ Sophie flicked through the pages of her notebook. ‘What about Camp Grant?’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s perfect. Your uncle was the epitome of camp.’

  ‘Well, it is only fair, seeing as how it was his money.’

  For three months they lived apart. Danny stayed at his office job down south — though he spent more and more of his time at work querying contractor invoices and tinkering with Camp Grant’s first-year projections — and Sophie lived at the camp, overseeing the renovations.

  ‘You won’t recognise this place when you see it, Danny. It’s looking really good.’

  ‘I miss you, Soph.’

  ‘The exercise bikes arrived today. Now the gym looks like a gym rather than a dorm with the beds ripped out.’

  ‘Are you getting tired of perving at the workmen?’

  ‘What? No. I’m too busy.’

  ‘Tell Gordon he’s still invoicing at the overtime rate.’

  ‘Okay. Love you. See you next weekend.’

  ‘Love you, too.’

  In truth, Danny’s eye had begun to wander. It’s only natural, he told himself, spending so long apart. When he could manage it, he drove north for the weekend, but his time there was so loaded. It felt like a conjugal visit and a labour camp combined. And so, gradually, the number of attractive women around town began to increase. Soon he started thinking about people at work in a sexual way. He may even have been flirting with Karen, his office manager. It was so long since he’d flirted he wasn’t sure what it consisted of these days.

  ‘Do you want a cuppa, Karen?’

  ‘I’d love one, Dan.’

  ‘Coming right up.’

  Was that flirting? Anyway, he didn’t feel bad, just confused. This fat camp thing had tipped life out of its carefully arranged cardboard boxes, and now everything — work, love, social life, dreams and aspirations — lay on the floor, mingling together. It was as if he was a teenager all over again.

  After he handed in his notice at work, it became clear that he had been flirting with Karen, because whatever she was doing before, she stopped. Now when he asked if she wanted a cuppa, she said no. Sometimes she got up to make one as soon as he returned. The next time he drove to Camp Grant it was to help Sophie interview camp counsellors. Since it was a weight-loss camp, the counsellors had to know about fitness and nutrition as well as managing teenagers and their emotions, yet still be willing to live away from home for a modest salary. All of the candidates were young females. They all had good bodies, but to Danny’s relief (or was it vexation?) there was always something off with these girls.

  Like Jennifer, twenty-three, currently working as a waitress and leading three Pilates classes a week.

  ‘I’m passionate about fitness. It’s all I think about. Really passionate.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Danny. ‘Passion: tick!’

  ‘I mean, I was fourteen stone when I was eight.’

  ‘Do you have any first-aid training?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘I still carry that fat little girl around inside of me.’

  He tried to picture this, but decided Jennifer would fit much better inside a fourteen stone girl.

  Or Demetria, twenty-eight, originally from California, who attended the interview in full Lyrca get-up.

  ‘What first attracted you to the fitness industry?’

  ‘The body is a temple,’ she said.

  Anything to draw attention away from that face, thought Danny. It had been a long day.

  ‘They’re all fruitcakes,’ he told Sophie that night.

  ‘They are not. They’re just —’

  ‘Passionate?’

  ‘Fuck me, you’re right.’

  ‘I’m sure a couple of them were anorexic, too.’

  She put her head in her hands.

  ‘Hey, Soph?’

  ‘You have to keep pushing, don’t you?’

  ‘I didn’t … I’m sorry. I’m a cock.’

  On Sunday night, before he drove south for work the next day, they managed to agree on four candidates. He sent the offers of employment the next morning using postage-paid envelopes from his office.

  His last week at work was spent fiddling with the Camp Grant website and having irresponsible daydreams about liaisons with camp counsellors, though these girls didn’t match any of those interviewed. His dream counsellors were fit, of course, but demure, ladylike. They read books translated from foreign languages. They wore gingham dresses when they weren’t working out.

  At the morning tea thrown in honour of his leaving, Karen stayed at her desk.

  ‘I brought you a slice of cake,’ he said, popping his head around the partition.

  ‘No, thanks. Watching my figure.’

  ‘You have a great figure,’ he told her.

  She lifted her head slightly, then went back to looking busy.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  She looked up at him with a degree of malevolence in her eyes where once champagne had sparkled.

  ‘About the cake thing. Sorry about the cake.’

  When he moved up to the camp for good, it was easy to stop fantasising about other women. For one, Sophie was all over him. Following your dream, he thought, must be the ultimate aphrodisiac. And then, when the counsellors moved in, a week before the kiddies to sort out rosters and routines and mission statements, fantasies became impossible.

  Holly and her fear of spiders, squirrels and falling leaves.

  Kat and her invisible cellulite.

  Amanda and her constantly ringing cellphone.

  Emily and her compulsive sex talk. What troubled him most was the way she referred to body parts with code words, normally involving office stationery.

  ‘What do you think a calculator is?’ he asked Sophie the night before the first intake of kids arrived.

  ‘Something to do with pushing all her buttons, maybe?’

  ‘She said “his calculator” though.’

  ‘Those crazy kids.’

  ‘Do you need me to do anything tomorrow?’

  ‘Just wear your Camp Grant T-shirt to the induction.’

