Love of Fat Men

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘I won’t burn.’ She reaches out and hooks one of his fingers with hers. This is how she likes to touch him. She smiles a deliberately childish smile.

  The couple next door start to clear up. They pack everything very carefully into a white and blue insulated bag, and then the wife lumbers to her feet while the husband flattens their hissing airbeds and telescopes the parasol. She watches him with a smile. A nice smile. The smile is for Edward too, as if he were part of it, the packing and unpacking and eating and clearing away. But the smile misses Josephine whose eyes are shut and whose fine-grained skin gleams over the delicate structure of her shoulder-blades.

  There is a bit of sausage left. The woman pauses in her packing. It is not worth wrapping in the waxed paper and taking home. But good food – a crime to waste it. She has never been able to bear wasting food, from a child. She looks at Edward, sees him looking back. Her experienced eyes take him in. A businessman in holiday clothes, solidly built with a roll of flesh around the stomach. His suits would hide it, but those Chinos don’t give a man a chance. They are clothes for kids with empty bodies. She glances at Josephine’s long, narrow back, sheathed in black ruching. Josephine’s thighs are as white as paper. Unhealthy. The woman smiles at Edward, removes two slices of rye bread from another waxed packet, and carefully sandwiches the sausage between them.

  ‘Bitte,’ she says to Edward, proffering it. He takes it, smiles, nods his thanks. Josephine has turned slightly so that her cheek is pressed against the satiny surface of the sunbathing deck. She is watching him out of one half-shut eye, her fastidious face taut. Edward opens his mouth wide. He bites.

  Smell of Horses

  The thick yellow light of a mid-July afternoon wobbles through the bathroom fanlight. It spreads and breaks into golden lozenges on the bare skin of the six women in the bathroom.

  This room hasn’t always been a bathroom. The big, square, late-nineteenth-century house belongs to Birgit’s great-aunt, who went into a Lutheran Home in the city a couple of years ago, and said she’d leave the house to Birgit in her will. But Birgit insists to all her friends that she doesn’t want it. Whatever happens, she won’t live in it. Ulli doesn’t know whether she says this to her aunt when she goes to visit her in her packed hot room in the Home, or whether she only says it to the women friends she asks out there for summer weekends. Birgit is twenty-four now, a student of philosophy, a city girl who has cut her long white hair short and crisp and close to her scalp. This little Swedish-speaking town on the west coast, with its neat-framed church and its little alleys which duck between the houses, is as familiar and stale to Birgit as the smell of her own past. She has chopped off this past as she has chopped off her hair. It’s the past of a good girl with long plaits who studied hard and was her aunt’s favourite. A girl who sat reading by the stove while autumn winds funnelled and whined past the house.

  The whorled pattern of the stove tiles has burnt into Birgit’s finger-ends through hours of boredom, hours of listening to stories and being trotted out to the old ladies who visited for coffee and cakes and stayed all afternoon without ever taking off their hats. When Birgit touches people, she cannot help leaving that print on them, the print of long, intimate bourgeois gatherings where the pastries are never quite as light as they were in the old days. But Birgit is twenty-four now, a student of philosophy and as hopeful as an exorcist.

  The light is liquid. You could smear it like golden slime. There are six women in one bathroom. The bathroom used to be a bedroom. There’s still a mahogany picture-rail, a soft, flowered carpet and a chaise-longue covered in moss-green velvet, picked and rubbed. The bath stands a metre or so out from the wall, on its own green-bronze claw feet. The big taps splay out water so fast that the bath fills in less than a minute.

  The bath is full of water. It came rushing out of the taps colourless, but now it sways and waits and it’s green, the colour of the new growth on a spruce. Ulli has been walking down by the shore, on the swampy, reedy, straggling outskirts of town where there are two peeling white houses like eyes staring off into nowhere. Her legs are scratched by the reeds and streaked with mud. She stands by the basin and flannels them down, pretending to herself that she is flannelling the legs of a horse. She is pleased with her legs. They are firm with exercise, and they have a tan which is neither too dark nor peeling. She had them waxed in a salon in the city a couple of weeks ago, so they are smooth and shiny. Mud fans out in the washbasin, and she pulls the plug, leaving a watermark of grime. Now she’s clean enough to go in the bath.

