Love of Fat Men

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Run down a yacht,’ thinks Carl. ‘Splintered to matchwood.’

  The big ferry thrums and rocks on its own weight.

  ‘How will they find them in the fog?’ he asks his father.

  ‘They’ll have flares. Let’s go to the other side.’

  Is the fog clearing? It is whiter than ever, and it hurts Carl’s eyes. Maybe that’s the sun behind it, trying to break out. There is a sharp smell of sea and oil. Announcements come jerkily, in the same voice they used to announce breakfast and the bingo session last night. It’s very cold, and to Carl’s amazement quite a few people are going down below, rubbing their arms, making way for one another.

  ‘You first.’

  ‘No, please, after you.’

  A man comes up with his camcorder. Its blunt nose butts around in the fog and finds nothing.

  His father leans on the rail, looking down. The rail is wet with spray or fog, and it makes a dark bar on his father’s jacket. He’s looking downward and backward, behind the ship. The speakers sound again.

  ‘They’ve picked up the dinghy,’ says Carl’s father.

  It all takes so long. Carl is cold and shivering and he can’t see much because a wall of adults has crowded to the rail. Suddenly his father says sharply, ‘There they are!’ He is leaning out over the rail, grasped by two men. A pair of binoculars is handed to him over the heads of the crowd. People shove against Carl from all sides. He can’t see anything at all.

  ‘They’re bringing the boat alongside,’ he hears his father say. ‘There’s the dinghy.’

  His father is the leader. Everyone is asking questions.

  ‘Are they all right?’

  ‘How many are there – can you see?’

  And a woman beside him says, ‘At least they had time to launch the dinghy. Must’ve been terrifying. Imagine being hit by this thing.’

  Then his father’s voice. ‘There’s two of them. A man and a boy.’ Carl hears the charge in his voice. A man and a boy. What sort of boy?

  ‘They’re alongside. They’ll be bringing them up. Can’t see any more from this angle.’

  The pressure of the crowd relaxes. Carl wriggles through to his father, who is down from the rail and talking to another Englishman.

  ‘– any more of them?’

  ‘– sailing alone with the boy …’

  ‘– bloody awful thing to lose your boat like that –’

  Carl stands and watches and listens. A man and a boy, sailing alone in the North Sea. The big ferry like a clumsy cliff bulging out of the fog to sink their boat. He tries to catch his father’s eye. He tries a joke. ‘Well, at least it wasn’t the bow doors! We were lucky.’ But his father looks at him.

  ‘We weren’t in any danger,’ he points out coldly.

  Not like that other boy. His father’s criticism hangs in the air. His father had the binoculars. He’d have seen the boy’s face. And the man’s, too.

  The fog is clearing now. Suddenly, when Carl looks, holes open in it and he can see right along the grey water. It’s very calm. He can’t help saying, ‘It wasn’t rough, anyway,’ but his father has an answer for that, too.

  ‘That’s why it happened. If there’d been a wind it would have blown the fog away. They’d have seen our lights.’

  But by lunch-time the whole thing might as well never have happened. They’ll be in port in three hours’ time. The cafeteria and restaurant are crowded and there is a pub quiz in the Marco Polo bar. Carl has been playing the video games at the bottom of the second staircase. He’s done really well on Rally Rider. But it’s so expensive and there’s no one to turn to and say, ‘Hey, did you see that? Level fourteen!’ His father can’t stand video games.

  ‘I might have known you’d be here,’ says his father’s voice just as Carl gets farther than he has ever got before. ‘Come on, we’re going to eat.’

  They find a table. ‘Wait here while I pay for our tickets,’ says his father. You have to buy a ticket and then you can eat as much as you want from the buffet. People go past with their trays loaded. There are two empty chairs opposite, and he must keep that one for his father. His father has touched it, indicating that it is his. But then a man puts his hand on Carl’s father’s chair. He is a big, stooping man with a worried face. Carl blushes and says, ‘I’m sorry. My father is sitting there,’ but the man just smiles and pulls out the chair, then beckons to someone else. Carl looks. It’s a boy, a thin, fair-haired boy about his age. His hair is so pale it’s nearly the colour of the salt spilt on the table. The man smiles again at Carl as he sits down, while the boy pushes his way politely down the rows of other people’s chairs, and squeezes into his place. The father pats the boy’s arm as he sits down. They both have meal tickets but they don’t seem to know what to do with them. They talk briefly, seriously, heads close together.

