Love of Fat Men

by Helen Dunmore

  Each time it broke he climbed it. Oh, he was living in Charlie Rend’s place now. He’d a gone on for years climbing and digging Charlie Rend’s vegetable patch, except for Tracey Ellerton’s piano. When I say Tracey’s, it was from her gran. That girl’d never’ve had the gumption to get herself a piano. And there she was moaning in the Stores cos Ellerton’s was next to go. They’d had the surveyor round to tell them. Not that they needed telling, they could see the cracks. But Tracey wouldn’t see it. She’d rung up every piano-moving firm in the book to get em to shift it but nobody’d touch the job. And then round she goes asking the lads if they’d move it for her. But if you’ve ever heard the earth grumbling when it wants to move you’ll know the sound there was around Ellerton’s, and none of them’d go near the place. Nice piano, mind. A baby grand. Tracey couldn’t play a note.

  Tom Two was in the stores. ‘I’ll shift it for you, Tracey,’ he says. Well, there’s nothing between him and Tracey Ellerton. She’s a bit taken back, but he smiles and says, ‘Don’t you worry. I’ll get that piano out of the house for you.’ So she says right.

  He gets ropes and canvas webbing, the sort they use to pull a cow out of a ditch. The house is moaning by now. It knows what’s coming to it. ‘Don’t do it, Tom,’ says Tracey’s mum. She knows her Tracey can’t play a note. But Tom just tells her to get a hold of the rope and sling it round her trailer hook. They’ve the van backed up to Ellerton’s, as close as it’s safe.

  There was the sea below, flat as a map. Its work was done. You could see the curtains shudder in Ellerton’s windows, though there wasn’t a breath of wind. And then Tom went in. He made nothing of it, stepped through the door as if he lived there.

  Must’ve been his weight. We heard a sound like yawning.

  ‘She’s going,’ someone said. Tracey was crying. Then Tom came to the window. He pushed up the sash, called out, ‘I’ve tied the ropes. Get ready to pull,’ and then he give us the thumbs up. Then the front of the house sagged like a man falling asleep upright. The kitchen window frame dropped straight out on to the grass. We saw the door-frame tear up from the step. The bricks jiggled and the chimney-pot starts to topple, but it was still a house. And then for a moment we saw them all at once, the way you see your life before drowning. Tom Two, the television, Tracey’s magazines, the live bricks and the skin of plaster over them, the fridge, the bedclothes and that blessed piano all dancing round in the same space like they’d got to know one another for the first time. And then the house reared up and was gone. It was a long time later we heard the sound of falling.

  When they were gone we all went down to look at the cliff. It was a big slab come off that time and there she was in her new face, bright and shiny as a copper penny. You’d think she’d miss the feel of Tom Two’s climbing feet, but she can’t show it. ‘There’s things you can do in the daylight,’ Tom Two used to say, ‘and there’s things you do best by night.’ And who’s to see them, when everyone’s tucked in their houses and the fog’s up? That’s when Tom Two comes. You’ll hear him whistle like a man does when he’s glad to go to his work. And she’s waiting for him. She’s missed the feel of his climbing feet, and his hands too, the way he stretches them out and feels for the soft places in her.

  Girls on Ice

  Ulli has studied the brackish waters of the Baltic in high-school science. She remembers field trips when she had to sample and test sea water before reading up on experiments which reported the leaching of DDT from the shores of our great neighbour into the tissues of Baltic herring. Our great neighbour. That was what they’d called the Soviet Union then. Ironic, derisive. That was the way to survive. There are no national borders as far as pollution is concerned, their teacher had emphasized. They should arm themselves with information. It was their future.

  But there were so many campaigns. Campaigns against heart disease. Campaigns to solve the energy crisis. Campaigns against alcoholism. They’d been bored kids in caps with ear-flaps, trawling the water to see how many life-forms it supported, looking sideways at each other, grinning and giggling. The environment was less fashionable then. She recalls the very words, held in the glassy tissue of boredom like flies in amber. The relatively shallow, brackish waters of the Baltic freeze easily. Leaving aside, as someone had whispered, the fact that it’s fucking freezing anyway.

