Love of Fat Men

by Helen Dunmore

  Ulli wonders if she will be able to walk across this city and ignore the signs and contours of her own map, her own landscape. Restaurants where she has spent night after night drinking and eating a minimal, required, quantity of food. Street corners where rows have blazed out and she’s been left to walk home alone, and other street corners where she has embraced, half-naked, with no matter whom in the middle of a summer night. The towpath in midwinter. The kiosk where she buys liquorice and apple doughnuts and cigarettes, and Vichy water for night visitors. It’s a map of lies and secrets. Its contours are the contours of hips and breasts, thighs and genitals. It’s a map crumpled with sleep and lack of sleep: sleep in the middle of the day after a long night; white nights when you haven’t slept at all and at four in the morning you get up and walk down quiet sunlit streets where all the shadows are in the wrong places. There are things on her map which don’t exist. Things she’s wanted to believe: who loves whom, who loves Ulli. Who wants to phone her, but has lost her number. Who is tied up in the same sweet bundle of memories with her, no matter where they are. These are things she’s mapped her life round for months. Some streets are hot with the first brush of a hand against a hand. There are houses where she’s slept for a night or for two nights. Bars which aren’t her own bars, where somebody’s taken her for breakfast. Changing-rooms where she and Birgit and Edith have stripped off their clothes and dressed up as housewives, as cabaret dancers, as teenage disco addicts, as old ladies who like to keep their knees warm. In her map there are clues she hasn’t picked up, symbols she’s misinterpreted, and words whose meaning she hasn’t bothered to check in the dictionary. She remembers a long argument over the word rehabilitation in a bar near the Sibeliusmuseum. Re-hab-il-it-ation. I have rehabilitated myself, I shall rehabilitate myself.

  Ulli will rehabilitate herself, in her dark blue uniform with pale blue accents, and a broad ribbon around her plait. She will earn money, too. Ulli will be firmly, discreetly knowledgeable. She will blush, sometimes, to the amusement of businessmen who have got daughters of their own back home. It’s a gift she’s never lost. She’ll look like a cross between a nurse and an airline hostess. Moderately sexy, and moderately reassuring. She hopes there will be French and German tourists, so that she will be able to put to good use the guide’s idioms which she has acquired in these languages. And she’ll earn her bonuses.

  But it’s one thing to show people around your country; even your city. It’s another to show them round your life. They will not want to visit the ‘old’ quarter where Ulli lives. It is not very picturesque; besides, it is cluttered with drunks who may shout at them, and gypsies and old ladies who want to bend their ear for half an hour at a time. And the pollution from the dual carriageway is awful. Ulli will have two weeks’ holiday in the middle, that’s agreed. Tourist Information does not want its guides to be white-faced, lank-haired and exhausted. They must breathe out the spirit of lakes and forests. Ulli is going to spend a weekend with her friend Edith, who is working on the Helsinki–Tallinn ferries all summer. Ulli can share Edith’s cabin – she’s cleared it with the ferry company. Ulli is going to do nothing but go backwards and forwards across the Baltic, lying on Edith’s bed and reading Dante’s Inferno, on which she must write a 10,000 word dissertation in the autumn. Ulli’s Italian is terrible, but she is counting on a summer of constant reading. She will not even get off the boat at Tallinn. Edith, in her dark grey uniform, will throw herself down beside Ulli, kicking off the shoes that bind her hot, tender feet, and she’ll mispronounce the words as Ulli runs her finger down the text. They’ll read the words together, translating them into broken clumps of language, muttering names. Edith will get bored.

  Edith’s strongly marked lips will be pressed together lightly and dreamily, a sure sign that she’s bored stiff. But on the other hand being bored has never bothered Edith. As far as she’s concerned her friends have the right to bore her. ‘You never know, you may learn something useful,’ she says, when people read poems to her in Italian or explain about rebuilding a vintage motor bike from scratch. Besides, Edith can slide back into herself, where no one else comes.