  ‘But we only have XXLs and above.’

  ‘Wear it. You can be the “after” photo.’

  ‘I can see the flyer: Come to Camp Grant and go from overweight teen to over-the-hill accountant.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t an accountant?’

  ‘Semantics.’

  ‘You’ve changed your tune.’

  ‘I’m a one-man financial management band, baby.’

  ‘Do you need help with that trumpet?’

  ‘You’re not funny.’

  As he stood at the front gate the next morning to welcome the parents and their chubby spawn, he could pick the cars which were there to drop off kids before they even indicated.

  4WD — Yes.

  Hatchback — No.

  Jaguar S-type — No.

  Toyota Minivan — Yes.

  Mr Whippy ice cream van — That poor kid.

  The parents all shared a kind of frazzled glee. When he shook their hands, he saw what might have been pity in their eyes.

  The first intake consisted of sixteen kids for an autumn half-term ‘Live-In Weight-loss Workshop’.

  ‘Like Santa’s workshop, but without the sweets,’ he told one of the parents.

  The kids’ arrival meant the real work finally started for Sophie and the girls (he didn’t want to come off misogynistic, but that’s what they were calling themselves), and the cooks and cleaners from the nearby village of Cranlaw. But for Danny, the holiday had begun. Al
l the pricing had been calculated, all the contractors paid; gas, power and telephone were on direct debit; and the website took the bookings, which Sophie oversaw anyway. All he had to do was dole out petty cash for an aloe vera plant in the kitchen and wait till it was time to pay wages again.

  The only smudge on the holiday atmosphere was being woken before dawn every morning, first by Sophie, who crawled out of bed to begin her day of rescuing the youth of the British Isles from themselves, and then by the mini-earthquake of the campers star-jumping their way to A Better You in the courtyard.

  He preferred to spend his time away from the camp. The truth was, he didn’t care for the kids. Their unconscionable eating habits and ‘never say live’ attitudes. Or the staff. This was Sophie’s dream and he was her accountant gigolo.

  His best friend, Sig, came to visit after the camp had been open a month. It was quiet. Only one dorm was being used because it was not school holidays anywhere within a three hundred mile radius. The only campers were high school dropouts or Critical Cases, though he wasn’t sure who made the ‘critical’ call: doctors, teachers or parents. Perhaps it was Sophie.

  ‘Sophie seems a lot taller,’ Sig said after he and Danny had completed a quick tour of the camp.

  ‘She’s tasted power.’

  ‘Ah, that’s what it is. Move over Mussolini.’

  ‘Come on, I’ll show you the loch.’

  ‘Och aye,’ his friend said in his worst Scottish accent.

  The sight of the water coincided with the chill and roar of the wind as they stepped out of the sycamore and birch windbreak that surrounded the camp. Sig dug his hands into the depths of his coat pockets but Danny, wearing just an unironed business shirt, didn’t even goosebump.

  ‘Do you want to skip stones?’ he asked.

  Sig looked at the dark green water.

  ‘I must warn you,’ Danny continued, ‘I’ve been practising. I once hit a duck on the twelfth bounce.’

  ‘You’re that busy?’

  He shrugged and pulled two ladyfinger cigars from his shirt pocket. They were halfway between cigarettes and proper hard-boiled-detective cigars.

  ‘You smoke now?’

  ‘Just these. I’m learning to blow smoke rings. Wanna see?’

  Sig was jiggling up and down on the spot to keep warm. ‘Can we maybe go back to the camp?’

  He’d never shown anyone his smoke rings. Sophie had banned him from smoking at the camp — bad impression to send the campers and all. Even the most perfectly rounded, unbroken smoke ring felt bogus, hypothetical, without a witness. But he shrugged once more and they headed back.

  Over lunch in the dining hall, surrounded by the trainers and the sprinkling of campers, Sig leant across the table and whispered to Danny, ‘You don’t eat this stuff all the time, do you?’

  He looked down at his steamed vegetables and wild rice salad. He’d never had a problem with the food — at least he didn’t have to cook. It wasn’t the task of cooking he minded, it was deciding what to eat three times a day for the rest of your life. He raised his head, wearing a ’fraid so expression.

  ‘You don’t, y’know, microwave a pizza afterwards?’

  ‘If you’re still hungry, I’m sure there’s seconds.’

  Sig pushed his plate forwards. ‘Nooo. I’m right. Might drive to the village, what’s it called —’

  ‘Cranlaw.’

  ‘Cranlaw, right. What sort of shops they have there?’

  ‘Your cough is getting worse,’ Sophie told him, six weeks into the camp’s operation.

  ‘It’s just the cold.’

  ‘It’s the bleeding cigarettes.’

  ‘Cigars.’

  ‘They are small cigars. I feel entitled to call them cigarettes. They’re not good for you. The kids have seen you at the loch.’

  ‘So. It’s my hobby. I’m allowed a hobby, aren’t I?’

  ‘What about your novel?’

  ‘I like being outside.’

  ‘Take the laptop.’

  ‘But it’s stupid.’

  ‘I think it’ll be funny.’

  ‘It’s a young man’s idea.’