  Of the six women, four are naked. Birgit is shaving her underarm hair with a clumsy steel razor she’s found in the cabinet. She’s put in a new blade out of a packet wrapped in waxed paper, and there you are – the thing may look Victorian, but it still works. Sirkka refuses to look at it. She says it sets her teeth on edge. She cannot bear to see the bloody, light-red nicks which it makes on Birgit’s white armpit. Then there is Ulli, now moving away from the wash-basin, stepping out of her khaki shorts and pulling her halter-neck top over her head. The top is butter-yellow, and the nicest thing she has to wear this summer. There are Sirkka, and Birgit’s cousin Edith. Sirkka is perched on the broad sill of the bath, hunched forward, her heavy round breasts dipping and swinging between her gesturing arms as she talks to Edith, who is seated on the big old-fashioned lavatory. This lavatory has a vast bowl of crazed ancient enamel, and a wide dark mahogany seat which matches the picture-rail and the shelf above the bath, and strains your thighs when you sit down on it.

  Edith’s thighs are wide apart, and she holds the front of the lavatory seat like the pommel of a saddle. This is her way of relaxing, she says. If she tenses one set of muscles, another will loosen. Edith has just announced to the roomful of women that she is dying for a crap and she hopes nobody minds. Nobody answers specifically, but there is a general murmur which suggests that nobody does. Besides, any crap which comes out of Edith’s firm slender body will surely be as inoffensive as a child’s.

  Two other young women, childhood friends of Birgit, are setting out cards for Patience on the flowery carpet-meadow. They are dressed in cut-off jeans and shirts. They really have been out riding, and they smell strongly of the sweat of the horses, and of their own sunbaked hair. It’s Ulli’s turn for the bath first, and then they’ll go in.

  Ulli kicks her pants under the bath. She doesn’t wear a bra with this particular sun top, but because she’s been sunbathing in her bikini for weeks she can’t get rid of that bra-and-pants look, which is printed on her in white. She doesn’t like it. By the end of each summer she aims to be smooth and bare, all of a piece, all of one colour. Birgit has told her that it’s fine to sunbathe naked on her great-aunt’s back porch, which is secluded and ringed with lilac and silver birch, and so Ulli plans to take out a blanket and sleep there in the late afternoon sun, once she has had her bath. One of the other women will rub her with sun oil. There’s a bookcase full of late Victorian and early Edwardian Swedish novels which Ulli has never read. Or perhaps she’ll drift through People in a Summer Night yet again …?

  They’ll eat late, about nine. Nothing fancy, just a cold table, with pickled herring and smoked meat and potato salad with dill. Edith can make stars and tulips out of tomatoes. Sirkka swears by the natural yoghurt which she makes fresh every day. It’s sharp and acid, but all the women feel sure it’s doing them good. Sirkka’s had problems with thrush for years, but not a moment’s trouble since she started making her own yoghurt. She eats it neat, without so much as a pucker of the lips, but the others crush in raspberries and bilberries and whortleberries, and then swirl clear honey over the fruit.

  They’ll eat and drink until their heads buzz and then they’ll stagger about saving the big moths that fly in through the open windows to char themselves on the lamps. Ulli will write her diary in enormous sloping letters which Birgit can read over her shoulder. A little later Edith will sing and Sirkka will hum along in her husky, cracked little voice which would s
ound terrible on its own but weaves in quite sweetly with Edith’s. Ulli will play easy pieces on the walnut piano which Birgit still hasn’t bothered to get tuned, because she’s not going to live here, she’s never going to live here. This is just summer life, she says. She likes to share it with her friends, with Ulli, with Sirkka and Edith, with the little girls she ran with and screamed with and fell in love with when she was a child. But Birgit doesn’t see that each filament of summer life is binding her in its own way, pinning her down as she sprawls so carelessly and nakedly in the grass of the backyard, or in the green swaying bathwater, or on the chaise-longue as she half-dries herself and then lets the remaining droplets evaporate slowly from the long blank canvas of her skin.