  No matter how weak her Italian, Ulli will get to know the Inferno like the palm of her hand. Its map, its language, its assumptions. It’ll knit up with the flat rocking of the brackish waters of the Baltic, with Edith’s breath on her arm, with the soft pressure of Edith’s warm side, with the ice at the bottom of the world. Really, Ulli knows this country already, before she even begins to read. She has been there.

  She’ll read a footnote which asks why Dante chose to expose a man he loved and respected as a sodomite. How did Dante decide to say that this person or that was in his Inferno? Why did he select this figure or that for such shame? These are the questions the commentator asks. Ulli will be surprised at the questions. Of course Dante had to say who was in Hell. After all he had a responsibility as an artist to represent the truth. He had met them there, hadn’t he, those murderers and adulterers and liars who seem so familiar somehow, as if they too are living somewhere on the inside of our own skins. How could he have pretended otherwise? Only if he was a liar …

  Ulli will catch herself thinking this. She’ll catch herself spreading out Dante’s map of the Inferno and studying it like a road-map, clearly marked with short cuts, diversions and all. She’ll stop reading and tell Edith, and they’ll both laugh at the way Ulli’s mind works. Edith will say that she thinks Ulli should have got rid of her medieval imagination by now. All that conditioning! Ulli will have to watch herself if she’s going to outwit the inner policeman. God knows she, Edith, has done her best to help Ulli, Edith will say, folding her hands piously. And it’s true that the idea of Edith having any sort of inner policeman is far-fetched.

  ‘Let’s have a drink. I only get an hour’s break now.’

  Edith will smile and drink white rum, and close her eyes. But Ulli will read on, tasting Georgian wine, thumbing the inside of Edith’s wrist. It’s the map of her own country, her native land, her latitude. Perhaps she’ll get work as a guide.

  Your Body Next to Mine

  The water runs softly down her body and into the grass. It is late afternoon but warm, so warm that you don’t need to towel yourself after swimming. The water crawls away over your skin like a thousand ladybirds. Josephine lies flat on one of the planked sunbathing decks, her face tucked into the safe personal square her arms have made. Beneath her the wood is worn to a silvery bloom, and there are no splinters. They have all been carried away long ago, in the flesh of other sunbathers.

  There is flesh everywhere. Plenty of breasts, proud and substantial and with the slight bluntness at their tips which may be to do with their being Austrian. Or it may not. Josephine doesn’t usually see so many breasts, or have so little to think about. Her own white breasts with their bluish veining are tucked inside a black ruched swimsuit and as far as Josephine is concerned they will be staying there. Breasts are all very well when they are so brown, so polished by eyes that they look more like accessories than flesh and blood. But her own in the changing-room mirror are naked as milk.

  Next to Josephine a couple squats under a parasol. Each has an airbed. They have inflatable pillows which they wedge under the napes of their necks while they turn their oily faces very slowly side to side under the yellow strokes of the sun. They are in their early sixties, and do not seem to care how much they eat or how big they grow. Since eleven o’clock they have eaten salami in seeded white bread with tiny pickled cucumbers, thin slices of buttercake which they dip into a glass jar of fruit preserves, a basket of white peaches and a flask of coffee. Nothing has been too much trouble. The preserved fruit looms goldenly inside its glass like a bottled foetus in a jar. The husband spears a whole peach, brings it up dripping. They have wine too. They lean off the deck and fish for the bottle where it is wedged upright in boggy water. A good idea, thinks Josephine.

  As the day goes on the water gets warmer and warmer, sucking at Josephine’s fee
t like a dog’s tonguey kiss whenever she has to clamber down to rinse off sweat and Factor 25 suncream in the lake. The couple watch her attentively as she walks over the boggy ground, back to the sunbathing deck, her body blazing white in the sun. Chaste, black-costumed Josephine looks indecently pale next to all these people clothed in their tans. Her small soft body is meekly downcast, but it makes a number of the stubble-headed fathers of families pause in their tasks of hurling small sons into deep water, or semaphoring at daughters who are paddling inflatable boats too far out into the lake.