  Suddenly, Carl sees that the boy is crying, without sound, pushing big tears away from his eyes with his fingers. His father talks to him all the time in a murmuring, up and down voice, as if he doesn’t mind, as if the tears are something he had expected. They’re sitting close together anyway, but then the father puts his arm around the boy. Carl ducks his head down and flushes. What if his father sees? What if his father says something in that voice of his that can cut worse than a knife? Even if the boy doesn’t understand he’ll recognize the tone of voice. And his father is coming back, weaving his way across the room with a full tray in his hand, not holding on to anything because he’s got a perfect sense of balance and the sea is as flat as a cow’s backside. Carl darts a miserably apologetic smile at his father.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, as soon as his father is close enough to hear, ‘I couldn’t keep your place –’

  ‘No, of course not,’ says his father. Carl stares, but can’t hear any sarcasm, can’t see any cold disgust on his father’s face. ‘Come on, there are some more seats over here,’ continues his father, and leads the way to a nearby table where a family has just got up from its meal. There’s rubbish all over the table. Normally his father would hate it, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

  ‘Did you talk to them?’ he asks Carl, with a little backward nod of his head towards the table Carl has just left.

  ‘No, I – they weren’t speaking English.’

  ‘Norwegians,’ says his father confidently. ‘But I don’t suppose they were in the mood for conversation.’

  Carl stares at his father, bewildered. Then there is a click in his mind like something loading on to a computer screen.

  ‘Oh,’ he breathes, ‘it’s them.’

  ‘Yes, of course. What did you think?’

  ‘I don’t know, I –’

  ‘I just hope the ferry company’s given them a free lunch, that’s all,’ says his father.

  ‘But it might not have been – I mean, we don’t know whose fault it was,’ says Carl.

  ‘Sail takes priority over steam,’ says his father, stubbing Carl out. But something’s got into Carl. He opens his mouth again.

  ‘That boy,’ he says, ‘that boy was crying.’

  He follows his father’s glance at the man, the boy. They are sitting still, close together, weary, their meal tickets crumpled on the table in front of them. Then the man reaches forward and touches, very lightly, his son’s hand.

  ‘Reaction,’ says Carl’s father, ‘a perfectly natural reaction once danger’s over. They were sailing back from England – managing perfectly well till our bloody ferry went across their bows.’

  Across their bows, thinks Carl. What does it mean? He feels his shoulders bow down too, crushed by the phrase, by the cliff of what his father knows and he does not. The engine of his father’s scorn churns and cuts into him. Then a small, treacherous thought slips into Carl’s mind. He looks across at the father and son at the other table. He’s seen something his father hasn’t seen. The boy’s sliding tears, the father’s face bent down to his. That language the man was murmuring. Carl’s father speaks a bit of Norwegian, like he speaks a b
it of everything. But does he really know what it means, that language the Norwegian father spoke to his son?

  A Question of Latitude

  It’s the twelfth of May. The restaurant garden’s open for the first time this season. A waiter goes round with a damp cloth, wiping dust and cobwebs off the white plastic chairs before customers sit down. Farther down, in the more expensive section of the garden where people eat full meals, there are pine chairs and tables, and heavy tablecloths. People here are not yet ready to pay good money for peasant food and boldly checked table cloths. They are only first- or second-generation city-dwellers, and they do not go to a restaurant in order to experience simple, authentic food. They want dishes with rich names echoing the richness of the sauces. They want desserts to make them marvel at the fantastic, throwaway skill of the confectioner. They want release from a sensible diet which follows the advice given in government leaflets and health clinic posters. HEART DISEASE! TOGETHER WE’LL BEAT IT! No, they come to a place like this in order to tell each other: Go on, be a devil! Spoil yourself! It’s not as if we come here every day!