  Ulli slides down in the water. She has hooked her long plait over the back of the bath, and it tugs the hairs at the nape of her neck. A sharp sensation, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, marries itself to the lukewarm lipping of the water at her breasts. One afternoon Birgit stood behind Ulli the whole time she was having her bath, and held Ulli’s plait free of the water. There was no tug, no sharpness, no discomfort. But Ulli isn’t going to let her do it again. It isn’t fair to Birgit. It’s not as if, at the end of each long slow cooling evening, Ulli is the one who goes over to Birgit and hauls her to her feet, losing balance a little so that both women stumble and sway and have to put their arms around each other to get a grip on each other’s weight. It isn’t as if Ulli does that for Birgit, or tends her when she drinks too much and cries and then says the next day that it’s nothing, it’s just the stress of her course. There are too many tests in Philosophy, Birgit says.

  Ulli loves to stroke Birgit’s soft hedgehoggy head, newly barbered: barbarous, to the spirit of her great-aunt who has overseen so many night plaitings.

  Ulli shifts her body from side to side in the bath and the water rocks up one side, then up the other. She can see right up the greenish inside of the wide-throated taps, which are not very well cleaned under the régime of Birgit and her friends. This makes Ulli think of looking up the insides of bodies. Kids, best friends, frenziedly devoted, picking one another’s noses, rolling earwax and swallowing it.

  She raises one leg out of the water. The skin turns silver in a bar of afternoon sun. Ulli balances on one elbow and runs a finger down the inside of one calf, wiping off water and sheen. Now Sirkka climbs up on the edge of the bath to open the fanlight and let out the smell of Edith’s crap, which after all smells much the same as any other human adult’s. As she stretches up Ulli receives a dizzying vision of her long full-fleshed tensed leg going away and away into the light like a ladder to heaven. The muscles in Sirkka’s buttocks flex and gleam as she undoes the catch and shoves the sticking, corky window-frame open. Edith turns from wiping her backside and smiles up as at a benediction. Ulli closes her eyes.

  Now she cannot tell where she is. The water is at exactly the temperature of her blood. She lowers her head until her ears are underwater and hears the bath boom and thud like her own circulation. She lets her body slop from side to side. She pretends she is a seal clambering the steeply sloping concrete sides of its zoo pool, bruising its wet black nose. She slips back into the bath, burying herself in the water. Only the twang of her plait at the nape of her neck keeps her the right way up. Then she rolls right over and crouches on all fours and ducks her face under the water and opens her eyes so she can see shifting squares of sunlight rove over white enamel. Her eyes sting and she comes up.

  The two friends-from-childhood have finished their Patience and are looking over the edge of the bath and wondering aloud how long Ulli is going to be playing about in there? Isn’t she going to wash herself and come out?

  ‘In a minute,’ says Ulli.

  They pass her a bar of Birgit’s expensive transparent soap and Ulli soaps her belly and her pubic hair then sinks down under water again. Dabs of soap foam float off across the water surface. Ulli’s eyes are level with the water and she watches the foam drift away from her like summer clouds moving springily towards a horizon: clouds which never turn to rain. She hooks her toes round the taps and then shoves off so the whole soaked arc of her body shivers through the bathwater one last time, and a fat wave flops over the back of the bath and on to flowered carpet and cut-off jeans and warm biscuity knees.

  She can smell horses.

  Cliffs

  There’s a file of murky cuttings in the local newspaper archives which shows the village as it once was. From the yellow and black fog of dots you can pick out dumpy cottages which have long since slithered into the North Sea. There’s a woman standing beside one of them, stout and grim-faced. She’d lived on the edge of a cliff with warnings in her ears for so long that when it came, that lugubrious parting rumble of earth from water, she had her black-clad Bible to hand and simply began to read the text she had already chosen.

  But times change. People who live in Marring now hold as hard to the notion that they are entitled to long life and fruitful retirement as Mary Anne Walters did to the turning leaves of her Bible while salt water washed it to pulp. They pay their council tax and expect the services of geologists, climatologists, sea-defence experts and Dutch marine engineers. And all for one village, mutter their inland neighbours. One little village whose inhabitants wouldn’t give the snot out of their noses for anyone not born and bred in the place. The vans roll in with their cargo of young chaps barking into mobile phones, come to study the latest crack in the cliff, the latest gape of subsidence in the wall of the old graveyard. The graveyard itself has long since disappeared.