  Girls by the Sea

  There’s a good title for a painting. Or it could be a chapter heading for a novel perhaps? But not a good title for a poem. Girls by the sea. No, it definitely wouldn’t work for a poem. You would begin to think of something sad, something elegiac, something long-gone. Long-gone good times.

  Girls on Ice

  No better. Trying to be ambiguous. Trying too hard. Can anybody trust a story which starts by shoring itself up with double meanings? Perhaps it’s only by not having a title at all that you can hold on to the itch of the moment.

  It’s very cold. A yellow snow-laden wind is just veering round from north to north-east. Ulli and Edith are walking south-west over the ice, out to sea, and now the wind’s blowing directly behind them, butting them along, wrapping their long coats around their thighs and knees so it’s hard to walk straight. Edith clutches her fur cap down with both hands. She wears a very soft pair of fur-lined leather gloves which once belonged to her grandmother. The surface of the leather is finely crazed with age, but the gloves are supple and warm. Edith can remember holding her grandmother’s hand and stroking the fur cuffs of the gloves. Now her own fingers have replaced her grandmother’s.

  Ulli’s family does not have such things to hand on. Gloves made of the finest leather that could be bought. Made to last. And a bargain, really, if you look at it the right way: once acquired, they last through generations, just like money does.

  Ulli is all in brilliant Inca wools: a cap of layered colours, a long scarf which she’s crossed over her chest and knotted at her back, and a pair of mittens in ochre and terracotta. Her coat is a heavy secondhand wool greatcoat from a church used-goods store. She has dragged it in at the waist with a wide leather belt, and its skirts flap around her ankles. She likes the contrast between her own narrow waist and the wide swirls of heavy cloth.

  Both girls wear laced leather boots with strong crêpe soles which grip well on the ice. The boots are a neat matt black, and they fit tightly around the ankles. They look rather like Edwardian skating-boots, the kind with holes in the bottom into which you screw the blades. The girls share a detestation for parkas in muddy primaries, for built-up snow-boots and thermal caps with ear-flaps, for mittens with strings which run through the armholes, for padded vests and all-in-one zip-up suits in scarlet or turquoise. In fact they avoid all sensible, practical outdoor clothing of the type listed as suitable for high-school cross-country ski trips. Edith will spend hours washing lace in weak tea until it acquires just the right patina of age. Ulli has spent a fortune on silk thermal underwear so that she need not mummify herself in heavy jumpers all through the winter.

  Girls on Ice

  Here and there the ice surface is churned by tyres. Away to their right a yellow Saab is nosing its way out, squat as a pig truffling for fish. As far as they can see the Baltic has just stopped still as if a traffic policeman has put his hand up.

  ‘It depends on what you mean by love,’ says Edith, skirting a Sitka spruce someone has dragged out here with the idea of lighting a bonfire on the ice. But the fire must have fizzled out, or perhaps someone else put a stop to it. One branch of the spruce is charred, that’s all, and the ice is puckered up where the fire has touched it.

  Ulli pretends not to hear what Edith has said. She wishes she’d never brought up the subject. They’ve had this conversation so many times. Is Jussi getting hurt, is Edith responsible for this, is there anything anybody can do about it, ought Edith to pull out of the relationship even if it makes Jussi unhappier than ever in the short term …?

  And whatever anybody says it doesn’t make the slightest difference to Edith. That’s just no
t the way she thinks. From her point of view, everything’s fine. Jussi’s having a good time. He must be, or else why would he stay with Edith? After all Jussi’s free to do as he pleases, isn’t he? Nobody is making him stay. Certainly not Edith. People should relax more, Edith thinks. Why are they always talking about relationships? Either you are having a good time with somebody, or you aren’t. If you aren’t, talking about it doesn’t help. And besides, Jussi is so moody these days. No fun to be with at all.

  And Ulli can’t help feeling that there’s a great deal in what Edith says, even though it does make some of her friends so indignant that they stop discussing relationships with Edith and start shouting instead. There’s certainly something lacking in Edith, they say to one another afterwards.