  There is no wind. Not even a breeze. Josephine turns left and slits her eyes. The white upper slopes of the Wilder Kaiser mountains crinkle. If she moves a finger they will disappear. Up there it has snowed, is snowing, will always snow. The little backwaters of the lake are full of carp. No one fishes. Instead they stand in the middle of wooden bridges, staring down at the peat smog where the fish circle. Bridges, planks and walkways knit together this area devoted to unsoiled nature. Josephine has seen hundreds of carp and has stopped looking at them. Once she watched a parachutist land on firmer ground on the other side of the birch trees, and once a water-snake swam deep under a family of ducks. No one else seemed to see it. She pictures herself brushing the dusky bellies of carp, her feet twined on weed. As she swims perhaps she will see the narrow head of a snake part the waters and sail alongside her, a long rippling V growing behind it.

  ‘Bitte.’

  The woman next-door – yes, it’s just as if they are each in their own suburban garden – offers Josephine a small silver fork on which a segment of pineapple drips syrup. She nods encouragement. Go on, have some! It won’t kill you! Skinny as you are.

  Won’t it? Josephine can’t bear, simply can’t bear anybody feeding her. Once a really quite nice man tried to drop grapes into her mouth one by one. He must have seen it on a film. At first she protested laughingly. She’d never found it easy to get angry when she was naked. But he kept on, his big mouth grinning above her. Suddenly she saw all his teeth. One of the grapes burst on the pillow. She was going to roll on it if she wasn’t careful.

  ‘No,’ she said, trying to keep her tone light, ‘no, no, I really don’t want any.’ But as soon as she opened her mouth he crammed in a grape and tried to follow it with his tongue. Gagging, she sprang bolt upright, clutched the sheet round her breasts and spat out ‘Don’t you ever listen, idiot!’ along with the crushed grape. Next thing he was hopping about the bedroom floor, stamping into his underpants with his back to her. No, Josephine can’t bear being fed.

  The pineapple smells of alcohol. The little silver fork winks in Josephine’s face. ‘Bitte schön. You don’t eat anything,’ says the woman. Her husband grins approvingly, his lips rolling back from a wide ring of teeth.

  ‘Oh. Nein. Nein danke,’ says Josephine. Is that right? But the woman waves the little silver fork encouragingly, as if she were trying to catch a fish.

  ‘Oh, OK,’ says Josephine. It will be too awkward, stuck bang next to these two for the rest of the day, perhaps for days to come. She’s noticed how everybody seeks out the same square feet of planking each morning. A rejected pineapple piece might grow to the size of the Wilder Kaiser mountains by the end of the week. ‘I mean, danke.’

  She smiles, opens her lips, her teeth, nibbles the cube of succulent pineapple in between them until it is hidden and then shades her smiling eyes as if the late low sun over the water is dazzling them. She turns sideways, reaching for her sunglasses, and in the second when her face is averted from the couple she spits the cube into her other hand. Sunglasses on, hand folded at her side, she turns back to the woman. This time there is a cherry on the spear of the fork. The smile is broader now, complicit with the secret greed in Josephine’s slender body. The pantomime of refusal and acceptance must be gone through again. But this time Josephine is wearing her sunglasses, so she has to reach for something else. A quick sniff, the back of a hand to her nose, the fumbling for a tissue. She has palmed the cherry.

  The woman is as relentless as a fruit machine. Does she know what Josephine is doing? No, that’s not possible. She beams at her husband with transparent glee as she feeds the foreign woman with cherry, apricot, grape, kiwi slice. The gritty slither of kiwi nearly defeats Josephine, but a pretended adjustment of her swimsuit strap takes care of it.

  Suddenly there is no more fruit. Smiling, benevolent, the couple retreat behind their magazines. They have done their best with Josephine. Some people need to learn to enjoy themselves.

  Josephine lies still, fruit sludge sticky in her left hand which dangles loosely, at ease, along the silvery-pale boarding. A shadow stops above her.

  ‘You took your time,’ she says.

  ‘The agency was shut till ten-thirty. If I hadn’t stayed we might not have got reservations. You were all right, weren’t you?’

  But he scans her quickly. The possibility of her not being all right is another shadow, deeper than his own.