  ‘I feel bad. Like you don’t want to be here.’

  ‘I like the loch,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe you should spend more time with the kids. You’re the only man here. Some of these kids need a male role model.’

  ‘One that smokes cigars?’

  She held out her little finger. ‘Just wee ones.’

  He thought about his smoke rings. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘give me a kid. One kid. I’ll daddy him like there’s no tomorrow.’

  The kid’s name was Barry. He was eleven years old and four feet tall but weighed fifteen and a half stone. He always wore a big orange FUBU hoodie, even while exercising. Sophie and the other counsellors had tried in vain to get him out of it. Now he was Danny’s project.

  ‘I like your shoes,’ Danny told him. They were old school Nikes. White with a purple swoosh.

  ‘Okay,’ Barry said, looking down. His head was shaven. A number two, Danny thought. Sophie hadn’t clippered his hair since they’d bought the camp. It was beginning to blow in his eyes down at the loch.

  ‘Do you want to get away from here for a while?’

  At the loch, he suddenly felt bad about smoking in front of an eleven year old. He patted the ladyfingers in his shirt pocket and said instead, ‘Got any hobbies?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Watch a bit of TV, I suppose?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Play a few computer games?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Danny picked up a stone and threw it sidearm out over the water. It bounced four times. ‘Not my best effort,’ he said. The kid stood there with his hands in the pockets of his orange hoodie, the blankest of expressions on his face.

  ‘Do you know much about classical Greece?’ Danny asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lyric poets? Sappho of Lesbos?’

  Barry snorted.

  ‘You’re right to laugh. That’s where the term “Lesbian” comes from. And “Sapphic”.’

  Barry’s face was going red, but he was grinning, sort of.

  ‘It’s not certain whether Sappho was a lesbian in the modern sense, but her poems were quite sensual. I used to have a book of them a while back. When I was researching my novel.’

  ‘You wrote a book?’

  ‘No. Just researched it.’

  ‘What was it about?’

  ‘Sappho, sort of. There was a theory that she was like the headmistress of a finishing school, a thiasos, for the girls of Lesbos. A place parents sent their daughters to become better marriage material.’

  ‘Like a fat camp?’

  ‘Um, maybe, but for hot, sexually curious girls.’

  ‘Awesome.’

  ‘Anyway, there’s some evidence that they used to have beauty competitions. Miss Lesbos 500BC, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Are you a historian or something?’

  ‘No. I am the director of finance.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The camp’s accountant.’

  ‘Dumb.’

  ‘Yeah, well, back to Lesbos: the winner of the beauty contest got the best husband and the winning thiasos got the best reputation, so these contests would have been cut-throat affairs. That’s what my novel was going to be about. All the characters would be female and they would all be getting it on with each other, knowing that as soon as you get married, that’s it.’

  ‘Can I read it?’

  ‘I told you, pal, I never wrote it.’

  ‘There’s no internet here.’

  ‘You’re only eleven.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  After two weeks, Danny had not succeeded in getting Barry out of his hoodie. He felt dodgy enough as it was — grown man and pubescent boy spending so much time alone, down by the loch, away from the other campers — without asking Barry to remove an item of clothing.

  He had begun to wonder if i
t was just the one hoodie, or several identical ones which he changed when no one was around. To find out, one day at lunch he spilt low fat/low carb salad dressing over the front of Barry’s hoodie.

  ‘Oh, that’ll leave a stain.’

  ‘Arh.’ Barry ran, as best as he could, out of the dining room and appeared five minutes later with a big wet patch on the front of his hoodie. He could have changed hoodies and wet the fresh one, Danny thought. He checked Barry’s top every day from then on, but there was never any sign of a stain.

  Barry stayed three weeks at Camp Grant in all, and lost half a stone — though Danny couldn’t tell, having never seen him without the hoodie.

  ‘Do you miss him?’ Sophie asked a couple of days after Barry had returned to school and his parents.

  ‘Who, Baz?’

  ‘Aw, you gave him a nickname.’

  ‘It’s not really a nickname. Chubby Checker is a nickname. Agent Orange is a nickname. Baz is just a shortened version of his name.’

  ‘I have another project for you if you’d like?’

  ‘Actually,’ he said, flipping open his cellphone, which had begun to vibrate in his pocket, ‘I’m quite busy with the numbers at the moment. Hello, Camp Grant, Danny speaking.’

  And it was true, the numbers did need his attention. The camp had been in operation for a little over three months, but it wasn’t meeting any of his cash flow projections. The problem was that during the school term, there weren’t enough campers to cover the cost of the staff and all the maintenance the camp needed. The peaks during holiday periods just weren’t earning enough to cover the losses in the troughs. He didn’t want to tell Sophie. He was the numbers man, and it was a numbers problem. He should have seen this coming.

  ‘Do you ever think you’re too good?’ he asked as they lay in bed one night.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Kids come here, they lose some weight, learn life skills to keep it off, and never come back.’

  ‘Are you saying we shouldn’t help these kids?’

  ‘As a business —’ he said, but stopped.

  ‘We’re doing okay, aren’t we? The next run of holidays are coming up soon.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. We won’t run out of fat kids for a long time.’