  They drive home before dark. The long banks of sea fog that wait just beyond the horizon roll in most nights, like old friends warming themselves at a fireside. As it blankets the houses of Marring the fog brings with it the smells of things the sea has long since swallowed. The bitter elder and ivy smell of the lane beyond the graveyard where lovers met to fight free of their virginity. The tang of autumn leaves heaped up by Charlie Hellus’ broom, where nothing but seaweed now swans with the tide. And the smell of Mary Anne Walters’ sheepshead broth. But no outsider ever smells any of these, for they come after dark when business is over.

  The cliffs at Marring are the colour of the red in those red-and-green rubbers which erase both pencil and ink. They fall straight down to the water below, like a child’s picture of sea and cliffs, but their sheerness has nothing to do with innocence. They are wily twisted things in their hearts, those cliffs, though they look as solid as a pound of old-fashioned mints on pension day. They know how to lull those who watch them.

  Look at the cliffs up close. There are slithers of water all down their face, like rats wriggling out of holes. And the sheer raw red breaks up into a thousand particles of shifting, shuddering sandstone and mud. But no one looks this close. No one can. They walk along the spit of shore which the sea has left to them, and they throw balls for dogs whose yapping climbs the cliffs, penetrates them, eases their fabric apart by another thousandth of an inch. And the sea twitches at the foot of the cliffs, all its fur rolled into points by the bright offshore wind.

  Twenty years ago one of those hippies came. He set up in the house closest the cliffs. Gone now. Tom Marl’s house. He got called Tom, too, the hippy. Not that it was his name. Was it in an Austin he come in, one of those eleven hundreds? No. A Mini. Surely you ent forget the flowers on it. Tidy car. But he let it rust. He’d no call for cars. Said he’d done with travelling.

  It was the day after Tom Marl’s house went down. Course he knew it was coming. The hippy, Tom Two. After he put all his worldly goods by the ice-cream sign outside the Stores he went back to watch it. Nothing to watch. Only the gape of the door and behind it a space where Tom Marl’s house was due to drop.

  It was a bright morning and the sea was beaten up in foam, jumping about like it knew what was coming to it. You could see the gulls flying through the space where Tom Marl’s windows was. And Tom Two says, ‘I’ll climb that cliff.’

  He did too. With half his ho
use hanging off it. He went up to the lip of it and felt about delicate, like it was the lip of a girl. He’d took his boots off. Then he twisted his hands in a tuft of grass and his bare feet squirmed into the first of those watery holes all down the cliff face. Like walking in cheese. Yes. But there were twenty gathered down on the shore by then and they say he danced down. They watched him. Half his house hung up above and the rest of it the sea was picking apart like a woman at a jumble sale. Some bits he lost his footing and slid, but each time the cliff caught him. Looked like it didn’t want to throw him off. He was raw red when he got down, and he ducked right into the water to wash himself.

  He came back the way we did. Along the shore and up the steppings. The rest of his house hung on. How many months was it? Then we had a storm and it walked into the sea. Never seen the cliff so red as it was the next morning, where it’d been sliced off. You’d a thought it was still shivering. Like when a butcher cuts the meat through so clean it doesn’t know it’s felt the knife.

  Tom Two was staring at it. ‘Missing your house?’ some fool asks him.

  ‘My climb’s gone,’ says Tom Two, staring at it. He missed that climb he’d done more’n he missed the house. And he was staring and working out how he’d climb that new cliff that was as wet and shiny as redcurrant jelly.

  He did. He let it dry out and four days later he was on it. He stuck halfway down but he thought his way off of the ledge while we watched him. Couldn’t get up so it was down or nothing. There was babble about holding out a blanket for him, like fluffing up cotton wool under a man falling from an aeroplane. He came down. No foothold or handhold so he dug himself into the cliff where it was softest, making up to it so it’d let him pass over it. Never seen such a thing. It was getting misty and the sun dropped as we stood, little red ball hopping down the sky till it sunk in the water. What if it gets dark, they said. What if he can’t see? Darker it was the better he liked it. There’s things you can’t do in daylight.