  ‘I quite liked the walk here,’ says Josephine.

  ‘Did you?’ he asks eagerly, and looks around at the view as if to see what she has seen. Lake, mountains, the white combing wake of water-skiers, the woman who has just climbed out of the lake with a baby twin on each hip. Now she steps with magisterial purpose towards the shower. She presses the cold-water button with her elbow. He notices that she doesn’t shut her eyes although long needles of shower-water are running all over her face. She hunkers down, one twin clamped between her knees, the other in her hands. Her costume is exactly the same colour as her tan. Another fifty yards, distance, and she would look naked.

  Josephine lies face down on the boards, her white legs trailing. The light is turning yellow. Edward looks along the spongy, impossibly green grass of the lakeside and sees what looks like quite a nice tea place. This is the best time of day, when you come out after the last swim. You shower, and then comb back your wet hair, squinting at yourself in a tiny crazed mirror. A pee feels like the final act of cleansing. Your sweatshirt is soft and grateful on your arms, which have begun to feel a chill. And when you walk out your feet slap on warm pine boards. But he’s only just got here. He hasn’t swum once this holiday. Josephine has her chin on her hands and is looking at him. ‘Your whole day wasted,’ she says.

  ‘Not wasted. I did see something of Innsbruck. And I found a nice place for lunch, we ought to go there. You’d love Innsbruck.’

  But they won’t, she knows. She tries to imagine it. Walk from the hotel to the station. Train. People in their compartment. Traffic, crowds. An escalator at the very least, possibly a lift.

  ‘All the same, a whole day out of your holiday,’ murmurs Josephine.

  It’s late. A file of laden homegoers crosses the little wooden bridge. Children sleep against their fathers’ necks, dazed with sun and water. Birches drip thicker and thicker shadow. And the couple next to her – next to them – have got out another flask. This time it is tea. The husband pours rum into his tea from a tiny bottle.

  ‘Tee mit Citron oder mit Rhum?’ he asks his wife, as courteously as a waiter in an expensive hotel. Yes, there are lemon wedges too, wrapped in a plastic bag. But the wife nods towards the rum. After all it’s a holiday, why not? Edward smiles. He would have the rum too. He remembers when Josephine started to drink hot water with a slice of lemon in it as soon as she woke up. It set his teeth on edge. He was always up first and he’d brought her a cup of tea and toast with cherry jam, every morning since he could remember. Always cherry jam. But suddenly she didn’t want it any more.

  ‘They haven’t stopped eating since they’ve been here,’ says Josephine rather loudly. Edward frowns. ‘Don’t be silly, they don’t understand. Why don’t you lie down? It’s perfect now. Not too hot.’

  But she’ll have been lying in the full glare of the sun all day, he knows. She would never hire a parasol, or choose a deck under the birches. He has to rub sunblock on to the parts of her body which she can’t reach, the back of her thighs, her shoulders. But
when he’s not there she manages. Josephine is as supple as a contortionist. He lies down carefully. His canvas deck shoes were new this morning, but they have a dirty rim of peat round them now. ‘The lake flooded,’ says Josephine. ‘It was three feet deep here last month. They’ve had a terrible season.’

  She always knows things like that, although he never sees her talking to anyone. But people always want to talk to her. Look at the woman next to them, giving her fruit, trying to make friends.

  Josephine’s been quietly working away since he got here and by now she’s hollowed out a little grave for the spat-out fruit in the bog by her hand. Her fingers are filthy. He watches them pat smooth the jelly-quaking ground where she has buried the pineapple and cherry and peach. She wriggles her fingers in the grass to clean them and then smiles up at him.

  ‘You managed then,’ he says.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Without me hangs in the air. He sees himself sweating round Innsbruck, noticing things for Josephine, worrying about her.

  ‘Lie down,’ she says, pulling him with her sullied fingers. His new Chinos creak as he lowers himself to lie beside her. There is the strong scent of her hair, and the vanilla smell of her shoulders.

  ‘You’ll have to be careful you don’t burn,’ he says. ‘This sun is hot.’