  After all, what on earth’s the point of coming out in order to eat something you could just as well make for yourself at home? Celebrations, anniversaries, silver weddings. It’s something to have stayed in one piece, never mind married. And the winter’s over. An itchy, prickly sense of spring spreads across the pale pinewood and the pale arms, unmarked by tan or freckles, which lie gratefully in the sun’s first warmth. The trees move in the light wind, potent with buds which look as sore and protuberant as the breasts of a twelve-year-old girl. They grow up so quickly these days, though their grandmothers can remember being sixteen before they had their first periods. Wasn’t there a survey somewhere which showed that Norwegian girls reached the menarche later than anyone else in the world? Isn’t that just like the Norwegians! But perhaps the same applies here. It’s a question of latitude, perhaps?

  The girls at the table have stripped off their jackets and their cotton sweaters. Ulli has rolled her jeans up to her knees, and Birgit has scooped up the two tails of her pink cotton shirt and tied them under her breasts. The fine-grained white skin of her stomach glistens in the sun, and there’s a dense pocket of shadow round her navel. There’s also a young man at the next table, the son of the couple who are celebrating their silver wedding anniversary. Their only son, it seems, halfway through his military service, his neck tender from shaving and dinted by his stiff collar. His hair kinks at the back, though it’s as short as possible, and his ears are scrupulously clean. This is just as well, because you can see straight into them. His ears stick out a little and the sunlight makes them reddish and translucent. There’s a fine stubble-fuzz on his upper lip, over his neat and prudent mouth. But his cheeks give him away. He flushes as Birgit catches him staring at her navel. But it’s no good: even though he’s shy and it makes him ridiculous and he is sure that everyone in the restaurant must have noticed what a fool he’s making of himself, he can’t help glancing back, just a look, then another look, to where the whole of Birgit’s body rises slightly and warmly with each breath, and the gently curving mound of her stomach rises too so that the glisten of the sun shifts slightly, goes back, shifts again … The boy gazes, hypnotized, and then he jumps as his mother speaks to him, and blushes again. He drags himself round in his chair so that he can’t see Birgit any more, and he picks up his pastry fork to bisect the layers of puff-pastry and ice-cream and glazed apricot which are puddling on his plate. His mother is the only one watching him. Her lips move, unconsciously, as her son swallows his food. He looks up at her, nodding through the mouthfuls of pastry: It’s good, it’s really good! And I still love sweet things, just like I always used to …

  In a moment she’ll push her own plate with its half-eaten pudding over to him. Go on, if you don’t have it it’ll just be wasted. And they’ll think we didn’t enjoy our meal. Go on.

  She’s trying to lose weight. The waiters will think that they didn’t enjoy the meal, she thinks. She’s a woman who always thanks waiters and tells them that everything was delicious, not knowing how they skim the uneaten food into the bins without even glancing at it. It’s not really food any more, just stuff which has done its job of being bought and sold. And the pretty waterlily paper napkins go the same way. It’s not that expensive here, after all. You get what you pay for, and in this case you haven’t paid for linen napkins, or even cotton ones.

  She doesn’t need to lose weight. When she takes off her pale fussy jacket her arms are solid and smooth. The flesh of her upper arms doesn’t wobble, and there is no overhang of fat at the elbow. Her complexion is pale, but clear, the kind of skin which only ever warms to a faint tan. The big solid arms rest calmly against her sides. No watch, no bracelets. She has rings, of course: two on the marriage hand, one on the other, a small opal on her little finger. As she pushes the pudding across to her son the milky opal suddenly spills fire. But she doesn’t even glance at it.

  ‘Eat up.’

  Ulli and her friends are finished with their omelettes and light beer. Ulli is eating slivers of fennel out of her side-salad. When she breathes in, the air tastes of aniseed. They’ll have to spend some more money soon if they want to stay on here, taking up two tables on the sunny deck the restaurant has had built over the river bank. You can look down as if you’re a diver choosing your moment to plunge. The river’s still swollen with melted ice and water coming off the hills. You would drown in it, but it looks so beautiful with its yellowness and its sucking current masked by the surface dazzle on the water.