  Edith is a fashion student. She’s set up her loom in the house where she lives with four other students and she weaves marvellously rough bright cloth out of which she cuts jackets and coats. One boutique is taking her clothes already, though their mark-up is scandalous, Edith says. In a year or two, when she’s built up her stock, Edith’s going to open a shop of her own, in partnership with two other final-year students. There’s no doubt that Edith’s going to make it. This winter she’s trying out a technique she calls scrap-weaving, and the room where she sleeps is covered with pieces of experimental cloth. She’s making up small, close-fitting jackets, like skating jackets. There’s a woman in England who breeds a particular type of long-haired sheep, and Edith’s got some wool samples from her; Jacobs, the sheep are called. Edith is making drawings of brief, smooth, long-haired skirts.

  Girls in Short Skirts

  They could walk on the ice in their short skirts, with thick tights and legwarmers and boots. Why not? They’d lose that nipped-in Russian look, that lovely balance of torso and leg, but they’d gain something nice. The sense of striding out.

  Men Looking at their Legs

  Yes, there’d be that of course. Does Ulli mind? Does Edith mind? Their legs are bold in dark green thick-ribbed tights and diamond-patterned Inca leg-warmers. Their legs are not anybody’s easy meat. They have no desire to wear glossy nylon and to strip off their frozen skin along with their tights.

  It’s nearly too cold to think. They go on squeaking over the ice, not wanting to turn back and walk into the wind. When they look back, the wind slashes at their eyelids until they brim with tears. A curd of snot freezes from Ulli’s nostrils to her lips. The shore is so far away. How far they’ve come, much farther than they meant. The town is just a little clutch of houses, humped round by low hills. Ulli feels as if she’s swimming miles out. She’d like to lie back and scull the water with her hands. She’d like to float on her back as close as possible to the surface of the water and to the warm sun. She must block out of her mind the dark depths of the water heaving underneath her. When she looks back to shore she feels a shiver of fear, emptiness and weakness, as if her blood is pouring out of her.

  Girls on Ice

  The only ones out here now. The yellow Saab has crawled back to its heated garage, and the kids who were practising ice hockey and shrieking across the bay to one another have all gone back home to drink hot chocolate and make up their team lists. Because soon it’s going to be dark. Already the horizon is folding in all around them. Already the reed banks have gone, and the spruce plantation behind the reeds. Blink, and the dusk thickens. Two soft round lights come on where the town is, and then there are more and more, coming on in warm rooms, as distant and inaccessible as the lights of a liner passing close inshore with a long moo from its foghorn. Blink, and you’ll miss the way home.

  ‘We’d better go back,’ says Edith.

  They turn, and the wind bites into them, glazing each particle of exposed flesh with frozen tears. Ulli’s greatcoat flaps open and a knife of wind slides up the inside of her thighs. She trips, and barges into Edith. They just can’t walk fast enough. The wind is shoving them offshore, like a flat hand saying BACK, BACK! But they are glad of its noise as it whines and buffets past their ears. They know for sure that they are too far out. The sound of the wind will hide from them what they are afraid to hear: the slow creak and unzipping of the ice. No good telling them now that the ice is solid from here to Ahvennanmaa. Out here you have to believe in ghosts and in ice spirits and broad-backed monsters breaking the surface with their snouts.

  The girls link arms. This way it’s easier to walk against the wind. They have to keep their heads down.

  ‘Don’t keep staring at your boots,’ shouts Ulli, ‘it’ll send you to sleep!’

  God, that is the last thing she needs. A sleeping Edith, keeled over on the ice, confident that everything’s going to be all right.

  It depends on what you mean by love.

  A cuff of wind throws the girls sideways. Now there are particles of ice in it. The air’s blurring. And surely it isn’t quite so cold? The temperature’s going up quickly, towards freezing-point.

  ‘I think it’s going to snow,’ says Edith.

  ‘You don’t need to shout about it!’ says Ulli. She doesn’t want to give the weather any more ideas than it seems to have already. Now she remembers someone telling her that there’s a current around here. It curves past the headland and then sweeps in close to shore. You want to watch that you don’t get caught. But she didn’t take much notice at the time. Who was it told her? It must have been some time last summer. They must have been going swimming, or perhaps Birgit had planned to take the boat out? They hadn’t taken any notice. Birgit knew the coast like the back of her hand.

  Now Ulli looks up and sees the snow coming from the north-east. The snow rushes towards them like the great filtering mouth of a whale. A ribbed curtain, swaying as it gains on them. The town lights have gone, but Ulli still knows where they were. She clings on to knowing where they were as the snow closes in on Edith and Ulli and wipes out the colours of cap and greatcoat, scarf and bold bottle-green tights until it’s all one whirlpool of white. Ulli thinks of the current, a long smooth muscle flexing itself under them. Edith’s cap has been torn off by the wind, and her wild brown hair flares upward, crusted with snow, snaking and streaming above her head like the locks of a Medusa. Edith’s mouth is wide and her teeth are bared and white. Surely, thinks Ulli, she can’t be laughing?

  Girls on Ice

  If you were to take a photograph of Edith and Ulli now, they would be dots. Black and white, merging to grey. Look closely and you won’t see their images at all, just two darker splodges on a pale background, like a graze on the paper. They’ll look as accidental and as unconvincing as those photographs taken to prove the appearance of ghosts.

  Enlarged, Edith and Ulli would be cell-like clumps of dots, like embryos held together in the loose grip of one particular moment before the wind changed, before the snow covered them or stopped falling, before they reached or failed to reach the shore.

  Acknowledgements

  Love of Fat Men was first published in Stand 33/1, 1991

  Batteries was first published in … And a Happy New Year, ed. Campbell, Hallett, Palmer and Woolsey, Women’s Press, 1993

  Short Days, Long Nights was first published in London Magazine, vol. 29, 11 & 12, 1990, and subsequently in Best Short Stories of 1992, ed. Giles Gordon, Heinemann

  Spring Wedding was first published in New Writing 4, ed. A. S. Byatt and Alan Hollinghurst, Vintage, 1995

  Annina was first published in Caught in a Story, ed. Caroline Heaton and Christine Park, Vintage, 1992

  The Ice Bear was first published in A Bridport Harvest, 1990

  The Orang-utans and the Angry Woman was first published in Iron Women, ed. Kitty Fitzgerald, Iron Press, 1990

  Ullikins was first published in Irish Tatler, December 1994

  A Grand Day was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in July 1994

  Smell of Horses and Girls on Ice were first published in Writing Women, 8/2 & 3, and 10/2

  By the Same Author

  Zennor in Darkness

  As U-boats nose the Cornis
h coastline, the village of Zennor is alive with talk of spies. It is a world of call-up and telegrams, secrets and suspicion, and no one is immune. Not Clare Coyne, nor her beloved cousin John William, who is home on leave from the trenches, shell-shocked. Not D. H. Lawrence and his German wife Frieda, who have retreated from London to a cottage in Zennor …

  ‘Her touch is subtle, delicate … The opening scene of three girls laughing as they slip down the warm sand dunes will haunt us as we read of soldiers drowning in mud’ – New Statesman

  ‘Extremely fine … an electrifying earthiness … Helen Dunmore mesmerizes you with her magical pen’ – Daily Mail

  Burning Bright

  A runaway from otherwise preoccupied parents, Nadine is set up by Kai, her Finnish lover, in a decaying Georgian house occupied by Enid, an elderly sitting tenant, whose own love affair many years ago ended in violence. ‘Be careful,’ warns Enid, who now knows everything about staying alive. When Nadine discovers that Kai intends to rent her out to a cabinet minister with special tastes, the warning assumes a prophetic quality …

  ‘The denouement is mesmerizing, but far from final. One goes on addressing the problems of evil which Dunmore raises, long after one has finished her electrifying book’ – Sunday Times

  A Spell of Winter

  Winner of the Orange Prize

  Catherine and her brother Rob do not know why they have been abandoned by their parents. In the house of their grandfather, ‘the man from nowhere’, they make a passionate refuge for themselves against the terror of family secrets. While the world outside moves to the brink of war, their sibling love becomes fraught with danger.

  ‘A marvellous novel about forbidden passions and the terrible consequences of thwarted love … Dunmore is one of the finest English writers’ – Daily Mail