  They put their remaining money in the centre of the table and there’s enough for coffee. Perhaps even a couple of cakes? Ulli counts the money, pushing the coins to one side. Yes, they can manage cakes too. Things are tight at the moment. For some of them the tightness is a pleasurable and precarious game, a game they can rest from in the sudden luxury of a cheque from home or a renegotiated student loan. For others it’s not so amusing. Maria has her new bra stolen from the communal laundry-room in the block of flats where she lives. When Ulli calls round to fetch her for a swim later that morning she finds her sodden and convulsive with angry tears, writing out a notice in thick felt-tip: TO THE THIEF WHO HAS ABUSED OUR TRUST AND STOLEN WASHING FROM OUR LAUNDRY-ROOM …

  Ulli puts her arms round Maria’s shoulders as she crouches over her sign, but Maria clenches her shoulder muscles, shrugging Ulli off.

  ‘Leave me alone, Ulli!’

  ‘OK. D’you want me to get some Sellotape or something, to stick it up with?’

  ‘No. I don’t! I’ll do it my own way! You don’t understand any of it – it’s different for you.’

  ‘Why’s it different for me?’

  ‘Oh, it just is. You’re all right, aren’t you? You’ll always be all right. I don’t suppose you’re even wearing a bra, are you? You don’t need to, anyway. Nothing really affects you, does it? You just smile and put it out of your mind. And you cut people out of your life the same way, when you’ve finished with them. Oh, I’m not blaming you. It’s just the way you are, you can’t help it.’

  The way you are. Ulli leans back against the wall-hung ironing board. The way you are. Things are easy for you. I know it’s an old-fashioned word, but you don’t seem to know what conscience is. Doesn’t anything feel wrong to you? Ulli has heard all this before, but not for years. Not since she left school, not from Maria, not from her friends. Maria’s face is patched with crying, and she is twisting a small dry cloth in her hand, one of those cloths you damp and lay over a fine blouse when you’re ironing it. Her eyes glow with the joy of telling Ulli, at last, her place in the world. You’ll never know all the ways in which you have brought happiness to others, thinks Ulli. Who said that? It must have been years ago. A teacher perhaps, lecturing the class on personal relationships. Well, Ulli has certainly brought Maria happiness. She looks as warm and played out as if she has just had an orgasm. But she’s going to spoil it for herself. Already she’s r
egretting her moment of plain speaking, reckoning up the damage it’s done.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ulli, I was upset …’

  ‘Yes. I know you were. Never mind.’

  Ulli has taken up the pen Maria’s dropped, and she starts to doodle on the sign. Two little figures: one small, frantic and bra-less, the other running with the bra dangling from her hands and her breasts jouncing, unsupported.

  ‘It’ll need a good caption,’ Ulli mutters, drawing in more small observant figures peeping around Maria’s furious lettering. She’ll have to think about what Maria’s just said. She can’t put it out of her mind. Maria’s got such an entirely different way of looking at ‘Ulli’ that it feels as if she’s done something physically painful, like wrestling Ulli’s skin until it’s inside-out ‘Ulli’. Now Ulli’s got to look at the inside of her own skin, which is not soft and smooth and glowing with spring colour. It’s a bloody dark purple, the reverse of everything she wants to believe about herself. It’s strange and frightening, the way her features are gummed on to the bone, when you look from the inside. And her skull’s there all the time, with a grin on it which will wait for forty or fifty years to show itself if it has to. When Ulli looked at a skull in the biology lab she thought of it as something which other people have when they die. She runs a finger along her jawbone. You can cry, but your skull’s laughing.

  She’s got to get out of this laundry-room with its smell of fabric conditioner, scorched cloth and sweat. She leaves Maria calmly pinning up her notice, standing back to check that it’s straight before she puts on the last piece of Sellotape. In order not to think of Maria and her own skull, Ulli thinks of money. Of course Maria’s right. Ulli is broke, but not broke broke. There won’t be any cheques coming from her parents, and she’s extended her loan as far as it can go, but something good has turned up. She has the promise of a well-paid job from June to September, working for the city’s tourist information centre. A brilliant job, really; she won’t be stuck in an office all summer long, she’ll be out and about, though admittedly out and about in the same places with which she’s already familiar to the point of not even seeing them any more. She will be paid a bonus for each foreign language she can offer. She has been reading up on Sibelius, on the shipping trade with Sweden, on the social history of West Finland. There will be a test; guides are expected to be discreetly knowledgeable, to be able to field questions without boring or irritating tourists with displays of unwanted erudition.